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A Witch's Fate - Guy Haley

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An Extract from ‘Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son’

A Black Library Publication

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A Witch's Fate

Guy Haley

Rostov was praying when Lord Dyre came to him.

Prayer was his habit before each interrogation. Prayer was necessary. The act meant more than communion with his silent god. Rostov welcomed the coldness of the stone against his knees and forehead, and the discomfort of his position of obeisance that held him in crushing arms. In that was an embrace of pain that kept him locked within his body. When his soul must venture to be dirtied again, he needed to feel the constraints of reality, and to know that it would be there for him when he returned.

Prayer cleansed him.

He spoke quickly and quietly. The edges of the pendant on his rosary bit into his bare hand as he gripped it.

'Oh Emperor, guardian of humanity, watch over me as I perform my duties for you,' he whispered. Cold, damp air, disturbed by his words, caressed his face. 'Oh Emperor, keep me true to my path and my vocation, so that I might not fall into the dark unwittingly, but forever be bathed in your light.' They were prayers more appropriate for a priest than an inquisitor, but he did not see them as a sign of weakness. He required all the strength he could find.

The door to the chapel was supposed to creak. A purposeful flaw; even on their own vessels inquisitors did not let their guard down, but somehow Lord Inquisitor Dyre contrived to enter soundlessly. The first Rostov was aware of his presence was a soft touch upon his arm.

'Leonid, it is time,' Dyre said.

Rostov ceased his prayers and drew in a deep breath of candlewax and old blood. His lips had become dry from repeating the words, and he wetted them with the tip of his tongue.

'Are you ready?' Dyre said.

'My soul is armoured,' said Rostov.

Rostov rose into a kneel, then genuflected towards the statue of the Emperor upon the altar. It was of gilt wood, carved well though split with age, and the gold was flaking away from the grain on figure and throne. A corpse's face glowered at Rostov, unmoving and unspeaking. His was the gaze of death. Dyre had no illusions about their duties or their master. His choice of statue reflected that.

'He watches over us,' said Rostov. He looked up at his mentor. 'I am empowered by His purpose.'

Dyre's aged face creased into a soft smile. His skin was thin to the point of translucency. During the twenty years Rostov had served Dyre, he had always looked that way. He was a century old, at least.

'It is good that your faith is so strong.' Dyre held out his hand to his acolyte.

Rostov took it, and Dyre helped him up. Standing, Rostov was a head taller than Dyre. The inquisitor lord appeared frail and shrunken, but there was real physical strength in him still.

'This witch is the most dangerous creature I have asked you to interrogate yet, my son,' Dyre said. He meant the familiar term more than figuratively. They were close. 'Her powers of foresight make her a risky prospect for you to read. She is high on the scale, at least a Gamma-grade. So I ask you again, are you ready?'

'I am ready, Inquisitor Dyre,' said Rostov. He tucked his rosary back into his robes. As he put his glove back on, the bruises on his palm where the edges of the Emperors throne had mortified his flesh were visible. 'Do we have a choice?'

'My son,' Dyre said. He reached up and rested his hand on Rostov's cheek. His palm was soft and warm, though his fingers had the callouses of a man used to wielding both pen and sword. 'There is always a choice. We can try another way.'

'This option I gladly choose.'

'You make the right choice.' Dyre nodded and smiled. 'You are ready to leave me now. You should strike out on your own, found your own retinue.'

'A few more years,' Rostov said.

'We shall see,' said Dyre. His patted his protege and removed his hand. 'Saquie is strong. Be wary of her gifts. She will try to corrupt you, and if she cannot do that, destroy you.'

'I am aware of this.' Rostov went to the chair where he had placed his weapons and outer clothes. The stone floor numbed his bare feet, but he left his boots and socks until last. 'I have touched her mind already.' He pulled on his jacket over his shirt and buttoned it. 'She is ready, I assume?'

'Antoniato has excruciated her in preparation.'

Rostov looked over his shoulder at Dyre. 'To soften her up for me?'

'A mostly failed attempt to frighten her,' said Dyre. 'All rests on your efforts, I am afraid. Locked in her mind is the location of the artefact, and a way out of Lady Candor Estrell's fortress. Saquie must have been coming and going somehow to advise Estrell. If we cannot break her...' Dyre shrugged. He put his hands into his sleeves. He had told Rostov often that he felt the cold more than he used to, an assertion Rostov had only recently begun to believe. 'There will be another way.'

'We need this artefact. I am aware of the risks and I am willing to take them,' said Rostov. He belted his weapons around his waist.

'Consulting a psyker of Saquie's magnitude is crime enough, even for a high lady of the spires. We could simply confront Estrell.'

'Then we will lose the artefact, and whoever Estrell has been aiding will disappear into the shadows. I am not afraid, lord inquisitor. You are testing me.'

Dyre nodded. 'I am. Forgive me.'

'Care for one's comrades is no sin, my lord,' said Rostov.

'It can be a weakness,' said Dyre. 'It is one I am increasingly prone to as the years pass.'

Rostov put on his cloak. He bent to kiss his master on each cheek. The old man's breath was sweet, faintly perfumed with the carew nuts he habitually chewed, and his lips were stained by their juices.

'We must all do our duty,' said Rostov. 'I do mine, no matter what it costs me, as you have taught me, all praise be to He of Terra.'

Bancha, Cheelche and Fizerment were on guard outside the witch's cell. Bancha had her sword drawn, point down on the floor, one hand resting on the pommel. The little xenos Cheelche was sat on the floor, grimly scrimshawing a piece of bone, and did not look up. Fizerment greeted him with a slight dip of the head. Bancha signed at him in thoughtmark with her free hand. Since entering Dyre's service, the Sister of Silence had discarded her order's armour and was dressed instead in typical mercenary garb, though she still wore her high gorget to cover the scars marring the left side of her face and her throat. She had been badly and permanently injured. Her use of sign language now was a necessity rather than a choice.

Fizerment was slouched, tired from spending so long in the null's presence.

'Any trouble from our prisoner?'

'No, my lord,' Fizerment said. He adjusted his grip on his lasgun. He was fully armed and armoured in black inquisitorial carapace. It did not suit him. Fizerment was a talented data-thief, not a soldier. 'We've taken no chances.'

'Bancha,' said Rostov. He felt her lack of psychic presence as a sucking void. She was plainly visible, unlike some of her kind, but she was hard for him to look upon anyway. The bitter precursor to vomit gathered in the back of his mouth as he forced himself to look into her eyes. 'It is necessary for you to depart. I must employ my own skills.'

Bancha nodded. She's tried a few times to break the wards, Bancha signed. This one's strong. Be careful, Leonid.

'Lord Dyre says the same. I will take no more risks than are necessary to retrieve the information.'

Those risks are great.

'I am ready for them. Now go, Bancha.'

She flipped her sword onto her shoulders, causing Fizerment to scowl as he had to shift away from its razor point.

Good luck.

The pressure on Rostov's soul abated as she left. Fizerment shuddered and stood a little taller. He waited while Rostov centred himself again before stepping aside from the door.

The portal was made of nested circles covered in warding runes. A blood reader was set in the middle. Rostov pushed the spike through his glove and let it bite him. Machine-spirits sampled his vitae and judged him worthy of entrance. The circles spun, unlocking the doors complex mechanisms, before the whole sank into the floor. A short run of stairs led downwards on the other side.

'When I am done, Pho-lu will relieve you. Go rest. Being so close to such a potent psyker is difficult.'

'I find Bancha harder,' said Fizerment. 'But thank you, my lord.'

'Quite.'

Rostov descended into the cell. A feverish heat was trapped inside that rose up in a fug of counterseptics. Bare plasteel reflected lumen light, dimmed for the moment. There were three bands of warding sigils stamped into the stairwell walls, and the steps vibrated with the workings of psychic-dampening machinery.

Antoniato, dressed in ruffed robes of plastek from his feet to his neck, was engaged tidying away a pulse generator. He was so different in the cells where he served as excruciator, thought Rostov. In combat he evinced all the attitudes of a veteran soldier. He was insouciant to the point of insolence, careless seeming, though rarely actually so. In the cells he was the picture of sobriety, adopting an air that would have him fit in seamlessly to any inquisitor's lair. He didn't enjoy hurting people, Rostov sensed that when they worked together, for his abilities were fully engaged when they questioned their subjects, but Antoniato was curious about pain, and how it worked. To meet two such different men living in one skin reminded Rostov that no being is simple, no matter how they might appear to be on the surface.

The witch was in the centre of the room shackled to a cross, dressed in a penitent's shift and streaked with sweat. The hair hanging down her front was extraordinarily long. There were small, precise burns on her skin where the pulse generator had been applied. She showed none of the humiliation her position was intended to inflict, and no lasting discomfort from her torture. Rather, she watched Rostov with fierce eyes. She radiated such pride she could have been garbed in the finest robes currency could buy.

'You are here then,' she said. 'The inquisitor shows himself. I felt the null-bitch leave. You gave me warning.'

Rostov listened to the quality of her words rather than their intended meaning. Her profanity was forced, but there was bravery beneath the bravado. She would be difficult.

Antoniato finished wiping the pulse generator down with alcohol, then took it to a deep drawer that came out from the wall. Rostov ignored the witch, but went over to the trays of shining implements laid out ready for use, hooked and sharpened all. He was saddened to see these things and know that he must use them. She tasted his thoughts and snorted.

'Weak,' she said. 'And I thought you might be like me.'

Rostov picked up a flat-ended muscle separator and examined it. Such care had been put into making the implement, the weight, the decoration, the edge. It sickened him. He lived in an era when mankind's gifts were bent to unspeakable aims. It took all his willpower to stop his hand shaking. He carefully placed the implement back down with a click. All part of the show.

He turned to look at the woman.

'You are like me,' she said, and a little wonder crept into her voice.

'I am nothing like you,' said Rostov. He approached her. Tethered to the frame, she was held higher than him, but she was in fact a small woman, well formed but unremarkable. It was always the mind where corruption took root, and that was hidden to all but the few who could see. 'Yes, we are both human. Yes, we are both psykers. In those specifics you are correct.' He tugged off one glove, then the other. 'But I am an instrument of the Emperor, an inquisitor, who operates with the full weight of His authority, whereas you are...' He smiled deliberately. 'Nothing.'

'I am mightier than you,' she said. 'We have the power of the empyrean in us, but it makes you a slave. I am free.'

'Your masters are worse than mine,' he said.

She grunted. 'Mine at least does me the courtesy of not lying. I am a seer. Destiny is my mistress, and she is never false. Tell me, inquisitor, do you wish to know how you will die?'

Rostov shook his head and tutted. He held up an admonishing finger. 'You were impressing me until just then, then you had to resort to cliche. Do you know how many times I have heard those exact words spilling from the mouth of one sorcerer or another?'

'I don't care,' she said. 'The past is of no interest to me, only what will be.'

'I suppose you knew this was going to happen?' he said. 'What I am going to do to you?'

She stared at him, but now he thought he detected the first flicker of fear.

'You can't have seen it all,' he said. He began to pace back and forth in front of her. 'Our gifts are fickle.'

'Torture will not make me speak,' she said.

'I am not here to torture you,' he said. 'Torture rarely works.'

'I have told you everything I know.'

Rostov stopped. 'This is not true,' he said. 'I have three particular skills. I can move without being seen, and I can tell when I am being lied to - I know the worth of a soul at first meeting,' he said. 'Yours is rotten.'

'Have you ever looked into the empyrean, inquisitor? I have. Do you think you can scare me? I have seen enough of the truth to know that all this is passing. Our universe is doomed. I have done nothing but try to survive as long as I can.'

'Your existence is itself a sin against the Emperor.'

Antoniato was going through the instruments, selecting those he thought might best work at the first level of excruciation. Rostov no longer needed to advise him as to which.

'So I am guilty for the circumstances of my being?' she said.

'No person is guilty of that,' he replied. 'What you are guilty of is avoiding the tithe, hiding your abilities, then using them. You are guilty because you have taken no efforts to make yourself of use, but you will be of use now.'

He took a chair from the far side of the interrogation cell and turned it around, then sat upon it, his arms resting upon the back. He would need the support when he reached out to her, but appearing relaxed was also part of his performance.

'You have been within the tower of Lady Candor Estrell. You have been within the labyrinth where she keeps a collection of forbidden xenos artefacts. You have performed psychometric readings on these. You told her fortune regularly. You know the secret ways in and the secret ways out. Tell us how we might get in and get out. You owe Estrell nothing.'

Saquie smiled. 'All my life I have been hunted and shunned. I have been tortured before, abused, cheated. Estrell gave me honest payment. I owe her no loyalty, but I owe you less. Why should I tell you?' she said.

'Because it will save you pain,' Rostov said.

She breathed deeply, and leaned her head back. 'Pain? Life is pain. If I tell you, then you will execute me or I will be offered up to the Black Ships, and taken to Terra, to meet the ends all our kind must. I have seen what happens, in my visions. It is why I ran. I will not become food for any god. Better that I die here.'

'You may serve, like I.'

'I do not wish to serve Him,' she said. 'I will not tell you. Let me go. Do not harm me. I can tell you do not wish to hurt me.'

'I do not wish to, but I will,' Rostov said sincerely. He paused. 'I did not tell you the third of my abilities.' He beckoned Antoniato forward. He came sombrely, bearing a tray of sharp objects. 'I can access a person's mind, but that person must be in pain. Pain opens all the doors they would hold shut.'

The witch's eyes fixed on the tray of knives, cruel spoons and hooks.

'I ride their pain,' Rostov said. 'It becomes a window, and through it I can see everything.'

'Then you must feel this pain,' said the witch.

'I do,' he admitted. 'My reasons for not wanting to hurt you are only partly altruistic. So what do you say, that we stop this now, and you tell us what we need to know?'

He could tell from the look on her face that she was close to giving up the secret. Often, his little display was enough to bring a torrent of confession and pleas from the most stoic subject. She had nothing to gain from hiding the information, and much to suffer. He hoped she would speak. He willed her to. He meant it when he said he did not wish to hurt her.

She stared at the instruments a long time, then looked him in the eye.

'No,' she said, and firmly.

Rostov waved Antoniato forward. 'Then with regret, we must begin.'

'I wonder what it will bring, this meeting of our gifts?' she said, as Antoniato approached. She was trying to be brave now. Her body was tensing in anticipation of the insults it was about to receive.

'There is where we are different. Yours you see as a gift.'

Antoniato put down the tray on a folding steel table, and selected a scalpel. If the presentation of the instruments didn't work, a little blood might.

Rostov closed his eyes and focused, creating a picture in his mind's eye of the witch, attempting to build a model of her wants and fears. It was all supposition to begin with, simple tricks of psychology. He would make no real connection until the pain began. He was glad he did not see the first cut, but he felt it, a hot, gliding slice in the upper arm, near the armpit, where the flesh was especially sensitive. He heard Saquies stifled scream, and saw her soul blaze in his witch-sight, suddenly revealed to him as a sun reveals itself from behind the horizon.

He levelled out his breathing, taking the pain he shared with the witch as Antoniato cut again, then again, carving little hot traceries into her. Rostov felt himself lift, then rush forward towards the glowing outline of his victim, and pass within her.

There was a sharp crack of a lasweapon, and a body hit the ground.

'It's a trap!' Fizerment shouted.

Rostov took a sudden, uncontrolled breath, and opened his eyes. Alarms blared from every quarter. For a moment he was at a loss as to where he was, then he saw his bloodied hand clasping that of Inquisitor Dyre. The old man was on the floor, his chest a burnt mess from a high-power las-beam hit.

He remembered. The artefact. The plinth. The booby trap.

'Throne forsake us, what do we do now! What do we do now?' Fizerment said.

Cheelche was at Rostov's elbow, pawing at Dyre with her broad, alien hands.

'Leonid,' croaked Dyre.

'They're coming!' Pho-lu shouted. He and Bancha ran to the chamber entrance to trade fire with Lady Estrell's personal guard. Ruby and blue las-beams reflected from the featureless black stone.

'Damn it, damn it!' Antoniato said. He unslung his plasma gun and activated its charging sequence. The coils started to glow. 'Get the device! We have to get out of here now!'

Fizerment was kneeling by the plinth. The short-barrelled las poking from the side still smoked. He had a portable cogitator open at his feet, leads plugged into an open panel in the floor. The artefact floated over the plinth, held up on a contra-grav field. A dull cube of metal two feet across, it was featureless but for a perfectly carved groove around the centre, and an alien cartouche imprinted on one face.

'Leonid,' Dyre said. His voice was quiet, and Rostov was forced to bend close to hear him. 'Lead them, Leonid.'

'Get that damn device now!' Antoniato shouted. He rolled across the floor, lay in the doorway and unleashed the power of his plasma gun. A blinding shaft of light screamed up the corridor. Heat belted from the coils, raising the temperature in the room by a half grade. A hot blast-front raced back down the hallway as the plasma stream connected, carrying the stink of vaporised stone, flesh and metal. Antoniato shut the gun off and rolled out of the doorway, las-beams cracking through the air over his head.

'I can't disarm it!' Fizerment shouted over the racket. He was staring at his tiny display, shaking his hands by his head.

'Get on with it!' Antoniato said. He was working the dials on his gun, getting it ready to fire again.

'Jeren, Jeren, don't die, you can't die!' Cheelche said. She bowed her fishlike face low to Dyre's side.

'I led us into this,' said Rostov.

'I came willingly. I came knowingly,' Dyre croaked. 'Get them safe.'

'Master.'

Dyre's eyes closed.

'Master!'

'He's dead. He's dead!' Cheelche wailed.

Gunfire barked behind Rostov. Pho-lu swore constantly in his rough argot, shouting more loudly each time he discharged his gun. The short respite Antoniato's plasma blast had won them was over. More of Lady Estrell's men were on their way. They wore black uniforms, half-carapace armour and sturdy helms with datafeed visors; not so very different to the gear the inquisitor's group wore. Mankind wasted so much energy fighting itself.

Rostov got to his feet.

'I can't do it,' said Fizerment. 'A trap, a trap. It's probably fake.'

'It might be a damned trap, but the artefact is here! It's real!' Antoniato shouted back. His gun chimed, charge replenished. He wasted no time in poking his head back round the opening to fire again, but a storm of light drove him back.

'Horus take me!' he swore. 'There's more of them by the second.' Cheelche was keening a wholly alien noise.

'Stop this panic!' Rostov said. 'Dyre wouldn't have fallen for an empty lure, of course the artefacts real. Fizerment, concentrate.'

'Fine, fine!' he said. He bent lower over the cogitator, flinching as las-bolts flickered over his head.

Cheelche was rubbing her face repeatedly at Dyre's side. Rostov pulled at her shoulder. 'Come on, leave him!' He dragged her to her feet.

There was a sharp crackle. The artefact dropped from the air, hit the side of the plinth and landed on the floor with a dull clang. A corner of the cube punched into the stone flagging, and it stood there on one point.

'Alright,' conceded Fizerment. 'That looks genuine to me.'

'Cheelche!' Rostov shoved her towards the box. 'Get it in the pack now.' Cheelche tugged a compact pack off her back and unfolded it. The bottom was lined with suspensors, and she jabbed at them quickly to activate them. To cover her, Antoniato dared another shot and Pho-lu intensified his fire. Cheelche struggled, and Rostov strode over to help her. The device was immensely heavy, more so than he had expected.

'You will be able to carry this?' he asked the xenos.

'Just watch me,' she said. He helped her set the pack on her back. She grunted as the weight settled.

'We need to leave. Now.' There were three exits from the room. The one they had used to get in was barred to them. The other two led into Estrell's labyrinth.

'His body...' Cheelche's enormous eyes strayed to Dyre's corpse.

'Leave it. Let them find out exactly who they have killed, and then let them fear. The Inquisition will not let this go unpunished,' said Rostov. 'His body is unimportant. His soul is at the Emperor's side.'

His eyes flicked from door to door.

'That one,' he said, pointing to the left.

'How do you know?' Cheelche asked.

'The Emperor is guiding us. We are leaving.'

Bancha left the door, shooting with her pistol behind her. Antoniato came next. They gathered by their chosen exit.

'Pho-lu!' Fizerment said.

The hive-worlder shook his head; his green mohawk unmoved by the motion. 'You get out. You need someone to buy you some time. I'm getting bored with life anyway. This is as good a way as any to go.'

He held up his gun and let off half a dozen shots.

Rostov nodded. He waved the others into the dark.

'Parting gift,' said Antoniato, tossing a frag grenade up the corridor. Pho-lu snatched himself back. The explosion blasted scraps of debris and bloody cloth into the artefact room.

'Emperor be with you,' said Rostov.

'Whatever,' said Pho-lu, and fired again. 'It's been fun. Now go!'

Rostov stepped into the dark and ran into familiar corridors in another place. He associated the cathedrum with safety, he always had, but his ten-year-old mind was belatedly seeing it as a cage. Footsteps followed him. He tried to shift into that space only he could access, where none could see him. His hunters found him anyway.

He whimpered. The people chasing him were awful spectres with faces of metal and terrible weapons.

There was a hot slice of pain across his chest. The witch's chest.

'This is where it happened,' the witch Saquie said. 'This is where your life was stolen and you were given over to serve. You don't look very happy about it.'

Rostov could not respond. His boyhood face was rumpled with terror, silent tears coursing down his cheeks as he backed into a dark corner, knowing he would be caught. He pushed back, feeling his spirit entwine with the witch's as thoroughly as two lovers' limbs. He could feel her fear along with her pain, yet she remained defiant. She enjoyed seeing this moment from his past in a bitter way. See, she was thinking, we are the same.

The scene in the cathedrum tipped and dropped beneath his feet. He saw himself from above. A woman in armour came for him with sword drawn, shackles hanging from her belt, two priests with stern faces approaching from either side, their stablights flashing into the shadows of the chapel, scaring back the dark and dancing over statues' faces until they inevitably illuminated his own, pale as a ghost in the corner. He looked like one of the stone saints. They saw him as a devil.

They lunged for him. He screamed for his mother. It was the last moment of weakness he had allowed himself. Irritated, he forced the memory away.

The past spiralled off into the dark.

'Give it up,' he said. 'Give me what I want, and we can stop.'

'I will not,' the witch said. 'All I have left is denying you.'

'This can end.'

'It all ends,' she said. 'I am going to die here, but if I am to be broken, you will break too.'

A stained-glass window appeared from the darkness before him, its angles all bent and untrue. It depicted the Emperor as a fierce, unloving god. Rostov burst through. The memory of glass shattered with exaggerated slowness, bits of coloured imagery spinning through the dark with the majesty of galaxies. The witch laughed.

'Oh, brittle faith.'

His feet were suddenly on a carpeted floor. The witch was next to him, garbed in fine clothes. She was beautiful, breathtakingly so.

'My turn,' she said.

The air was cloying, too warm, too thick, choking with the scents of bodies and perfume.

'The pleasure house where I was raised,' she said.

Grunts of carnal delight came through paper and wood partitions. Backlit figures writhed in shadow plays of indecency.

His reaction betrayed him.

She raised an eyebrow. 'Such a good little church boy, even after everything they have done to you. You needn't look appalled. I was employed as their fortune teller, nothing more, a sideshow for these lustful men.'

A sliding door banged back hard. A red-faced worthy stormed from a room aglow with candles. He was shouting for the mistress of the house, gesticulating so wildly he put his hand through a paper wall.

The mistress came as quickly as her hobble skirt allowed. Wine was offered. Women too. Little seemed to calm him. Beyond the door, watching with unblinking, brown eyes ringed with make-up, the young witch waited for a fate she had already seen.

'It was a good life on a hard world, until I told the truth too many times. This one...' Saquie pointed at the shouting man. 'He was worried his young wife was unfaithful. I told him he was right, and what's more she had three lovers. The irony that he discovered this in a brothel did nothing to blunt his anger.'

Rostov focused, trying to see his way past the illusion. What he needed was in the witch's mind, somewhere. The pleasure house wavered. Saquie's apparition looked at him sharply. 'Ah-ah,' she said. 'No, no.'

The building vanished on a cold wind, giving way to a winter street where snowflakes danced manically between tall buildings typical of a civilised world. Warm light spilled out from windows, but the young Saquie was shaking with the cold. She wore a heavy coat over her old finery, now too small for her. It wasn't enough to protect her.

'I grew to adulthood on the streets,' she said. 'I almost didn't.'

The younger witch stopped, cocked her head, as if listening to distant music. She ducked out of sight into the open entrance vestibule of a hab block just before a group of male soldiers, reeling drunk, came around the corner, shouting at women and making them hurry on.

'Without my gift, I would not have survived.'

'We are cursed,' Rostov said.

'My curse has kept me alive,' she said.

A hard anger came over Rostov. It was difficult to say if it were his or hers. 'A witch's fate is always to die.'

'It's all our fates to die!' she said. 'And don't you dare tell me it is better to die in service than live in sin,' she said. 'All we have is life. It is the only thing that is ours, and the Emperor wants to take that too. He's no better than a xenos, or the heretics.'

The scene changed. The girl was thinner, ill-looking, huddling with others around a fire in a half barrel while enforcer suppression craft swept over the city, their bright searchlights scouring streets. The crackle of distant gunfire came and went with the wind.

'You seek to break me with suffering,' she said. 'You can't. There is only suffering. It is all I have ever known.'

Flashes of leering faces, of guns, hunger and pain assailed Rostov. But these were his own memories. They flickered past, then stopped. A grim prior lashed him with a knotted whip as he knelt in cold water, his back bare. He remembered trying not to cry out, even to let his teeth chatter. He would show no sign of weakness.

'This is not the Black Ships?' she said.

'No. It is Terra,' he replied.

'Show me the ships. Show me so that I may know I was right to avoid them.'

She was pushing at him, the slippery advances of her mind probing his thoughts and his memories. The sensation at once repulsed him and brought him comfort. He was rarely close to anyone.

'You are one of those,' she said. 'Who holds those he cares for away from himself, in case they are hurt. I see. Ah!' she said. 'I think I have it.'

The holds of the Black Ship pressed in, almost usurping the image of his chastisement. Rostov felt a rising panic. He could not go back to that long voyage, the sense of dread heavy in every moment, the pressure of the other suffering minds around him and the unspeakable things scratching at the edges of the Geller field, desperate to feast, all the terrors he had endured. His wrists ached with the bindings he had worn. They had made them for him especially. They had seen his power even then.

'No,' he said firmly. The doubled image faded. His whipping continued.

Rostov extricated himself from the witch's mental embrace, and came back to himself a little, hanging halfway between the worlds of the mind and the body. He was in agony, his body throbbing with ghost pains shared with the witch. There would be stigmata, he was sure.

'More,' he croaked. His shirt was drenched in sweat.

Antoniato looked at him in concern. His arms were bright red with blood to the elbow, so much so that the scalpel he held seemed to be part of his hand.

'My lord, are you sure?'

'More!' he demanded.

The witch hung from her restraints, bloody all over, patches of skin missing, and worse. But her eyes blazed.

Antoniato's fingers danced over the implements on the tray, selecting the flat-headed spatula Rostov had toyed with earlier. He moved hesitantly, then drove it into the space between two exposed muscles in the witch's arm.

Both she and Rostov screamed. Rostov saw...

...a turning.

'This way,' he said, plunging down a branch of the tunnel. They had been running for five minutes. The alarms had faded behind them, and there was as yet no sign of pursuit.

'Are you sure?' asked Fizerment nervously.

'Don't question the inquisitor,' said Antoniato.

'It is the way,' said Rostov with certainty. The smooth stone covering of the walls had given way to bare metal only yards from the artefact room, and the maze now had the utilitarian brutality of a penal facility. They moved at a brisk jog, sending circles of illumination dancing over rust patches and corroded rivets. There was no lighting, so they were forced to rely on their lamps.

'How are you faring, Cheelche?' Rostov asked.

'It's not too heavy,' the little xenos replied. Despite her short legs and odd, waddling gait, she was keeping pace with the humans. 'Well, I lie. It's very heavy, but I can bear it.'

'I am sorry about Dyre. I know you—'

'You're crap at this. Just don't,' she said, and pulled ahead of them.

They went through large rooms with many exits. Fizerment scanned every one with a look of perfect fear before they went further. 'Clear!' he shouted.

Rostov would choose an exit, and so they continued through the maze. His instincts worked well, until they came to the entrance of another room, and Fizerment paused to perform his scry.

'Cle—'

He did not finish the word. The ground opened up and he plunged out of sight into a dark square. He screamed all the way down to the bottom. Rostov rushed to the pit, catching sight of the last flashes of Fizerment's lamp before the dark devoured it. His cries stopped, but the banging of his body against the sides of the shaft went on and on.

'Shit,' said Cheelche. 'Shit!'

'Is it safe?' said Antoniato. He swivelled at the waist, panning his shouldermounted stablight around the chamber. It was several times wider than the corridor. 'Is that the only deadfall?'

'I do not know,' said Rostov.

'This is a disaster,' said Cheelche. 'We're all going to die.'

Antoniato pulled his canteen from his belt and slid it across the ground.

It came to a spinning stop.

'Looks safe,' he said, and made to move forward.

Bancha's hand shot out and grabbed his elbow. She shook her head.

The entire floor collapsed inwards, clanging and clattering away.

'Sounds like it goes all the way down to hive bottom!' said Cheelche.

'We're going to have to double back,' said Antoniato. He, Cheelche and Bancha looked to Rostov for guidance.

Which way, inquisitor? Bancha asked, her fingers pale flashes in the gloom.

Rostov didn't know. He was blundering, leading them deeper into Estrell's maze. They were caught in a trap within a trap. The witch's final revenge. He had failed.

They were relying on him. He was their leader now.

'Back to the last chamber, then first left,' he said with false confidence. It inspired them, and they moved more easily, though Cheelche kept glancing back.

'Shit,' she said.

They went the way he said, and passed down a tunnel that went into a steep spiral.

'We're going deeper,' said Antoniato.

Rostov was about to reply when a bright light smote his eyes, and he threw up his hand.

'Look, inquisitor,' Saquie said. 'Look upon the truth.'

He opened eyes that had not been closed, and saw a great band of light scarring the heavens.

'The Great Rift,' he said.

They floated serenely side by side in the velvet expanses of the void, the galaxy spread out at their feet.

'This is the truth. This rip in everything will consume us all.' She felt sad, and he shared it. His assault upon her body meant nothing there, in that place far from mundane concerns.

'We are all going to die, and worse. I have seen it,' said Saquie. 'The days of mankind are nearly done. For years I have been seeing it. All we can do while we are here is live. All any human ever has been able to do is live. That is all I tried to do.' Her spirit form looked into his. 'This is your true gift, isn't it? This intimacy.'

'It is not a gift. Intimacy from pain is no intimacy at all,' he said.

She looked off, into the Rift. Past the glowing remnants of shattering reality where immaterium met materium, it was possible to glimpse a little of what lay beyond. It was beautiful in a way. Seeing it as she did, Rostov grasped, perhaps for the first time, that the warp itself was not evil, but akin to a poisoned ocean. The damage it did was not the ocean's fault.

He realised this was her impression, not his.

'Temptation. Falsehood,' he said. 'The Emperor shields me from your lies.'

'It's not a lie,' she said. 'Though every sentient being has its own ways of seeing, there are undeniable truths. That is one.' Her sadness became heavier, dragging him down with her. 'I have known this forever. If you wish to find wickedness in my powers, then it would be fair to call this knowledge a curse.'

Her spirit appeared strong, but it was wavering. The injuries inflicted upon her mortal form were taking their toll. She was dying. He let his attention move again, and in that room that smelled of death a million lifetimes away, he stood from his chair, and walked towards the bloodied witch. He pushed Antoniato aside, and, with dreamlike ponderousness, took a probe from the trays, all now dotted crimson.

'You will kill me now,' she said in the void.

'Only once I know what I need to know.'

'I only wanted to be left alone,' she said. 'Why is that a crime?'

'That is not a viable choice. You either serve Terra, or you are His enemy.' The Rift flickered. For a moment, Rostov had a vision of a figure upon a great seat, screaming in silent agonies as He was consumed eternally by a pyre built from His own mind.

He staggered, forcing the image away. The witch's last attempt to flee was unsuccessful. She was weakening, and he snared her in his soul, dragging her towards union. She saw into him fully, and he felt her pity at what she witnessed.

'He is a merciless god,' she said.

'There is no mercy in this universe, anywhere,' he said.

'He will not live,' she said. 'Your mentor, Dyre. Warn him of the trap, and he will die another way. I can show you hundreds of deaths, all in that one place. His time has come.'

'I know,' he said.

In the realm of flesh and blood, he took the final probe, and pushed it into her innards, so that its tip kissed her heart. Pain impulses amplified by proscribed machineries ignited her nervous system. The last doors were blasted open.

They fell into each other, and for a single instant, they were one.

Rostov experienced everything she had ever known, and he was not gentle with it. He tore her life to pieces, searching for the route out of the labyrinth. He found it buried deep beneath astrological consultations her rich patron thought harmless, unaware of the daemons screeching for their soul-stuff as they dabbled in the forbidden. Saquie knew enough to hide the memories.

The witch sighed. Her soul began to fade. It should have moved into the poisoned ocean of the warp, where Rostov was sure it would be torn apart, for the Emperor surely would not guard her. He resolved to spare her that at least, and held her tight in his mind as her essence fragmented and frittered away. She screamed for release, but he would not give it.

'Forgive me,' said Rostov.

'I cannot,' sighed the witch, and was gone.

Rostov stopped firing, and almost leapt forward, checking himself before he fell into the las-fire coming down the corridor at them.

'There is a way out,' he said. 'I have it.'

The soldiers of Lady Estrell had brought them to bay again. Rostov suspected they had known where they were all along, and the highborn was toying with him. A stupid thing to do. She would pay a high price for her arrogance. He would see to it personally.

'Where?' said Antoniato.

'Through them,' said Rostov, pointing at the troopers holding the corridor.

Cheelche was sighting her tau-made rifle and snapping off deadly shots. Antoniato carefully nursed his plasma gun to maximise its fire output. Bancha knelt in the corridor in full face of the enemy's attack, shooting her bolter methodically. She saw his gesture, and nodded.

One more of them had to die. That was the blood price of success.

Bancha rose. She dropped her gun, and ran at the foe, drawing her sword as she went. She gave a moaning battle cry, the only sound her ruined throat could make.

'Follow her!' said Rostov.

Bancha was a paragon of elegance in violence. The corridor was full of las-light, and she was a deadly silhouette against it. Her sword flicked out and around, up and down, every cut a kill. She danced past jabbing blades and lasgun butts swung as clubs. In seconds it was done, the terrified survivors fleeing and falling prey to Cheelche's unerring accuracy.

Bancha turned to face them. She tore off her gorget. What was left of her lips rose in a smile. Their stablights caught the steam rising from her front. Her armour was a mess of holes. Fires burned in some.

She fell with a clatter to the floor.

'Now Bancha,' muttered Cheelche, as they jogged past. 'Great.'

'Keep going,' said Antoniato.

Rostov led them down numerous passages, taking turns at speed. They came to a door. He knew it would be locked.

'Melta,' he said.

Antoniato tossed him a miniature fusion charge. Not as powerful as the large flasks the Space Marines carried into war, but more than enough to burn out the lock mechanism.

They shielded their eyes as the charge flashed through the metal.

'Help me,' Rostov said.

Antoniato and Rostov grunted as they heaved the door back into its housing. Cheelche kept wary watch behind. They shielded their eyes again as bright daylight forced its way around the door. Sharp winds came with it, and they saw a panorama of the cloud tops, pierced by the rusting spear of the hive spire.

'Another dead end,' said Cheelche.

'Not when we have a ship,' said Rostov.

He manipulated one of his digi-rings, and called up their transport from the void port.

Antoniato gently took the probe from Rostov's hand. He was spent, knelt on the floor in front of the dead witch, his head hung. In this state a gentle touch would topple him.

He was vaguely aware of Antoniato speaking quietly. A minute later, Dyre arrived.

'Leonid,' Dyre said. 'Leonid, look at me.'

Rostov swung his head around. It felt like a boulder. His hair was heavy with blood. His skin tightened as it dried on his skin.

'Are you alright?'

'I feel dirty, and ashamed,' he said honestly.

Dyre nodded sympathetically. 'Congress with so tainted a soul will always bring shame. You have done your service well, be not sorrowful, but rejoice that you do the Emperor's work.'

Always Dyre provided these homilies after the filthy work was done. Rostov wondered if he pretended to misunderstand. He had never been sure. The shame was not external, but from within. He loathed what he did, and he loathed what he was.

'You found a way in, a way out?' Dyre asked.

'Yes.' He was so tired. He wished to wash the witch's blood from his body and sleep.

'Then we shall begin planning. Well done, Leonid. With this xenos artefact, we stand a chance of halting the Crusade of Slaughter. Billions will be saved.'

'She was not evil,' said Rostov, raising his eyes to the disfigured body. He had made her ugly. He had done that while she lived. 'She only wished to survive.'

'I understand your gift brings closeness to these subjects. It is your burden,' said Dyre. 'As always, I am sorry for it. But I warn you to discard their sentiments, and set your mind to His service.'

'I saw more,' said Rostov. He looked into his mentor's eyes.

Sensing something amiss, Dyre dismissed Antoniato.

'I saw the mission. There will be casualties,' said Rostov. 'You will be among them.'

Dyre looked at him a long time. Years of guarding his mind made his thoughts unreadable.

'We will definitely secure the artefact?'

'Yes,' said Rostov. 'Though Pho-lu, you, Bancha and Fizerment will all pay for it.'

There came another long pause. 'All men die, Rostov,' Dyre said quietly. 'If we do not go, I will live, but how many more will perish? Although there is always a choice, every one of them has consequences.' He looked at the corpse. 'Just ask her.'

Dyre called Antoniato back in.

'Help Inquisitor Rostov cleanse himself, and dispose of the subject in the sanctified furnace,' he said to the veteran. 'Take no chances. Full rituals. Bring in three priests, and make sure Bancha is present. The taint of evil may linger. When you are ready, Leonid, we shall plan our next move. Rest now.'

Dyre departed, leaving Rostov alone with the blood and the shame.

INTRODUCTION

Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son Limited Edition

The Indomitus Crusade is the single largest military operation in the history of the Imperium since the Emperor Himself set out to reconquer the stars. It will fight at thousands of worlds. There are hundreds of millions, if not billions of people involved from every branch of the Imperium's colossal war machine, and it comes at a time of great danger. After 10,000 years, Warmaster Abaddon's plans have almost come to fruition, bringing him closer to success than his father Horus ever came. The galaxy has been plunged into a fresh night, where daemons walk free and the foes of mankind reave unopposed. The last time this happened, during the Age of Strife, mankind was almost rendered extinct. For years, the Warhammer 40,000 clock has stood at one minute to midnight. Now the bell tolls. Time is running out for humanity.

The Indomitus Crusade forms a key part of the current Warhammer 40,000 background, and the book you hold now is the first step on a journey detailing an epoch every bit as perilous and rich as the Horus Heresy.

Into this dire moment steps Roboute Guilliman, last loyal son of the Emperor. Kept in stasis since his demise at his brother Fulgrim's (many) hands, Guilliman was a contemporary metaphor for the Emperor in the 41st millennium. A titanic figure from a past age, imprisoned upon a timeless throne, neither truly alive nor truly dead. Thanks to the machinations of the aeldari, who perceive their own extinction rapidly approaching, and the genius of Archmagos Belisarius Cawl, Guilliman was revived at the moment it seemed the Imperium might fall. So he's back, perceived as a saviour by many and a threat by some. Either way, in the early days of the crusade and beyond, he has got his work cut out.

Behold, the Dawn of Fire.

I was very privileged to be asked to join this project when it was concocted in secret many moons ago. My work on Guilliman in the Dark Imperium books apparently recommended me for the job, so thanks to everyone who bought and enjoyed those; you propelled me to fresh heights. In its conception and creation, the Dawn of Fire series takes many valuable lessons from the highly successful Horus Heresy, that two-decade epic. Foremost among them is the writers' room, where we scribes all get together and thrash out how we are going to tell this towering story. These meetings are always great fun, buzzing with ideas and the occasional challenge and we wanted this creative collective for the Dawn of Fire too.

The worlds of Warhammer are fascinating places, not only in the epic fictional tales, but also in the real world, in how those stories are created by the intersection of miniatures, gaming and the long-form narratives that grow around them. There are so many creative people involved in these universes. The Indomitus Crusade is of such importance to the now of Warhammer 40,000 that we worked closely with our counterparts in the other creative studios a great deal. These meetings and story sessions, which involve lead storytellers from across Games Workshop, have been mind-blowing for a big Warhammer 40,000 fan like me.

And I am a big fan. I've been playing Games Workshop games since I was ten years old, that's a dizzyingly long 36 years now. My father has always been into wargames. It was he who introduced me to RPGs and used to let me roll his dice on his game nights when I was an annoying child, but it was his inclusion of me when he tried First Edition Warhammer that had me hooked. Hundreds of battles, thousands of models, and now a couple of dozen novels later, and I am still hooked. I remember writing, years ago, how exciting it was to have my first Warhammer book published. Then it was exciting to be invited into the Horus Heresy, and now this, where I have a hand in helping to shape the very mythos itself. I can't believe it half the time.

That's another thing about this project; we are shaping the mythos more directly than ever. The Indomitus Crusade differs from the Heresy in that we're effectively telling a completely new story. Everyone knows how the Heresy ended (except one guy, who took me to task on social media for spoiling the Emperor's fate! Seriously). The great joy of that series was describing how what we all knew happened happened, and why, as well as teasing you all with lots of unfathomable mysteries. When it comes to misdirection, that Emperor is an expert and no mistake.

This project is narratively rich and creatively challenging in a whole different way, in that you don't know where it's going. It's another kind of journey, and it's been especially gratifying for us sketching out a grand plot behind it all. We're looking forward to shocking and delighting you with plenty of twists and turns.

For the primarch there is much yet to do. As there is for us. And there are many surprises yet in store.

Remember as you read this that the Horus Heresy lasted a mere seven years, while the Indomitus Crusade was a century long, so we have a myriad amazing stories to tell you and revelations to uncover. Onwards, then... for the Imperium!

Guy Haley

Yorkshire

December 2019

About the Author

Guy Haley is the author of the Siege of Terra novel The Lost and the Damned, as well as the Horus Heresy novels Titandeath, Wolfsbane and Pharos, and the Primarchs novels Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter, Corax: Lord of Shadows and Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia. He has also written many Warhammer 40,000 novels, including Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work, Dark Imperium, Dark Imperium: Plague War, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Darkness in the Blood, Astorath: Angel of Mercy, Baneblade and Shadowsword. His enthusiasm for all things greenskin has also led him to pen the eponymous Warhammer novel Skarsnik, as well as the End Times novel The Rise of the Horned Rat. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

An extract from Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son.

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

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

But that was yet to come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Messinius stared at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He closed his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He opened a vox-channel to Gate Command.

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

‘On whose order?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<threat detected.>

‘They’re coming again,’ he said.

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

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

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

‘Stand ready.’

‘My lord?’ The voice became more insistent.

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

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

‘Fire,’ he said coldly.

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

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

Vitrian Messinius awoke groggily.

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

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

‘Shall I?’ Selwin gestured to the hypnomat.

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

‘The wall again?’ Selwin asked.

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

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

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

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

Selwin bowed. ‘Already done, my lord.’

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First published in Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son in Great Britain in 2020.
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