• GAUNT’S GHOSTS •
Dan Abnett

THE FOUNDING

BOOK 1: FIRST AND ONLY

BOOK 2: GHOSTMAKER

BOOK 3: NECROPOLIS

Also available as an omnibus

THE FOUNDING

THE SAINT

BOOK 4: HONOUR GUARD

BOOK 5: THE GUNS OF TANITH

BOOK 6: STRAIGHT SILVER

BOOK 7: SABBAT MARTYR

Also available as an omnibus

THE SAINT

THE LOST

BOOK 8: TRAITOR GENERAL

BOOK 9: HIS LAST COMMAND

BOOK 10: THE ARMOUR OF CONTEMPT

BOOK 11: ONLY IN DEATH

Also available as an omnibus

THE LOST

THE VICTORY

BOOK 12: BLOOD PACT

BOOK 13: SALVATION’S REACH

BOOK 14: THE WARMASTER

BOOK 15: ANARCH

Also available as an omnibus

THE VICTORY – (Part One)

More tales from the Sabbat Worlds

SABBAT WAR
An anthology edited by Dan Abnett

SABBAT CRUSADE
An anthology edited by Dan Abnett

SABBAT WORLDS
An anthology edited by Dan Abnett

URDESH: THE SERPENT AND THE SAINT
A novel by Matthew Farrer

BROTHERS OF THE SNAKE
A novel by Dan Abnett

DOUBLE EAGLE
A novel by Dan Abnett

TITANICUS
A novel by Dan Abnett

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

Introduction

THIS IS WHAT VICTORY FEELS LIKE (FOREVER THE SAME)

WHOSE VOICE IS HEARD NO MORE

GLORY FLIGHT

THE DEATH OF THE PROPHET

NINETEEN-THREE COREWARD, RESOLVED

THE TOMB OF VICHRES

DEEP

ARMADUKE

INDOMITABLE SPIRIT

01

02

03

04

05

FROM THERE TO HERE

About the Authors

An Extract from ‘Urdesh: The Serpent and the Saint’

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.

Introduction

Welcome to the Sabbat Worlds Crusade. Welcome to the Sabbat War.

Introductions are usually a place where we might pause and reflect, and ruminate, ‘How did this all happen?’ and ‘How did we get here?’ A place where we might, traditionally, contemplate the past.

But this (I can hardly believe it) is the third volume of the Sabbat Worlds anthology series, and in the introductions to the previous two, I’ve spent a lot of time discussing the past, and asking ‘How did we get here?’. By and large, at this stage, I have a feeling we all know.

I’ve been writing the Gaunt’s Ghosts novels since I began writing for Black Library, which would be some time during the Triassic Period. A long time ago, is what I’m saying, and there are a lot of books to show for it: fifteen full Gaunt’s Ghosts novels, numerous short stories, and somewhere in the region of ten more related books that tie into, or supplement, the core sequence. It is the longest ongoing ‘thing’ I’ve ever written, and I’m pleased to say that I still enjoy it… And I’m still thinking of new things to do with it. I feel a very deep connection to this saga, and to the many characters involved.

The most recent Gaunt’s Ghosts book, Anarch, was not the last, but it was a serious piece of punctuation. It was the fourth and final book of the fourth arc, and it brought to a close a sequence called ‘The Victory’. And there was a victory, a major one. The novel finished off quite a few ongoing storylines, some of them (sorry!) in quite terminal ways. As is my wont.

Anarch represented closure, mainly so I could take a deep breath, rest the series at a point where readers wouldn’t howl, ‘But what happens NEXT?!?’, and spend a little time on other projects (a small matter called the Siege of Terra, anyone?). There will be more Gaunt’s Ghosts novels – a new arc, in fact – but that’s down the line from here. Anarch was a good moment to give the poor Ghosts a well-earned break.

But Ghosts get restless. The next arc is already nagging away at my thoughts, and there are some unexpected side projects that are likely to please fans of the Tanith First, some of which are appearing alongside this volume. So what better time to produce another of these anthologies? It’s been six years (six!) since the last one, after all.

The Sabbat Worlds is a significant region of the Imperium overrun by the Archenemy, and the setting of the Gaunt’s Ghosts novels. Here, an Imperial crusade has been slugging away at the enemy for decades, slowly driving them out of the Sabbat Territories. If you want to know more about the place, there’s a handy (and luxuriously illustrated) guide, and even a map. It’s a corner of the Imperium of Man that I have spent a considerable amount of time creating and fleshing out… Much like a campaign setting that a game master might develop for his intrepid role-players. Indeed, I think one of the reasons I have enjoyed it so much, and come back to it so often, is that it reminds me of the days when I was a DM, home-brewing worlds on a regular basis.

The real proof of a campaign setting, of course, is the stress test: can it stand the pressure of other imaginations playing with it? That’s the main reason these anthologies began. They were an opportunity to let other authors visit the Sabbat Worlds, and contribute stories to fit inside the continuity of the war. Both previous volumes, Sabbat Worlds and Sabbat Crusade, showcased some amazing work by some prodigiously talented writers, who each brought their own take and invention to the crusade, and took ideas in directions I couldn’t have imagined. Both volumes were real joys to work on; it’s wonderful to have other people come into the sandpit and play alongside me. And it’s gratifying that the Sabbat Worlds are interesting enough that they wanted to do that.

So here’s volume three. And, boy, have we lined up a great roster of authors: some veterans, some new, all at the top of their game. Some of these stories, as with the previous volumes, look back at incidents from the crusade’s past, picking up on threads that were left dangling, or concepts that were mentioned in passing and remain unexplored. But others are looking forward. A surprising number of these stories are set in the ‘now’ of continuity, at the time of Anarch, or just after. They are not reflective; they push the crusade onwards, and open up new vistas and new possibilities. Anarch may have been an end-stop and a piece of punctuation, but it was also a platform, a foundation on which the next phase of adventure could be built, and that phase starts right here. Anarch was a plinth, and I say that simply so I can use the word ‘plinth’, which I am inexplicably fond of. Also ‘badger’ and ‘Antioch’, but I digress…

I’d like to thank all the authors for their work. Each story has blown me away as it’s come in. I would also like to thank the regular ‘without whom’ department: Nick Kyme, Jess Woo and Nik Vincent, and also Kate Hamer, who has not only done great work shepherding this project, but has also been seriously fun to collaborate with, especially during the enforced isolation of The Year That We Shall Not Speak of Again. My, the Google Hangouts conversations! My, my, the jokes! Lockdown life (and I write this as we come out of the second one in the UK) has been very different, to say the least (though, from an author’s point of view, not that different from anything else – sitting alone at your desk writing is still sitting alone at your desk writing). But I am heartened that, as a small positive among all the bad things and struggles it has caused, the bubble-living of The End of The World has amplified the desire to read. Reading has offered a form of escape for many stuck in isolation. Enforced distancing seems to have reminded people that books are whole worlds, right there in your pocket.

Here, then, are a few more escape routes. And it’s not The End of The World, even if it regularly feels like it out in the Sabbat Territories. Sanitise your hands, slip on your favourite reading mask, pull up your favourite chair, and buckle on your favourite heavy-duty reading trousers. We’re off, and there’s a war to win. No looking back now, the future awaits…

Dan Abnett
Maidstone, December 2020

THIS IS WHAT VICTORY FEELS LIKE
(FOREVER THE SAME)

WRITTEN BY DAN ABNETT

Preface

I’ll get the ball rolling, just to show them how it’s done, eh? (I joke: read the other stories and you’ll see no one needs to be ‘shown how it’s done’).

This is a new Gaunt’s Ghosts story, set in continuity, which is to say it follows on directly from the end of Anarch. Anarch was a bit of a beast – the longest Gaunt novel so far, and there was inevitably a feth-tonne of stuff to be wrapped up at the end. Unwilling as I was to do an Extended Director’s Cut and write an ending that went on and ever on, I tried to keep it all mercifully concise.

So this anthology has offered me the opportunity to elaborate, to tie up some things, to answer a few questions, and to visit the Ghosts as they plan their future. I was also able to incorporate a couple of great ideas from Nik (who, let’s face it, essentially has to live with the Ghosts as much as I do), for which I am extremely grateful. This story is, I suppose, an epilogue to Anarch, an extra final chapter that didn’t make the cut. But it’s also a complete story in its own right and, in some ways, is the first chapter of the next book.

We’ve seen the Ghosts in war, we’ve seen them struggle and fight. But we’ve never really seen what happens when they win, and what happens after that. What does that feel like? Does it feel good, a relief, or is it actually difficult to process? What good are victories and glories if you’re not in a position to enjoy them?

This, then, is what The Victory feels like…

They were burning the dead again. Third day running.

Viktor Hark managed to ignore the smell for a while. He was hardened to the dispiriting odours of the battlefield. Career Militarum, you learned to just block them out and get on with your business.

And he had business aplenty to get on with. He adjusted his chair, picked up his stylus, and returned his attention to page seventy-six of the Munitorum requisition briefing.

‘Feth it,’ he said. He put the stylus down, and got to his feet. The smell was truly foul. He stomped to the window of his large tower office. It was a fine day; that’s why he’d left the window open. The mass cremations were underway about six kilometres away, but the coastal wind was driving the smoke, and the stench, across the Great Hill and into the precincts of the Urdeshic Palace. He leant out to close the window. Fair enough to endure the reek on the battlefield, but this wasn’t the battlefield. Not any more. This was liberated Urdesh, the hour of triumph, and this was not what the world was supposed to smell like.

It was not what victory was supposed to smell like.

The window was small and old, and he was large and formidable, but it fought back anyway. Hark muttered ‘Feth it’ again, twice, followed by a ‘Feth this’, and a testy ‘Feth it all’, before the window finally submitted to the authority of the Prefectus and the power of his augmetic arm.

He returned to his desk and resumed his seat. The stink still hung in the room, permeating the limewash and the filing crates and the unfathomable oil paintings left behind by his predecessor. Permeating his clothes.

‘Fething feth it,’ he said. He wondered if the mess was open yet.

There was a knock at the door.

‘Open!’ he barked, not looking up, expecting Ludd with more papers. It wasn’t. It was Baskevyl.

‘A moment?’ Baskevyl asked.

‘Of course, of course,’ replied Hark, beckoning enthusiastically as he made a quick margin note on the requisition briefing. Then he suddenly leapt to his feet and stood to attention.

‘What… are you doing?’ asked Baskevyl, cautiously.

‘Standing up. Sir.’

‘Because…?’

‘Guardsmen of all rank, from file to senior, will stand attentive when the commanding officer enters the room. My sincere apologies. That was absolutely inexcusable.’

Baskevyl narrowed his eyes slightly and regarded the rigidly upright commissar with great wariness.

‘Is this some kind of…’ he said. ‘Are you taking the piss, Viktor?’

‘Sir. No, sir.’

‘Oh, for Throne’s sake… Viktor…’

‘I am senior Prefectus officer of the Tanith First, and you are the regiment’s colonel.’

Baskevyl sighed.

‘Sit down,’ he said.

Hark sat down.

Baskevyl wheeled over another chair and sat facing him.

‘Don’t be doing that,’ Baskevyl said wearily. ‘We’re friends. I think that allows us a certain degree of informality.’

‘It is my responsibility to maintain and exemplify formal protocols,’ said Hark, ‘and if I don’t get in the habit, we can hardly expect any hairy-arsed lasman to–’

‘It’s a habit I’d prefer we didn’t get into,’ said Baskevyl.

‘You are colonel.’

‘Acting.’

‘Even so. We have standards.’

‘He will be back.’

Hark nodded. ‘Yes. Of course he will. But Ana says Rawne could be out for six months. Six minimum.’

‘Well, I tell you this much,’ said Baskevyl, ‘when he does come back, Rawne won’t like you doing that any more than I do. Because he doesn’t want to be colonel any more than I do.’

‘Well,’ replied Hark philosophically, ‘what any of us “want” has never really factored into the scheme of things, has it?’

‘In the regiment?’

‘In the Astra Militarum.’

Baskevyl nodded. He sagged in his chair.

‘It should have been Gol,’ he murmured.

Hark wasn’t sure how to reply. Before he had to, Baskevyl sat up again and said, ‘What is that stench?’

‘Burning bodies,’ said Hark. ‘They’re using a derelict manufactory site out at Kadish Hill, but the wind’s in the wrong direction.’

‘Enemy dead?’

‘But of course,’ said Hark. ‘We’re not barbarians. Our fallen are being treated with the respect they are due. But mass disposal is necessary. The local population is stringing up Sekkite corpses in the street, so I hear. Pelting rocks at them. All part of the manic festivities. Also disgraceful, and a public health issue. So… the Munitorum is processing.’

‘You can’t blame the Urdeshi,’ said Baskevyl. ‘This is a turning point for them. They’ve suffered under Archonate occupation way too long.’

‘They have,’ said Hark. ‘And, my friend, this is a big moment for us too. This is victory. The greatest since Balhaut. We have delivered the grace of the Throne, and restored the Pax Imperialis. We have made good on pledges sworn on the eve of the crusade to deliver the Sabbat Worlds from the malign grip of the Archenemy–’

‘Spare me the propaganda…’

‘I’m saying, Bask, this is what victory feels like.’

‘Maybe. It’s not done yet,’ said Baskevyl.

‘No,’ Hark admitted. ‘No. A few years more, perhaps. But the Anarch’s dead. The Archon stands alone. We enter the endgame. We should at least celebrate that.’

‘Well, we could start by you not jumping up like an idiot every time I walk into a room.’

‘I… can accommodate that.’

Hark looked across the desk at Baskevyl. The Belladon seemed to be fascinated by a patch of carpet, and Hark couldn’t remember the carpet being all that interesting when he took the office over.

‘What’s on your mind, Bask?’ he asked.

Baskevyl roused out of his reverie. He glanced back at Hark, flashed an entirely counterfeit smile, and said, ‘A, B, C, E, G, T, and V. I’d like to hear your thoughts. I can’t seem to settle on decisions.’

‘Ah,’ said Hark. ‘That. Of course.’

‘And I also,’ said Baskevyl, ‘want you to tell me, to my face, that the effort is worth it, too.’

‘Worth it? How do you mean?’

Baskevyl looked at him as though he ought to know. There was a brooding disquiet in his eyes.

‘You are a good friend, Viktor,’ he said. ‘Probably the best I have left–’

‘High praise indeed,’ said Hark, one eyebrow raised.

Baskevyl chuckled. ‘You know what I mean. I’d normally talk details like this through with a good friend. See which way the wind is blowing–’

‘Easterly, from Kadish Hill,’ said Hark. Baskevyl ignored Hark’s levity.

‘I’d go to Gol with this,’ said Baskevyl. ‘And I keep forgetting I can’t.’

Hark pursed his lips and nodded.

‘It was the same after Corbec,’ he reflected.

‘I can imagine,’ Baskevyl replied. ‘Except it wasn’t. Rawne’s fethed up, and this isn’t his kind of thing anyway. When Corbec died, Gaunt was still very much hands-on. But he isn’t any more. And he won’t be. And Gol’s not here. It’s just us scraps and actings and survivors left to sort the details out, and it hardly seems worth it.’

‘Because?’

‘Because I think the Ghosts are done, Viktor,’ said Baskevyl.

‘What, because… Gaunt’s Lord Executor?’ asked Hark. ‘Bask, he’s not… I mean, he won’t be involved at company level again, I realise, but he has assured us several times that the Tanith First will form his personal command detail, the core of his new armies. We get a few months here at Urdesh to recuperate and heal our wounds, not to mention revel in the honours and garlands heaped upon us from every quarter for our role in the victory, then–’

‘Then what?’ asked Baskevyl. ‘We’ll never be front line again. Our war is over. We’ll get shiny new uniforms, and we’ll parade up and down behind the fething band every time Gaunt takes a review, and people will say, “Oh, look at those fine lasmen, with their bright shiny buttons. They were the ones who brought the Anarch down”. And that, Viktor, will be the rest of our lives. Honoured veterans. Sitting around in one forsaken palace after another, polishing our medals, waiting for the next ceremony. We will become domesticated. House pets. Tamed and caged by a new kind of duty.’

‘Huh,’ said Hark. He sank back in his chair. ‘My, my. We spend our lives longing for the meat grinder to end, and when it does, we miss it. The curse of the Militarum. Forever the same.’

‘What?’

‘You know, the old Tanith toast? My point is, Bask… Is a happy ever after and a life of honoured, ceremonial retirement really so fething awful? Isn’t it what we were fighting for all along?’

Baskevyl shrugged.

‘Some people, Viktor,’ he said, ‘deserved to be here to enjoy it.’

‘I’m not arguing that. The other curse of Militarum life. Look, I’m senior Prefectus officer, and apart from jumping up and down like jack-on-a-spring when you come through a door, I am also obliged to keep things running so, yes, it is worth the effort, and even if it wasn’t, we have to do it anyway. Let’s get the companies sorted. If we got to pick and choose the jobs we liked, this wouldn’t be the Imperial fething Guard, would it?’

‘Duty, eh?’ said Baskevyl. ‘Forever the same?’

‘Something like that. Now…’

Hark rose to his feet and brushed down the front of his jacket.

‘…First things first, what we really need is a party.’

Baskevyl frowned at him.

‘What? Feth, no.’

‘I’m not talking about some mindless celebration to mark the victory, Bask,’ said Hark. ‘We’ll leave that to the common folk who remain mercifully unaware of the bitter price a victory demands from those who achieve it. I’m talking something small and dignified. A dinner party. Just us and the company seniors. We’ll set empty chairs for the missing as a mark of respect, and then, together, we will decide who should fill them.’

‘You got a light?’ asked Brostin.

‘What?’ Cant responded. He cleared his throat. His voice was still tight, the garrotte wound that had nearly killed him on the Armaduke still healing. Sometimes, in ways he couldn’t control, his voice came out like a whisper or a ridiculous squeak. He was about to say ‘What?’ again, but he saw that the hulking Tanith was wiggling a tatty cigar between his teeth.

‘Oh, yeah,’ said Cant. He got off the wall, fished out his lucifers, and lit Brostin’s smoke. Brostin inhaled contentedly, but kept the cigar clenched between his teeth. He only had one functioning hand, and that had three splinted fingers, so the effort of actually holding a cigar had been abandoned.

‘They won’t let me have a light,’ said Brostin, gazing into the distance.

‘I can’t imagine why,’ replied Cant.

‘Eh?’

Callan Cant coughed again, to rid the whisper-squeak from his voice.

‘I said,’ he repeated, ‘I can’t imagine why.’

‘Oh, you can’t, can you, Cant?’ asked Brostin, and chuckled to himself.

Cant sighed. Brostin wasn’t a good friend by any means, but they were both survivors of B Company’s otherwise decimated First platoon, the ‘Suicide Kings’, so they had looked out for each other during their mandated infirmary stay. Cant had been wounded before the Ghosts had even arrived on Urdesh, so he’d missed everything that had transpired in the past few weeks, including the brutal last stand of the Suicide Kings at Plade Parish. Aongus Brostin had been there for that, at Rawne’s side, and had ended up suffering severe crush injuries for his efforts. He’d been trapped under rockcrete rubble for hours.

A fine pair they made, out in the sun on the infirmary’s terrace. Cant, skinnier than usual, pale, dark rings under his eyes, a dressing around his throat like a roll-neck collar covering the thin, pink scar-line where an Archonate wire had almost sliced his head off. Brostin, in his invalid chair, strapped to a backboard, both legs and one arm pinned and cast rigid. He looked like a statue that had been taken off its plinth and laid askew across an armchair. No one knew if he’d walk again, or if he did, if he’d ever be able to lug the weight of flamer tanks around.

‘Smoke,’ remarked Cant. It explained the irritation in his throat. They’d been allowed out onto the terrace to get some fresh air. There was a good view across the courtyards and walls of the Urdeshic Palace, and the city of Eltath beyond, sprawling in a bright sea haze. But smoke was blowing in across the yards from somewhere in the distance.

‘Bodies,’ said Brostin.

‘What?’

‘That’s dead meat burning,’ said Brostin. ‘Cremation work. Fething amateurs.’

‘What do you mean, “amateurs”?’

Brostin sniffed. ‘You can smell it, Cant. They’ve got the temp too low and nothing like enough fuel. Corpses’ll burn like tallow fat. That’s the stink, see? They want a fiercer heat. And someone who knows how to work a fething flamer.’

Cant nodded. The immolation of cadavers wasn’t quite the topic he wanted to discuss. He had barely spoken to anyone in weeks. He wanted to know about everything that had happened, about the Tulkar Batteries and the fight to hold the city, about the monumental victory that had, apparently, happened while he was in a pharmaceutical haze.

And he wanted to know about the Kings’ bloody last stand, and what would happen to them, and to B Company, with Rawne so badly wounded and Gaunt gone. But Brostin was hardly the person to ask. Cant didn’t want to stir him up with questions about the events that had put him in traction and left him sitting here in the sun, unable to light his own smoke, with little prospect of an active future.

‘Gonna be Lurgoine,’ mused Brostin, gazing out at the distant smoke. ‘You mark my words. Jo Lurgoine. Now Rawne’s out. Lurgoine, or maybe Fergol Wersun. Gotta be a veteran Tanith for B Company senior, and they’ve both paid their dues, Throne knows, so they’re the favourites. Both overdue a promotion. Wersun’s a fine lasman. Tough as rockcrete, but Jo’s more level-headed, so my money’s on him. That’s what you were thinking, isn’t it?’

‘No,’ Cant lied.

‘It is.’

‘It’ll just be temporary, though,’ said Cant. ‘Surely? Once Rawne is–’

‘Nah, Rawne’s pegged for regimental command if he pulls through. No more company lead for him. It’ll be Lurgoine. Or Wersun. Permanent.’

Brostin fell silent, pensively exhaling smoke around his cigar.

‘Or Ruri Cown,’ he added. ‘But a Tanith, definite.’

They heard footsteps behind them. Cant turned. Brostin used his splinted hand awkwardly to back-rotate the left wheel of his chair and swing himself about.

Doctor Kolding had a data-slate in his hand.

‘Just came to notify you, Trooper Cant,’ he said. ‘We’ve reviewed, and you’re fit enough to be discharged. Light duties only, and I want you back here every morning to have the dressing checked.’

‘Good. At last,’ said Cant.

‘Well,’ said Kolding. ‘Be sensible. Mind how you go.’

Kolding paused, as though there might be other things to say, but he’d never been one for small talk. With a curt nod, he turned and walked away.

‘Good for you,’ growled Brostin. ‘You must be sick of this place.’

Cant nodded. He’d been praying for a release note. Now he felt guilty leaving Brostin alone.

‘I can come back and visit you,’ he suggested.

‘Oh, you can, can you, Cant?’

‘Yeah, I can.’

Brostin sniffed. His stare had returned to the distant walls and the pall of smoke.

‘I’ll be fine,’ he said quietly. ‘Chance to put me feet up. Take life slow and easy. Haven’t we all wished for that?’

‘Well, can I bring you anything?’

Brostin thought about it. He fished the ratty cigar from his teeth with his bandaged hand.

‘I want a drink,’ he said.

‘A drink?’

‘Sacra.’

Cant shrugged. ‘I can probably get you some sacra,’ he said.

‘No,’ said Brostin. ‘I want my sacra. My sacra in my bottle. It’s the good stuff. You can fetch it for me, from me kit.’

‘I can do that,’ said Cant.

This was what victory felt like.

The streets of Eltath were shaking. Crowds were choking Princeps Avenue all the way back to Ordinel Place and the Great Hill Road. People cheered as the parade wound through, their cheeks and foreheads painted blue, white and gold, the tricolour emblem of Urdeshi forge world. Pennants danced and flags waved furiously. Temple bells were pealing from every tower and spire. The roar of the crowds almost drowned out the playing of the marching bands, all drilled Urdeshi ceremonial units that were followed by Urdeshi infantry regiments, followed by Keyzon and Helixid formations, followed by processions of fab worker unions and clade guilds, their gilded and tasselled banners high in the sunlight, streamers fluttering overhead. Some of the Urdeshi soldiers broke their perfect marching files to take flowers from the reaching hands of the crowd, or steal cheeky kisses before running back into line. People stood with hands on hearts, singing the battle hymns of the clades. Flowers, everywhere – garlands of islumbine around necks, sprigs of islumbine in waving hands, twists of islumbine tucked into drum straps or epaulettes, wreaths of islumbine around company standards. The flower of the Beati was not native, but suddenly it seemed to be flourishing everywhere.

Between the regimental blocks came columns of esholi, ringing handbells, carrying relics, or shouldering biers on which sat effigies of Saint Sabbat. Street hawkers were selling medallions of the Saint by the handful, and votives of Saint Kiodrus too. Saint Sabbat’s illustrious companion, her Lord Executor during the original crusade, was enjoying a popular resurgence now there was a new Lord Executor to idolise.

Arrowhead formations of Thunderbolts soared low over the city, following the route of the march, the howl of their afterburners briefly overwhelming the vast noise below, their fleeting shadows making the crowd look up, and point, and cheer. The Aeronautica birds banked high and wide over the bay, popped tricolour trails of smoke, and turned back to make another pass. Another three circuits, and they would sweep to the carrier decks of the mighty Naiad Antitor to refuel, load more smoke canisters, and do it all over again. First Minister Hallemikal and the senior ordinels of the Upper House came out onto the balcony of Convocation House to watch the fly-past and wave to the crowds. From the high docks of the shift-port above the city, in the slope of the Great Hill, berthed ships sounded their sirens and their approach horns, the deep call of void giants resting in their dry-dock silos. Out in the bay, the sea was full of boats and amphibia, of sails and flags, the water strewn with islumbine petals. Later, after dark, there would be feasts and skyrockets long into the night.

It had been the same for three days. It would be the same for another month.

The Ghosts, on a day pass, pushed their way through the seething mob, politely refusing the garlands pressed at them, awkwardly accepting kisses and embraces.

‘Feth this,’ said Kester Raglon. ‘There’s no room to move!’

‘What?’ Wes Maggs yelled, hand cupped to his ear.

‘He said there’s no room to move!’ Jed Lubba yelled back.

‘There must be somewhere we can get a quiet drink,’ shouted Noa Vadim.

‘What?’ Maggs bellowed.

‘With me,’ said Mach Bonin. ‘No, thank you,’ he added, to a woman who was either eager to kiss the Tanith scout or give him the small infant she was clutching.

‘It’s a good thing you can’t hear this,’ Raglon said to Nessa, ‘because it’s fething deafening!’

He had garlands of islumbine in both hands and he didn’t know what to do with them. The planes went over again, low, the noise of them making their diaphragms quake. Nessa Bourah grinned at Raglon, and put her hand to her chest. She could feel the mayhem, and that was enough.

They made their way through the scrum to the rear of the crowd, and squeezed out into a side street. There were people here too, running, laughing, drinking, and the tumult of the main parade echoed behind them, but it was easier to move.

‘Feth,’ said Maggs. ‘I thought I was going to get the life kissed out of me.’

Most action you’re going to get, Nessa signed.

Vadim snorted.

‘What?’ said Maggs. ‘What did she say? She said something, I didn’t see it.’

‘She said we’re heroes,’ said Bonin. ‘Whether we like it or not. So get used to it.’

‘Where are we?’ Lubba asked. Squealing children scampered past with flowers in their hair and paint on their faces.

‘Little Clade Street,’ said Werd Caober, bringing up the rear, last out of the crowd. ‘Arcuda said there was a decent place around here somewhere.’

‘Kolosim says there’s a good liquor-house on Zaving Square,’ suggested Maggs.

‘Well, that’s over that way,’ said Caober. ‘We’re not going to fight our way back through those crowds.’

‘Shit,’ said Raglon, stopping suddenly. ‘Look at that.’

On the next street corner, there were three Sons of Sek. They were strung from the bracket of an iron street lamp. Small children were laughing as they milled around and threw stones at the suspended corpses.

‘They’re doing that a lot, so I hear,’ said Vadim.

‘Who?’ asked Maggs.

‘The Urdeshi,’ said Caober. ‘Street gibbets all over the city. Every corpse they find.’

‘Doesn’t seem right,’ murmured Raglon.

‘No more than they deserve,’ said Bonin.

‘Maybe,’ said Raglon.

‘They’d do it to us,’ said Caober.

‘Yeah, but it’s not about them,’ said Raglon. ‘It’s what it says about us. We could show some dignity in victory.’

‘Feth dignity,’ said Maggs. ‘I’m thirsty.’

The Ghosts looked at the hanged corpses for a moment. They could smell the bloating and the encroaching decay. The roar of the city nearby seemed to diminish for a moment.

What did they do to their mouths? Nessa signed, but no one noticed.

‘This way,’ said Caober abruptly. ‘Let’s get arse-faced.’

‘Well, you’ve got a head start, then,’ said Maggs.

The bar on the next street was busy, crowds spilling out into the road.

‘Here’ll do,’ said Vadim.

‘I’ll buy the first round,’ said Raglon, the only officer in the group.

‘I don’t think you’ll need to, Rags,’ said Lubba. The patrons at the bar, all locals, had seen them, and were already waving and shouting and clapping.

‘Well, it’s a dirty job…’ Maggs grinned, and led the way forward.

Raglon glanced back. Bonin had been left behind. He was still staring at the makeshift gibbet.

‘All right, Mach?’ Raglon asked.

‘Yeah.’

Raglon wanted to press it. Bonin had been right in the hell of it, down in the Undercroft when the woe machines cut loose. No one really knew how he had survived, or the others with him, or how they’d managed to fight and protect an astonishing number of the regimental retinue from the horror in the dark.

‘Something on your mind?’ Raglon asked.

‘No,’ said Bonin. ‘Let’s get drunk.’

‘Ah! Piece of the shit!’

Sergeant Haller came to a halt at the sound of the familiar voice, and backtracked a few paces down the palace hallway until he came level with the half-open door.

‘Problem, major?’ he asked.

In her quarters, Major Pasha glanced at him. She was sitting on her cot, a uniform jacket in each hand, and more clothes spread across the floor from her kitbag.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘There is dinner.’

‘Dinner?’

‘Dinner, yes. Party. Dinner party. More parties, never-ending. Three this week, Haller. Three. And more to come. Victory! Huh! Harder gakking work than fighting! And now, Viktor Hark, he says we have another dinner. Formal. Senior staff.’

‘I’m sure it will be… very convivial,’ said Haller.

Pasha got up.

‘As you may have noticed, my dear sergeant, we have fewer officers to go around than usual these days.’ Pasha shook her head sadly. ‘Laid up hurt, or … ah, Throne bless the dead. There is too much to do, Haller, and not enough of us to do it. I have four of the meetings today. Four. Munitorum. Tactical. Then war room. Then meeting to review memorial services. I have no time for more things.’

‘The dinner?’

‘Yes, the dinner. Well, not so much the dinner, but it is being dress code. Formal. I wore my dress uniform at function night before last, and some gak-idiot Keyzon spilled the wine down it. It, I cannot wear. So I come to find my spare.’

She held a jacket up for him to see.

‘That’s… pretty much ruined,’ he said.

‘Yes! Yes, it is. Piece of the shit. My kit was in Undercroft billet, and Undercroft billet flooded, now everything is ruined piece of the shit. I do not have time to find replacement.’

‘Well, I could do that for you.’

‘You could?’

‘Of course.’ ‘You have time?’

‘I can spare some.’

‘Oh, Cin Haller. You are good man. Honest, good Verghastite son. You know tailor?’

‘Tailor?’

‘Tai-lor,’ she said, over-enunciating. ‘Gar-ment ma-ker?’

‘No, but I thought stores could–’

‘Munitorum no good, Haller, no good. Take too long. Request slip, and the authorisation, and then requisition, and then blah blah in triplicate…’

‘Then I think I know someone,’ said Haller. He held out his hand. ‘Leave it with me, major.’

She passed him the ruined jacket. It was damp, and it stank.

‘Just like this one?’ Haller asked.

Pasha narrowed her eyes. ‘You saying I have put on the weight?’ she asked.

‘No, I meant the styling of it, mam.’

Pasha grunted. ‘Yes, like that. Thank you, Haller. You are helping me out a great lot.’

The gymnasium of the Palace barrack wing was a large, cold space. Whitewashed walls, hardwood floors varnished like glossy caramel, large windows that shone with the high air and the sea light. There was no one in except Chiria when Criid arrived. Chiria was lifting weights on a corner bench. They nodded to each other, but said nothing. That suited Tona Criid. She had nothing to say.

She crossed the big, brown leather floor mat behind the practice cages. They were old machines, immaculately maintained, though no Astartes had used their vicious programs for combat drill in a long time. She had thought about running, her favoured method of burning away energy and anger, but running would mean leaving the Palace compound, and she couldn’t face the city. The crowds. The celebration.

Loss and rage wrestled inside her, fighting for supremacy. Whichever of them won, she would still be broken.

She pulled her shirt off over her head, and stood in boots, breeches and vest as she bound her hands with tape. Then she took a breath, bowed her head, and launched the first blow. She rained them hard. The hanging bag, brown leather like the floor mat, shivered on its chain with every muffled slap.

She kept hitting until her knuckles were raw. They were dead. They were all dead, and nothing made sense any more.

She paused, panting, ready to go again, and saw Chiria standing at the edge of the mat. Chiria was a head taller than Criid and her muscled arms twice the size. She was wiping sweat off her neck with a cloth, her weight reps done. There was a look on her famously scarred face, and Criid knew what it was.

‘No offence,’ Criid said. ‘I don’t want to talk.’

Chiria nodded.

‘I guessed that,’ she replied.

‘Nothing to say,’ said Criid.

‘I understand,’ said Chiria. She walked over to the wall racks, and took down a pair of focus pads. They were old, brown leather too. She put them on, ducked under the speed ball, and came across the mat to face Criid.

She took a braced stance, and cupped the pads up.

‘Not in the mood,’ said Criid.

‘Better than the bag,’ said Chiria. ‘More responsive. Do your worst.’

Criid hesitated. She realised Chiria really wasn’t going to talk. She knew better than to try, because how do you even start? She wasn’t trying to use the opportunity to have a quiet word, or console. She was just standing there with her hands up, waiting to be hit.

Criid slammed punches into the pads. Chiria took them, nodded, and they began to circle. Criid punched some more, harder and with less finesse, and Chiria just soaked up each blow with gentle, corrective back-steps.

‘Do your worst,’ she urged.

‘You don’t want that,’ said Criid. ‘It’d break your hands.’

Chiria grinned, and raised her eyebrows as though to say ‘as if’.

Criid let it all go. Fifteen minutes straight, no let up, pounding into the pads that floated and bobbed in front of her, moving around the mat.

Chiria stepped back and lowered the focus pads. Criid was out of breath, sweat dripping off her onto the leather.

‘Any more, and you’ll break your hands,’ said Chiria.

Criid nodded.

‘I’ll be back tomorrow,’ said Chiria.

Criid nodded again.

‘My form’s not good,’ she said, breathing hard. ‘All over the place.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Chiria. ‘Just do it. I don’t care what I look like, I just do what needs doing. However long that takes.’

‘Yeah,’ said Criid.

‘Unless you want to stop?’ said Chiria.

‘No,’ said Criid. ‘I’ll keep going. However long that takes.’

‘Tomorrow, then,’ said Chiria, and walked away. On her way out of the gymnasium door, she passed Merity Chass coming in.

Criid was stripping off her wraps. Chiria, bless her bones, had had the decency not to even try a conversation. Gaunt’s daughter couldn’t be trusted to do the same. Criid gritted her teeth. She didn’t need this.

‘I’ve been looking for you,’ said Merity. Her hair was growing out. Her tunic and breeches looked like the basic uniform of the Tacticae Division.

‘Listen, I’m sorry, but I really don’t want to talk about anything,’ said Criid.

‘I understand,’ said Merity. ‘I don’t want to talk about it either. None of it. Dalin. Yoncy. Gol. What the feth is there to say?’

Everything, thought Criid. Nothing. The children had been hers. She had saved them, and raised them. Then it turned out they were Gol’s, by some miracle, and she and Gol had worked together to share the responsibility.

Then it turned out that the children weren’t children at all. And now they were gone, and there was a hole left where they had been, a gaping wound, a fathomless pit, and Gol, by some cruel and unbearable injustice, had been lost in the same pit, and others with him, like Jessi Banda, and Leyr, and Neskon and Ban Daur’s woman Elodie, and General fething Von Voytz, and so many more.

And the greatest injustice of all was that Criid had been spared, so she would have to live with it. She’d never be whole again. None of them would, none of the ones that this had touched. And that meant everyone, because those children had been known and loved by everyone, and Gol Kolea had been the heart of the regiment.

If this was what victory felt like, then Throne help those who lived to see it.

Criid tossed the wrappings into a metal bin, and leaned against the wall, hand splayed, head down, the sweat dripping from her face disguising the tears falling from her eyes.

‘How can you miss something so completely and also hate it?’ she asked.

‘Someone,’ said Merity.

‘No,’ said Criid. ‘They were lies. They were weapons.’

‘I was with Dalin right at the end,’ said Merity. ‘He came to find me. I don’t think he’d have done that if he’d been a lie. I think that part of him was still there. Enough to slow him down and delay his onslaught.’

Criid looked at her.

‘I thought you didn’t want to talk about it?’ she snapped.

‘I didn’t. You asked.’

‘You miss him?’

‘Of course. We were close. He was my friend, until he wasn’t.’

‘He was my son,’ said Criid. She straightened up.

‘What do you want?’ she asked.

‘Not this conversation,’ said Merity. ‘Neither of us are ready for it. But you made a promise to me. Or rather, to my lifeward.’

‘What?’

‘That you’d protect me. That’s what you told her.’

‘Feth sakes, I haven’t got time for this,’ said Criid.

‘You misunderstand me,’ said Merity. ‘Since I arrived on Urdesh, I’ve got through two bodyguards. My lifeward. You were there for that. Then they gave me a Scion. Her name was Relf. I didn’t know her long. She died in the Undercroft.’

Criid stared at the girl. There was no expression on Merity’s face. It was easy to forget quite how much shit she’d been through too. If she’d been able to feel anything, Criid would have pitied her.

‘So what?’ Criid said. ‘You want me to be your lifeward now? Your bodyguard? Because I made some fething promise? You want me to protect you?’

‘Oh no,’ said Merity. ‘I don’t want to rely on anybody. I want to protect myself. But someone needs to teach me how. You’re a soldier. A good one. I’d trust your lessons.’

‘Self-defence?’ Criid asked. The request had wrong-footed her.

Merity nodded. ‘And firearms. Whatever techniques you’ve got the patience to teach me. I only ever did basic.’

Criid shook her head wearily.

‘There are times,’ she said, ‘when you remind me of your father.’

‘I’ll try not be insulted by that,’ said Merity.

Criid reached to her hip and drew her warknife. She held it out, grip first, towards Merity.

‘Then we’ll start with blades,’ she said. ‘Straight silver. That’s the Ghost trademark, so you’d better learn it.’

Merity took the blade.

‘What will you use?’ she asked, but Criid had knelt down to pull a blade from a boot sheath. It was stubby, half the length of the warknife, like a baby sister.

‘Short silver,’ she said. ‘A lot of us carry backups. Blade fights are ugly, and the only good ones are the quick ones. There’s no finesse. Nothing fancy. You do whatever works. You get in first, and finish it fast. A knife-fight that lasts gets slippery and messy, and you lose grip, or footing. Or you bleed out. So you kill the fether hard before he cuts you. With me so far?’

‘Every word,’ Merity replied.

‘Good. Now come at me.’

With Pasha’s mouldering dress jacket under his arm, Haller was crossing the Circular Court when he spotted Ban Daur. His old friend was standing alone, facing the wall.

Haller didn’t much want to talk to him, because he didn’t know what to say. Daur had just lost his wife in the most horrific circumstances. But no one had seen Daur for days, and now here he was, just staring at a wall.

Haller wondered if he should fetch Hark. Or Curth.

‘All right?’ he asked.

Daur looked at him. His uniform was grubby. He seemed calm, though he needed a shave.

‘Hey, Haller,’ he said.

‘Something wrong with that wall?’ Haller asked.

‘No, I just…’

‘What?’ asked Haller.

‘Where are you off to?’ Daur asked.

‘I’m trying to get Pasha’s jacket fixed. There’s some dinner, or something. Anyway…’

Daur nodded.

‘Probably a good idea, getting in Pasha’s good books,’ said Daur.

‘It’s just an errand,’ said Haller. ‘What do you mean, Ban?’

Daur looked up at the sky. It was bright and hazy. They could hear engines in the distance. Thunderbolt flights, out over the bay.

‘Well,’ said Daur, ‘there are jobs in the offing. Promotions. You’d be in the mix, I should think. I’ve recommended you before now. I think you’ve got a good chance this time.’

‘You mean… a company senior?’ asked Haller.

‘Seems there are a few vacancies right now,’ said Daur. He said it deadpan, and seemed amused by it. Haller was a little shocked.

‘You think I’m… currying favour to get her backing on a promotion?’ he asked.

‘No,’ said Daur. ‘It was a joke. Sorry, my sense of humour needs recalibrating.’

Daur looked around suddenly, as if he’d heard something, then turned back to Haller.

‘Actually,’ said Haller, ‘Baskevyl was talking about me filling in for you. Acting senior on D Company. Just for now. Until you’re…’

‘Better?’ asked Daur.

‘You know what I mean. You need time.’

Daur nodded.

‘Unless you’re going to… just carry on,’ said Haller.

Daur shrugged.

‘No idea,’ he said. ‘But if it came to it, I’d be happy to see D safe in your hands. Although…’

‘What?’

‘Acting? Do you just want acting? There are permanents on offer, and you’ve been on the shortlist for a long time. It’d be you, Derin, maybe Cown.’

‘Lurgoine,’ said Haller. ‘Wersun too.’

‘True,’ said Daur. ‘Well, there are enough spots, may the Emperor protect us. C Company–’

‘No,’ said Haller quickly.

‘No?’

‘Not that one.’

‘But you’re Vervunhive. Makes sense.’

‘No. Not Kolea’s,’ said Haller. ‘I won’t take it. No one wants it, Ban. No one can follow him.’

‘Oh, but you’ll take mine off me?’

‘Because you’re coming back,’ said Haller. He wavered. ‘Aren’t you?’

Daur glanced aside again.

‘What’s the matter?’ asked Haller.

‘Nothing,’ said Daur. ‘C Company would be a good fit for you, Cin. You’d make it your own quick enough.’

‘I don’t want to make it my own. I wouldn’t take it. I don’t want people thinking I’m trying to replace Gol.’

‘It doesn’t matter what people think,’ said Daur.

‘It does to me,’ said Haller. ‘Heritage. Respect. Respect for tradition. I don’t know. There’s a way of doing things. Ceremonial. Like… like wearing the right jacket.’

He looked down at the ruined coat he was carrying.

‘Whoever takes C Company should have earned it. They should be bulletproof. Not just the next idiot on a list.’

‘Well, E Company, then?’ said Daur.

‘Oh gak! Seriously? Meryn’s mob? The unlucky bastards? The cursed company? No thank you!’

Daur stared at him, and then started to laugh. Haller winced. It didn’t seem right Daur laughing. Haller hadn’t meant to be amusing.

‘I tell you what you are, Cin,’ Daur chuckled, ‘you’re fething picky! Not this one, not that one. Company senior is company senior. It’s an honour, and you deserve it. Stop making objections. Respect for tradition, my arse.’

‘Oh, I want it,’ said Haller. ‘But C was Gol, and E was fething Meryn, and it’s toxic.’

‘Have it your way,’ said Daur. ‘Go and get that coat mended. And try not to trip up on any heritage or tradition while you’re doing it.’

Haller hesitated.

‘You be all right out here?’ he asked.

‘Of course. Why wouldn’t I be?’

‘Because. Because of what happened to… I’m so sorry, Ban.’

Daur didn’t reply.

‘Look,’ said Haller. ‘You keep… you keep looking around. Is there something bothering you?’

Daur shook his head.

‘I keep hearing voices,’ he said softly. ‘Everywhere I go. Even in the quiet corners of this place. Sometimes, it sounds like…’

He stopped. He looked at Haller.

‘It sounds like her, sometimes,’ he said. ‘Like she’s just behind a wall, calling out. Don’t look at me like that. I’m probably just going mad. I’m going to get Ana to check me out. Of course, if I am mad, I’ll be relieved of duty, so D Company can be yours full time.’

‘Voices?’ said Haller.

‘Old voices, Haller. You know, ghosts. Corbec. Feygor. Merrt. I swear I heard Bragg laughing in the back quad yesterday. Sometimes it’s her. It’s just me, Haller. Just my imagination. The good old torments. You know how that gets. Day before last, I was sure I heard Brin Milo in the billet. Even thought I saw him too.’

‘Well, you probably did,’ said Haller.

‘What?’

Haller frowned.

‘Didn’t anyone tell you?’ he asked. ‘He came back. Milo came back. He survived. Came back with Mkoll. The KIA report was wrong. You probably did hear Milo.’

Daur looked stunned.

‘Really?’ Daur said. ‘He came back? Is he… Is he going to rejoin the regiment?’

Haller shrugged.

‘No one knows,’ he replied. ‘No one’s really spoken to him. He’s, like, all grown up. Not a boy any more, not at all. And very distant. No one knows what to say to him. It’s all a bit awkward, to be honest. But still, he made it, and I’m happy about that.’

‘He came back,’ Daur murmured. ‘Well… that’s something.’

‘But we’re going to get a drink, right?’ asked Asa Elam as they walked down the Great Hill into the city.

‘Yes, we’re going to get a fething drink,’ replied Darra Bray. ‘Leave off. I just need to make a stop on the way.’

‘As long as there’s some drinking,’ said Elam. ‘And some celebrating. And all of that.’

‘What stop?’ asked Shoggy Domor. Bray sighed, and began to explain it again.

‘Cant came to me,’ said Bray. ‘He’s got a problem. He’s just got signed off out of the infirmary, and Brostin asked him to fetch his sacra for him.’

‘We can get him sacra,’ said Domor. ‘Osket’s got a still and–’

‘No,’ said Bray. ‘Brostin wants his bottle. His own bottle. Bragg gave it to him, years ago. Anyway, Cant checked Brostin’s kit, and the bottle’s been smashed. I think it was in Brostin’s musette bag when that rockcrete fell on him.’

‘Oh, shit,’ said Domor.

‘I know,’ said Bray. ‘So Cant came to me. Asked where we could get another. And we can’t because, you know…. I mean, who’s got one of Bragg’s actual, original bottles left any more?’

‘Larkin?’ said Elam.

‘Oh, probably,’ said Bray, ‘but he’s not going to give his up, is he? So Cant came to me. He’s made this promise. I said I’d help. Look, here it is. I knew I’d seen one. This won’t take a moment.’

He ran down some pavement steps to the low parade of a small commercia.

‘But we are going for a drink?’ Elam called after him.

‘Oh, feth you!’ Bray called back over his shoulder.

‘Uh, “Feth you, captain,” if you don’t mind,’ Elam replied as he and Domor followed Bray down the steps.

‘So you can’t fix it?’ said Bray.

The ceramicist’s workshop was small, and low, and dark, and smelled of glazes and kiln dust. The ceramicist, an old Urdeshi man, looked down at the bundle that Bray had unfolded on the counter.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Really?’ asked Bray.

‘It’s broken,’ said the old man. The shattered pieces of the sacra bottle were spread out on the gun-cloth Bray had wrapped them in.

‘Oh,’ said Bray. ‘I thought you could… put it on your wheel thing?’

‘You don’t really get how ceramics work, do you, lad?’ observed the old man.

Elam leaned in over Bray’s shoulder and whispered, ‘This is a waste of time.’ Bray shushed him. Domor was waiting in the doorway, leaning on the jamb, smoking a lho-stick.

‘I thought there was a technique…’ Bray said.

‘There is,’ said the old man, ‘I suppose, if you have most of the pieces. I could reassemble it. But it wouldn’t hold anything. You couldn’t put liquid in it.’

‘But it’s for sacra,’ said Bray.

‘I don’t know what that is,’ said the old man.

‘Well, this was a bottle given to my friend by Bragg…’

‘I don’t know who that is.’

‘Doesn’t matter. This is a traditional bottle. A traditional style, you see? It’s a sacra bottle, from Tanith.’

‘I don’t know where that is,’ said the old man.

‘What I’m saying is,’ said Bray with such patience Elam was beginning to smile, ‘they don’t make them any more. Anywhere. So I need to repair this one.’

‘Can’t you just get a different bottle?’ the old man asked. ‘I have many.’

‘Yeah, but it won’t be a sacra bottle from Tanith. It won’t be this one. Because this one is special. It was given to my friend by my other friend–’

‘I can repair it,’ said the old man. ‘But I’m telling you, you won’t be able to put this sacra stuff in it.’

‘Give it up, Darra,’ Elam whispered to Bray.

‘I’m telling you,’ said Bray to the old man, ‘they don’t make these any more–’

‘Well, they could,’ said the old man, sorting through the pieces. ‘I could. It’s not a complicated shape.’

‘You could?’

‘Yes.’

‘And it would look like this?’ asked Bray.

‘Yes.’

‘And you could put sacra in it afterwards?’

‘Yes.’

Bray looked at Elam. Elam laughed out loud at the earnest, harried look in Bray’s eyes.

‘Do you think he’d notice it wasn’t the same one?’ Bray asked Elam.

‘I doubt it,’ said Domor from the doorway behind them. ‘A shed fell on him.’

Nessa finished her drink and slammed the glass upside down on the table. The crowd, filling the liquor-house to capacity and pressed in all around, exploded in wild cheers and laughter. Nessa executed a mocking, modest bow and wiped her lips.

Maggs sat back in his seat, coughing.

‘Every time,’ said Caober, taking money from those who had wagered.

‘You shut up,’ said Maggs, blinking hard to clear his vision.

‘How many times is that?’ Lubba asked, patting Maggs on the back. Nessa grinned and held up seven fingers.

‘You shut up,’ said Maggs. ‘And your fingers too.’

‘You don’t drink like a scout, Wes,’ said Raglon.

‘Feth off,’ said Maggs.

‘Another round?’ asked Vadim of the crowd, to shouts of approval.

‘I don’t think Wes is up to it,’ said Lubba.

‘I think a real scout should show us how it’s done,’ said Caober. ‘I’ll be fethed if the sniper cadre takes recon eight in a row.’

Nessa, watching his lips, laughed.

Mach, she signed. I’ll whip his arse too.

‘Right,’ said Vadim. ‘That’s a challenge. Ladies and gentlemen, a new contestant will take on our reigning champion! Wagers, please!’

Raglon glanced around.

‘Where is Bonin?’ he asked.

Night was beginning to fall, and the first of the skyrockets were banging and fizzling above Princeps Avenue. The crowds had not dispersed. Taverns had opened their shutters to the street, and grox were roasting on spits. The festival would last into the small hours.

Mach Bonin kept off the main thoroughfares. He walked through the back lanes of the old quarter, through quieter, narrower streets where the smell of roast meat and woodsmoke hung in the air, and the crowd was a dull background roar, and the light flickered, multicoloured, as fireworks went off overhead.

At Brackett Street, there was another gibbet. Two bodies, both Sekkite troops. They’d been hacked about, mauled before and after death. He stood and looked at them. He looked at the faces. He looked at the mouths.

Same thing. And done recently.

He had to be close.

A long, grim day was coming to an end, but there were still a few hours left to get work finished.

The mortuary was a chilly space of stark white tiles. There was row after row of wheeled metal trolleys. Ana Curth didn’t think she’d ever seen a charnel house of quite such capacity. The coloured flash of rockets came and went against the darkening sky in the small, high windows. From below their feet, they could hear the clank and rumble of hatches as Militarum crews wheeled in more bodies from transports in the yard.

‘Let’s get it done,’ she said. She had the data-slate.

Ayatani Zweil nodded.

‘No one thinks about this part, do they?’ he remarked, toying with a sprig of islumbine.

‘How so?’

‘Well, this is not an aspect of victory that anyone ever considers. They’re all out there, hullabalooing and what have you, because the wretched Anarch is dead, and Urdesh is free, and everyone will live happily ever after. They don’t think about the cleaning up. The taking stock. The sober accounting of the price we paid.’

‘We do,’ said Curth.

‘We do, ah yes,’ said Zweil. ‘The priest and the doctor. Forever the same.’

It was a simple process. They checked each trolley in turn, folding back the shroud sheet to reveal the body. Curth cross-checked the death list, confirmed identity, and sealed the death notice with her medicae authority. As she did, the ayatani blessed each body, murmured a few words, and performed the last rite of benediction.

A last five minutes spent with each of the fallen. The Munitorum would handle the burials. One trolley, then the next. It didn’t take long before they found a face they recognised. There would be others. Curth wondered how many more. No one knew the exact figure yet. There would be some impossible to identify, and there would be some, like Gol Kolea or Elodie Dutana-Daur, who weren’t there at all.

They worked methodically, row after row, trying to ignore the aching cold of the mortuary air, trying not to react when a shroud folded back to reveal a particularly ghastly mutilation.

‘How’s the blessed Beati?’ Zweil asked after a while.

‘Stable,’ Curth replied, shifting the cold and heavy flesh of an Urdeshi storm trooper to locate his tags. ‘Sleeping still. But I think she’ll recover.’

‘As much as any of us, eh?’

‘Quite.’

‘How do you think she is?’ Curth asked.

‘My prognosis, Ana, is much the same as yours,’ Zweil replied. ‘She is not quite so loud in my dreams these days, not quite so bright. But she has not gone away, not yet. And there is islumbine blooming everywhere, between every cobblestone and in every gutter. I take that as a good sign.’

Curth pulled the shroud back over the waxy face. Zweil had turned to the next cart along.

‘Ah,’ he said.

She wouldn’t have to check the tags. It was Meryn.

They stood and looked at the body for a moment.

‘What a vile little feth-wipe that man turned out to be,’ said Zweil.

Curth nodded.

‘You heard about his exploits, I take it?’ Zweil said.

‘Oh yes,’ she replied. ‘Luna Fazekiel told me all about it.’

‘Nevertheless,’ said Zweil, ‘we treat him the same as everyone else. Judgement is not our place. That’s the purview of another authority.’

‘Of course.’

‘I mean the God-Emperor,’ said Zweil. ‘When I said “another authority”, you see? I meant–’

‘I know.’

‘Oh. Good. Sometimes I wonder if, as a doctor, all you see is the flesh.’

‘No, I see the rest. But the flesh is my profession and the spirit is yours.’

Zweil smiled sadly.

‘Shall we?’ he asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. She put her seal on the death notice, and they moved to the next cart.

‘Sometimes,’ said Zweil, ‘I think it’s a shame that there are no rites for the living.’

‘The living?’ she asked.

‘Yes, Ana. The ones who don’t end up in a bag or on a trolley. The ones who survive. Who get to deal with tomorrow. I often think it’s harder for them. Harder than death.’

‘Harder than death?’ Curth frowned at him.

‘Of course,’ said Zweil, ‘I might be barking mad, but that’s how it’s always struck me. Those who serve the Astra Militarum pay with their lives. All of them. It’s just that some do it in one moment, and others do it for the rest of their days.’

‘Why bring it to us?’ asked Ree Perday.

‘Well,’ said Haller. He’d laid the ruined jacket out on a table in V Company’s gloomy rehearsal room. Some of Perday’s fellow band members were looking on. ‘Well, because V Company… that is… you’re good at this sort of thing. Mending and fixing and sewing on buttons… you’re good at costumes…’

Perday fixed him with a glare.

‘Costumes?’ she asked.

‘Did I say costumes? I didn’t mean costumes,’ said Haller rapidly. ‘I meant… ceremony. And, uh, tradition.’

‘I think the sergeant’s suggesting we’re not a fighting company,’ said Zef Erish, the hulking standard bearer. ‘I think he’s suggesting that all V Company knows is how to march and play, and maintain regalia, and sit around sewing…’

‘I wasn’t suggesting that,’ said Haller.

‘I think you were,’ said Migol Gorus from the woodwind section.

‘No, you’re a fighting company, like all the others,’ said Haller. ‘I just know that you’re good at this kind of thing because it’s part of your work.’

‘Absolute bloody insult,’ said Erish.

Haller exhaled.

‘Look, who’s in charge?’ he asked.

‘No one,’ said Perday. Haller closed his eyes and nodded. Wilder. Of course, Wilder. And he was dead. V Company, which was principally the colours band and, to many, the laughing stock of the regiment, unwanted and unnecessary, was yet another section lacking a senior officer.

‘I’m sorry,’ Haller said. ‘I didn’t mean to come here and insult you. I just seem to have a knack for it. Honestly, I was just trying to get Major Pasha out of a fix. My apologies.’

He picked up the jacket and walked to the door.

Then he stopped and looked back at them.

‘You do realise,’ he said, ‘that you’re about to become the most important part of this regiment, don’t you? The front line? The vanguard?’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Erish.

Haller stepped back towards the bandsmen, who regarded him dubiously.

‘The Tanith First,’ he said, ‘is about to be transformed. We’re about to become the personal honour guard of the Lord Executor. That probably means we’ll never see the field of war again. From here on out, it’ll be parades and receptions, reviews and ceremonies, pomp and circumstance. And that’ll be down to you. Because I can tell you right now, none of us lot know how to do it. Us lasmen don’t do ceremonial. Feth, most of the Tanith couldn’t march in a straight line if you gave them a map. We’re good at many things, excellent at a few things, but Holy Throne, we are utter shit at the things we’re going to be doing from now on. We’ll all be looking to you. You lot know how it works. You know what cap to wear, which foot to start on, how to keep time, how to carry a fething flag. How to turn, in marching ranks, on the spot. I have no idea how that shit works. You make it look easy. I’m telling you, your hour has come. From this day forward, the honour of the Tanith First and Only rests on your shoulders. We’ll all be counting on you. We’ll be trying, desperately, to learn how to do what you do. We’ll be begging you to show us how to do it. All of it. I don’t even know what the feth that is.’

He pointed.

‘It’s a hautserfone,’ said Nikodem Kores.

‘Right,’ said Haller. ‘See? Who the feth knew? V Company, your moment of glory is here. You’re Gaunt’s Ghosts now. So buckle up. Anyway… I just wanted to say that. Thanks for your help.’

‘Look, we… we do know how to mend a jacket,’ said Perday. Haller halted in the doorway and looked back. Perday glanced at the other band members. Some were glaring at her.

‘Well, we do,’ she said.

‘We do,’ said Erish. ‘We’re always having to fix stuff up.’

‘We have to look our best every time,’ said Kores. ‘Not just special occasions. Every gakking day.’

‘Sergeant Major Yerolemew has us for breakfast if there’s a stitch out of place,’ said little Witt Arradin, the woodwind player, who was no more than eighteen.

‘We’ve got thread machines,’ said Perday. ‘Spoolers. Stitchers. And boxes of buttons and trim. And bolts of cloth. You can’t rely on the Munitorum. Give us that here.’

Haller handed the jacket to Perday. She spread it back out on the table, and the bandsmen gathered to take a look.

‘Oh, that’s ruined,’ said Erish.

‘It really is,’ Perday agreed. ‘But we can use it as a pattern. Cut it up. Make another one.’

‘I’ve got some good lining silk,’ said Gorus.

‘Can we match these buttons?’ asked Perday. ‘Nikky?’

Kores nodded.

‘Who’s this for?’ enquired Erish. ‘Is it the right size?’

‘I told you, Major Pasha,’ said Haller.

‘It can’t be,’ said Erish. ‘The placket’s the wrong way around.’

Haller screwed his face up, confused.

‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘This is a man’s jacket,’ said Perday. ‘It buttons left over right. A woman’s buttons the other way. See?’

She unbuttoned the top of her own jacket to demonstrate.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Haller with greater emphasis.

‘It’s just the way it’s always been,’ said Arradin. ‘A tradition.’

‘Men dress themselves, women dress each other,’ said Perday. ‘That’s where it comes from. That’s what I was always told. This is a man’s jacket.’

‘Well,’ faltered Haller. ‘Pasha’s never been… I mean, she doesn’t make a thing about being a woman. She prefers to be taken on merit, not… you know… Maybe it’s a choice, is what I’m saying. Maybe she doesn’t want to be seen as different to the male officers.’

Perday shrugged.

‘Might be worth checking,’ she said. ‘When does she need it?’

‘Tomorrow night,’ said Haller.

‘Well, we can get started,’ said Perday. ‘But you’d better go and check. We can always switch the placket over, but we don’t want to be doing that at the last minute.’

‘I’ll check,’ said Haller.

Bonin crossed the old box girder bridge that spanned the Underclade Air Canal, and reached the edge of Vapourial District. The main noise of celebration was behind him, now, back in the old town, but the streets were still busy. Colours flashed from detonations overhead. The fireworks made plosive, popping sounds.

Vapourial had been part of the main fighting zone. The Ghosts had been deployed nearby. Many buildings were shuttered and derelict, and the further he walked, the more the fingerprints of war became clear. Broken windows. Shattered tiles and spills of brick. A burned-out truck.

He was entering ghost streets, where the living, celebrating part of Eltath ended, and the broken zone began – the part that war had dug its fingers into, the part that had been abandoned in a hurry, and to which no one had yet returned.

There were more gibbets here, set up by looters, most likely, or roaming militia patrols. The sorry dead of the Archonate’s finest, hanging silent in death, filling the night air with the queasy scent of corruption.

He looked at the faces. The mouths.

Same as before.

He was pretty certain he had the trail. A scent of the wretched living was much more distinct now there were only the dead around.

Haller knocked on the door, and an aide answered. Pasha was in a meeting with six Helixid officers, laboriously running through a sheaf of patrol lists.

‘I have a question for Major Petrushkevskaya,’ Haller whispered to the aide. ‘A question about the placket…’

‘Left over right,’ Pasha called without even turning her head.

‘Gotcha,’ said Haller, and stepped back out.

Movement, on an upper floor.

Bonin eased the sagging door open in the darkness. An old fab building, broken down, part of a clade division complex. In the gloom, he could see stained walls, broken glass, brick dust. Enough brick dust to show a scuff mark.

He edged inside. Of course, they’d come into Eltath without weapons. No one carried a lasgun with them on a night out drinking. Not even a sidearm. He drew his straight silver.

Every few seconds, without pattern, rhythm or warning, there came the bang of a firecracker or the fizzling pop of a rocket from a few streets away. At every little detonation, he froze and tensed.

Just fireworks.

He crept up the ragged stairs.

In the Undercroft that night, it had been as though hell had swallowed him. The darkness had been total and choking, stinking of waste-water, pierced only by screams, and a shrill wail like a bonesaw that came and went. He could remember feeling the terrified bodies of the retinue slamming into him, panicking as they tried to find an exit in the dark.

There had been no exit.

He remembered feeling blood splashing his face. He’d fought. Him, and Yerolemew, and Feen Luhan, and a few others. They fought with whatever they had… rifles, handguns, blades, then anything they could grab and wield.

They had fought in the dark, against the dark.

When the light had finally returned, the few of them were far fewer. Mach Bonin would not forget it, and darkness would never quite be the same reliable friend to him again.

But he had survived. And he had learned what desperation meant, and what it did to a person.

He reached the upper floor.

By the strobing light of fireworks, he checked the long, abandoned rooms. There was a stink here. He saw some ragged, filthy blankets, perhaps part of a bedroll. He saw a bottle, and an empty food can that had been hammered open.

The Sons of Sek wore charms, emblems of their foul gods, often around their necks as medallions, the way any soldier of the Astra Militarum might wear a medal of Saint Kiodrus. The Urdeshi, the citizens of Eltath empowered by sheer relief in the hours after victory, had been merciless in their humiliation of the enemy dead. They had killed the few they found wounded, and strung them all up, both the battle-slain and the mob-murdered, their disgrace and defeat displayed as trophies in the streets. They had beaten the corpses, burned some, and pelted others with stones and garbage as they swung in the breeze.

And they had ripped off their charms and made the dead eat them. They had forced the Sekkite corpses to swallow the ugly emblems of their ugly gods. They had stuffed the throats of the enemy slain with the icons they wore, and then sewn their lips shut, so the blasphemy couldn’t get out, and so the corpses would tumble into eternity, choking on the very images they worshipped.

Bonin froze. No, just another firecracker, spitting and fizzing.

Someone had been cutting the charms out. Someone, in cover of darkness, had been slipping from gibbet to gibbet, slitting open sewn-up mouths and pulling out the trinkets and the swallowed medals. Someone who was lost and alone and desperate, and trying to find a way out of a hell that engulfed them. Someone trying to gather symbols of power and meaning in the hope that, somehow, they might grant them the ability to reach out to the Ruinous Powers and be heard, or perhaps hear again the voice that no longer spoke to guide them.

Someone who, if they were cutting open stitched lips, was at least armed with a blade.

A rocket banged. Bonin turned with a start, and the packson was on him. He was big and filthy, and every bit as desperate as Bonin expected. A cornered, wounded animal. His lair had been discovered.

Bonin saw the glint of a serrated blade.

He ducked, and twisted. There was no finesse in a knife fight, and the only good ones were the ones you won fast. No hesitation. Cripple the fether hard and fast, and put him down, or you’ll be down with him, drowning in your own blood.

Skyrockets went off in series, five streets away. A long, trailing sequence of soft sounds, like paper tearing and wrapped fists pummelling a leather bag.

Bonin slammed the packson back against a rafter, but they were bigger than him, and stronger. The Son lashed out, and the impact threw Bonin across the room. He hit the wall, fell in a shower of dust. He felt hot wetness down his arm where the blade had caught him. He tried to block, but his hand was slippery and wet, and the power of the next attack smashed his straight silver right out of his hand.

Bonin rolled, taking savage kicks in the back and hips. He got up on one knee as the packson lunged to bury the hook-knife in his chest.

Impact.

The packson leaned so heavily on Mach Bonin, he had to brace to hold him up. The Sekkite’s legs began to twitch and shudder, and Bonin pushed him away. As the packson fell, Bonin wrenched his short silver out of the enemy’s neck.

Outside, firecrackers rippled across the sky in a slow, sustained flurry.

The following night, they were just lighting the lamps in the Circular Court as Baskevyl hurried down the colonnade. He was going to be late. He adjusted the buttons of his dress coat as he strode along, and tugged at the starched collar. He’d never been comfortable in Number One Dress. He reflected that he was probably going to have to get used to it, like a lot of things that made him uncomfortable.

The long, polished table was laid, and the room was softly lit with lumen globes, and silver candelabra. As Baskevyl entered, everyone pushed back their chairs and snapped to their feet.

‘Please, stop doing that,’ he sighed.

Asa Elam chuckled. Commissar Hark, at the far end of the table, gestured to the empty chair at the opposite end. Everyone was in dress uniform.

‘If I sit down, will you do the same?’ asked Baskevyl.

The mood was quiet but genial enough, considering. The food was good, better than they’d had in years. Servitors whirred in and out, bearing plates and trays and tureens. The palace kitchens were eager to serve the very best fare for the senior officers of the Lord Executor’s honour company.

They were all present, all the company seniors, all in dress uniform: Major Pasha, Captain Kolosim, Captain Criid, Captain Elam, Captain Obel, Captain Domor, Captain Raglon, Captain Arcuda, Captain Ewler, Captain Mora, Captain Spetnin, and Captain Mklure, along with Hark and Medicae Curth.

There were empty seats too, set in respect. One for Rawne, one for Kolea, one for Meryn, one for Daur, one for Theiss, and one for Wilder. The absence was palpable, even the absence of those who had ended their lives in ignominy.

‘I’m pleased to see you here,’ Baskevyl said to Criid as the conversation swirled.

She shrugged.

‘Where else would I go?’ she asked.

‘You could have declined the invitation, under the circumstances,’ said Baskevyl. ‘No one would have blamed you.’

‘I see Ban did that,’ said Criid, nodding to the empty chair that represented D Company.

‘And no one blames him,’ said Baskevyl. ‘Tona, if you need me to appoint an acting for the duration–’

‘I don’t,’ she said quickly. ‘I really don’t. I’m broken, Bask. I am so sad, I can’t even feel it.’ She looked down at her hands. Her knuckles were worked raw. ‘But it’ll be worse if I stop. So I’m just going to slug it out. Each day as it comes, beat it into submission.’

Baskevyl nodded.

‘But if you ever need to stop…’ he began.

‘I’ve never stopped yet,’ said Tona Criid. ‘I don’t intend to start.’

‘Hear bloody hear!’ said Pasha, eavesdropping, and clinking the stem of her glass with her butter knife.

‘Perhaps,’ said Hark, raising his voice to be heard, ‘before the night gets any older, we should discuss the one order of business. Company appointments. Bask has been struggling with that–’

‘For shame,’ booed Ferdy Kolosim in a deliberately low voice that was probably meant to be an impression of Lord Cybon.

‘–so I suggested this dinner in order that we might discuss the possibilities and share our thoughts,’ said Hark. ‘Right then, Bask is colonel–’

There was a general clinking of glasses. Elam pounded his hand on the table.

‘–and,’ said Hark, ‘and he will be colonel until Rawne returns. Now, Bask doesn’t like it, but he’s stuck with it, so tough shit. Right, that one was easy.’

Several present laughed.

‘Rawne won’t like it either,’ Domor called out.

‘He really won’t,’ agreed Curth.

‘Well, we’ll cross that caustic lake of fire when we come to it,’ said Hark.

‘Rawne is special man,’ said Pasha. ‘Very special. He will soon adjust to the idea of being colonel when he realises the alternative is for him to take orders from one of us.’

There was general applause and agreement.

‘All right, settle!’ Hark called. ‘Now, moving around the table. The question of an acting temporary for A Company also seems decided, because Tona has declared herself fit.’

More clapping. Criid stared at her plate, silent. Baskevyl leaned over and patted her on the arm.

‘B Company needs an acting while Rawne’s indisposed,’ said Hark.

‘Jo Lurgoine,’ said Domor immediately.

‘Well, obviously,’ said Hark. ‘I just thought we could pretend this was a discussion, Shoggy.’

‘Lurgoine on B Company,’ Baskevyl agreed. ‘It’s well past time he got a command, even if it is temporary.’

‘One us better hurry up and die then,’ said Pasha. There was a moment’s hush.

‘What?’ she protested. ‘I can’t be making joke?’

‘All right, Lurgoine’s decided,’ said Hark. He looked down the table at Baskevyl and winked. ‘See how easy this is? How fluid and effective?’

‘Move on, Viktor,’ warned Baskevyl.

‘Yes, colonel, sir,’ said Hark. ‘Right then… C Company.’

He fell silent. The officers around the table went quiet too. No one made eye contact.

‘Ah,’ said Hark. ‘I spoke too soon. This was always going to be a tricky one.’

‘Skip it and move on, Viktor,’ said Baskevyl, painfully aware how sharply the mood in the room had shifted.

‘No, Bask,’ said Curth. ‘Decide it. Decide it now, or it’ll be like a wound that won’t heal.’

‘Yeah, please,’ said Criid softly.

‘This is the hardest one,’ said Baskevyl. ‘This is the one I kept going around and round on, which is why I couldn’t decide on any of them.’

‘Then this is the reason we’re having this dinner,’ said Criid, quite fierce. ‘So fething do it.’

‘It has to be a Verghast,’ said Lunny Obel.

‘Right,’ said Criid. ‘Lunny’s right.’

‘Yes, but who?’ asked Baskevyl. ‘There are some decent potentials, but those are big boots to fill. I don’t think anyone wants the… the honour of it. For fear of fething up.’

He waited for someone to speak. The door behind him burst open instead.

Ban Daur stood there. His dress uniform looked a little wrinkled, as though no one had reminded him to press it.

‘I’m late,’ he said. ‘Sorry, colonel. I nearly didn’t… I’m late. That’s all. Just late.’

‘We’re glad to see you, late or not, Ban,’ said Baskevyl. ‘Have a seat.’

Daur sat.

‘You’re discussing command appointments, I think?’ Daur said. ‘I thought I should be here for that.’

‘We were discussing C Company, Ban,’ said Hark. ‘But as you are now present, may I presume a discussion of D Company is no longer necessary?’

Everyone looked at Daur. He took a deep breath.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Not necessary. I don’t want to vacate. I intend to conduct my duties.’

‘Are you sure?’ asked Criid, surprised.

Daur nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said. He looked around the table and the solemn faces watching him. ‘Yes. It’s that, or sit around waiting. Just waiting. Which helps no one and just makes the time go more slowly. So…’

He looked down at his plate.

‘I don’t think she’s coming back,’ he said quietly. ‘But she might. So while I wait, I had better make myself useful.’

He looked up again. The candlelight flashed in his eyes.

‘You know what?’ he said. ‘Yesterday, I discovered that Brin Milo has come back.’

Several of them nodded.

‘Brin Milo,’ said Daur. ‘Imagine that. After all these years. Presumed dead. Long gone. Taken from us. But he’s back. So there it is. Sometimes people come back when you think they’re dead. I think that’s the main reason I’m sitting here now.’

Daur glanced around the table. No one spoke.

‘So, C Company?’ he prompted.

‘Gotta be Verghast,’ said Obel.

‘I was thinking Haller,’ said Baskevyl. ‘It’s about time–’

‘No,’ said Daur. ‘He won’t take it. He told me. Cin’s a fine man, very loyal. But he won’t follow Gol. He doesn’t want to step on Gol’s legacy.’

‘Well, he wouldn’t,’ said Whyl Ewler.

‘No, I don’t think he would,’ agreed Daur, ‘but there you have it. Haller feels the weight of tradition. Heritage, all that. Struggles with it, because he respects it too much. So, not him.’

‘What about Fergol Wersun?’ asked Raglon. ‘Fine soldier.’

‘Tanith,’ said Obel, with a shrug.

‘Even so–’ said Raglon.

‘Chiria,’ said Criid.

They looked at her.

‘Kleo Chiria,’ she said. ‘She’s Vervunhive. She’s hard as nails. I’d trust her with my life.’

‘We all would,’ said Kolosim. ‘And we all have.’

‘And she doesn’t care what people think of her,’ said Criid. ‘She doesn’t care what she looks like, she just gets it done. I respect Haller’s feelings about C Company. Chiria is not weighed down by that sort of baggage.’

‘Seconded,’ said Vaklav Mora.

‘All right,’ said Baskevyl, nodding. ‘That’s an unexpected and excellent choice.’ Knives rattled against glasses.

‘So what about E Company?’ asked Rade Mklure. ‘I mean, now we’re making headway?’

‘Nobody wants E,’ said Matteus Arcuda simply.

‘Cursed company,’ Kolosim agreed. ‘Poison.’ There was a general murmur of agreement.

‘I learned something about ceramics yesterday,’ said Elam, out of nowhere.

‘Just how much have you had to drink, Asa?’ asked Mklure.

‘No, hear me out,’ said Elam. ‘I watched a man trying to put something back together again. Doesn’t matter what. A broken bottle. Anyway. He was trying to help a friend who was trying to help a friend. You were there, Shoggy. This man, he just wouldn’t let it go. It was hopeless. It couldn’t be done. If he put it back together again, it wouldn’t work any more. In the end, he realised he’d have to accept a new one. A replacement. One that looked the same, but was sound and complete.’

He paused. He looked sheepish.

‘Go on,’ said Pasha. ‘This is being marvellously existential.’

Elam grinned.

‘E Company is broken,’ he said. ‘I mean, it’s shattered. More losses than any other, even B, and no pride. It’s all down to that bastard Meryn. Throwing men away. Wasting lives. I don’t think it can be glued back together. I think it has to be remade. From scratch, by someone with the patience to do it. Someone who accepts that sometimes the replacement is as good as the original. Someone who’s prepared to… to try again. You know? The way Bragg used to?’

‘So?’ Hark asked.

‘So,’ said Elam, ‘I nominate Darra Bray. Besides, let’s face it, Bray should have been a company senior years ago.’

‘About fething time,’ said Domor.

Hark looked at Baskevyl. Baskevyl nodded an affirmative. Everyone at the table applauded.

‘All right,’ said Hark. ‘M Company. A replacement for poor Theiss, may the Emperor rest him.’

‘Oryn Ifvan,’ said Baskevyl without hesitation. ‘I’d already decided that one.’

‘Good call,’ said Criid.

‘And the illustrious T Company is also already decided,’ said Hark, looking at Nico Spetnin. ‘Captain Zhukova was in with a shot there, of course, as acting, but she’s bound for the scout cadre, at the chief’s request, and she’s taken a demotion to do it, so I’m delighted that Nico gets a spot worthy of his abilities.’

‘Thank you, sir,’ said Spetnin, raising his glass.

‘Don’t feth it up, Nico,’ said Mora, ‘or Zhukova will come for your balls.’

‘I won’t!’ Spetnin laughed. ‘Or I will wear body armour, day and night!’

‘Do both,’ Daur advised.

‘So, the last,’ said Hark. ‘A replacement for Wilder at V Company. Colours Company. Which, I know, like C and E, is one that no bastard wants, but not for the same reasons. We treat it as a joke, which is shameful. But, Throne knows, we were a fighting regiment and we never asked for a band. Any suggestions?’

‘There are Ghosts who deserve an opportunity,’ said Baskevyl, ‘even if it is the back-handed compliment of the colours section. It’s still a section. Wersun’s been mentioned. Cown, I think. Hecta Jajjo. Geddy Derin’s on the list too. I don’t know.’

‘Actually,’ said Pasha, ‘this afternoon, I received request from Sergeant Major Yerolemew. It seems V Company would like to make it known, if it counts for anything, that their choice would be Sergeant Haller. As you say, Ban, he respects tradition and heritage. He respects ceremony. I do not believe Haller would see it as a back-handed compliment. And where we’re going, I think ceremony is going to become very important.’

There was a lot of nodding.

‘Also,’ said Pasha, ‘Haller is very good at buttons.’

‘How much have you had to drink?’ asked Mklure.

‘Not enough!’ Pasha declared, and slapped the table.

‘Then let’s do that,’ said Baskevyl. He got to his feet and raised his glass. ‘I’ll make notifications tomorrow and get the promotions processed.’

‘Do you want to check any of this by Rawne?’ asked Hark.

‘No,’ said Baskevyl. ‘I’m colonel. Now stand up.’

They got to their feet.

‘To those we have lost and those who are absent,’ said Baskevyl.

‘The Emperor protects!’ came the chorus.

‘To our Lord Executor,’ said Baskevyl.

‘Gaunt!’

‘And to his Ghosts,’ said Baskevyl, ‘may they live forever.’

‘First and only!’ they replied, and drank.

‘What’s this?’ asked Brostin.

‘Your bottle,’ said Cant. He coughed, and then tried it again without the squeak. ‘Your bottle.’

Brostin was sitting in his chair, out in the pale midday sun on the infirmary terrace.

‘Oh,’ said Brostin. ‘Is it?’

‘Yes,’ said Cant. He glanced back across the terrace. Darra Bray was standing in the doorway behind him, out of Brostin’s eyeline, watching intently. He nodded to Cant encouragingly. He mouthed, ‘Go on.’

‘Well, give us a sip, then, Cant,’ said Brostin. ‘I can hardly hold the fething thing now, can I? No, I can’t, Cant.’

‘Ha ha,’ said Cant. He unstoppered the bottle, and tilted it as he brought it to Brostin’s mouth. It wasn’t very neat, and there was a little spillage, but Brostin smacked his lips.

‘Ah, yes,’ murmured Brostin. He grinned. ‘This is what victory feels like. Say hello to Mister Sacra. Why, hello, Mister Sacra.’

‘All right?’ asked Cant anxiously.

‘Yeah.’

‘Proper sacra, eh? From your bottle? The one Bragg gave you, all those years ago?’

‘Yes,’ said Brostin.

‘Good,’ said Cant. ‘Good.’

‘Turns out,’ muttered Brostin, ‘you can when you put your mind to it, can’t you, Cant?’

‘Of course I fething can,’ said Cant. He looked back at the doorway, but Bray had gone.

‘Give us another sip,’ said Brostin.

‘Sure,’ said Cant, tipping the bottle. ‘Is there… is there something wrong?’

Brostin swallowed and licked his lips. ‘Nope,’ he said.

‘Sure?’

‘Yes. Why?’

Cant stood for a moment, thinking. He winced and braced himself.

‘Look,’ he said. He sighed. ‘Look, Brostin. Uh, the thing is… this isn’t your bottle. The bottle Bragg gave you, it got smashed. This is a replacement. I wasn’t going to tell you. I didn’t want to annoy you. But I just can’t lie about it. It isn’t your bottle.’

Brostin nodded, staring into the distance.

‘Of course it isn’t,’ he said. ‘You think I couldn’t tell?’

‘Oh,’ said Cant. ‘Oh. Well, uh, I had better be going. I’ll leave this here.’

He put the bottle down.

‘I’ll come back in a day or two,’ he said.

‘Hey,’ Brostin called after him.

‘What?’ asked Cant. He cleared his throat.

‘What?’ he said in a proper voice.

‘Give us a light, eh, Callan? Before you go,’ said Brostin.

WHOSE VOICE IS HEARD NO MORE

WRITTEN BY GRAHAM MCNEILL

Preface

Graham’s as much a veteran as I am. We came up through the ranks together. Pals, fellow lasmen, fought side by side in the early skirmishes of Black Library, took our battle scars in the Heresy Wars, won promotions, got our own commands… He’s a good friend, a great writer, and a fellow High Lord (there’s a ceremony, with hats and sashes, a whole thing…). So he’s supremely qualified for a tour of duty in the Sabbat War and, in fact, he’s done it before. His first dazzling visit to the Sabbat Territories was in the first anthology (go read it!).

When Graham pitched me his idea for this story, I loved it. It was brutal and violent, and packed with all the visceral shooty-death-kill-in-space we have come to expect from him. When he delivered, I still loved it, but I was astonished. There, as expected, was the blood and fury, the down-and-dirty nastiness, the operatic ferocity he does so well. This is, I warn you, a savage tale. But in executing his idea, Graham has pulled off an absolute coup. The story is exactly what he pitched, but at a certain moment (I’m not saying where, no spoilers) he demonstrates extraordinary craft by just easing his foot off the gas, so that what might have been bombastic becomes chillingly clinical and bleakly understated. Just brilliantly effective. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is why he’s a High Lord…

This story is set… somewhere… after Anarch.

‘Construction of the mass-conveyor, Vociferator, had been all but complete when the armies of Urlock Gaur swarmed the coreward planets of the Cabal System and captured every ship moored in the graving docks of Caius Innate. Its original shipwrights built it to ferry materiel to Warmaster Macaroth in the Khan Group, but it would go on to serve darker masters.

First pressed into service as a troop transport for Blood Pact hosts, it violently changed hands at least four times before finally serving the will of Anakwanar Sek.

Later reports indicated its shipmaster was a being known as Etogaur Shida-kai, a seasoned veteran whose forces carved a bloody path through the circumvallation of Gereon to save hundreds of thousands of newly trained packsons from the overwhelming forces of Imperial liberation.

With Imperial Army Corps on the offensive throughout the Khan Group and threats from rival magisters mounting, the Anarch’s need for trained troops had never been greater. And so Shida-kai transformed the Vociferator into a battlefield scavenger, following in the wake of Sanguinary conquests and sweeping up prisoners of war to be sworn into the Sons of Sek.

The devastating events following the Salvation’s Reach attack had driven the Anarch to demand ever more packsons for newly opened fronts in his feud with Gaur, and so Shida-kai brought the Vociferator to the bloody aftermath of the Samid Alpha campaign.

Their supply lines severed by berserker fleets of the Zho Sanguinary, an entire battle corp had been cut off and fought to bloody submission on the Samid core-world. Archenemy forces slaughtered the surviving Imperial officers and discipline masters, as well as the senior enlisted men, dragging an estimated fifty thousand men and women aboard in chains.

Imperial relief forces were already moving in-system to cut off its escape, but Shida-kai had no intention of remaining at Samid Alpha. His master’s voice called to him, and so he made all speed for the system’s lesser known Mandeville point.

Reports from similar encounters with such vessels suggested that every one of those fifty thousand soldiers brought aboard the Vociferator would be given the chance to repudiate their loyalty to the Emperor and pledge fellowship to the Archenemy.

The vast majority of brave Militarum soldiers would, of course, refuse such a heinous offer and willingly die in agony, but those whose courage was lacking would be cut and branded to be reborn in the Anarch’s host. Accounts from subsequent capture-clades indicated that Shida-kai had promised his master ten thousand packsons, a mighty gift that would make all the difference in the wars yet to come.

A bold and reckless promise perhaps, but one that – if honoured – would see him rise to command a Sanguinary host of his own. Yet, unknown to Shida-kai, events on Urdesh would soon paradigmatically alter the nature of war in the Sabbat systems.’

Excerpted from Beyond the Spinward Reaches

Hunting below the waterline of a voidship was the worst.

As an environment, it entirely favoured the hunted, possessing innumerable places to hide, and countless bottlenecks to funnel a hunter into an ambush. Add in multiple levels as well as the potential for traps laid by a cunning escapee, and you had an incredibly complicated, fluid environment that required a heightened form of spatial awareness.

Not that many of the broken souls who managed to break free were in any physical state to fight back, but it paid to be prepared.

Renn Duraki was Urdeshi born and raised, Militarum trained and equipped. He knew how to fight in steel mazes like this. He’d learned his craft as a Whiteshield in the bombed-out ruins of Orppus and Zarakppan; had honed those skills defending the multilayered structures of Eltath’s dynastic tech-claves, and storming oceanic promethium platforms.

A starship was never a place of quiet, but the Vociferator was louder than most. Its deck plates vibrated with the heartbeat of its engines, its bulkheads swelled and shrank under the awesome forces beyond the hull, and grunting, howling sermons wailed from the augmitters strung the length and breadth of the ship.

But below the waterline was something else entirely, where the heaving, mechanical guts of the vessel turned over with a thunder like the interior of a forge-fane turning out beaten metal for the war effort. Duraki’s ears would be ringing for days after this hunt.

Even over the grinding machine noise, he could still hear the sermons, as if they were conducted and amplified through the metal and grease of the lower decks. Not even the ship-borne vermin that lived in the bilges were spared its jagged cadences.

The noise made it impossible to track the prey by sound, but neither Duraki or Knox needed to hear their quarry. They’d hunted escapees in this part of the ship so many times they could navigate it blindfolded. They knew its every nook and cranny, the blind alleys, and each location where it might be possible to hide.

Duraki paused by an oil-slick stanchion, taking a moment to breathe.

He was exhausted, and had hoped to snatch a couple of hours of rest before Vraed sent him and Knox off to sort out his own damn fool mistake.

He clenched his fists and loosed a shuddering breath to let out his anger.

Not all of it. He lived on anger the way some soldiers lived on recaff or stimms.

It sustained Duraki, gave him a reason to keep fighting; a reason to hold on to himself.

His anger reminded him of who he was, or at least who he hoped he still was.

It was hot down here and the air stank of oil that had gone around the ship’s veins more times than any enginseer would certify as healthy. Yellow steam hung in sulphurous veils, and cloudy liquid trickled from the metal-grilled platforms above.

Knox drew level with Duraki and unclipped the leather mask from his helmet before bending his head back to let the moisture drip into his mouth. Droplets splashed his branded and tattooed skull, running down his cheeks like milky tears.

‘Don’t drink that shit, grox-brain,’ said Duraki. ‘Give you cancer.’

Knox spat. ‘I look like I care?’

‘I’ll remember that when your mouth’s lousy with lesions.’

Knox shrugged at Duraki’s prognosis and said, ‘So why the pause? You got something?’

Knox was a scowling veteran of Erinyes Secundus, and had fought in the final battles between Mater Heggerol and Lord Militant Caul. He’d lost an arm on the Last Day, and his augmetic replacement was a brutish clawed hand of hissing pipes and sinewy coils. Plated with carved bronze, it was hung with a skull he swore belonged to the man who’d tried to kill him that day.

Duraki didn’t believe that, but would never say so.

Knox had already killed two men who’d dared question the truth of his trophy.

‘Renn?’ said Knox when he didn’t answer. ‘Do. You. Have. Something?’

Duraki took another breath and shook his head. ‘No, but I know where he’ll be.’

‘Sub-deck Theta, behind the power relays?’

‘Yeah, they always run there. I suppose they figure it’ll foul an auspex.’

‘This one’s tough, Vraed says. Says he wants this one back alive.’

Duraki swore. ‘I swear he deliberately allows some of them to break free just to let them think that maybe, just maybe they’ve got a chance of escaping.’

‘Sounds like something Vraed would do,’ agreed Knox. ‘Says he maybe got a pistol too.’

‘Typical,’ sighed Duraki. ‘Letting a prisoner get hold of a weapon is just the sort of petty, cruel shit I’d expect from one of the Repudiators.’

‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Knox. ‘Better for him now if he puts it in his mouth and blows the back of his head off.’

Duraki nodded in agreement; it had been Vraed who had taken his repudiation, and the Tongueless Man never let him forget it.

Since he didn’t fancy drinking the toxic condensate, he took a moment to unclip his Urdeshi-stamped canteen from his belt and take a drink. Common to water drawn from shipboard reservoirs, it was brackish with a metallic tang. He tasted particulate matter, but it was best not to think what that might be.

‘Vraed’ll be expecting us back soon with this one,’ said Knox. ‘We got no time for rest.’

That Knox was edgy at the thought of Vraed’s displeasure was new.

‘Since when do you care what Vraed wants?’

‘Just don’t want to be on his bad side, you know?’

‘Scared he’s going to put you on report?’

They both grinned, remembering a time when infractions would only result in something minor, like latrine duty or picking up brass on the hard-rounds range.

‘He’s spiky, you know? On edge and looking to spill blood. They all are. Like something big’s coming. Can’t you feel it?’ said Knox.

He glanced over his shoulder as he spoke, like someone might be listening to them over the din of clanking machinery and the droning sermons.

Duraki allowed that wasn’t an unreasonable suspicion. Besides, he had felt it.

Discipline aboard the Vociferator had always been brutally harsh, but now even minor misconduct was punished with lethal penalties. The atmosphere was thick with potential violence. Duraki felt it in his every shallow breath and shortened temper. And though he could only understand one word in three droning from the ship-wide augmitters, he sensed the strident, imminent nature of them.

Everyone in their berth-pit felt it too. Kezra wouldn’t shut up about it, kneading her fists against her temples and rocking back and forward. She’d whisper the same meaningless phrases over and over again, like the pitiful wretches whose minds had snapped in the hell of combat. Shanno wouldn’t stop crying, and even the normally unflappable Vaslov talked darkly of the coming campaigns, like he was a damn Lord Militant and not the former aide to a dead lieutenant.

Taliam clung to her company’s old vox-caster, forever tinkering in its guts, like she was ever going to pick up another signal. Once an enginseer, always an enginseer…

So, yeah, Duraki had felt the same thing, but what good would admitting it do?

‘Don’t worry your pretty little head, Knox,’ said Duraki. ‘We’ll get this one and bring him back, and if Vraed has anything to say about how long we took, I’ll take that knife of his and cut out his lungs.’

‘Sure you will,’ said Knox, clipping his mask back in place. ‘Come on, let’s find this stupid shit and get him back.’

Duraki had spent three decades of his life fighting in the Urdeshi regiments, cutting his teeth in the Fourth Light before earning his spurs in the Tenth Storm-troop. His finely tuned survival instinct and a determination to simply not die had kept him alive then, and it was keeping him alive in this terrible new reality.

Averagely tall and thickly built like most Urdeshi soldiers, only the last vestiges of his basic-issue puzzle-camo remained intact. The fabric of his trousers and tunic-coat was little more than a collection of stolen cloth he’d stitched and stapled together. Vaslov had once called him the Patchwork Soldier and since Duraki hadn’t killed him for it, the name had stuck with the others.

If the quartermaster who’d issued him his combat gear saw his appearance now, he’d recoil in horror and yell for the nearest commissar.

He and Knox pushed forward, squeezing through the cramped maintenance shafts and tech-crawlways, piercing the gloom with stab-lumens mounted on the sides of their helmets. Red lights strobed through the confines of the tunnels, and flames from the decks above made the liquid on the rumbling pipework glitter like crystals. The engine spaces above were lofty cathedrals to the power of machinery, temples of dark iron and electromotive force, but down here in the hidden guts, the spaces weren’t designed for human scale.

The power relays were just ahead, and Duraki ducked under a knot of weeping cables, the hairs on his arms standing to attention with loose static charge.

His eyes narrowed and he turned back to Knox, placing one hand over his mask and pointing with the other.

Be silent.

Knox knelt where Duraki was pointing and ran his finger along the jagged edge of a broken pipe. It leaked ammoniac droplets that hissed when they hit the deck plates, and when he lifted his fingers to his mask, they were stained red.

Blood, he signed, the first symbol they’d learned aboard the Vociferator, before smearing it along the flat of his combat knife.

Duraki thumbed the catch on his holster and drew his laspistol. Its weight was greater than a standard-issue Militarum one, with a heavier charge pack and stamped out for a larger grip. He liked the extra stopping power, and had learned to compensate for its different balance.

Ahead, the narrow passage widened out into a high chamber that flickered with unsafe galvanics. Ceramic insulator discs, each tens of metres wide, were stacked one on top of the other in tall columns that rippled with slicks of blue light.

The blood droplets went right, so Duraki went that way, waving Knox left.

They moved silently on the outside edge of the crackling pillars of electrical energy, keeping low, looking beneath the insulator towers for any sign of their quarry.

There… Duraki saw the man, sitting with his back to the wall with one arm wrapped around knees drawn up to his chest. The hand of the other held a few scraps of paper, pages torn from a book, and Duraki saw he was reciting the words written on the pages, though he couldn’t hear them over the crackling hum of the chamber.

He paused, signing through a gap in the columns to where Knox was matching his pace.

At the end, by the regulator station. Unarmed.

Knox nodded in understanding. Corposant danced on the serrated edges of his blade and flickered on the barrel of Duraki’s pistol like it was some child’s novelty weapon.

The man looked up as they approached, defiant but worn thin, his nerves like glass.

Duraki knew that feeling well.

The man’s eyes were red and suspicious, his uniform torn and bloodied. The camo-pattern of his trousers was dark grey, and a few glistening flects of glass still clung to his uniform jacket, like it had once been scaled like a lizard and he’d recently been plucked.

‘You’re Vitrian, aren’t you?’ said Duraki.

The man nodded, his eyes darting over Duraki’s clothes.

Confusion, mixed with a faint ember of hope, danced in them.

‘Puzzle-camo?’ he said, his voice parched from dehydration and screaming. ‘Urdesh?’

‘Once,’ agreed Duraki. ‘Not much left now.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Knox, pointing his knife at the crumpled pages in the man’s hand.

‘The Byhata,’ said the man, clutching them to his heart like a talisman. ‘My honour code.’

‘What, like the Primer?’

The man shook his head, tears spilling down his cheeks. ‘No, I mean, yes. Sort of. It’s so much more than that.’

Knox took a step towards him. ‘Can I see it?’

‘No.’

‘Why not?’

‘You’re not Vitrian.’

The man struggled to rise, using the regulator station to haul himself upright. He saw the inked eagles on Knox’s arms, the Militarum serial number tattooed on the side of his neck.

‘You’re Imperial…?’ he said, his eyes widening. ‘Emperor’s mercy, you escaped too?’

‘No,’ said Duraki, snuffing out whatever hope was growing in the man’s breast. ‘We’re here to take you back.’

The man’s entire body began to shake.

‘You’re with them?’ he gasped. ‘No, you can’t be… please… You’re Imperial!’

‘Not any more,’ said Duraki, aiming his laspistol. ‘This is your last chance. Come with us, or I’ll shoot you right now.’

The man sank to his knees, the pages of his Byhata pressed to his chest as he made the sign of the aquila. Swift words spilled from his lips, prayers to the God-Emperor on Terra.

Duraki knew the words. How could he not? He’d heard those same prayers since the day he’d been born, had spoken them himself since he was old enough to know their meaning. Even now, they still had the power to reach him, but he forced memories of his mother teaching him the words to the Imperial Hymnal to the back of his mind.

Dangerous thoughts like that could get you killed if a glyf sensed them in your head.

‘The Emperor of Mankind is the Light and the Way,’ said the man, glaring at Duraki and Knox with unbridled hatred. ‘All His actions are for the benefit of mankind, which is His people, and above all things, the Emperor will protect…’

Duraki shot the man in the head.

His dead body slid to the deck, leaving a smear of pinkish brain matter on the wall behind him. He toppled onto his side, eyes open, his face at peace.

Duraki put another las-round through his skull.

‘Shit, Renn…’ said Knox, kneeling by the headless body and lifting the bloody pages from the dead man’s grip. ‘Vraed wanted this one back alive, another soul to serve the Anarch, whose voice drowns out all others.’

‘No,’ said Duraki. ‘That one was never going to be a Son of Sek.’

‘I reckon you’re right,’ said Knox. ‘He’d have spat in Vraed’s face and had his guts cut out inch by inch. At least this way it’s quicker.’

Duraki holstered his weapon and said, ‘Take his hands though, they can use them to make a couple of mute-masks.’

Knox nodded and set to work with his blade at the dead man’s wrists.

‘What’ll we do with the rest of him?’

‘Nothing,’ said Duraki, turning away. ‘There’s things down here that need to eat too.’

The shutter to their packson berth was marked with a series of slashed tally marks the Sanguinary tribes used in lieu of alphanumerics. Duraki always avoided looking at it, which was easy when you walked with your head down everywhere you went.

Too many things sought to drag your eyes up, things that would kill you for looking at them, things that would leave you a drooling meat-shell. Things that would remind you of where you were and what you had become.

Duraki didn’t walk with his head held high any more.

Not since he and the others had been taken from Urdesh in the weeks before the first Militarum landings at Zarakppan. Urdesh had changed hands more than once over the years of fighting, enough that it didn’t seem to matter much whose boot was on your neck.

Urdeshi-folk were pragmatic, hard-boned, and didn’t give a damn who they offended.

He reached for the shutter handle.

‘You sure you don’t want to report to Vraed first?’ said Knox.

‘I’m sure.’

‘He’ll be pissed if he thinks we didn’t go straight to him.’

Duraki sighed. He knew Knox was right, but he was soul-sick and exhausted.

‘I don’t care,’ he said, pushing open the door. ‘What more can he take from us?’

Knox pushed past him with a frown. ‘You stupid shit. You’re alive, aren’t you?’

Duraki didn’t answer and followed Knox inside.

According to the markings on the steel walls, their berth had once been office space for a Munitorum supply clerk to officiate this section of the ship’s hold. Intended for a single individual, it now housed seven soldiers in such close confines that even the most parsimonious billet officer would baulk at the cramped conditions.

The air stank of sweat, filthy clothes, and old food. Just entering the space made Duraki’s throat close up. The low-level buzz of hushed chatter faded as they entered, but picked up again when the others saw it wasn’t a scourger looking to spill a little blood or a random Excubitor driven to murder by whispers only they could hear.

Taliam sat cross-legged on her bedroll, bent over the husked case of her vox-caster and surrounded by its internal workings. She looked up, her features pinched and her shaven skull now tattooed with squirming snakes like some cursed goddess of antiquity.

‘Any luck?’ he asked.

‘Nothing yet,’ she said, ‘but I’m hopeful. I found a scrap of copper on the range. If I can file it down enough, I think I can use it as a connector on the transceiver array.’

She lowered her voice. ‘The machine-spirit’s still here, it’s just, you know… hiding.’

‘Keep at it,’ he said, and she smiled.

Shanno sat in the corner of the room, turning his laspistol over and over in his hands, like he couldn’t decide whether to clean the barrel or put it in his mouth. Tears ran down his rune-branded cheeks as he finally pulled out a cleaning rag and began disassembling the weapon.

‘No one’s checking how clean your weapon is any more,’ snapped Knox, dropping his weapons onto his bedroll and collapsing to his haunches.

‘Hey,’ said Taliam. ‘You want him with a weapon that jams up when you’ve got a Tempestus Scion coming at us?’

She realised what she’d said, and immediately put her head back down. No one wanted any reminders of who they’d likely be fighting next. No one cared to think that those same soldiers they’d have to kill were once their comrades in arms.

A loaded silence fell. No one looked at each other.

Only the sound of Kezra’s soft weeping from her bedroll disturbed the silence.

‘She at it again?’ asked Duraki.

‘You know the dreams or visions or… whatever they are haven’t stopped since she took her oath,’ said Vaslov without looking up from his card game. ‘Any other time or place, a commissar would’ve declared her a witch and put a bullet in her brain.’

Sitting opposite him, Hansen played a card onto the upturned ammo box.

Vaslov shook his head, and said, ‘That was stupid,’ before playing a card from his own hand and taking the round.

‘Any water left for clean up?’ asked Duraki.

Vaslov nodded, dealing another hand. ‘Not much, but enough for a doxy’s bath. They’ve cut back on the water rations. My guess is we didn’t have time to take enough on before we broke orbit. Likely means they don’t expect all of us to survive translation.’

‘Always the optimist, eh?’ said Duraki.

‘Tell me once when I’ve been wrong about shit like this.’

Duraki left him to his game, stripping off his tunic-coat and undershirt. His body was lean to the point of borderline malnourished. Life in the Urdeshi regiments had made him tough, but he’d become hard since being forced to choose between life in the Sons of Sek or death with Vraed’s blade buried hilt-deep in his guts.

He thought back to the man he’d just killed.

‘You got off easy,’ he whispered.

His arms were wiry and dirty, the muscles hard knots beneath his tattooed flesh, a mix of knives, skulls, and names that had once meant something to him. Like everything else, they’d faded and now felt like they belonged to another person entirely. Upon his repudiation, Vraed had burned the aquila from his shoulder with a plasma-brand. He didn’t know exactly what the scorched sigil represented, only that it marked him forever as property of the Anarch.

Duraki scrubbed his face, his armpits and his chest with opaque water and a wiry brush, hard enough to leave his skin red raw.

He ran his hands through his hair and over his wildly bearded face, catching his reflection in a polished scrap of metal Taliam had managed to scavenge up.

On impulse, he took his combat knife and began scraping the blade down his cheeks. His skin was warm, and the water cold, but his blade was sharp. It was a messy process, and before long the water was red with blood. He kept at it, scraping the edge down his stubbled skin until he was as close to clean-shaven as he could reasonably get.

It wouldn’t pass a Militarum personal hygiene inspection, but it was good to feel the air on his skin. He patted his face dry on the stiffened rag they used as a towel and wiped his knife dry on his trousers.

‘What you do that for?’ said Knox, looking up and doing a double-take as Duraki stood next to him.

‘I didn’t like it. I looked like a feral-world savage.’

‘No Ordo Prefectus here to pull you up on a charge for being Dishevelled on Duty.’

‘I remember Captain Haxworth used to say that discipline always fell apart when soldiers stopped shaving,’ said Duraki. ‘First, they stopped bothering to care for their personal appearance, then it became their weapons, then orders… Pretty soon they were walking around like the rules didn’t apply to them, you know?’

‘Rules don’t apply to us. Not here.’

‘Not the old ones,’ said Duraki. ‘Now we have new ones and they’re worse.’

Knox stood up and leaned in close, keeping his voice low.

‘Shut your mouth,’ he hissed. ‘Are you trying to get us killed?’

Duraki didn’t answer and cursed his stupidity. Knox was right. They always knew when soldiers like them – the ones who’d turned – spoke of their past lives as Militarum. As if the walls were spies and could relay any faltering of devotion to their new masters.

‘What’s the matter with you?’ hissed Knox in Duraki’s ear. ‘This isn’t what we agreed.’

He saw the dead man’s face, eyes closed as he recited a child’s prayer to the Emperor.

The killing had affected him more than he thought, which was stupid. Duraki had killed gods-alone-knew how many soldiers of the Militarum since he’d become a packson. He’d stood by and watched as Vraed had gutted hundreds more in the Sanctum.

So why was this man still lodged in his thoughts like a splinter?

Was it his shock and disgust that Duraki was ex-Militarum?

Was his anger a reflection of Duraki’s own?

Or was it that his faith was so much stronger than Duraki’s had been?

‘Are you listening to me?’ said Knox.

‘Yes,’ he whispered. ‘It’s just… I used to think we did the right thing, that we could hang on to who we were. Fight from the inside, you know? But everything they make us do…’

Knox turned his back on the others so that only Duraki could see what he did next. He swept his hands across his chest, fingers brushing over one another and briefly interlocking.

Just long enough to form the sacred aquila for a fraction of a second.

Duraki looked down and saw Knox still had the pages the dead man had so desperately clung to wedged in his tunic pocket.

‘You’re lecturing me?’ he said. ‘Those’ll get us all killed. You need to burn them.’

‘I will, but I want to read them first.’

Duraki was about to answer when he looked over Knox’s shoulder and saw Kezra sitting upright. She was looking right at him, her head cocked to the side like a curious bird.

Did she know what they were talking about? Had she seen or heard?

No, her eyes were sunken hollows, bloodshot and haunted by dreams that woke her screaming in the night, but they were focused somewhere far behind him.

She pulled herself up and threaded a path between the others to stand in front of Duraki.

‘The pale face of death,’ she said, reaching up to touch his face.

‘I know I haven’t seen sunlight much, but that’s a bit harsh,’ he said.

‘Swords of three will come,’ she said, running her fingertips across his forehead, left to right then diagonally down to his chin before finally tracing a line back up to the other side of his forehead in a triangular pattern.

Her touch sent a shiver of pleasure through Duraki.

It had been too long since anyone had touched him softly.

‘The pale face of death,’ she said again. ‘Swords of three. Only you will see it coming.’

Then she slapped him, hard, leaving a stinging red handprint on his cheek.

Duraki flinched and angrily pushed her away. Off balance, she crashed into the ammo crate Vaslov and Hansen were using as a card table. It and the cards went flying as Kezra toppled to the deck, limp like someone who’d just taken a perfect long-las round to the head.

‘Slaydo’s hairy arse!’ yelled Vaslov. ‘I was winning there!’

Hansen bent to help Kezra to her feet. She blinked and took a deep breath, like a sleepwalker waking from a dream and not knowing where they were.

‘What happened? Why am I on the floor?’

‘You hit me,’ said Duraki, his cheek still smarting from her slap.

She saw the handprint on his face and said, ‘You shaved.’

‘It’s a fair point,’ said Taliam, looking up from the now mostly rebuilt vox-caster. ‘You look weird without facial hair.’

Duraki had no answer to that, the ridiculousness of it all mingling with the cognitive dissonance boiling beneath his skin. Everyone was staring at him.

He laughed, the sound unfamiliar to him. It bubbled up uncontrollably, like a geyser blocked for centuries and now surging to the surface. He bent double, holding his sides as tears ran down his face, salt stinging where he’d cut his face with his blade.

The others looked at him like he’d gone mad, and maybe he had.

But it was a contagious madness, and the laughter passed between them like the viral strains of a toxin-bomb. Even Kezra joined in, her gaunt cheeks ruddy with mirth.

Duraki sank to his haunches, his tears of laughter turning to tears of self-loathing and self-pity. His chest heaved as the laughter turned to sobs. It didn’t matter, no one could tell the difference. The hiking laugh-sobs kept coming as he pictured the man’s head exploding.

His hand clenched into a fist at the memory of pulling the trigger.

Yes, the laughter was contagious and hysterical, but it died instantly in their throats at the sound of a fist hammering against the shutter of their berth.

Three quick, authoritative blows.

They turned as the shutter slammed open and a hulking shadow filled the doorway. Tall, armoured in bronze and black, a pale hand of mottled flesh fastened across his mouth.

A sirdar squad leader.

One of the low-level ranks, but still with the power of life and death over the Repudiated.

‘Eskar va Duraki?’ Which of you is Duraki?

Knowing why the sirdar was here, Duraki forced himself to his feet and slid his tunic-coat back over his shoulders.

‘I’m Duraki,’ he said, wiping his face on his sleeve and pushing down the rising insanity bubbling away in his gut.

It burned there like spoiled meat ready to be vomited up.

‘What is it you want with me?’

‘Vraed Damogaur enshak yah,’ said the sirdar with a relish that easily spanned their divergent languages.

Damogaur Vraed summons you.

They called Vraed the Tongueless Man not because he had cut out his own tongue, but because it was the one body part he never took from those he mutilated.

He left his victims their tongues so their tortured souls could yet scream in the immaterium, their anguish serving as a demented choir to the eternal voice of Anarch Sek.

The Repudiator was waiting for Duraki in the Sanctum, down on all fours and surrounded by scores of disembowelled corpses.

Duraki didn’t look at them; he had no wish to see the inventive cruelty of Vraed’s skzerret.

‘Khin voi Seksangua?’ asked the Repudiator without looking up. Where is Sek’s flesh?

The Sanguinary tongue wasn’t new to Duraki; he’d heard enough of it on Urdesh before the liberation, but found it hard to fluently parse its guttural, unintuitive structure, as though some part of his brain simply rejected knowing it.

‘Dead,’ he replied.

‘Mortek?’

‘Yes,’ confirmed Duraki, tossing the two severed hands to the deck beside Vraed. ‘He fought back. Gave us no choice. We had to kill him.’

Vraed ignored the hands and rose from the deck in one smooth motion, his arms and legs wet and glistening with coagulating blood.

The Repudiator stood two metres tall, encased in warplate that had once been dull ochre, but was now muddy with rust and painted sigils. Shrivelled spheres and flaps of rotted flesh hung on chained hooks, excised eyes and severed ears cut from those who refused to repudiate. A leather thong of teeth hung from the high collar of brass encircling his muscular neck, and his cloak was a collage of flayed skin taken from a hundred bodies.

His hairless head was a scarred ovoid pierced with weeping cabling and hammered with spiked rivets that held a mute-mask fashioned from the tanned flesh of a hand over his mouth.

Yellowed eyes sunk in the doughy mass of his branded face fixed on Duraki.

‘Esar Sek khar sartra ghur impertek,’ said Vraed. Sek requires all to be given the chance to renounce their god.

Duraki took a moment to translate the words in his head.

A moment too long.

Vraed’s gnarled hand lashed out and struck him hard across the face. Duraki slammed into the iron bulkhead. Before he even hit the ground, Vraed moved with inhuman speed and fastened a grey-skinned hand around his neck. He unclasped his mute-mask, letting it dangle from the hooked rivets above the gouged wounds in his skull that served as ears.

The Repudiator’s breath tasted of ash, his skin of grease. His teeth were splintered things: not sharpened, just broken, as though he were rotting from the inside.

‘I talk now. In your words. So you hear,’ said Vraed. ‘All souls belong to He whose voice drowns out all others. None are yours to kill. You hear?’

The Repudiator’s skzerret was at Duraki’s throat, its serrations pressing into the soft meat below his Adam’s apple. Rivulets of warm blood pooled in the depression at his collarbone.

‘I… hear,’ gasped Duraki.

‘Too few souls renounce,’ said Vraed. ‘Etogaur Shida-kai demands more. Our gift to the Anarch will be nothing. Too many refuse to serve Sek. Too many break too easy. You broke just right, Du-ra-ki…’

‘I live to serve the Anarch,’ said Duraki, reaching up to place a hand over his mouth. ‘He whose voice drowns out all others.’

Vraed leaned in, his sulphurous eyes boring into Duraki’s.

‘You heard His truth,’ said Vraed, gently running the tip of his blade down Duraki’s body in the same cut he favoured when gutting those who refused to hear the Anarch’s truth.

He tapped his knife against Duraki’s skull. ‘But Vraed thinks old voice still linger in you.’

‘No,’ snapped Duraki. ‘It doesn’t.’

Vraed loosed his grip, dropping him to the deck. Still wet with gore, Duraki slipped and fell onto his backside, feeling the still-warm blood soak into the seat of his trousers.

‘Up,’ said Vraed. ‘Etogaur Shida-kai demands account.’

Duraki’s heart stuttered.

‘You will come,’ said Vraed. ‘Confess how you denied the Anarch a Son.’

Like most Militarum soldiers, Duraki’s experience with voidships was limited to snapshots of what he’d seen through the armaglass of trans-orbitals, marching onto vast embarkation decks, then shuffling in a mob through vaulted transitways to the billet decks. Then, the same process in reverse when they were ready to go to war.

An Imperial ship was echoing reverence and grandeur, plaster saints staring down at the marching soldiers in disapproval, flaking gold columns, bare steelwork, skeletal carvings and guttering firelight glinting on dusty marble. Magnificent in a stark way, to be sure, but the feeling you were walking through an artefact of a dying age was impossible to escape.

A ship of the Archenemy was something else entirely.

Visceral and alive, it was filled with sound and fury, terror and death.

The central processional was hung with banners of stripped flesh, the reliquaries overflowing with bleached bones, and pale, lifeless hands beckoned from the shadows. Wails of the damned echoed from every corner, and the sound of sharpening blades seemed to emanate from the very walls.

But no matter how grating or dissonant was each individual sound, the Anarch’s voice overpowered them all. It grated on Duraki’s nerves like a barbed hook being forced slowly into his ear canal. The words were strident, repeating, frantic, zealous, berating, ferocious and exhorting. Leering faces pressed out of steel bulkheads in response as though the ship itself sought to answer the Anarch’s demands.

Duraki’s mind filled with sickening images: mass murders in the Sanctum, his hand wet with the blood of the dead; an eagle, its wings broken and featherless, eyes weeping tears of dark blood.

‘The voice… the Anarch…’ he managed, keeping his eyes focused on the riveted deck plates. ‘Something’s changed.’

At first the Repudiator didn’t answer.

‘Sek kayav utama sangua vanak,’ said Vraed. Sek speaks of blood and victory.

‘So this is like, what, a motivational speech?’ said Duraki, fighting the urge to look up.

Spectral shadows slithered around his feet, projected by the ghostly light of a glyf.

He wanted to look up at it, he needed to. Even felt his chin lift a fraction before Vraed struck him an admonishing blow.

‘Your head stays down,’ he said.

Duraki’s mouth filled with blood and tasted of cinders as they approached the bridge.

The Vociferator wasn’t built as a warship, so had little of the structural defences common to a fighting vessel. Its only concession to security had been a series of reinforced blast doors, but they lay buckled and blackened on the deck, blown open by demo charges upon its seizure from the orbital yards.

Duraki felt his stomach turn over as Vraed led him towards a pair of the largest Excubitors he’d ever seen. Half again as tall as Vraed, their plate was midnight blue and silver, marked with painted runes and carved like exposed muscle. Their eyes were concealed by carved fright visors, their mouths sewn shut with flay-wire.

Vraed spoke to them in the tongue of the Sanguinary tribes, quickfire bursts of guttural barks that used an argot Duraki couldn’t follow. The voice of the Anarch was louder now, and the barbed hook twisting in his ear felt like it was rooting around in the middle of his brain. Vaslov had once told Duraki about an ancient Terran culture that preserved the brains of its kings and queens by scraping the organ out through the nose with long hooks, and he felt a measure of sympathy for those ancient rulers.

The Excubitors allowed them past, and Duraki’s heart pounded fit to burst in his chest. His breath came in short, sharp bursts, the blood surging in his veins. Its roaring filled his head like a tempestuous ocean, and the awful sound of the Anarch’s voice was carried on every crashing wave.

Duraki imagined the remainder of his life could be measured in moments, but he wasn’t afraid. Not because he was especially brave, but because he was past caring. He’d known many masters in his life, but was determined to die with a curse upon all generals, warmasters and commanders, a last blaze of defiance to mark an unremarkable life.

The bridge was shallow but wide, a semicircular stage bounded by curved tiers, like a horizontal section through the upper reaches of an amphitheatre. Upon the upper three tiers, skeletal figures were chained to benches like slave rowers in an ancient galley, naked but for soiled loincloths. Their shaven heads were pierced with cabling, and their lipless mouths twisted like chewing grox as their worn-down teeth clacked together in a constant chattering tattoo.

‘The lekt choir,’ said Vraed, noticing his revulsion. ‘Mind-speakers. Through them we hear He whose voice drowns out all others.’

Then he could hear it, a pattern in the chattering, a whispering beneath the raging madness of the blaring screams.

Anarch I am. Anarch of all.

Repeated over and over, an endlessly aggrandising refrain.

Below the lekts, the brutish machinery of command bounded the space, mechanisms by which the ship’s master directed it through the void. Servitor creatures in sunken pools of corrupted oil monitored the base functions of the Vociferator as fallen Martian adepts hung just below the vaulted ceiling on rotating gimbal-cradles, enveloped in spheres of red light.

At the centre of the command bridge, half a dozen armoured warriors argued around the glowing disc of a navigation hololith. An orb of dirty blue and yellow light jerkily spun between them, sector-scale representations of war fronts, warp routes, and storm fronts too complex for Duraki to comprehend.

Every one of these warriors was larger than any soldier Duraki had seen, armoured in bronzed plate, heavy-duty fatigues, pelt-cloaks and regulation-issue weapons.

But for the eye-watering runes cut into their bare arms and the trophies cut from living foes hung from their armour, they might have been high-ranking Militarum command staff.

A monstrous figure swathed in a cloak of iridescent feathers like a peacock reclined on a vast palanquin of brass and bone. His physical form was grossly swollen, plates of corroded metal fused to his body, with folds of distended flesh spilling out where the armour had split.

He held a pair of upturned ruby hands on an ebony handle at his mouth, and as he spoke the red fingers of the hands caressed his cheeks in time with his words.

Shida-kai.

Vraed advanced towards the hololith, but Duraki remained rooted to the spot.

The deck was sticky underfoot, reeking of corruption and spoiled meat.

Realising Duraki wasn’t following, Vraed turned and sharply beckoned him to move. Duraki shook his head, his earlier defiance melting like ice before a flamer. He didn’t belong here; this wasn’t a place for baseline humans.

People like him were brought here to die.

Vraed drew his skzerret, and that broke the spell holding Duraki immobile.

Eyes cast down, he reached Vraed, and together they approached the hololith.

Shida-kai looked up from his contemplation of the map, the ruby fingers stroking his face describing gentle circles on his cheeks. His eyes were a collection of black orbs, as if a nest of insect eggs wriggled in his sockets. Duraki looked away, feeling as if everything about him would be lost were he to catch so much as a glimpse of his reflection in them.

A pair of Excubitors in red-scaled armour and bearing long, hooked polearms stepped towards them, but Shida-kai waved them away with a red-gloved hand.

‘Etogaur Shida-Kai,’ said Vraed, dropping to one knee and placing both hands over his mouth. It shocked Duraki so much to see Vraed showing deference that he forgot he was still standing.

‘Yha takar skerza mortek!’ bellowed one of the Excubitors. You kneel or you die!

Duraki dropped to his knees, still refusing to meet the diabolical gaze of the etogaur.

‘Do you have the Sanguinary tongue?’ said a dry voice, a sound forced up through a mummified throat and so close it could have been whispered right in his ear. Simultaneously Duraki felt the soft pressure of a crystalline fingertip trace a line from his cheek to his lips.

He flinched, but there was no one there.

‘Damogaur Vraed says you denied a soul the boon you so willingly accepted.’

Duraki felt his bladder tighten and his throat clamp shut. He knew who was speaking to him, and felt his head lift involuntarily. He hadn’t heard Vraed tell the etogaur anything, but maybe he’d missed it? His mind was wrapped in a fog, his skull filled with the incessant buzzing of swarms. He couldn’t be sure of anything right now.

‘No, no, no…’ he whispered.

He tried to keep his eyes shut, but the lids peeled back anyway.

The etogaur’s black eyes were squirming gateways into somewhere impossibly dark and empty, an echoing void where a soul ought to be. To meet the gaze of such a hollowed-out being was almost too much for Duraki, and he felt his gorge rise.

The fingers on Shida-kai’s mask extended and curled like crab legs, stroking the etogaur’s cheek, and Duraki felt their echoing touch on his own skin. He whimpered, the sensation like the warm, slimy presence of a leech pulsing on his skin as it fed.

‘You are Urdeshi.’

It wasn’t a question, so Duraki was thankfully spared the necessity of answering.

‘Even now, the Anarch, whose voice drowns out all others, spreads His truth upon Urdesh,’ said Shida-kai. ‘But the soldiers of the corpse-prophet yet deny His voice. The Anarch brings fire and ruin, turning the key to victory in the great lock of the universe.

‘But such an endeavour requires meat and bone and sinew, and that is how I serve, by bringing Him trained hands to hold guns, devoted hearts to drive knives into flesh, and Repudiated souls awoken to the truth He brings.’

Duraki wept hot tears, feeling Shida-kai’s words crawling inside his skull and prising open every secret place within him. He wanted to scream, but the invisible touch of the etogaur’s phantom fingers kept his lips sealed tight.

‘My gift to the Anarch is an army, an eightfold host of those who once served our enemies, for it pleases Him to turn his enemies’ swords against them. Vraed brings me the Repudiated, but you killed one destined to serve His will.’

Duraki wanted to scream, to rage and wail that one life meant nothing in the galactic scale of the war. Force was measured in army groups, in cohorts and brigades. A single soul could never make a difference.

‘You are wrong,’ said the etogaur, plucking the thought from his head. ‘For how is a victory earned but by infinite individual actions? To deny one life is to deny the Anarch, and the Anarch is never denied anything.’

A terrible heat built within Duraki’s skull, the psychic force of Shida-kai’s words like a wildfire in his mind. His eyes, unable to blink, burned under the furnace gaze of the etogaur, and with every passing instant, yet more of his inmost secrets were hauled out into the light.

Then the fiery touch of the etogaur’s mind snapped away, and Duraki fell forward onto all fours, breath heaving and his skull pounding as if someone had beaten him with a hammer.

The sounds of the world rushed in to fill the silence.

Howls from the lekt choir, the thrashing of the servitor creatures in their pits.

The bellowing roars of denial and shock from the warriors around the hololith.

Duraki blinked furiously, rubbing the heels of his palms against his eyes and scraping his cheeks free of the memory of Shida-kai’s touch. A warm rain fell on him, splashing his cheeks and smelling of hot tin.

He held out his hands. The palms were bright red, wet with raining blood.

He sat back on his haunches, staring in open-mouthed amazement.

Etogaur Shida-kai writhed on his throne, his mask of hands fastened around his throat, his undulant black eyes bulging as they strangled the life out of him as though now possessed of their own murderous life.

The damogaurs and sirdars stabbed and tore at one another in a frenzy, like hunger-maddened beasts in a cage. Even Vraed, still on his knees, was plunging his skzerret into his belly again and again like a lunatic. His screams were not of pain, but anguish.

A booming detonation drew Duraki’s eyes upwards.

One by one, the lekts were dying. Fully three-quarters of them already had no heads, their swaying trunks topped by squirting stumps. Their headless bodies writhed and spasmed before collapsing inwards, as though consumed by an inner fire.

One of the lekt stared right at Duraki with pain-filled eyes.

‘Ger tar mortekoi! Ger tar mortek!’ it screamed before its head exploded like someone had planted a frag in its skull. Bone fragments and a mist of brains and blood aerosolised in the air, adding more volume to the scarlet rain.

The few remaining lekts screamed in one unified voice.

‘Sek esa mortek! Sek esa mortek!’ they screamed, until every voice was silenced in an explosion of blood, bone, and blue fire.

The meaning of their words unfurled like a banner in the wind.

Sek is dead! Sek is dead!

‘Open the damn shutter!’ yelled Duraki, hammering his fists against the metal.

Breathless and bloodstained, he rattled the shutter in its frame.

His lungs were on fire, his muscles burning after his flight from the bridge.

It had taken him twice as long to get back to his crew billet.

The voice of the Anarch was gone, but a howling, desperate madness had replaced it.

Packsons were roaming the cavernous halls in murder-gangs, driven insane by the sudden absence of the Anarch’s voice. Screaming Excubitors dragged captives from their cells and executed them in ritual slaughters before turning their guns and blades on one another.

The scrap-monsters hanging in the gibbets were screaming and thrashing in lunatic hunger, while their maddened glyfs screamed in loss.

Duraki kicked the shutter again and again, buckling the metal with every desperate blow.

‘Open up! It’s me, Duraki!’

He stepped back as he heard the rattling of heavy chains. The shutter lifted a few inches.

‘Renn?’ said Knox. ‘That you?’

‘Of course it’s me, you moron, let me in.’

‘What’s going on out there?’

‘The whole place has gone bloody mad,’ said Duraki, kneeling to speak through the gap at the bottom of the shutter. ‘The packsons are tearing each other apart, and – if it’s all the same to you – I’d prefer not to be alone in the damn middle of it all!’

‘You’re alone?’

‘I just said I’m alone, didn’t I? Now let me in!’

Duraki heard gunfire farther down the transitway. Zipping bolts of las streaked overhead, followed by the dull crump of frags.

The chains rattled again, and the shutter ground upwards. Duraki didn’t waste any time and threw himself flat to the deck, squirming under just as soon as there was enough room.

He rolled onto his back and put his hands up as he saw himself facing a host of weaponry.

‘Woah, woah! It’s me. It’s bloody me!’

Knox was the first to lower his las. Shanno, Vaslov and Hansen kept theirs trained upon him, as if he might attack them.

‘Hells, Renn, what’s happened out there?’ said Knox, offering him a hand up.

Duraki took it and levered himself to his feet. He took a moment to let his breathing settle, bent over as he tried to get his tumbling thoughts in order. The berth stank of fear and charged las power packs. He took a deep breath, running his hands over his scalp, before shaking off scraps of flesh and tiny bone fragments.

‘Are you hurt?’ said Knox. ‘That’s a lot of blood.’

‘It’s not mine,’ said Duraki. ‘The lekt choir, their heads all exploded.’

‘What’s a lekt choir?’ said Hansen, turning his rifle back to the shutter.

Duraki shrugged. ‘I think they’re like astropaths or maybe battle psykers?’ he said. ‘I don’t know exactly.’

‘And their heads… exploded?’ said Vaslov.

‘Yeah. Every one of them.’

‘Why?’

‘Because Sek’s dead, Vas. Sek’s dead.’

The words hit them like a hammer blow, though they must have known something huge had happened. Even over the sounds of fighting coming from beyond the shutter, they couldn’t have missed the absence of the Anarch’s voice.

Taliam looked up from her vox-caster.

Only now did Duraki see she was holding the vox-caster’s cracked headpiece to her ear.

‘You got it working?’ he said.

She nodded, holding up a hand for silence.

‘She got it working?’ he said, turning back to the others.

‘Kind of,’ said Vaslov. ‘There’s signals. Ship to ship. Constant bearing, decreasing range.’

‘Whose ships?’

‘Don’t know,’ snapped Taliam, toggling switches and adjusting dials on the side of the battered device. ‘But it’d be a lot easier if you’d all shut up and let me work. All I know is the signals are Imperial and they must be really close for a field-caster to hear them.’

‘You’re absolutely sure Sek’s dead?’ said Shanno, moving his gleaming laspistol from hand to hand. ‘They always said he was immortal.’

Duraki moved to his bedroll to retrieve his own lasgun and said, ‘Well, I guess he wasn’t as immortal as they said. Something’s happened on Urdesh. Someone got to him.’

He looked over to Kezra’s bedroll. The woman had her back to him, scratching furiously on the wall with a tiny screwbolt held tight in her bleeding fingertips. The manic jerks of her head and hand put Duraki in mind of the doomed lekts on the bridge.

‘Kezra, what’re you doing?’

She turned her head as if she hadn’t known he was there.

‘The pale face of death. Swords of three.’

The wall in front of her was scratched with a repeating pattern, crude representations of what looked like skulls, each surrounded by a triangular pattern of swords. It was like something you might see on a flag or embossed on armour. Duraki didn’t know what it was, but was struck with the certainty that it held some greater meaning.

‘Anyone know what this is?’ he said. ‘This thing Kezra keeps drawing.’

‘Balhaut, when the Gate Fell,’ said Vaslov.

‘What’s that now?’

‘It’s a painting,’ said Vaslov. ‘By Van Stook, one of the true old masters of Sabbatine art.’

‘Thanks for the art history lesson, but what’s that got to do with anything?’

Vaslov shook his head. ‘It’s a painting that depicts a famous Militarum victory on Balhaut. Big heroic stuff, you know? Glorious Guardsmen fighting Blood Pact, some fancy officer in the middle of it all, but he’s standing next to an Astartes warrior in purple armour. That symbol is on his shoulder guard.’

Vaslov tapped his lasgun barrel on the skull bounded by the triangular pattern of swords.

‘It’s the symbol of the Silver Guard.’

Kezra dropped the bolt she was using and put her head in her hands.

‘They’re coming!’ she whispered, looking up at the ceiling. ‘They’re coming now…’

Duraki put a hand on Kezra’s shoulder and said, ‘Thank you.’

She flinched and said, ‘For what?’

‘For reminding me,’ he said, rising and marching back towards the shutter.

‘Wait, what are you doing?’ said Knox, blocking his path. ‘You’re not planning on going back out there?’

‘I am,’ said Duraki. ‘We all are.’

‘What?’ said Vaslov. ‘No, that’s lunacy! We’ll die out there.’

‘What do you think’s going to happen when the Space Marines get here? We get to go home for sacra and medals?’

Vaslov’s eyes were filled with fear. ‘You’re going out because of a symbol scratched on a wall? Kezra’s crazy, you know that.’

‘It’s not just that,’ said Duraki.

Hansen nodded at Vaslov and said, ‘Vas is right. We can’t go out there. If the packsons don’t kill us, the Space Marines will.’

Knox moved to stand before Duraki and said, ‘If we go out there, who are we killing? Who are we fighting for?’

‘You know who we’re fighting for.’

‘I want you to say it. Say it out loud, so we can all hear it.’

Duraki’s heart hammered in his chest, and the roaring in his ears sounded like thunder. He’d always thought it was the echoes of the Anarch, he whose voice drowns out all others.

But that wasn’t right, not any more.

The Anarch, whose voice is heard no more.

It was the Emperor. It was always the Emperor.

Duraki scanned the faces surrounding him. He knew them as well as any he’d known in his days as a Guardsman. They’d been bonded by shared guilt, by broken chains of loyalty to a shared ideal that had been forged into something new and terrible.

But something broken could never be forged into something stronger.

‘We’re only alive because we were weak,’ he said, years of hiding from the truth finally catching up to him. ‘Emperor forgive us, but we pledged to our sworn enemy. We told ourselves so many lies over the years as to why we did that. Some of us did it because we just didn’t want to die. I convinced myself I could tell them what they needed to hear and still be loyal in here.’

Duraki thumped his fist to his chest, where his heart was.

‘I told myself that I could do more good alive than dead, that I could sabotage the workings of the Archenemy from within. I told myself that if I could do one thing, just one thing, to discomfit the enemy from within then it was worth me staying alive.

‘But that was a cowardly lie,’ he continued, tears flowing down his face and cutting pale lines through the blood coating his cheeks. ‘Decades of war wears a person down, strips away everything superficial about them. It exposes who they really are. And the thing I’ve learned is that if the core is already strong, then it becomes stronger, it toughens up. That kind of soldier can take anything and they won’t break. But if the core’s rotten, like a worm-ridden fruit, the endless grind of war will destroy them, crush them and abandon them to the slow rot of fear. And that sort of person will go to any lengths, will say and do anything, to save their life. The man we killed below the waterline… he was strong, but us? We’re weak.’

He paused as a groaning rumble sounded through the Vociferator’s superstructure, the stresses of hard manoeuvring. Seconds later came the dull, booming clangs of impacts transferred from the hull and into the ship’s bones.

Kezra looked back to her carved wall and said, ‘Swords of three, they’re here. Swords of three, the vengeancers come to cut, cut, cut!’

Beyond the shutter, screeching alarms and war-horns brayed, filling the Vociferator with a thousand screaming voices. Packsons making ready for war.

Duraki swallowed his fear and said, ‘The things I’ve done since my capture, the things we’ve all done? We can’t undo them, we can’t forget them and we sure as hell can’t hide from what we’ve done just to stay alive.’

He hefted his lasgun, and thumbed his rifle onto full-auto.

‘But we can make amends.’

‘You’re crazy,’ said Vaslov. ‘The seven of us can’t make any difference.’

‘Maybe not,’ said Duraki. ‘In fact, almost certainly not.’

‘So why go?’ pleaded Shanno. ‘Why can’t we hunker down and let the Astartes kill the packsons?’

‘Because to the Astartes we’re all packsons,’ said Duraki. ‘There’s no going back now. We’re going to die on this ship, so all that matters now is how we die. We go out there and we kill as many of those bastards as we can, because who knows, maybe we’ll kill just enough to tip the scale.’

‘I can’t die like this,’ said Shanno. ‘Killed by our own. It’s too stupid.’

‘Listen, the truth of what we did hurts too much, I know. We lied to ourselves over and over again until we came to believe those lies. But the truth is still inside us, waiting for its moment. This is that moment. Now we have to pay our debt to the Emperor, to prove to Him who we really are.’

‘And who are we then?’ asked Vaslov, pacing back and forth.

‘We’re the thrice-damned Astra-bloody-Militarum,’ said Knox.

Duraki saw acceptance that the fate they thought they’d outrun had finally caught up to them. Shanno and Hansen wept openly, but he knew they would stand. Knox would back him, no matter what, and Taliam was clever enough to understand the truth of what he said.

Vaslov too, for all his bluster, would still come.

Even Kezra stood with them now, her lasgun held across her chest.

Knox slung his weapon and worked the chains of the shutter, ratcheting it up with powerful, swift movements.

One by one, they ducked underneath and formed up on Duraki.

Now that the moment was upon them, he could think of only one thing to say.

He made the sign of the aquila and said, ‘Only in death does duty end.’

They set off in the direction of the command bridge, moving as a squad, just as they’d been trained so many years ago on so many different worlds. They moved with grim purpose, their broken chains of loyalty reforged and made stronger than they had ever been before.

Seven soldiers against a ship full of the Archenemy.

What difference could they possibly make?

The words of Shida-kai echoed in Duraki’s thoughts.

For how is a victory earned but by infinite individual actions?

+++ ADDENDUM +++

To: Chapter Master Veegum.

From: Vengeancer Squad Argentum Primus.

Clearance: Vermillion 9

It is reported this day that Archenemy vessel (designation Carrier 30732/GHY) seeking covert system exfiltration via Mandeville Point 77F6 Delta has been destroyed, together with its entire complement of newly raised Sekkite troops en route to spinward warzones.

Elapsed time between hull breach and vessel destruction was substantially lower than projected.

Internecine strife within the Archenemy forces facilitated the swiftness of this operation, together with the disabling of the vessel’s core command-and-control functions by persons unknown.

The Emperor Protects.

+++ ADDENDUM ENDS +++

GLORY FLIGHT

WRITTEN BY ROBERT RATH

Preface

Some say Rob’s a rookie, just a fresh-faced recruit, new to the reality of war. Not from these chops he isn’t.

His story is set a few years back, in crusade terms, and like mine and Graham’s, it explores what happens ‘afterwards’. Perhaps that’s an accidental theme of this collection: what happens when the fighting’s over? Consequences, taking stock, the menial and unglamorous tidying up that has to be carried out when the party’s done. We all seem to have been drawn, in very different ways, to aspects of warfare that don’t often get looked at.

That’s not to say there isn’t fighting in this. It’s a blistering tale, but also a deeply human one. It’s a terrific piece of storytelling, pacy and well judged, and it showcases a stalwart section of the Astra Militarum that doesn’t get featured often enough. I’m talking gunships, folks. Cue the Wagner. Rob Rath is cycling his engines, and he needs a door gunner…

‘We don’t take special requests,’ said Flight Officer Dzeck. She had to shout to make herself heard over the artillery and test-cycling of turbofans. ‘Unless it’s on the manifest, we’re not taking it.’

‘I have the dispatch orders,’ said the mortuarian. He held them out, the sheets of pulp paper whipping like a cavalry pennant in the engine-wash. The Valkyries of Glory Flight were doing preflight cycles, clearing the dust from the vector-thrust nozzles in their wing tips.

Herodor was hard on the Valks.

‘It’s all proper,’ the mortuarian said, pushing the hem of his blood-spattered plastek robe down as it ballooned in the gale.

‘Talk to the wing commander, not me,’ Dzeck said, shaking her head and pointedly not taking the documents. She’d had enough experience with the Munitorum to know that once you touched the paperwork, it became your problem.

And she did not want this problem.

Instead it was her mortuary chief, Stavven, who grabbed the sheaf of papers. Damn him. He took them just as they’d begun to tear, smoothing the orders out on the back of his data-slate. ‘He’s right,’ Stavven said, sliding up his helmet visor so Dzeck could look into his obnoxiously kind eyes. ‘It’s flagged from command. Looks like he was a last-minute addition.’

Dzeck tried to conceal the snarl. She hated how Stavven did that. Calling the cargo he or she, making it personal.

Stavven wasn’t like the rest of Glory Flight. Unlike the rest of her crews, he hadn’t been drawn for this duty from the 22nd Keyzon Air Assault Group. He wasn’t even Aeronautica, but Ecclesiarchy. A civilian on her kite. One who was flight-certified, but a civilian all the same.

To Dzeck, this was a mission. But to Stavven it was a mission. Big difference.

‘It doesn’t come aboard unless it’s on our manifest,’ she reiterated. ‘It’s physics. We’re fully loaded as is. We don’t have room for that.’

The sarcophagus was waist high, with a lid thick as the flat of a sword blade. Made from some kind of obsidian, it hovered two inches off the ground on the repulsors of the loader. A mortuary servitor, its spinal rig heavy with needles and embalming phials, stood mutely at the rear, ready to push it aboard.

‘It would fit,’ said Stavven, adjusting a knob on his data-slate so a schematic of the cargo bay flickered on the screen. ‘True, the mortis drawers on either side are full, but there’s still the main bay. There’s still room for the…’ He checked the paperwork. ‘…colonel.’

Dzeck ran her tongue along her bottom row of teeth, scraping up Herodoran dust, and turned to spit, then thought better of it. Two days back, a commissar had paid her a visit to remind her how disrespectful that was. Stavven, she was sure, had prompted that talk.

So she swallowed the grit and turned to watch the ground crew climbing out of the cockpit of the Ascension of Saint Kzacja. The craft’s freshly resprayed colour scheme – dust blue on top, sky-grey on the underside – still looked strange to her. Paint that had already started to flake in the harsh conditions.

‘Everything good?’ she yelled, sticking up a thumb.

The maintenance crew nodded and flashed a double thumbs-up.

Emperor-damned Herodor. After a week dirtside, this preflight ritual was getting familiar.

Before landing, she’d heard that the very dust of this shrine world was sacred, blessed by Saint Sabbat herself. Stavven wore a pouch of it around his skinny neck. So hallowed, in fact, they were supposed to spit in ration cans rather than on the ground.

If it was sacred, Dzeck thought, it was a sacred nuisance.

It got in everything. Engineers had to do preflight cycles before each take-off, making sure none of the blue silica dust had been sucked into the turbofans. Get a deposit of it collecting in the wrong place and it could jam a turbine or even strip rotator shafts like an industrial sander. And the particulates were so fine, even the shrouds they’d fixed over the intakes only lasted for a short time during the dust storms.

She heard Stavven say something indistinct, and wheeled. ‘What?’

‘I said,’ he repeated, leaning close and shouting, ‘regulations state that we have to make reasonable accommodation for funeral customs.’

‘This’ – she gestured to the enormous coffin – ‘is not reasonable. What does it weigh?’

‘Two tonnes.’

‘Two tonnes? Two kakking tonnes? Kakk, no.’ She crossed her arms, annoyance bleeding into anger now. ‘Use ground transport. Let the Munitorum cargo-8s take it.’

‘We tried,’ the mortuarian interjected. His eyes darted between the two air crew, nervous. ‘They’re overloaded running supplies between Landing Field Tertius and the front in the Stove Hills. Only military-critical. No bodies.’

‘Kajj,’ said Stavven, using her name as if they were friends. ‘You know that as mortuary chief it’s my call.’

‘Not when it affects flight integrity,’ she shot back. ‘We’re fully loaded. A two-tonne slab will throw the Valk’s centre of gravity way off.’

‘It won’t,’ said Stavven. ‘You’re used to Voss-pattern Valkyries, Kajj. The Ascension is a Spectre assault carrier–’

‘I know what I fly.’

‘Then you know it can carry two Centaur tow-vehicles,’ Stavven continued, with condescending patience. A ping drew his attention to his data-slate, and he turned it around to show her, shouting as the engines cycled higher. ‘It’s out of our hands anyway – manifest update from the commander. It’s on there.’

Dzeck stepped away, masking her fury by doing a visual check of the rest of the flight. She saw Malkov stepping off the mounting ladder of their escort, Angelic Mourning. He raised his helmet visor and held his arms up wide as if to say: What gives? Why the kakk aren’t we moving?

She flashed the hand signal for delayed take-off, and raised two fists, indicating twenty minutes.

She could see his eye-roll from two landing pads away, and almost smiled as he climbed back into the Angelic’s cockpit to vox an update to flight control.

‘It’s the right thing to do,’ said Stavven. ‘It’s what Saint Kzacja would’ve done. After all, was it not she who led the mourning esholi, those who recovered the Beati’s body when Sabbat fell? Those who washed her nine wounds and twined her hair with islumbine? Who escorted it to Hagia with the White Scars, and whose very name graces our noble–’

‘You have fifteen minutes to load it, secure it, and get yourself in the cockpit,’ she said.

Stavven nodded at the mortuarian and signed the form.

‘Your flight officer–’ the man started.

‘Is a fine pilot,’ Stavven finished. ‘She and the Keyzon would not have this honour if they were not the best. But her duty is to care for the aircraft, mine is to care for the martyrs.’ He smiled at the mortuarian. ‘Would you mind telling your servitor to pull back the lid? I need to run an auspex scan, and quickly – just to ensure there’s no danger to the aircraft. So many explosive rounds and exotic weapons in this theatre, you know.’

The colonel was in bad shape. Though the mortuarian had done his best, Stavven could see patches where the glass coat of armour sagged over missing pieces. One leg ended at the knee, the shin and foot carefully placed by his side.

Thankfully the colonel wore a full helmet, so Stavven didn’t have to look into his face as he swept the auspex over the remains, searching for ordnance.

‘Don’t worry, sir,’ he said, voice soft. ‘We’ll get you where you belong. You’ve done your part, leave the rest to Glory Flight.’

‘CB Forward Control,’ said Dzeck into the rubber cup of her rebreather. Beyond the muffle of her helmet, she could hear the keening of quad turbofans directly aft of the cockpit. ‘This is Glory Flight, flying Imperial martyrs to Tercius. Request departure clearance.’

A crackle in her ear. ‘Glory Flight, this is CB Forward Control, you have priority, go ahead and God-Emperor’s speed. Get our heroes home.’

‘Confirmed, Control,’ she said, then opened her channel to the three other Valks of her flight. ‘Glory, Glory. We are clear for ignition. Angelic and Eternal, lead off. Standard formation.’

‘Confirm, Glory Lead,’ said Malkov.

Two pads to her right, she saw the Angelic Mourning rise off the mat, heat haze wavering the air beneath it, dust billowing away in ribbons from the down-thrust. To her left, she saw Eternal do the same, coming to three-metres hover.

‘Go,’ she said.

The two craft pitched nose down and opened their vector turbojets. They raced along the runway, rising as they went, giving Dzeck a glimpse of the blue halos of fire in their exhaust. They hit the ramp at the end of the dirt field at full speed, using its lift off to shoot themselves into the sky before breaking in opposite directions to make spiralling ascents.

Angelic Mourning was a Vulture gunship. Nimble and fast. Beautiful and lethal. Eternal Honour was a standard Valkyrie, Voss-pattern like Dzeck’s old kite. She saw the side doors slide open and gunners level the heavy bolters as it ascended.

Both would fly escort two hundred metres above them in case of trouble, keeping an eye on the cargo-carrier Ascension and its sister machine, Duty Fulfilled. Each escort loaded out for different combat roles, Angelic packing hunter-killer missiles to counter air-to-air threats, and Eternal specced out for vaporising ground threats.

She used to fly kites like that. Combat aircraft. So wholly different from the grox-like Spectre-class. Twice as wide and with double engines and vector nozzles.

‘Duty Fulfilled, you are go,’ said Dzeck, and she watched the Sky Talon, Glory Flight’s heavy lifter, rise from its rubberised launch mat. While the craft was based around a basic Valkyrie fuselage, its crew compartment had been removed in favour of four mag-clamps that could deliver vehicles or supplies.

In this case, it held a cargo container puckered with purity seals.

‘Will you look at that.’

It took Dzeck a moment to realise it was Stavven speaking, not the Duty’s pilot, Kazaran. And at first, she didn’t see anything amiss.

It wasn’t until the Duty sprinted for the launch ramp that Dzeck realised the ground crews, from every wing, were lining the runway, arms held in a salute.

‘They’re seeing them off,’ said Stavven. ‘Duty has two crew from Ninth Special Tactics Squadron aboard. Poor souls. Killed by ground fire in a bad drop. Seven machines overrun on the ground.’

For a moment, Dzeck felt something before swallowing it. She focused on planning her take-off, on the exact steps she’d need to get her people back safe, and make sure that tomorrow, no one was lining up to see them off.

Duty Fulfilled hit the ramp and angled skyward. The escorts technically didn’t need the ramp – none of Glory Flight did – but ramp take-off preserved fuel for the transports, who burned more promethium in vertical thrust.

Dzeck opened the throttle on the down-thrust, feeling the Ascension come up on the cushion of air, bobbing slightly. Riding heavy as gravity pulled at it.

‘Emperor and saints, bless this flight,’ intoned Stavven. ‘As you blessed the beloved Saint Kzacja, whose hands carried the bones of martyrs. And thus…’

‘Engaging engines,’ said Dzeck, pushing her throttle forward, slow and steady. A managed acceleration with only the smallest down-tilt.

The lines of saluting ground crew crawled by, then slipped, then blurred as the quad engines built themselves to full howl. Dzeck set her teeth, eyes fixed on the ramp. Getting a craft as big as a Spectre off the ground was inherently dangerous, with little margin for error. Too shallow or too steep and they likely wouldn’t walk away from the resulting crash.

‘Watch over us, Saint Sabbat,’ intoned Stavven. ‘She who has returned in her glory to us. And bring to our charges what all martyrs crave.’

Dzeck had heard that rumour, but she didn’t believe it. The commissars were always saying a miracle was about to happen, but in six years of flying for the Emperor, Dzeck hadn’t seen one yet.

The leading edge of the ramp passed beneath the Ascension’s nose and Dzeck hauled back on the stick, two-handed, pitching the canopy view into the white sky so the jet thrusters shot them into the air of Herodor. An anaemic sun, filtered through cloud layer, blurred the left side of her tinted visor.

She felt the tug of lift as splitting air rushed past the airframe, and let out the breath she’d been holding.

‘Ascension,’ Stavven said, and kissed the sandbag at his neck.

Below, Dzeck could see the improvised runways of Civitas Beati Forward Airbase shrinking. She rushed past a flight of Valks hovering fifty metres on their right as they waited for the big Spectre to clear the runway. The flight dipped in unison, as if bowing. A mark of respect to the dead.

‘Comforting, isn’t it?’ Stavven said. ‘How they treat those who’ve gone to meet the Emperor?’

‘Yes,’ she answered, because it was expected.

‘When we’re killed,’ he continued, ‘they’ll do the same for us. We’ll be in repose in the rear, going to our rest in honour.’

‘We wouldn’t be in the rear,’ she corrected. ‘Lowly warrant officers like us go in the container.’

Only full officers rated embalming or burial whole. The Ascension of Saint Kzacja was for lieutenants and up. Everyone else was either cremated or rendered down to bone depending on religious preference, and stacked in the compartments of the cargo container under Duty Fulfilled. Dzeck had made the mistake of looking into that container once, at the twig-like snarls of loose bone, each tagged with parchment ribbons noting which regimental chapel they would go to when they made it to Balhaut. Many had no labels at all. By contrast, the plastek bags of ash were comparatively neat and sane, making Dzeck glad she’d noted cremation as her personal preference on the intake forms.

Stavven, being from Balhaut, had no doubt opted for the acid-renderer.

Creepy world, creepy people.

Dzeck levelled out and came alongside Duty, matching its speed. Though she could make them out on auspex, she craned her neck and looked directly up to spot the two Vultures circling above. She could barely make them out against the sky, due to their resprayed grey-white undersides. Camouflaged, like all of them, against the uncanny blue earth and bone sky of Herodor.

‘Glory Flight, check-out and call in,’ she said. ‘Factorum floor’s open. Raise your time cards and punch in for day shift.’

‘Duty reporting, all systems green,’ said Kazaran. All business, no banter.

‘This is Angelic, sitting on you at three hundred ems,’ said Malkov, using the non-approved abbreviation for metres. ‘You can see the front from here. I can feel Shoka right behind me caressing that firing stud.’

‘You know it,’ cut in Malkov’s weapons operator.

Laughs on the channel.

‘Negative, Angelic,’ Dzeck said. ‘You loose a missile, it’s coming out of your pay stub.’

‘Shame,’ he shot back. ‘All this ordnance, no one to drop it on.’

‘This is Eternal, if I can get a word in edgeways,’ cut in Stola. Her voice was hard but not humourless. ‘Right engine has a bit of a stutter, think I sipped a bit of dust on take-off but nothing to worry about. Better call the turn or we’ll be halfway round the planet before Malkov stops jawing.’

‘Noted,’ said Dzeck. ‘Execute ninety-five-degree turn on my mark, head for LF Tertius. Let’s keep it at two hundred ems for transports, four hundred for escorts. That should keep us out of any ground fire. No reports of Archenemy fighters but keep an eye on the auspex for bats just in case. Ready?’ She paused, consulting her flight plan. ‘Mark.’

Dzeck stomped the right pedal and brought the nose rotating around, seeing Duty do the same on her right, putting the sun behind them and their noses towards the horizon.

Above her, the escorts mirrored their turn, as if the pairs were each other’s shadows.

For a moment, she felt like a combat pilot again.

Monthax, that’s when she’d been a real pilot.

The fortress world had been hell. Some of the worst combat of the entire crusade. A siege that seemingly would not end.

But Dzeck hadn’t seen that part of the fighting. Fourth Wing of 22nd Keyzon Air Assault had been up in the grasslands, running hunt-and-slay missions to keep the Archenemy from gathering in enough strength to take the staging areas so crucial to keeping the pressure on the fortress itself.

When mortars harassed the staging area, they’d fly. When roving servo-skulls detected heat signatures on the hills, they’d fly. And that was when they weren’t just on patrol, looking for trouble.

That was Dzeck’s job. To look. Her Valk, Foxhunt, had been stripped down for scout duty. No door guns. Extra fuel for extended time in hover. Only a pilot, a gunner/sensor operator, and a crew chief in the bay.

They were the hunt in hunt-and-slay.

Foxhunt would fly low and fast, spotting targets and marking them with smoke canisters fired out of the door by the crew chief’s grenade launcher. Then they’d haul-arse away as the Vultures and Vendettas circling above dived down to turn the place to char.

Malkov had flown one of those Vendettas, sweeping down to wash the ground with flame as she pulled out. Watching her back in case the ground fire got too intense.

At times, she flew so close to the ground that the downwash of her thrusters parted the tall grass like hair, revealing cultists crawling like lice through the foliage. She’d open up on them point-blank with the multi-laser.

At times, the engagements were so close she came back with blood splashed across her canopy.

Then it all went to kakk.

They’d been out looking for trouble when they’d found more than they bargained for. A long-range patrol was pinned down amidst the enemy. Taking casualties. Begging over open vox for extraction.

If there was one thing the Foxhunt had, it was transport capacity. Empty space. But it didn’t have much armour.

Dzeck set down for only twelve seconds, then burned upward. But that was long enough. On the ascent the Archenemy scoured them. A frag missile detonated on her two o’clock. A las-bolt slashed in through the open door, killing her crew chief. Another punctured a marker grenade secured on the wall, filling the transport bay with red smoke.

Air uptakes sucked the smoke right into the cockpit. Blinded her so all she could do was blast fire through the vector nozzles and climb for altitude.

Dzeck didn’t realise Malkov was coming up behind her, in case she went down and he had to affect rescue. She ascended right into his Vendetta, clipping her tail fins off on the other craft’s nose, sending her into a spin that – though she didn’t know it at the time – almost made their cockpits collide. But she kept burning upward out of the ground fire. Actually made it.

It was only at eight hundred ems that she regained control and managed to flush the cockpit.

And found her gunner was dead. Klev had been killed by the missile detonation, bled out on the way up.

But she made it back to base, somehow, the gunner’s blood pooling around her pedals.

Collisions don’t look good on a flight record, but Malkov was a gentleman about it. Took the black mark, as he should have, after coming up so close in her blind spot. He could’ve got political. Kicked a fuss and equalised the blame, but he didn’t. Even in the politics of the officer’s wardroom, he was a good wingman, keeping fire off his scout.

It was her last mission on the Voss-pattern Valk.

When the ground crew slid open the door at base, pooled blood dribbled out from the deck inside. Seven dead soldiers in her kite.

It was a mess. But either the action must’ve looked good on paper, or the three surviving members of the patrol had carried extremely vital intelligence, because instead of a reprimand, she and Malkov got transferred to Glory Flight, part of the rotating honour duty that fell to each squadron for a year. A demi-wing of the 22nd Keyzon’s most decorated and experienced pilots, pulled from duty, to serve the dead.

And now, her kite spent every day full of corpses.

‘I don’t like that sky,’ said Dzeck. They’d been flying three hours, most of it in vox silence to prevent drawing bats. ‘That smear on the horizon.’

‘Looks like a silica storm,’ said Stavven. ‘We’ll be on the ground long before it reaches us.’

‘I guess.’ Dzeck keyed the comm. ‘Glory, Glory. LF Tercius approach, standard holding pattern until we get clearance. Descending circles stacked at one hundred ems. Let’s get on the deck fast, looks like it’s blowing up out there.’

She waited for confirmations before switching her vox-channel wide. Below, she could see Landing Field Tercius, a flat volcanic glass field on the floor of a collapsed caldera. Two troop ships were disembarking reinforcements ready to make the drive towards the uplands of the Stove Hills, where Blood Pact remnants were said to be digging in. Towards the crater rim, now no more than broken hills, a Munitorum work gang of servitors and their handlers were unloading red-banded wooden crates from a cargo lander and staging the boxes for inventory and disbursal.

Heavy traffic. Especially since the control tower was a hasty pre-fab with only a mid-range vox and an auspex that got spotty due to the dust and terrain.

Dzeck could even see another flight of Valks, deploying a squad into the Hydra batteries on the crater rim. Probably the best way to cycle crews given the rough terrain. Four more craft banked a circular approach, slow along the edge of the crater rim.

With Glory Flight already stacked and circling, they’d get the first crack at the landing field.

‘Tercius Tower, Tercius Tower. This is Glory Flight, martyr transport inbound from Civitas Forward. Request clearance to land.’

‘We see you, Glory Flight. Transmit landing codes.’

‘Send them,’ Dzeck ordered. She heard the thick clack-clack of Stavven’s keypad.

‘Code received, Glory. Bring them to their rest. Put down on pads nine through twelve.’

Dzeck waited as she came around in the holding circle, then released the right pedal to bring the Ascension out of its lazy spiral. She banked, lining the big kite up on the white lines of the field, chalked out to indicate the approach path for incoming traffic to keep them clear of the orbital lifters.

‘See,’ said Stavven. ‘No trouble. Saints took care of us.’

‘Say that when our skids set down.’

‘Have a little faith, Kaj–’

‘Glory Flight, Glory Flight!’ the tower broke in, so loud it made Dzeck’s depressurising ears hurt. ‘We did not clear multiple landings. Instruct your Valks to break off. Break. Break. Break.’

‘What the hells?’ Dzeck swore, twisting in her seat and looking behind. ‘Is anyone back–’

The cockpit shook, canopy panes rattling in their armoured frames as the aircraft shot over them – close enough that the jet wash of the intruder caused them to dip as the Spectre’s air intakes sucked the other craft’s exhaust.

‘Holy Emperor!’ Dzeck felt the stick go loose a second, nose dipping down and left wing dropping as left number two engine stuttered and stalled. She felt the controls catch and nursed the throttle forward to restart the stalled engine.

‘Kajj!’ It was Malkov. ‘You alright?’

She saw the Valk up ahead, burning down fast on their former approach path. Blue up top, grey-white underneath. Double orange stripes of Ninth Squadron on the wings and tail boom.

‘Yeah,’ she said, decelerating and breaking left to turn a wide circle and re-approach. ‘I’m okay. Bastard dropped in on my line.’

‘Couldn’t they wait their damned turn?’ Malkov snapped. On her auspex, she could see him breaking out of the stack and hovering protectively, three hundred ems above. ‘They could’ve–’

Then the tower broke in on an all-bands broadcast.

‘Unidentified Valkyrie flight, you are not cleared for landing. Break off and give your confirmation code before approach.’

Movement on her left. Dzeck looked out to see another Ninth Squadron Valk slipping down alongside the Ascension, matching it for speed. Pilot scoping her from the cockpit.

‘Squadron rivalry?’ asked Stavven.

‘Special tactics flight showing off,’ she replied. ‘Measuring their–’

The Valk’s side door slid open, revealing a trooper in fatigues and an atmosphere helmet. Dzeck could see his rust-coloured uniform rippling in the wind, his tether waving as he unshipped the heavy bolter and swung it out to…

Dzeck slammed her thumb on the vector thrust button and pulled the stick left, the sudden manoeuvre viffing her upward with a jerk and sliding the big Spectre directly over the Valk.

And as she did it, she screamed into the mic: ‘Blood Pact! Blood Pact! Blood Pact!’

It was the mask that tipped her, the snarling grotesque covering the bottom half of the door gunner’s face. But it was too late.

The orange-striped Valk on approach let loose with a Hellstrike missile, the unmistakable purple flame spearing from its nozzle, rushing it in a straight line towards the landing field’s tower.

Dzeck heard the flight controllers scream before the missile detonated, knocking out the prefab command building in a blast of fire and smoke that threw a debris cone sixty metres deep.

She only saw the damage peripherally. She was knife-fighting the traitor Valk now.

It slammed air brakes and slipped out from under her, trying to get her in its forward sights. But she blasted her left wing’s vector nozzle to send her into a partial roll, flying on one wing tip for a moment – a spear of multi-laser fire passing by – before she folded over and crashed down into a dive.

She lost the bat. It turned and overshot her, not realising how quickly the quad engines would rocket her towards the ground.

Dzeck hadn’t either. She was a scout pilot, used to air-to-ground engagements in a small craft. Her on-the-wing manoeuvre had taken her too steep, too fast. The kite was overloaded, carrying two tonnes more than her accustomed haul.

‘We’re in a spiral dive,’ said Stavven.

‘I know,’ she shot back. Not much room to manoeuvre. She was rolling left, already hearing the stress on the airframe. Watching her altimeter go down and her airspeed spike.

She cut the engines, used her pedals to counteract the roll. Wind whistled by the canopy. Dzeck pulled back on the stick, trying to bring her nose up and grab some lift. Heard the groan of tortured metal and eased off, not wanting to rip her wings off. Sweat pooled in her rebreather cup.

Two hundred ems.

‘Ascension, Ascension,’ squawked Malkov. ‘You’ve got a bat on you.’

Red multi-laser fire flashed past. The kite rocked, slamming her forward, rattling her stick out of position, increasing the dive.

One hundred and twenty ems.

She pulled back and locked her elbows, compensating for the next laser hit. The ground was coming at her, spinning like a betting wheel. Another kick in her tail. She heard Stavven throwing up.

She was pulling Gs now. It felt like her arm was made of stone as she reached for the master engine ignition…

Eighty ems.

Reaching.

Seventy.

Reaching. Nose nearly level.

Lock tone.

She punched the engine ignition, jammed the throttle forward.

Took off like an arrow, quad engines shooting her away from the base and pressing her back into her seat. Lock tones blaring. The missile on them.

‘Countermeas–’ she choked. ‘Count–’

BANG.

Sparks fountained around them and for a second she thought they’d been hit, but then an explosion echoed the shotgun blast and she heard shrapnel score the thick armour. Knew Stavven had deployed flares.

‘Thanks,’ she gasped, viffing to gain altitude and banking around.

She didn’t see the bat. Only empty horizon, and a trail of smoke leading down to a fire on the blue-dusted lava field.

‘Splashed him,’ said Malkov. ‘Shoka finally got to use a hunter-killer.’

Relief at her evasion and the head rush of a full breath sparked a weird elation. She opened her mouth to respond but Stavven cut her off.

‘The airfield!’

She swept low over the black lava. Saw the chaos they’d left behind as they’d fled from the bat. Saw where all the other traitor machines were.

They were swarming on Tertius, making firing passes on the transports.

On the crater rim, las-bolts sketched across the Hydra batteries, evidence of what she could only assume was the Valk-deployed squads murdering the gunners.

Three hundred ems above, Duty was in a circling brawl with a traitor Valk, both machines dancing, spitting streams of tracer fire as they banked and dodged. Kazaran had been a Vendetta ace before assignment to Glory, and had more dogfighting experience than any of them.

But below was the real danger.

A Valk floated at hover in front of one of the landing ships, its rocket pod firing a spiral stream of ordnance directly into the transport’s throat. Critical systems detonated. Fire belched from the cargo bay, throwing shapes Dzeck knew were bodies.

The traitor was already rising diagonal to reorient on a new target – the unloaded cargo.

A flash-memory from Dzeck’s approach. Her visual scan of conditions near the landing pads. Red bands on the crates.

Heavy ordnance.

‘Stop that bat!’ she yelled. ‘The one near the pad! Get me a lock!’

She brought her nose around, cursing the heavy slowness of the kite. Hating the man who lay entombed in the sarcophagus. Watching her gunsights slide slowly, too slowly, towards the inverted V of the traitor Valk’s tail.

Knowing she wouldn’t get there.

Eternal Honour dived down on it like a raptor on a kill. Spitting a multi-laser stream hot across the Valk’s spine that glanced off the armour plating but left a burning line of fire on the blue paintwork. Door guns chattering to keep the Valks above at bay, and deny them an attack run. Then Stola pulled up, firing a rocket pod at the last moment so the air-to-ground ordnance dropped in a fanning parabola directly on the bat, driving it nearly to the ground.

But it had already loosed.

Landing Zone Tertius rocked as the ammo dump blew first outward, then upward in a mushroom cloud. The stricken traitor Valk slammed sideways and tumbled across the runway, shedding parts before disappearing in the rolling fireball. Blue dust leapt upward from the expanding circular shockwave.

‘Mayday! Mayday! Mayday!’ voxed Stola.

Her Valkyrie had been knocked through the air, spinning in a nose-and-tale axis rotation as she burned vector nozzles to stay upright and level. Two objects swung from the fuselage, and with a sick feeling she realised it was the door gunners, Xaj and Fannal, ripped out of the bay by the centrifugal force but still connected by their tethers.

Two traitors, turning as one like raptors sighting prey, dived in on the stricken kite.

Malkov scorched past Dzeck, pointing his Vulture on an intercept path. His silhouette shrinking even as she watched. ‘Everyone get clear,’ he voxed. ‘This field’s a no-go. I’ll do what I can to stall them before following.’ He let loose a hunter-killer that zipped ahead of him like a darting fish, causing both bats to break from their attack run on Eternal Honour. Stola’s craft was levelling out slowly, like a wobbling top about to fall.

‘Where the hells do we go?’ asked Kazaran.

‘The storm,’ said Stavven.

Dzeck looked, saw the wall of blue silica blanketing the western horizon. Opened her channel. ‘Make for the storm.’

‘Are you kakking joking?’ said Stola. She’d levelled out and was running hard. Dzeck could see the door gunner Xaj hauling himself back into the crew bay, face white as the sky.

‘They’ll hunt us otherwise,’ said Kazaran. ‘Lose them and we can set down until the windstorm passes.’

‘Splash one!’ called Malkov. Through the calm, she could hear the edge of effort in his voice. ‘Bastards are all over me, out of countermeasures.’

She couldn’t look back to see him. He was in their blind spot. Nothing in her front canopy but a billowing curtain of silica.

‘God-Emperor’s speed, Malkov,’ she said.

‘Splash two!’ he grunted. ‘Pulling a lot of Gs here. Lascannon battery zero. Think I scored a hit on one of the Hydras. They’re opening up now. Splash thr–!’

A BANG in the vox-speaker.

Then they plunged into the blue.

Two hundred metres of altitude, twenty-five of visibility. Headwind thirty knots, gusting to forty. Changing direction at odd times as they picked their way through the mountains.

Blue everywhere, enveloping them like a plastek body bag. Silica scoring the paintwork from the Ascension’s wings.

Duty Fulfilled and Eternal Honour followed behind, wobbly, like loklings after their mother. All three were relying on vector down-thrust to keep them airborne and minimise how much dust the turbofans slurped up.

‘You said it was around here,’ Dzeck said. Her eyes hurt from staring at blue. Her neck ached from leaning forward in her loosened straps to peer through the canopy. Extended stress-flying had curled her hands into claws.

‘The saint…’

‘Don’t tell me about the saint,’ Dzeck snapped. ‘Tell me about the map.’

A gust of wind battered their left side, pushing them sideways and rattling tooth-sized stones against the canopy. Dzeck nursed the stick and pedals, steering to correct. It felt like trying to close a door in a gale.

‘It’s here,’ said Stavven. Dzeck could hear the maps on his chart flipping and crinkling. ‘The chart says we should reach it in one minute at current rate of speed.’

‘So where the hells is–’

‘Back air!’ Stavven yelled.

Dzeck hauled on the stick like she was reining in a horse, jacking the throttle lever back so the downward thrust only drifted them backward rather than flipping them over.

‘Halt, Glory! Halt! Halt!’ she shouted into the vox.

It took a moment for their forward momentum to bleed off, and for a sickening instant, they slid towards the blinking red light of the aerial tower.

Stopping two metres from the ghostly struts.

‘Glory,’ she said into the vox. ‘We found it. Back off ten ems and set down slow. Full lights.’

The chart called it the Monastery of the Rocks, a rough-hewn cathedral erected in a volcanic overhang cave, its tower and spire thrusting up a hundred metres. If not for the mast with the red warning lumen, they might have run straight into it.

The sanctuary lay inside the cave, sheltered from the frequent silica storms. A natural hangar.

All three Valks slipped inside, where they could take cover and clear their engines.

Eternal Honour was in a bad way, one turbofan shroud partially torn by the ammo dump explosion. She’d drunk more sacred dust than the rest, and had just made it under the lip of the cave when her engines cut and she set down hard – dropping the last three metres to bend a landing skid and crumple one vector-thrust nozzle.

It had been the same nozzle that killed the door gunner, Fannal, during the uncontrolled spin. His tether had stretched too far and passed his legs under the wash, cooking them off. Dzeck hoped the head injury had killed him before that.

She smoked a lho-stick while watching Eternal’s crew chief, Banqal, assess the damage.

‘Can she fly?’ Dzeck asked. She shifted the strap of her sub-compact lasgun, unused to the encumbrance.

Banqal shook her shaved head. ‘It’s bad, mamzel. She’s salvageable but she won’t make it out under her own power.’

‘So… no escorts. We’re down to cargo-haulers.’

‘Yes, mamzel. Sorry.’

‘Kakk,’ Dzeck said.

‘Officer,’ chided Stavven, raising a hand to indicate the sanctuary. ‘The saints are watching, and we need all the help we can get.’

‘Kakking spectacular,’ she repeated, and ditched the end of her lho-stick on the cave floor. ‘Don’t you need to go check the body drawers, Stavven?’

Stavven blinked, nodded and left, whispering and fingering his sandbag.

Dzeck stared at the silica storm that raged outside the cave mouth, piling banks of blue powder shin-deep.

‘It’s weakening,’ said Kazaran. He was a small man, but so serious he seemed larger. ‘Give it until morning. My worry is where exactly we’re supposed to go.’

Dzeck looked at him, noted the shrapnel scar – a perfect C-shape – that sketched through his hair at one temple.

‘Here comes Calkoi.’ Kazaran nodded at the Duty’s chief, who was wandering from the cathedral, looking windblown and shaky.

‘Get anything on the vox?’ Dzeck shouted.

Calkoi raised a hand in apology, and Dzeck saw the dust trickling off in the folds of his flight suit. It caked his face, adhering to the sweat and moisture of his lips like make-up powder. A satchel-vox the size of an ammunition canister dangled at his hip.

Kazaran held a canteen to him, and the Sky Talon’s chief – an aeronautical signals specialist – washed the dust off his face, took a swig, and spat before answering.

‘Storm’s kakked communications,’ Calkoi said finally. ‘Rigged a whip-wire up on the bell tower, but we’re in a cinder cone. Even without the dust it would be tricky to get a signal out.’ He took another swig of water. ‘I did pick up a broadcast. Fragmentary. They know Tertius was splashed, but don’t know how. Everyone’s supposed to reroute to LF Ganshar.’

‘So they don’t know about the hijacked Valks?’ asked Xaj, Eternal’s remaining door gunner.

‘Hopefully they went down in the storm,’ said Dzeck. ‘How far is LF Ganshar?’

‘Eight hundred kilometres,’ said Kazaran, looking at a flight chart. ‘We could get there, but that’s nearly half our operational range, and we’re max load on cargo. Fuel situation might get dicey. And now that we know there are bats, it would be good to have some promethium in reserve if we have to evade or fight. Those traitor Valks, we were the only witnesses to their methods, and they’re going to try to down us before we get the word out.’

‘Fight with what?’ sneered Stola, slapping a palm on her wrecked kite. ‘Eternal’s inoperable and we’re down a gunner.’

Dzeck nodded. ‘So we strip it.’

‘What?’ said Stola, stepping protectively in front of the kite.

‘You said yourself it’s inoperable. And it’s got what we need most – fuel and ordnance. If we can transfer the promethium to the Ascension and Duty, put one Hellstrike on the Sky Talon, and the other Hellstrike and door guns onto the Ascension, we can at least make a fight of it. The Ascension’s left and right number two doors are welded shut due to the mortis drawers, but the front two are operable – and they have gun mounts.’

‘Doesn’t solve our fuel problem,’ said Kazaran. ‘The Ascension is overloaded. It’s a Spectre, so it can handle the extra ordnance and three more crew, but that’ll burn more promethium. And we’re low.’

‘Scary low,’ added Calkoi. ‘We have to drop… something.’

Nobody missed the emphasis. Neither would they take their eyes off the floor.

‘Make the arrangements,’ said Dzeck. ‘I’ll talk to our Ecclesiarchy colleague.’

Victor Stavven rezipped the body bag and pushed the drawer closed.

One drawer, of fifty.

He’d been checking core temperatures. Auspex-scanning for decay. Visual checks for lividity and pooling. Adjusting the chill coils. Positioning chemical ice packs in the drawers to compensate for the weak electricals of a grounded aircraft.

‘We’ll get you home,’ he reassured them. ‘All of you. It’s the least we can do.’

He saw a figure standing in his peripheral vision and touched his pouch of dust.

‘I’ve been serving our charges,’ said Stavven. ‘Their rest has not been disturbed so far, even with the manoeuvres you pulled.’

‘If I hadn’t pulled those evasions, our charges would be burning inside a wreck at LF Tercius,’ she said, taking a step inside the bay. Dzeck rarely came back here, and she looked a little haunted, her voice dropping and eyes lingering on the drawers as if one might spontaneously open.

‘It wasn’t a criticism,’ he said. ‘I’m saying that this is a well-built machine. Maybe a better one than you realise. It doesn’t respond like a scout Valk, and it never will. The Ascension was built for a different purpose, and it fulfils that purpose as well as any other loyal servant.’

‘We need to talk.’

He stripped off his plastek gloves. ‘I thought we were talking.’

‘There’s a plan in progress. Eternal is inoperable. Next field eight hundred kilometres away. We’re going to salvage what we can from Eternal to refuel and up-arm. Move out when the storm breaks. There’s only one problem.’

Stavven let a breath out of his nose, long. ‘Weight.’

Silence hung between them.

‘Do you have any ideas?’ Dzeck asked.

‘No, I don’t think I do.’

Dzeck’s jaw tightened. ‘Don’t make this harder than it has to be.’

‘If you want me to jettison something from this aircraft, you will need to state, explicitly, what it should be.’ He paused. ‘I need to hear you say it.’

‘Cargo,’ she said.

‘You mean heroes,’ he responded. ‘You want me to leave Imperial martyrs who gave their all. Who at long last have laid down their burdens, made their great sacrifice.’

‘I can’t help them,’ said Dzeck. ‘But I can get my people out of here.’

‘These are your people. Our people.’ He lifted a yellowed drawer tag between his fingers, ‘And when they enlisted into the Emperor’s service and pledged to give their lives, we promised something in return: our respect. So no, I will not abandon these men and women. As Ecclesiarchal representative, I forbid it.’

‘If we take all of this’ – Dzeck splayed her hands at the sarcophagus and drawers – ‘more of my air crews will die. I’ve already lost three today. One I served five years with.’

‘And Flight Officer Malkov has my respect and gratitude, as do all Imperial martyrs. They gave their lives, and I give them my res–’

Dzeck was on him so fast, he could barely defend himself. Her fists balled in his flight suit, and he felt his back slam the bulkhead.

‘Don’t you say it. Don’t you dare kakking say that you give them respect.’ She shoved him again into the wall and backed off, as if afraid she might do more. ‘How long have you been with this crusade, eh? Don’t you know how this all works? The Militarum? The Aeronautica? It doesn’t give anything. It takes. The whole Emperor-damned crusade is a machine designed for taking. First it takes your home and family, then your freedom. Then it uses up every bit of you it can. Rips parts out of your body. It takes your friends and your sanity. Feeds you on slop. Terrifies you with commissars. And the only time it gives you any kakking respect is when you’re dead in a kakking drawer.’ She smacked a palm against one of the porcelain mortis drawers, then nearly doubled over with rage and pain, fists pressed to her stomach. ‘God-Emperor, why are we even here? You left our wing short-handed, put them in danger so our best could haul corpses.’

‘You’re here to keep our faith with the dead,’ said Stavven. ‘You sneer about respect but it is all I can give them. Treat them equally. Bring their sacred human forms to rest with honour.’

‘Respect,’ she sneered. She grabbed a chrome drawer handle and before he could stop her, slid it open. Wisps of vapour coiled away, revealing a plastek body bag shrunken around a torso with no legs. ‘Is this what you do to someone you respect? Is this what you do to the sacred human form if you revere it?’

‘Desecration!’ Stavven shoved the drawer closed and shouldered between Dzeck and the locker rack, spreading his arms across them. ‘Why? Why are you doing this?’

‘Because I was put on this Emperor-damned duty for saving lives. Pulling soldiers out of the fire. And for that, I was given this honour of risking my friends’ lives to deliver those who are already dead. Every day I wake up with one goal.’ She stepped back and pointed at the rest of the flight, gathered by the stricken Eternal and looking at the raised voices. ‘To keep those poor bastards from ending up in that damned container. ‘And I won’t risk their lives so a few more skeletons can be piled up on Balhaut. Because the Imperium might only care about them once they’re dead, but I care about them now. They don’t have to die to earn my respect.’

‘Look,’ Stavven said. ‘I’m a combat mortuarian. I can’t fix this broken galaxy. Or convince the Militarum to change what it is. The one thing I can do is try to give these dead the dignity they deserve.’

Dzeck glared at him.

‘Would you dump Malkov in a cave, and let him rot? Just abandon him after what he did?’

Dzeck stepped back, looked over her shoulder at the crews, staring.

‘How’s that refit coming?’ she growled at them – which got them moving. She watched, her anger cycling down like a cut turbofan.

‘I have a proposal,’ said Stavven. ‘If you want to hear it.’

Dzeck grunted.

‘Can I ask you for a lho-stick first?’

She looked at him, brow furrowed, but extended a crumpled pack with an igniter tucked inside. ‘Thought you didn’t.’

‘Haven’t in a long time.’ Stavven took one and wedged it in the corner of his mouth. Stepped the designated three metres from the aircraft and flicked a light. ‘But after that, I might restart.’

He handed the pack back, and Dzeck lit her own.

‘We can’t leave the officers,’ he said. ‘The Ecclesiarchy and Munitorum would have a fit. They’d decay by the time anyone retrieved them, it would get unpleasant. We need to bring something back to show we tried.’

‘So we ditch the enlisted, I suppose,’ said Dzeck.

‘Well…’ Stavven took a puff. ‘They’re skeletal and ash remains. No spoilage. And a cathedral is a fitting place for temporary storage waiting for retrieval.’

‘Doesn’t help our weight problem,’ said Dzeck.

‘Ascension can handle it, she’s a Spectre,’ said Stavven. ‘And lightening up Eternal frees up a lot of promethium. Will that serve?’

‘Guess it’ll have to.’

‘Hey, firebugs,’ said Banqal.

They turned to see the mechanic rolling a pair of external fuel tanks on a collapsible cradle.

‘Gangway for fuel, unless you checked the cremation box and want to go early. Got one tank for you, one for Duty.’

‘Change of plan,’ said Dzeck. ‘How long to unship the mortuary container?’

He sat in the void, perched on a low rock. Mumbling. Lips moving, forming words Dzeck couldn’t understand.

Just the two of them. Her, the man, and the unfamiliar words. A prayer maybe. Or a chant. He rocked back and forth with the rhythm of it. This man in the darkness.

No, not a chant.

As she stepped closer, she realised he was holding a book, a slim volume the size of a palm. The dark-skinned man stared at it, intent, caring for nothing but the page. Rocking. Taking the marks of ink on paper and speaking them into the void.

He wore scaled armour. Black and glassy, a substance she found familiar but could not place.

Maybe because the pressure distracted her. Each step closer pressing on her eardrums and sinuses until she could feel the blood pound. Chill, humid air filled her lungs like syrup as she got close. Circled around him.

She must look at his face. She knelt, bringing her to eye level with the bobbing volume he held close as a mask.

And then, he looked up.

One eye, brown as earth, the white of it stark against his ebony skin – the other a gory tunnel.

Fly.

Dzeck sat up, gasping. Hands grasping for her lascarbine, finding only the stone pew she’d lain on for a few hours’ rest.

She checked her chrono: 0500. Only three hours’ sleep after prepping the Valks and storing the mortuary container in the lava tube the absent brothers used as a crypt.

It might have to do.

She slung her lascarbine and walked out into the cavern, her mouth foul from a day of rationing water, skipped oral hygiene, and a half pack of lho-sticks. She saw Xaj standing picket near the Eternal at the cave mouth, his silhouette framed by the false dawn. She waved.

‘Shipshape, Xaj?’ she called.

‘Yeah, mamzel,’ said a voice behind her. ‘Why?’

She turned. Saw the kid gunner emerging from a necessarium cloister, buttoning his trousers. Looked back to the figure.

Then swore and swung her lascarbine up.

A long las-bolt sizzled past her and caught Xaj in the throat, blowing out the kid’s larynx so his shout of alarm gurgled and died.

The subcompact was on burst-fire. Meant for personal defence. Her first bleat of fire sent bolts fanning wild at the attacker, most spanging off the Eternal’s armoured bulk. The attacker dropped into a prone position and fired back, but Dzeck had already dodged back into the doorway.

Dzeck shouted: ‘Contact! Contact! Contact!’ Behind her, Glory crews rolled from their sleep, staggering towards her with their carbines.

‘What’s going on?’ asked Kazaran.

‘They’re hitting us,’ said Dzeck. ‘One by the Eternal. We need to dust off in one minute. Storm or no storm. Don’t get caught up. Run for the kites.’

‘What about Eternal?’ said Stola. ‘We can’t leave her salvageable. Regs say–’

‘Just get to the Valks,’ said Dzeck. ‘We’ll toast her on the way out if we need to. We’re going to fire and move. Ready? Go.’

Dzeck dashed towards her kite, firing the carbine at waist height, hands on the pistol grip and foregrip. Not winning any marksmanship awards, but keeping the shooter’s head down.

There were more helmets in the mouth of the cave now, silhouetted against the grey dawn. Red las-fire whickered around her air crew as they sprinted the ten metres to their craft. In front of her, Banqal caught a bolt in the temple and went down on her face. Blue dust, scorched to molten glass by the chop of enemy fire, sizzled on her ruined body.

To her left, she saw a man in red fatigues emerge from a volcanic tunnel and advance on their kites. He put a lasrifle to his shoulder, the cheek of his snarling facemask pressed to the stock.

Dzeck pressed her trigger and fanned fire at him, scoring two hits and dropping him to the sand. Another followed him, fumbling with a grenade, but Kazaran felled him with a shot to the head.

She made the Ascension, mounting with the aid of grip pads and handholds. Dropped into her pilot’s seat and flipped the turbofans live. A red las-bolt spanged off the nose in front of her open canopy, another squealed past a metre above her head.

The craft shuddered, and she thought they’d been hit before she realised what it was.

Instead of mounting the cockpit, Stavven had manned the newly installed heavy bolter, chambered a belt, and was pouring suppressive fire towards the cave mouth. He shouted something Dzeck couldn’t make out.

Until she activated her helmet’s vox-bead.

‘The hells is Stola doing?’

Dzeck knew she shouldn’t look up, should focus on getting the Ascension in the air – but she did.

And saw Stola running directly for Eternal, a grey canister in her hand.

‘Damn it,’ she said. ‘No, Stola. No, no.’

Stola’s blonde ponytail bobbed behind her as she ran. Braving the fusillade, zigging and zagging to keep the shooters guessing. Only getting as far as she did due to Stavven’s suppressing fire.

A shoulder-fired rocket rushed into the cave mouth, corkscrewing wide and detonating against a cathedral buttress.

Dzeck grabbed the canopy lever and yanked, her vision of the fight briefly cut off as the armoured crystal shut and sealed. Stavven would have to get into the cockpit via the communication hatch.

‘Ready to launch,’ Kazaran said over the vox. ‘Do we lift?’

‘Lift, come about and lay down fire,’ said Dzeck. ‘We’ll cover you while we wait for Stola.’

‘Acknowledged.’

To her left side, she saw Duty rise on its vector nozzles, light as an interceptor now that its mag-clamps were free of their burden.

‘C’mon, Stola,’ Dzeck urged. ‘C’mon.’

A hundred metres away, she saw Stola hold down the trigger of her carbine, sweeping fire across the cave mouth before dropping it to dangle across her chest on the shoulder strap.

Enemy heads down, she boosted up onto the grip pads and tossed the cylinder into the open cockpit of Eternal Honour.

Duty opened up with its chin guns, a stream of heavy bolter rounds hammering the cave mouth, keeping the attackers pinned.

‘Now get back, Stola,’ Dzeck said. ‘Get down, why the hells don’t you get down?’

On the vox, she could hear Stavven praying.

‘Stola!’ Dzeck yelled into her headset, realising the pilot’s helmet wasn’t on. She slammed a fist into her canopy, knuckles shielded by her thick glove.

It was when she saw Stola’s legs kicking that Dzeck realised what had happened – she’d snagged her carbine sling on one of the canopy catches, and was now hanging helpless as–

The phosphorus grenade Stola had tossed in the cockpit detonated. Hot white sparks rocketed towards the ceiling in a fountain, each a star-bright ember trailing smoke. Fire broiled out of the cockpit, catching immediately, melting avionics and torching the leather seats.

Stola no longer struggled. She began to burn.

‘Go! Go! Go!’ Dzeck shouted, and Duty didn’t wait.

The Sky Talon rushed forward, chin guns barking to clear a path and dissuade any infantry fire.

The moment Duty passed, Dzeck kicked her own vector nozzles in and went into a rising pivot. Quad engines howled in the confined space. It would be a tight fit with the burning wreck of the Eternal Honour at the mouth of the cave, but she took it at speed. Black walls and ceiling rushed by, enemy Blood Pact scuttling away from the entrance like tiny crabs fleeing a wave.

Her left wing passed two metres from the burning wreck as she shot into the cinder cone and spewed thrust downward, rising in an almost uncontrolled ascent. A krak missile whooshed past the right wing, leaving a gauzy trail that her turbofans pulled into spirals. The airframe rocked as medium ordnance, a ballistic grenade maybe, punched the armour panels on the Spectre’s belly, rattling Dzeck’s helmet against the canopy.

That hit might’ve ended Foxhunt but the Ascension was a bigger, tougher machine and it kept its climb.

She burned for open sky, teeth clenched so hard they hurt, a rage-filled sob for her lost wing-mates smothered by the cup of her rebreather.

The traitor Valks were waiting for them up in the blue. And it was blue. For the first time since they had deployed on Herodor, the atmospheric top clouds had blown off, revealing a startling sapphire heaven.

If it hadn’t been, they wouldn’t have seen them waiting up there. Four of them. Their white-painted undersides stood out like hovering gulls.

Kazaran had been right. They’d been looking for them. To finish the kill or track them to the next airbase it wasn’t clear, but it was plain enough that they hadn’t expected to find them.

The Valks were scanning, circling at four hundred ems as spotters and probably dropping squads to do ground searches while they looked for crash debris from the air, and only now converging with the news of their troops’ discovery.

‘Angle of attack, Kaz?’ Dzeck asked.

‘Stay low, keep your blue topside towards them. Chase the canyon. Remember Malkov and the Navy void-boys?’

She smiled. Malkov had been pulled for a simulation war game before Morlond. Asymmetrical air war. Aeronautica Valks versus Navy Lightnings.

The Valks won, every time. If they stayed low and used terrain, the Lightnings couldn’t get a lock. The hovering Valks disappeared into a maze of auspex noise while the Lightnings were silhouettes against a clear sky.

She took it low, following the mountains, which after the storm had a head of dust-cap deposits frosting them like blue snow. Feeling out the new weight of the Ascension, she noted how it still felt like a gliding anvil.

‘Sacred blood,’ she breathed. ‘Can’t believe you guided us through this range blind, Stavven.’

‘Saints protect,’ he voxed from his position on the door gun. ‘You want me in the gunner’s seat?’

‘I can handle, stay back there and watch our side. I’ll keep the mountain on our right.’

She brought the Ascension to a slow halt, tilted it skyward like the quad guns on a Hydra battery.

‘I have a lock on the right one,’ Dzeck said. ‘Armed. Kazaran? We each have one Hellstrike, better make these shots good.’

‘Locked the left one,’ Kazaran voxed.

‘Been a pleasure flying with you, people,’ she said. Then: ‘Fire, fire, fire!’

She felt her right wing lift as the Hellstrike rushed out from the firing skid, temporarily washing the canopy with contrail as it streaked skyward and curled right.

On the left, Kazaran’s target fired countermeasures and banked – but too early. The Hellstrike chased the flares for a second – then they dimmed out, the guidance systems reacquired its target, and the missile burst right below the fuselage.

The Valk fell from the sky, one of its wings sliced clean away, tumbling nose over tail like a high-diver until it hit a mountain slope with a burst of flame.

Dzeck wasn’t so lucky. Her target popped flares and pulled a vector-assisted rollout, the missile exploding harmlessly to its beam. She didn’t see it, only heard Stavven call it as she banked low around a mountain to cut visual contact, fighting crosswinds as they slewed her tail booms to and fro.

‘They’re coming,’ said Kazaran. ‘Bearing six-three-nine. One’s right around the peak from you.’

‘Copy,’ she voxed, rolling up the shoulder of a mountain slope, skids cutting only five ems above the dust dunes, to come up on the Valk’s four o’clock.

Dzeck heard the clack of a heavy bolter chambering. Mumbling prayers.

She settled her sights on the Valk, running above her at a five-degree angle, slipping to her left. Below her feet, servos whined as the chin-mounted autocannon slaved to her helmet display rotated with her head.

‘Ready on left bolter,’ said Stavven.

‘Engaged!’ shouted Kazaran.

Dzeck squeezed the trigger, feeling the cockpit kick as the autocannon hammered. An asynchronous drumbeat, muffled in her helmet. Wham-wham. Wham-wham.

Tracers sketched low and heavy, dropping below the Valk’s belly. One caught a landing skid and slapped it away in a shower of sparks. A door-mounted heavy bolter answered, and she heard the rattle and pop of rounds hitting her armoured left wing.

The bat viffed upward, using the momentum to carry it diagonally out of the autocannon’s field of fire. But in doing so it miscalculated. A strong crosswind howled down from between the peaks, pressing the Ascension down as if trying to force it into the mountainside.

The big machine had twice the thrust nozzles of a Valk, and Dzeck stayed up. The Valk, though, faced top-on to the wind and fighting it with its thrusters, practically stood suspended in air.

‘Splash it!’ she shouted.

The burr of the heavy bolter vibrated the airframe, golden tracers zipping out towards the Valk. Stavven wasn’t a trained gunner, and undershot – but the Valk might as well have been grounded. Stavven walked the fire up to the Valk’s underwing fuel tanks, rupturing one with a puff of promethium and shearing away a rocket pod.

And a thrust channel.

The craft’s right wing vector nozzles quit, the remaining nozzles and wind shear sending it into an irrecoverable roll that smashed it into a mountainside.

‘I got it!’ yelled Stavven.

Dzeck could barely hear him over the howl of a lock tone.

She throttled up and sprinted, trusting the quad engines and crosswind to carry her clear of the incoming ordnance. To her right, an outcrop exploded, sending chunks of rock clattering off her wing and rolling along the canopy. She prayed, really prayed, none would find the turbofan.

‘Valk on our seven,’ voxed Stavven.

‘Shit,’ said Dzeck, banking around a cliff. ‘Shit. Shit.’

As a stable weapons platform, the Ascension was more than a match for these Valks, but as a dogfighter – and this heavy – it had almost no options.

Another crosswind blew in, and her nose dipped towards the grey of the cliff before she corrected and nursed more fuel into the engines.

Multi-laser fire flashed in a ribbon above her cockpit and she heard rolling, like ball bearings on steel – the sound of melted armour spalling away under the superheated beam. Close to the engines, too close.

‘We’re taking hits! It’s coming through the crew bay. I–’

Lock tone.

She banked hard right around the mountain, hoping the crosswind would snarl the pursuer, that their sheer mass would save them.

The Ascension slammed sideways, nearly contacting the mountain, and sinking into the turn, like a ship listing after taking on water.

‘What the hells?’ she yelled. She tried to right the craft but it felt wrong, unsteady. Had they been hit?

‘It’s the sarcophagus!’ said Stavven. ‘It’s broken loose.’

The deck tilted at fifty degrees. Handholds in the ceiling racks hung diagonally. Stavven, for the first time, doubted whether he was right to serve the dead.

A multi-laser pulse had pierced the crew bay and scored a line down the coffin. For a moment, Stavven thanked the dead man for having saved their lives. Taken a hit for them.

Then the two-tonne block slid right with the bank and cracked into the mortis drawers, fracturing the thick white porcelain and nearly throwing him out the opposite door.

He’d had a sickening glimpse of how close they were to the mountain peak.

‘Lock it down!’ said the voice in his vox-bead. ‘Lock it down!’

Stavven clambered over, using handholds, and checked underneath to see if the sled was still engaged. It was.

‘Level out!’ he shouted.

Another multi-laser hit bored through the back hatch, blasting open the ammunition hopper on the left door gun and cooking the bolts off like firecrackers.

He could feel the Ascension struggling to right itself but lopsided and pinned by the big sarcophagus. Another hit, shaking the craft. A mortis drawer opened and spilled a body.

He prayed to the God-Emperor, the risen Sabbat and Saint Kzacja. The floor began to level, and he reached underneath the coffin to find the sled’s activator stud.

Over the vox, he heard the lock tone.

And felt the Ascension dive.

The great sarcophagus slid towards him with a squeal of obsidian on metal decking.

With the centre of gravity thrown so far to the right, there was nothing Dzeck could do but dive.

Rise and vector, and they’d hit the mountain on their right side. Yaw left and they’d never get away in time. The missile was coming in one second, maybe two. The Valk was tracking close. Right on her arse.

So Dzeck pointed her nose down the slope and burned, using the weight of the sarcophagus to her advantage. She felt her stomach flip as the thing squealed forward in the hold, slamming into the bulkhead behind the cockpit with a crunching bang that felt like a missile impact. The weight dipped them almost level with the downslope, their passage kicking up a swirl of silica deposit in their wake.

And over the vox, she heard screaming.

Stavven howled in pain and shock. He gripped the heavy bolter mounting for all he was worth.

His top half hung out of the open door, mere metres from the rushing dust deposits, world fading and coming into focus like an adjusting pair of monoculars.

He feared falling, but would not fall, because the sarcophagus pinned his right leg to the bulkhead.

Behind him, in the slipstream of the Ascension’s passage, he saw the enemy Valk come over the ridge and angle down on them, hunting. It was so close he could see the snarling mask on the pilot’s rebreather. See the turbofans rotate, drinking the smoke they trailed from the multi-laser hits. And the billowing cloud of dust they threw in their wake.

No intake shrouds.

The Valk’s left engine coughed flames and quit. Its left skid dipped and its nose angled upward so the missile rushed out high, passing above the Ascension by three metres, unable to arm due to the proximity.

The Archenemy pilot’s eyes went wide as the crosswind caught them, engines stalling and gagging, the craft coming down on its edge so one wing dug sand, the momentum cartwheeling them down the slope, shedding parts. One wing gone. Tail boom snapped. Canopy crunching against a boulder.

It was the last thing Stavven saw before the dark closed in.

Dzeck supervised the loading herself, ensuring it was done right. Directing the servitors, making sure they handled it with care.

‘Careful with that one,’ she said, laying a hand on the heavy glass lid. ‘It’s been through hell.’

The mortuarian looked her up and down. ‘Looks like you all have.’

Dzeck shot her eyebrows. ‘Some of us more than others.’

She looked to Stavven, who was watching the bone container roll onto the packet ship. He leaned heavily on the cane, his temporary augmetic still too painful to walk on.

‘Didn’t expect you to care much,’ Stavven said, nodding to the sarcophagus, ‘about that.’

‘He saved us, I think. Snapping loose. We would’ve been splashed, for sure, if we hadn’t unintentionally dived so hard. Just a little shallower we’d be all over that slope.’

‘So it’s a he now, is it?’ Stavven shook his head. ‘A multi-laser hit broke it loose. The missile was too close to lock. No saints or spirits involved. Just… war.’

Dzeck thought of the man murmuring into his book, then looked at the mortuary chief’s clumsy augmetic. ‘Maybe, yeah. Probably right.’

‘We’re lucky we made it out. Because you’re a good pilot, and can keep being one.’ He tapped the augmetic with his cane, wincing. ‘No gunner’s seat for me.’

‘Is it strange?’

‘What?’

‘Knowing it’s going to Balhaut,’ she said. ‘Going home, when you aren’t. In the container with the rest of the bones.’

He took a breath. ‘I’ll join it soon enough. I haven’t given enough yet. Not like Malkov. Shoka. Everyone from Eternal. The Imperium hasn’t done with me yet.’

‘That reminds me,’ said Dzeck. ‘We’re doing another flight from Tercius. Martyr flight, special. Recovered remains, mostly partials. Casualties from the attack, but also Xaj, Malkov, Shoka. I made special requests, called in a few favours. Got us the assignment. Kazaran and Calkoi are in, I’ve got an alternate co-pilot, but I could still use a door gunner if you’re okay going up. Thought it might… kakk, I don’t know, exorcise all this. Provide closure.’

Stavven looked at her, eyes hooded.

‘Come on,’ she clapped him on the shoulder. ‘Let’s bring our people home.’

THE DEATH OF THE PROPHET

WRITTEN BY MARC COLLINS

Preface

Like Rob Rath, Marc Collins might be considered something of a newcomer, but that’s only because there are still dinosaurs like me lumbering around the place, checking the sky for impending meteors, and wondering how we’re ever going to develop rudimentary stone tools with these tiny little arms.

With the confidence of a real veteran, Marc turns his attention to the Chaos side of things. His story, set post-Anarch, is a perfect companion piece to the first two stories in this book, but it looks at the impact of a major Imperial victory from the point of view of the losing side. What does defeat feel like? If you are part of a ritualistic culture slaved to dark faith and conditioned obedience, what do you do when commands you are so used to obeying stop coming?

Marc’s story is a chilling one, but surprisingly sympathetic. And never let it be said that I don’t let people play with the toys. How could I not, when someone like Marc plays with them so well?

RIMWARD, TOWARDS XERXES
794.M41

‘The Anarch is dead.’

Gerik Damogaur was almost surprised that the words had come from his own lips. It was his duty to bear the pronouncement, every hateful syllable of it, to his fellows. The few remaining packsons had gathered expecting hope and revelation and instead were faced with the incontrovertible truth. There were no more than twenty in the chamber, only those most trusted to hear the painful revelation, though others waited beyond.

The Anarch, Great Sek, He whose voice drowns out all others, was dead. They had heard whispers of it, no matter what front they had fled from. Worse still was the fact they had failed to hear His whispers in their minds as an antidote to this poison. Instead, there had been only silence. Not as a sacrament but as a loss. The void within them had only grown in the long flight of exile and so they allowed themselves, at last, to grieve.

Some wailed. Their animal ululations echoed about the Administratum foyer that they had gathered in. Others threw themselves down onto the tiled floor and beat at themselves as though penance could restore him. If the Anarch could have been brought back by the mere shedding of blood, then they would have unleashed oceans of it.

They would have bled the galaxy white for him.

The walls of the chamber shook with the distant thunder of artillery, warring with their howls. It was still too far away for Gerik to tell who manned it. He knew the timbre of the guns, the weight and fury of them, but there were enough Urdeshi guns on both sides.

‘How can this be?’ Kyresh asked. He was stocky, yet his features were sharp and lean like a fine blade. A scourger, Gerik deduced, from his fine chainmail and pallet helm. The man shuddered as though with palsy, every part of him in motion as he sought to still his agitation. ‘He was the light and the Voice of the warp. He spoke and it was the Kings who whispered through his lips. How can such a man be dead?’

‘Was it the Archon?’ another voice piped up. Gerik whirled about to face him. Tyvas. Young and foolish. A rank trooper elevated, though not exalted, because of base cruelty. Held up amongst his peers as a totem of savage defiance. He had right to be here, certainly, as much right as any of them – but his was a crude and clawing ascent. The others looked at him now, with his graceless fumbling, and their meagre respect curdled on their tongues. ‘If he is dead, then we should throw ourselves upon the mercy of the Archon.’ He paused, looking around at the other gathered packsons. The knot of warriors had tightened at his pronouncement. Beasts sensing weakness. Gerik knew teeth were being bared behind their devotions – hidden by the dead fingers of enemies.

‘Coward,’ Kyresh said in response. ‘You speak of surrender as though it were sanctity. I know your kind, as I have always known them, and they welcome the lash no matter the hand that holds it.’ There was a whisper as Kyresh drew his skzerret and another as the ritual blade sang through the air. Tyvas barely had time to be aware of the wound that killed him. His hands groped for his throat, to try in vain to staunch the rush of blood, but he could do nothing to stop the inevitable. His feeble pawing served only to smear bloody handprints along his neck and up over his chin, in mockery of the oath he had betrayed.

Kyresh kicked him back and stamped upon the corpse’s face. He turned and fixed Gerik with his stare. There was a wildness in those eyes. Dedication warring with the simple pleasure of a kill. ‘He got his wish, one way or another,’ the scourger said. ‘He wears the Archon’s colours now.’

‘Enough,’ Gerik said.

Kyresh’s cocky smile faded.

‘It is not for you to say so, brother,’ Kyresh growled.

‘I have rank. It is for me to say.’ Gerik spoke calmly, though the threat lived plainly behind the words. ‘You were not there on Urdesh, Kyresh. You did not fight when the sacrament of war was ascendant. I did. I bear this word and its weight.’

‘Then what do you propose?’ asked another, quieter voice. Dhareg looked at Gerik with measured placidity. The Father of Wolves was at ease, though tears streaked his powdered face. ‘What are we to do in such times?’

‘We have no shaman to lead the ritus, no lekts to bridge the veil into reality’s reflection. No truth will flow from the lips of the warp.’ Another, named Vzar, spoke with force. Gerik expected such things from the Shadow. Few had seen or done the things he had in the service of the Anarch. ‘What guidance is there, save you?’

What guidance is there? Gerik thought. He bit back his doubt.

‘We must listen for the Voice of the warp,’ someone said. They turned. The warrior was plain upon the eye. His head was shaven, his eyes pale green, and the devotion strapped to his chin was yet fresh. He seemed the consummate image of a Sekkite warrior: youthful, proud and unafraid to speak his mind.

‘Yes,’ Gerik said in agreement. He could not turn his eye from the youth. ‘You speak with wisdom, but I do not know you.’ He inclined his head to the fellow warrior. ‘What is your name?’

‘Ekren,’ said the youth. He stood taller at the damogaur’s attention.

Gerik almost shook his head. To be so young and eager in such times…

‘Ekren speaks with wisdom!’ Kyresh brayed.

Gerik turned and levelled his gaze upon the scourger, but he did not return his attention. Kyresh was playing to his audience, flailing at the air as he sought to stir the ashen hearts of the defeated. ‘The Anarch spoke in the warp’s Voice, and we can bid it speak again.’

The packsons rippled in response. Some cheered, others spat insults, but all reacted. That was what Kyresh thrived upon: the adulation and outrage of his brothers. Goading one as he tamed the other and directing it in the service of the Sanguinary wars which defined this corner of the benighted galaxy.

‘Hear me!’ Kyresh bellowed. Gerik let him speak. ‘Where our brothers talk only of doubt and failure, I will give you hope! We will settle this in the way of blood and with those sacrifices we shall honour the gods. We shall stir them until they notice us once again. We shall call forth the Voice of the warp, and it shall choose who it will speak through. Who it will guide us through.’

There was silence then. Still and cold. Gerik broke it. He laughed bitterly and every eye moved to him. Even Kyresh turned in grudging acknowledgement.

‘If,’ Gerik said simply, ‘any of us are truly worthy of bearing its word.’

Twice before had the Word of the Anarch graced this world.

The first utterance had been ‘MERCY’, for the inhabitants had willingly accepted the Anarch’s glorious rule. The second had been ‘BLEED’. Now the planet was a nameless world of dust plains and the bleached bones of the old Imperial cities. The Anarch had drunk it dry, drop by drop, until there was nothing left of value.

Save as a nest. A fastness. A bolthole amidst the storm, the tumult that had raged since Urdesh and dogged the heels of every loyal Son. A tide of Imperial fire and Archonate blood.

A single day had passed since their meeting. For some it had been a time of contemplation and meditation, while others had drummed up support, speaking with fire and with poison. Other Sons had tried to coax the warp with blood – of others or their own – though with little success. Merely more raw materials added to the meat foundries. Their deaths would serve the Sons of Sek more keenly than their lives.

The faithful had once again gathered amidst the entrails of the Administratum Hall – where once the legalists and adjudicators of the Imperium had gathered to render their hateful laws and oaths. It had the air of a great performative amphitheatre now, carved from marble, etched with fine frescos and murals. By the main doors of the chamber had been one of particular note and ire. Their Saint had stared out with her hollow cattle eyes, rendered yet more beatific by the fawning hands of artisans. The Sons had spat upon it first, and then over time had worn the nine wounds of her martyrdom into the stone. When that had ceased to be enough, they had gouged her visage off the wall until only a grey absence remained, a smear upon the firmament, as she ought to have been after the Anarch’s great triumph. They did not touch the text beneath it that declared, ‘And A Shepherd Child Shall Lead Them.’

‘Let her lead them,’ someone had said. ‘As all false prophets, she shall lead them to their end.’

Gerik was not sure that the irony of such statements found his kin. Instead he watched as each warrior prepared himself in the sight of gods and brothers.

They stood in the centre of the chamber where the benches and scrivener’s tables had once sat. Tearing them out had been the first consecration. They now formed gibbets beyond the walls, where the wirewolves hung silent and still. The warp’s whispered caress no longer graced the nameless place and the few learned men amongst them – the would-be heritors of this fallen age – considered that a foul omen.

Gerik paced about before his brothers as they readied. He could feel the crunch of ash and bone dust beneath his feet, and he trod winding patterns into the second sacrament. They had brought tribute to anoint it, the pyres of worlds, Archonate and Imperial, to sanctify the proceedings. Bowls of burning human tallow lined the edges of the sacred space. Smoke rose from them alongside the stink of old atrocity, the better to render it liminal and veil-thinned, to coax the empyrean into vulgar displays.

Such things made Gerik smile. He did not smile often, and it was not a pleasant sight. His mouth moved in strange ways as though unaccustomed to mortal joy and he was aware of the grey tinge of rot that rimed his lips, where the fingers of his devotion had rested too long, mouldering and wet.

They had each laid their own devotions along one of the sweeps of stone that acted as a handhold down the central staircase. A parade of severed hands, which had cradled the mouth of each holy warrior, was displayed with the reverence due to them. They were taken from common soldiers and from generals, from cardinals and humble ayatani.

Each was sacred.

A promise and a symbol of their devotion to something greater than themselves.

Now they set them aside.

They stripped to the waist, discarding their ochre fatigues and the plates of stolen combat armour in piles, before they coated themselves with fine layers of ash and pale pigment. Some of the piles were more ostentatious than others. Gerik’s eyes drifted over the chainmail that had marked Kyresh’s rank – the helmet long since discarded – and at the scrimshawing which had colonised Dhareg’s flak plates. The art bled from him, it seemed, and it warmed Gerik’s heart to see the gifts of the Prince-Dark-and-Radiant at work in the hands of a true master. Amongst them, only Ekren took the time to pray. The simple piety of it stole Gerik’s voice even as it bound his sight. When the young warrior looked up, he looked away in shame.

To call the Voice of the warp was no easy thing. Even the greatest of the Shydmetkahin ritualists would have struggled with the rites. It demanded the utter surrender of a being’s past and future, the sacrifice of faithful brothers. An offering of the self.

And as always, it began with silence.

Each warrior anointed one of their hands in the thick pungent ochre pigment that would usually stain their uniforms and drove the digits against their own closed mouths. They did not gag or retch as they did so, and though the pigment stung and the blows they forced against their own flesh were heavy-handed, they did it with quiet pride and determination.

Without the hands of others to hold their mouths closed they would use will alone, until the will and word of the Anarch animated them.

Until they were ready to speak His truth.

Packsons stalked to the fore, robed in makeshift black, smeared with ashes. There were no true heritors. No lekts. No guiding hands or quicksilver minds to shape and lead them in the ritus. There were only these pretenders, charlatan-shamans who spoke in hisses. When they smiled Gerik could see the rotten ruin of their teeth. Too fond of their own elixirs.

With such bastard implements must we endure…

Half-remembered and once-observed undertakings were put into action. They grinned as they ground resin and amber against silvered bowls. Some opened their veins and spilled blood into the mixture, while others spat to smear liquid about the edges of the bowl. No two ingredients were the same: the eye of a blind seer, plucked from the skull and pickled; dust ground from a tongue which had never kept an oath; and scintillating powders that the peddler insisted were inchoate dreams given form. Desperation drove them onwards, to attempt and to protest that their efforts would be successful.

They chanted as they prepared the bowls and laid them before the assembled warriors. Kyresh, Vzar, Dhareg, Ekren, Liran, Vrin, Urx. There were two others who Gerik did not recognise, nominated from amidst the milling packsons – ascended, like Tyvas had, from the multitudes. Gerik stood with them. He observed. He held rank and was entitled to take part. To join the sacred rites.

Each warrior knelt and picked up their bowl. The mixture shimmered under the torchlight and strange colours danced along its surface, like oil upon water. Gerik almost fancied that he could see shapes undulating just beneath the surface, sub-aquatic life ready to rear up and snap at him. He swallowed back whatever mortal distaste rose in his throat, before drowning it completely with the fluid.

It burst upon his tongue.

Sharp.

Sour.

The world convulsed. He shuddered as he struggled to keep it down. He drew deeply, gulping it down. The others were doing the same. Some were doing so with difficulty, just as he was. Despite all his bluster Kyresh looked as though he would vomit it back up. Dhareg, by comparison, had already finished. He smiled in perfect contentment. Gerik hated him in that moment.

A gagging wet sound broke their own internal conflicts. One of the strangers had sunk to his knees, spluttering into the ashes. Vomit and blood left his lips in a torrent. His eyes rolled back, and he pitched forward into the mess. His brother gazed down at him, then dropped his bowl with a clatter. He could not move. He barely even shivered. Gerik saw the flash of red as something burst behind his eye and the bloody tear which followed it, before he too dropped to the ground.

This is why we cling to our priests and idols. Why the lekts whisper into our minds. Without the tools of the Anarch, we court so many deaths. We falter at the first hurdles.

The survivors placed their empty bowls down before them. Chests heaved, eyes were wide, and they looked at each other with grudging respect and new-born insight.

‘Shall we begin?’ Gerik asked.

Kyresh went first.

He strode into the centre of the chamber and threw his arms wide. A ripple of praise echoed from the packsons gathered at the edges, punctuated by the encroaching hammer of artillery and the world-shaking detonations above. They did not have to look up to know that ships were dying in orbit – bleeding their fire across the skies to eclipse the stars.

‘He has all the preening pretence of one of them,’ a voice whispered at Gerik’s ear. He turned, coming face to face with the glower of Vzar. Before this day of days, Gerik had never met the Shadow, but his reputation preceded him. Few among the Sons who remained had not heard of Vzar and his exploits. Vzar raised a gloved hand, clenched it into a fist, and then snapped it back to his side. He wrestled with the kill-urge, as they all did. He wished to spill the blood of those he considered brothers or to throw himself into the tumult beyond. Where once patience had reigned now inaction galled him.

All bulwarks, with time, could be worn down.

‘The Commissariat,’ Gerik repeated carefully, as though it were ancient wisdom, ‘is the strength of the Guard. As it strengthens the Militarum so it has made the Sons stronger. You know that better than many others, having seen the failings of the Pact first-hand.’

Vzar laughed and shook his head. ‘You speak accepted knowledge as though it were purest truth, damogaur. What good has it done us though? We have embraced these ideas to our hearts and carried them as the banners of our ascendancy. We have been shaped to believe that we would see our day and our hour. That the Anarch would rise to eclipse the Gaur and that the Imperium could be driven back. We were to be the edge of that blade. Sons and scions of a new age. The sanguine tide would drive back Imperial iron.’

‘That was always so,’ Gerik began, but Vzar cut him off. His broad face creased into an almost bemused sneer.

‘And we would do it in borrowed finery? The Imperium’s discipline officers, the Gaur’s framework… We are made of the borrowed and the broken. Is it any wonder that we break in turn?’

‘Some would call that blasphemy,’ Gerik said. ‘Some would say that you do not hold to your heart the words of the warp’s Kings.’

Vzar laughed coldly. ‘Let us watch and see, damogaur,’ he said. ‘And we shall see what blasphemy is defined as come the ritual’s end.’

Gerik was about to answer when the first impacts rang out across the hallowed space. Flesh against flesh.

The ritual began, as it would end, with blood. Violence was the knife against the skin of the universe, whetting the hunger of the Kings beyond.

The warriors had cast aside their weapons and fought in the oldest fashion, hand to hand. Pure in its primacy, the first way by which men had ended men. The first cut which had opened the way. Mortal might pitted against its like. It was always an invigorating sight and every last packson of the Anarch was as a beast when it came to such things. They were like canids wrestling beneath the table for the last scraps of meat.

Duty and the honour of command though… that was a more precious prize than roasted flesh.

Kyresh was all swagger. He posed and flexed while his opponent flailed at him. He sidestepped and weaved away from the errant and uncoordinated attacks. Liran… what a fool he was. His fire was no match for Kyresh. Not even enough to make it sporting.

Kyresh caught Liran with a savage backhand. The man staggered back. He spat blood, and the ashes beneath their feet took on yet more of the crimson hue, as if it were a spreading corruption. Like the reach of the Archon across the hololithic maps and the slow extent of the Warmaster’s fronts. Gerik bit back the thought, too much like blasphemy itself, and instead focused upon the ritual combat.

Liran was on one knee, breathing heavily, spilled sweat making his powdered flesh run white and ochre. Kyresh was equally exerted but he showed no weakness. His lips parted in a long, drawn-out breath. His eyes shifted upwards as though seeing something for the first time. Widening in revelation. Even from here they could hear the scourger’s breathing hitch. A quaint quirk of Imperial architecture ensured that any word spoken at the centre of the chamber could radiate out to subordinates and supplicants.

‘You know me,’ Kyresh whispered and then spoke again – louder and with greater determination. ‘You know me to be Kyresh. I have the honour to serve as a scourger of our proud brotherhood. I am the strength in your arms and I am the lash at your backs. I am the Anarch’s fury and vengeance and vigilance. To whatever end comes.’

Liran was the only one not listening, it seemed. He drove himself up and swung a fist for Kyresh’s face. Kyresh took the blow, reeled from it, and then looked at Liran as though seeing him for the first time. He drew back his own fist and smashed it into Liran’s nose. The sirdar crumpled.

‘Is that all, boy?’ Kyresh laughed. He looked up at the gathered packsons and at his rivals. Gerik felt his gaze sweep him like a waft of forge-cinders. ‘We fight for our very soul, brothers, for our continuation in this glorious war, to bear the warp’s great Voice within us… and these are the dregs laid before me? How did you ever rise to sirdar? I will never know. You would not have left my tender mercies, let alone begun to climb in our regard!’ He laughed again and turned, arms outstretched, to greet his brothers. ‘This is who presumes to bear the Voice? To speak as the Anarch once spoke? To be our master?’

This was not the parade ground. It was propaganda. As inevitable as such displays were, they turned Gerik’s stomach.

‘Unworthy,’ he let himself mutter. His eyes found Ekren again, across the ceremonial ring. The boy was watching, learning, processing everything that Kyresh did as surely as Gerik was. He could see Ekren’s lip curl in distaste.

The boy was good. He had promise.

Unlike Liran. Liran who now gawped face down on the ground. He flailed like something dredged up from the traitorous seas of Urdesh, and all who looked upon him knew only disdain. This was something weak. To be crushed under the heel. To be dashed upon the rocks at birth. They were elevated beyond such things by training and patronage.

‘It would take more than a little grasping man to end me,’ Kyresh panted. He placed his boot upon Liran’s neck and pushed him into the ash. Bursts of the pale dust rose from the struggle of the man’s breathing. Kyresh ignored it. He had them now. He knew that. His eyes were alight with savage pride. ‘I have fought for Him and bled for Him. I have killed in the name of the Anarch and there can be no greater honour than that.’ He knelt and scooped up a handful of ashes, letting them fall between his fingers, before standing again. As the firelight caught the drifting flakes, the world shifted. Images seemed to writhe and dance within it, though the warp remained still and quiescent.

Yet still the world shook and changed, glittering against the skin of reality like shattering glass.

‘A scourger is a drumbeat in your soul, and I have ever been thus.’ His words writhed from him with the febrile shudder of true belief, even as his prey struggled underfoot. ‘When we marched against the men of the Imperium we did so with righteousness in our hearts and silence upon our lips. We moved through the desert like a holy thing, like a fire, a plague, a storm. All that stood before us fell. Their skins we took as cloaks and their bones became our pipes. It was a fine and sacred undertaking.’ He seemed wistful then, content to crouch low and still Liran’s movements with a hand at the back of the head. He let the man turn and look up at him, holding his gaze as he spoke.

‘But they were far away. Across a greater expanse of salt and rock, unkissed by water or the hands of men. The wild places belong to the Kings of the warp, and so they belong to us, but this does not mean that they love you. A holy thing may still kill you. As sure as a blade is a blessing.’ The ashes blew, kicked up by the distant rumble of the artillery wind. Not so distant now… Yet it was more than that. As Kyresh spoke the world seemed to curdle and slough away. Soon there was only the expanse of blasted earth. Sun-baked and dead.

Gerik blinked. He saw–

–the dull plains as they stretched out forever. Parched as eternity’s edge, as surely as any world which had known the bite of a jehgenesh’s thirst. Sand stirred at their feet like powdered bone as they trudged on inexorably. As duty demanded. They were his Sons and they would not be turned from their course by such petty hardship.

‘Suffering,’ so the etogaur said, ‘is how the gods reward the faithful.’

The column stretched out across the sands in a vast track of black and ochre, etching their progress through the landscape like the writhing marks of a serpent. The sun beat down upon them as they marched – reducing everything to the reflected glare from the pale, dry earth. Parched lips remained closed as though in devotion. None raised a voice in complaint. To admit as much would be a show of weakness. In a place such as this, weakness was death.

Such places were sacred. Sanctified by the many names and faces of death. Reaved of life, so unlike the green and pleasant lands the Imperium coveted. They were men of the shepherd and her crook, of the farmer and his plenty, but they ignored the primal truth.

One day all places shall be such as these.

Kyresh strode ahead and scanned the horizon. He paced back and forth like a hunting canid, a jackal of the deep deserts. Sometimes he stopped and let them pass him before he pulled the flail from his belt and let its bladed tails fly freely.

Men collapsed under his ministrations, but they were true Sons of Sek and soon pulled themselves up once more, accepting punishment as though it were blessing. They kept their silence and locked it away with the worn, rotting hands of the enemy, employed either as clasps holding helmets to heads, or simply bound to the face. The symbol of their devotion. The demonstration of their resolve.

Their hands. His words. His will, their bodies.

There was an echo on the wind. A whisper. A scream. The world resounded with the only voice that mattered. They each felt the fingers pressed against their mouths tighten in sympathy as it stole their exhalations, took them as a tithe. Felt the grit gather between worn and mouldering fingers. Watched it snag against borrowed and defiled flak plates. Followed the traceries of blood as they seeped from the wounds rendered by their scourger.

‘I will bring you glory!’ Kyresh snapped. ‘In the name of the Anarch, whose voice drowns out all others!’ He added the words almost as an afterthought, but no one raised their voices against him. His place was to inspire. To drive them forward and to be the iron rod ever at their backs. The blade at their throats. Pushing them onwards.

Towards the citadel.

Though they did not speak, even the surest of the Sons felt their breath catch at the sight of it. Walls of rockcrete and iron. Raised with all the plodding lack of imagination which blighted the minds of the Imperium. They would not coax a fortress from the earth – fed upon blood and bone and made divine. Instead they grubbed in the dust and built their child’s castles. Ignorant of the sanguine tide that would wash them asunder.

All except Kyresh moved in silence. Scourgers spoke with the voice of the Anarch. They acted with the holiness of His will. If it fell from the lips of a scourger then it could not be untruth or sin. They were allowed a voice beneath their sallet helms and Kyresh used it as a weapon.

He goaded. He raised his voice with every crack of the flail. Just as barbed. Just as sharp. For some it was the last thing they heard before they succumbed, crashing into the dust as he rained down blows and imprecations.

The Commissariat, for all its failings, had taught well by example – and been exceeded, surpassed and outdone in its brutality. As with all things it was improved in the hands of the faithful.

In the heat and dust of the desert, death was a familiar thing. A useful gift. Brothers died that their blood might quench thirst and their flesh end hunger. Equipment was passed around to those who needed it most. Talismans danced from hand to hand, to draw the eye of luck or destiny. The gods had loved their fellows enough to draw them up into the holy rancour of the warp. Any man would wish the same. They kept one body. Marked him with sacred signs. Cut him open and bared him to the attention of the gods and their spirit hosts. He would serve, when the time came.

Through it all Kyresh raged and bellowed. The beating heart of their enterprise. All the while the fortress grew more distinct. More true.

‘Only cowards would fail to take this from them!’ he roared. ‘Look and behold who you face! Will you break before them? No! You shall break them in turn!’

At the sight of their banners, all could see who they faced. The Vitrians. Glass men, all. Kyresh threw back his head and laughed as he whipped yet another brother to death. All thoughts of use or plundering the body were lost as they surged ahead.

In silence. In unity.

They charged under the arc of the enemy’s guns. Light seared down at them with the crackle-fizz of high-power las. Plasma lashed at them from heavy emplacements and turned the sand to glass – turned men to bloody vapour. All that was needed was for them to reach the walls. To breach the fortress. To drown them in blood and thunder and fury.

‘Now!’ Kyresh screamed.

The body, ritually prepared and readied, threw itself up and its voice was the howl of the warp. They had worn thin the veil with suffering and blood, and now the wolf they had conjured forth tore its way towards the enemy. Their brother had died, as so many others had died, so that victory could be snatched from the jaws of defeat.

The blood wolf was a migraine smear of unctuous light as it hurled itself into the fray. It snarled, features blurred like bad pict-film, and it tore through the storm of fire. It was lightning in a bottle made of broken human bones, caged in flesh even as it burned out and through it. Talons of fire extruded from ruptured fingernails and it bounded up the sheer side of the fortress like a felid chasing avians.

The plasma emplacement swivelled and sighted. It fired. The bolt never connected. The blood wolf caught it, held the miniature sun in its hand for a perfect moment, and then crushed the light. A roiling, angry wave of flame gouted back at the gunnery crew and cooked them to bones within their glass armour. Scales shattered at even the reflection of the thing. It grinned with teeth of sanguine warp-fire and laughed with the mirth of atrocity as the first shots finally found it.

The inferno raging beneath its skin finally reached the charges and grenades that the packsons had adulterated the corpse with.

It detonated in a rush of heat and fury, unbinding the daemonic force within it in an eruption of hellish force. An inconstant false un-dawn rose above the walls even as the stone sloughed away. Like boiling water, like rotting flesh, the fire of the apocalypse consumed it and the Sons poured into the breach like daemons.

Kyresh threw himself forward, blade up, and embedded his weapon under the chin of a stumbling Vitrian. Blood gouted across the scourger’s face, hot and coppery against his teeth. He grinned with savage adulation as his brothers swept in around them, each of them falling back to bladework, to the sanctity of the knife: iron against glass and flesh set against flesh.

They could cleanse cities in a night. This place, for all its false bravado, would be no different. Kyresh let the body fall and wheeled about, looking for new prey. He turned and paused. As though seeing something for the first time…

Gerik shook himself and realised that he was staring at Kyresh’s gloating features. Twisted with callow, overweening pride, the scourger’s face was distended by his grin and stained with blood and pigment.

No one else seemed as affected as Gerik. None of the others who had imbibed the sacred unguent were unmanned. He looked from face to face and saw only the resigned acceptance of Kyresh’s boast; even Ekren had bowed his head in acknowledgement. Gerik looked down at Liran. The man’s eyes stared blankly, his jaw sitting slack, and it was obvious that Kyresh had broken his neck. As before, two Sons strode across the ceremonial space and dragged him away.

Gerik did not remember hearing the man’s neck snap, so lost had he been in… in what? He swallowed hard. The vision had passed, and he had lost time, living Kyresh’s offering as though he had been there.

He had not been there.

They had not fought in the hot dust against the glass-men of Vitria together. He had heard of Kyresh’s triumphs as others had but they were not his to share or glory in. His fingers twitched as though seeking a blade, and he quieted them with a significant effort. He did not move even when Vzar shouldered past him. The Shadow looked back at Gerik as though he were a simpleton and then turned to face his opposite. The warrior was called Vrin, Vzar’s brother in blood as well as allegiance. The similarity was striking, though Vzar was sharper featured, save where Vrin had marked himself with five long ritual scars over his lips and down his chin – in imitation of questing fingers.

Vzar reached down and removed his gloves, letting them fall to the dust, already forgotten, and all eyes went to his suddenly bare hands. They bore no skin upon them. It had been removed, painstakingly, and never allowed to heal. Gerik knew that some who had renounced the Gaur had replaced the skin about their hands with unblemished flesh – but Vzar despised such half measures.

He wore his pain as a gift to the gods and the Anarch.

The two men nodded at each other and then turned their gaze to Gerik. He swallowed and pronounced the words of his judgement.

‘The first sacrament has been undertaken. An offering of blood and breath from the hand of a brother. Let the next offering be one of blades.’

They each drew their skzerrets, turning them over in their hands. They were almost identical – bone-handled, barbed, their edges serrated to extract the most worthy of pain from their victims. They circled but neither raised their weapons. Vzar sneered and Vrin spat into the ashen dust at his feet. They smiled with the mirth of wolves, the joy of hunters who finally feel themselves challenged.

Vrin had risen in the estimation of his packmates precisely because his brother had carved a legend into the galaxy’s skin. In many ways, there was no greater spur to competition. So he had fought and clawed his way up, as a rank trooper and then a heavy weapons gunner, and then onwards – upwards, to stand as a weaponmaster.

All these warriors, these men of dark renown, were known to Gerik and yet he had never met them. He had seen the merest shadows of them upon the walls and thought them mighty.

Knowing these men in the flesh… am I impressed or merely disappointed?

There were so many of them and yet so few. So few truly worthy. Gerik looked around the chamber, at the observers and the sanctified. Were any of them truly worthy of the Voice’s attention? The galaxy was changing. Their worlds were shifting beneath their feet. In such times, were any deserving of the power that such a blessing would confer? Would it even be enough to stop the inevitable?

Gerik listened and he watched. Rumour and legend were as whispers, echoes and reflections of the truth. They spoke to him with their every action. Each movement was a precise thing. A blade arcing through the air to meet its fellow, muscles bunching with the effort of the strike, dust kicked up by the shift in stance.

Sparks cut across the empty air as the blades met and serrated edges ground against each other. Evenly, though not equally, matched. Gerik’s breath caught as he watched. Sheer single-minded skill ground against dogged iron determination. The blades clashed again and again in mid-air. The others watched intently, hunching forward to try and pick out details, to note specific instances of skill. Even Kyresh seemed impressed.

Gerik tensed. Every click of metal against metal was another creeping tremor along his spine. He could feel sweat beading his forehead and running down his chin. He could taste the thick chemical reek of the powder as it bled from his skin.

Vzar ducked under his brother’s swipe and drove in, etching a crimson line along his sibling’s flank. The weaponmaster jerked back, suppressing a curse, but Gerik barely noticed. He looked about the circle. Kyresh was laughing as he spoke with Ekren. There was something there. A grudging respect. Did the scourger see it too? The potential the young warrior carried?

Power and experience accepting the promise of youth. Gerik was fascinated as he watched. He could see it, Kyresh could see it. He wondered how the others could not see the near-numinous possibility that shrouded Ekren.

Gerik wanted to go to them, to speak with them as brothers, but he could not move. The clatter of the ritual combat drew him back in. He had to focus.

He felt his eyes roll as Vzar began to speak.

‘I lived amongst the Gaurites and wore their colours.’

He lived amongst the Gaurites and wore their colours. He hid his face behind cruel, cold iron and affected the feral disdain common to the Sanguinary masses. Vzar answered to a false name, broke bread with men who were not his packsons, and let the barbs of his mask gouge his cheeks. He bore the scars of allegiance upon his hands, as though cut into him by the Gaur’s own armour.

He was a liar. A spy. A ghost in their midst. A shadow waiting to strike. He was pheguth. A brand he would wear proudly in the atrocity to come.

The death brigade held a line ten kilometres across, strewn throughout the misshapen interior of the equatorial forests. They glimmered with strange bioluminescence, fogged with fungal blooms of deep blue and roiling crimson. It lit against his uniform, the fabric dyed so deep a red that it was almost black – soiled in the blood of sacrificed men of the Militarum and granted a final sanctity by the murder of its previous owner.

Vzar found that the most difficult affectation was setting aside his superior discipline. It was not an idle boast to say that the Sons of Sek were better drilled and more consistently equipped than the Blood Pact. He held himself to a lower standard, moved with a little less surety, and worked to draw as little attention to himself as possible.

He was amongst them for a year. A year of curdled camaraderie, of deceit. He lived and breathed treachery as though he needed it to live. Every moment sharpened him, whetting his entire being until the moment he was required.

A year. A year fighting the Gaur’s battles for him. A year stinking of blood and offal. A year of gore-rites and eked out suffering. Of trading the future for the past. Of holding close to his choler any time they took the Anarch’s name and word in vain.

He could ignore but he had not forgotten. He charted every slight by tracing patterns into his palms until they bled. Encoding them with pain and the offering of his agony. He grew accustomed to the taste of blood and continued the practice of drinking it as a novelty – even when the blood of others replaced his own.

Vzar became a world unto himself. He was smeared in the toxins of the battlefield, stained again and again with the viscera of the weak men of the Imperium. The sorties and advances dragged out and bled into one another. He began to wonder if he would ever truly know his purpose.

He had volunteered for the first night’s patrol, as much to get away from the others as to clear his mind, when he heard it.

The wind shifted with a fecund whisper. There was a song upon the air. The world itself stilled, held its breath, and then began to speak again in the voice that drowned out all others.

He trembled in the fragrant dark, only the barest of details picked out by the fungal light, and then moved off. New purpose flooded him. His every muscle tensed and bunched as he jogged onwards through the undergrowth.

For all their sins and lapses of practice, the Pact had the presence of mind and efficiency to maintain an ammunition dump in this portion of the forest. A squat collection of drums and crates nestled under the boughs of a sprawling tree. Men squatted amongst the bulging roots or sat upon low slopes. Three of them. One looked up as he approached.

‘Gaur Magir,’ he declared, and they nodded. Relaxing. They returned the greeting. War cries subdued, pensive, waiting.

‘All is well. What do you need?’ one of them asked. His grotesque was rough, indicating his youth and inexperience, and he held his lasgun loosely. Even amongst the elite there was room for laxity. Imperfect imitation of the Militarum bred mistakes such as these. Like cogitator errors creeping in or the imprecise transcription of monastic savants. The promise of victory had been lost, and worlds had burned, at a heritor’s error before… so too would the failings of these men bring down their masters.

‘There has been a breach,’ he said simply. He watched the man’s eyes widen. The other two shared glances. The disorientation of shock. The sudden rush of realisation.

‘What?’ the young one asked as his face twisted into an angry snarl. ‘The Imperium?’ His eyes snapped around, wildly, in one direction and then the next. Searching for shadows. Hunting for ghosts.

‘No,’ Vzar whispered and let the last vestiges of pretence fall away. Control reasserted itself like a strap snapping taut. His knife was in his hand and up before he even finished his sentence. ‘We are betrayed.’

He drove the blade into the youth’s eye and bore him to the ground. The others were moving as though underwater, leaden by surprise as Vzar snatched up the rifle and fired twice. The shots were precise. Perfectly executed. The men stopped and tumbled back with steaming holes drilled through their foreheads. He could taste the burning flesh as the smell of it rose onto the wind. Vzar checked the charge on the weapon and marvelled for a moment at the Urdeshi maker’s mark. He kept his silence and checked the bodies for their clips.

And their grenades.

When the moment came, he would make a pyre of their sacrifice. He would draw their eye and then disappear into the darkness. Like a shadow.

First though there was a deeper sacrament to be undertaken. He returned to the first of them and pulled the blade from his skull. He looked at the blood covering the length of it, the sanctity of it – of a life taken by the hands of the faithful and given to the Kings beyond. He did not clean the blade before he lifted the warrior’s hand by the wrist and held it up. His tongue wetted his lips as he began to saw through the flesh and bone.

Soon he would be complete again.

The explosion tore through the darkness and the silence. Immediately the camps were on high alert. Lines of communication contracted, and the war fronts followed with them. Turning inwards as outriders hurried to investigate.

He stood in the shadows, in the darkness that was holy to him, and he prepared his weapon. The fingers of the enemy felt good against his lips. Still warm with the last flush of life. Ready to bear him forward, animated by only will and word.

He stepped from the shadows as the first Pacted soldiers ran past him, and shot them in the back. Not the single precise shots of before, but a burst at full-auto. He peppered their spines with shots that maimed, that paralysed, and that killed, then spun on his heel and faded back into the shadows.

He would kill them all. By degrees. With intent. This portion of the line would fold and fail – whether the betrayal truly killed it or opened it up to external pressure. The Gaur would be shamed. The Pact would be routed. The Sons could profit and the Anarch would be exalted.

That was what the whispers promised.

Gerik blinked.

An eternity seemed to have passed between one breath and another. Time had indeed flowed on, lost like sand between his fingers. He took in the scene of bloody horror. Vzar had subjected his brother to an intricate end. A thousand cuts had easily been etched into the other warrior’s skin. In places it had peeled away as though fully flensed. Vzar said nothing. He simply cast his knife down beside the body and took his place at Kyresh’s side. He ignored the man’s encouragements and little boasts. He barely even looked back at the others.

Gerik felt bile boiling in his stomach. He knew what he was experiencing was not right.

Was he dying like the others? A drawn-out coward’s death of sickness and shame? He did not know. He did not want to know.

Worse though… The idea that it would not be his death alone. If the Voice did not speak, did not claim a new champion from the mass of the Sons… what then? Annihilation. The end of all they were. The seeds that had been sown upon Gereon and other sacred worlds would never bear their fruit – only wither and fall.

Dhareg placed a hand on Gerik’s shoulder. His fingers were rough, calloused by the intricacy of his craft, shaped by a life of devotion to his art. ‘Is it not sublime?’ he asked, his eyes wide and staring – pupils huge.

‘It… it is.’ Gerik shook off his hand and turned from the bitter taint of his rapture. He was lost in the storm of sensation. Was this what revelation was? The pounding migraine agony spreading through his skull?

Ours is the brotherhood of necessity. The camaraderie of the hells. No room for mercy nor weakness. Simple fidelity is what we trust in. Not to ourselves but to the gods. To Him.

Dhareg nodded and moved off into the centre of the arena, passing the young Ekren.

The others preened and posed, yet Ekren evinced a simple faith. A quiet power. Perhaps they were all looking in the wrong place, so swept up in signs and wonders that they missed the simple mortal truth…

The will to power.

Dhareg stopped and turned, before sinking to his knees. All eyes were upon him now. All focus. Even his opponent, sirdar commander Urx, paused to stare at the Worker-in-Metal. The Father of Wolves.

Dhareg’s eyes were closed. He moved his head gently as though listening to a song only he could hear. They all ached for that certainty. To know and hear the voice that they all missed. It was so close, so familiar, but it denied them. The Anarch was gone. He no longer walked the worlds in opposition to her hateful light. Everywhere the stench of the sacred flower closed in. It was behind the fyceline crackle of the enemy’s shells. It drowned out the unwashed gore stink of the Pact. The world stank and shrank and the warp kept its silence.

The hall shook. They were close now. Close enough that the sounds of combat were impossible to ignore. Urx snarled and hurled himself forward, spurred on by the encroaching thunder of battle – aiming his fist squarely at the placid features of Dhareg.

His eyes opened. Dhareg reached up and grabbed Urx’s hand. Squeezing until he heard bones break. His features creased into a beatific smile. It was kindness warped by cruelty.

‘Shall I tell you how I came into the grace and favour of the Anarch? You who holds rank but lacks soul?’

Gerik could not look away. He succumbed again, slipping under the tide of nausea as another wave crested him. He surrendered.

His hands were always still when they worked.

Perfect placid concentration exuded from him. He was at odds with so many of his brothers and so he had become an outcast. Solitary. Only snipers knew greater isolation amidst the armies of the Anarch.

In many ways he had long since given up being a warrior. His muscles remembered. His heart. His soul. His being had forgotten. That was why he had ranged so widely. Why he had trained under heritors and opened himself to the wisdom of the warp. To wear at reality as a sculptor wears at marble, to polish the skin of the world until it shone with the light supernal.

He had taken the hand which he wore as a devotion from a shaper of silver idols, a man whose fingers had been burned and scarred by his own art – as he had moulded the hated aquila and the icons of the Saint. He had deceived the silverworker and then he had killed him. The hand was rough against his lips. Sacred. Beautiful.

Dhareg had walked a dozen worlds and carved the wirewolves from metal. He had caged the infinite and gazed upon its beautiful wonder. He had watched the dance of the glyfs as they were born from pure conceptuality and found their courses in the world.

Those courses had become his. He had heeded the whispered voice and had ranged ahead of his brothers. For his duty was a holy thing and it was not a fear of arms alone.

He wormed his way into the heart of their world like an imago into flesh. Ever beneath their notice, cloaked in shadows and signs and wonders, but always vigilant for their attention. The hated Saint had visited the world in ages past and reaved it of its true name. He did not care what stolid hateful Imperial label had been forced upon it. Instead he fed on lesser names. He listened. Waited. Fixated.

Such diligence brought him to the Marble Garden. A shameful extravagance. A simple grove where once she-in-her-unworthiness had rested. They had caged it in smooth stone and coaxed clear waters into it – while their people thirsted as surely as any throat-dry world of the Consanguinity – and girdled it with statues. She stared down with dull judgement alongside Kiodrus and Faltornus.

Dhareg hated them. He hated them as much as he admired the skill shown in their composition, and that made the hatred ache all the sharper. He had known the honour, in early life, of viewing the works of Karlier and Frachar after they had been broken as so many others had been broken.

There was a glory there that lingered with him, in seeing the hands of the Imperial enemy turned to true and honest craft. Men could work wonders when they surrendered their sanity and their souls to the beauty which dwelt beyond the world.

He had used his hate. He had sketched the statues and noted their dimensions by eye. He had observed the rites the Imperials practised, and he had waited. He had worked marble of his own. Real and imitation. He had worn and chipped and rasped at the stone until it shone. He had hollowed it, laid it aside, and begun to work upon the metal.

Here there was a greater beauty. A vaster truth.

Each piece was assembled with love and fidelity. With a commitment that few Imperial artisans could have matched. He worked until his blood ran into the work and sanctified it further. He created in a holy fugue. Dhareg took no bread nor water nor meat-of-the-city. He maintained his long vigil. When he broke from his work he walked the narrow crawlspace he had found within the bowels of their rule and he crushed the islumbine blooms beneath his bare feet. Soiling them as they sullied him.

Impurity was the price of victory.

The day of the Saint’s ascendancy there was to be a sacred council of war. Normally these things were done within the bastion sanctum but this was a holy day to them – the unfaithful can often be confused and distracted by false signs and wonders. They were as children in understanding. Dhareg pitied them but knew that their time was near.

The night before the meeting the statues were taken to be cleaned. To be garlanded in her flower, dusted with martyr’s ash, and polished to a glorious sheen.

That was when he chose his moment.

He stole in amongst them in the robes of a lithologic adept, as grey and worn as ancient stone, fussing over the precious statues as though they were newborn babes and not priceless relics. They were so engrossed in their work, so devoted to their craft, that they did not notice as he wheeled in the covered trolley. They did not stir when he deftly drew hammer and chisel from beneath the sheet and advanced carefully behind them.

They were barely aware that they were dying when he set about them. Blood spattered the smooth pale stone of the statuary. It would likely endure there forever, such a stain, but he did not care. Instead he turned back to his own prize.

The death had roused them slightly. He pulled back the sheeting and watched the trembling stone. He began to whisper the myriad names of death, binding their hunger with lesser trinkets of yearning, until they quieted at last.

He stepped over the bodies and picked up the garlands and ashes with trembling hands and pursed lips.

When the preparations were made he would destroy the originals. Then, he would wait.

They gathered beneath the eyes of saints and raised their glasses in a solemn toast.

From his concealed hiding place amidst the arches of the upper terraces he watched them with disdain. A lord governor chuckling dryly at the side of a Militarum general. There was a sombre and sober ayatani present as well. Every so often he would gaze up at the rendition of the Saint as though seeing it for the first time again.

Men such as him were why the Sons raised iconoclaves. It was not simple desecration. It was the death of their joy and their hope. Such things were sweet upon the tongue. Dhareg drew his knife along the palm of his hand, adding to the myriad scars of creation, and began to whisper.

The world trembled, sighing like breath drawn in too quickly between teeth. The very air soured and grew heavy. There was a sudden ozone reek, blossoming into innumerable odours. Rotting flowers, the excrement of beasts, corpse-rot and grave dust. They looked around, eyes darting as they sought an explanation. For the heavens to answer weak prayers for deliverance.

The Saint moved.

The statue lurched forward and her artfully graven face split. The smile became a tortured grin of breaking stone, until it was a burning maw, rendered volcanic by terrible internal heat and un-light. The others moved too, as though following her lead, their movements jerky and forced. Marionettes animated by a power vaster than all of them.

The wirewolves bound within the hollow stone were newly born. They were precocious.

They were hungry.

Dhareg gazed down at the carnage with a perfectly placid smile. He recognised the ill-fitting gesture after a moment. He was aping the warm pleasure that the ayatani had shared as he stared up at the Saint.

As she devoured his face with teeth of fire and metal, Dhareg considered that there was a beautiful symmetry there. He would meditate upon it, and embrace it when next he was moved by the Anarch’s will to create.

‘Gerik? Damogaur?’

The voice roused him from his reverie and his head snapped around to follow it. Ekren looked at him with tired eyes, bled of all disappointment. ‘Were you dreaming, damogaur? What did the visions show you?’

‘Truth,’ Gerik murmured. He could feel drool on his chin and winced at the shame of it. He forced himself to stand taller. ‘I have seen the Anarch’s truth in the souls of our brothers. I have seen the truth that should be writ upon the world.’ He swallowed. ‘I believe you are that truth.’

‘The will of the Voice is absolute. We all know this,’ Ekren allowed. He stepped back and Gerik could see the war within him played out upon his face. Surprise as it faded into surety. Dismay as it became determination. Every muscle clenched, every sinew tightened. ‘If it is the will of the Kings of the warp that I bear the voice of revelation then I shall do so. I shall lead where it follows, if all will follow where I lead.’ He smiled and in his plain features Gerik saw all the potential of the man. He could no longer feel the drug’s bite. It was as though it had never been. Perhaps, he now realised, it never had.

He understood.

Gerik was nothing.

Perhaps that was what mattered in the end. A boy with ambition who wished to serve in the cult armies of Nadzybar but had been denied. Who had served the armies of the Gaur, though chafed at the brutality of his calling. Until the Anarch had found him. Until the voice which drowns out all others had filled him and invigorated him.

There were scars on his soul that would never heal. He had seen and done the impossible. He had surrendered himself. The gore-witches of the old Archonate had marked his fate as a child. That he would be a vessel. He would take orders and swallow them down. He would endure. He would remain pure when ambition poisoned so many others.

A man without ambition. Without fear. Without doubt. A man who would follow orders into hell itself. A true son.

Had he known what that meant until the bloody years after the schism was joined at Salvation’s Reach? Did he understand what the Anarch’s ascendancy and scheming would mean?

It no longer mattered. The Anarch was dead. He had failed.

All that remained was for Gerik to listen. To truly hear and to understand. To hear the Voice.

To accept what he had been shown. To accept why he had been shown.

To let me in.

Gerik opened his eyes just as Ekren’s blade swung for his throat. His hand was up in an instant, taking the boy by the wrist as one might discipline a child. He sighed and the breath was charnel. Gerik laughed in a voice that was not his own. It was strange, layered, bent-double and broken. The voice of the dead.

‘I know you, Ekren. A child playing at war, thinking he was worthy. You were not a willing vessel. You were simply empty. Hollow. You can fool others, but you cannot fool me.’

Gerik squeezed until he heard bones pop. He could already taste the marrow on his tongue. His other hand came up, holding his own ritual blade, and cut the boy’s throat.

Kyresh broke first. His confusion turned to rage as he hurled himself at Gerik. Gerik simply turned to face him. He laughed at the scourger’s bravado before he rammed the fingers of one hand into his face. Eyeballs popped under his nails. ‘Ah, scourger! You only ever beat down those whose ascent you feared. You killed so many potential leaders in the cradle of their training. You served only yourself. Unworthy.’

Vzar and Dhareg stepped back. The room was no longer silent. Whispers abounded. The walls shook. The enemy were so very near. Time had almost abandoned them. Now, though, there was a whisper. The world woke anew. Wirewolves stirred in their gibbets.

‘What are you?’ Vzar asked. He clenched his hand into a fist, as though that would keep it from rising to cover his mouth.

‘Anarch!’ a voice cried from the stands. Others took up the cry. ‘Magister!’ came the voice again.

Gerik laughed again. It carried and echoed strangely as he held out his arms, displaying himself to the waiting crowd. His rivals sank to their knees, keeping their gaze upon the ground, ignoring the spreading bloodstains.

‘I am not your Anarch. I am not your magister. I am the future,’ Gerik said. His words rang out, clear and strong, and the packsons began to cheer. A terrible, hideous crackling resonated out from him, as every last bone in his body broke and reshaped. ‘In time, the new heritors shall remake me. They shall render me fit for war and glory. Now, though, is the time of resistance. The age of the Anarch is over. I am not Him. I speak with the voice that waits beyond. The voice which drowns out all others. I am the throat of the warp and my word is vengeance. Blood vengeance and death to our foes. Not with trickery and deceit but with blade and shell and teeth.’

They reached for weapons and howled with savage joy. The furious mirth of the reborn.

Their clamouring, their prayers continued, even as the doors at the chamber’s edge blew in.

A storm of enemies. A riot of Imperial banners and Gaurite war-totems.

Gerik wondered how many would be victims and how many would be converts, come the end.

He could feel the mortal aspects of him atrophying as he was remade. He could feel his chin splitting. Reshaping. Blood and mucus slicked it, rendering him capable of such profound speech.

As the enemy drew in around him, as his brothers, his disciples, his Sons, rallied to the defence… he opened his mouth and pronounced the Final Word.

And the First.

NINETEEN-THREE COREWARD, RESOLVED

WRITTEN BY MATTHEW FARRER

Preface

If Graham McNeill is a veteran of the Sabbat War, then Matt Farrer is a… a super-veteran. He’s contributed to each anthology so far. I’ve never hidden my admiration for his writing. He’s so inventive, so creative, a superb author. When he said he was willing to write for this volume, I was delighted. I knew it would be good: it was Matt. But what he’s written is quite extraordinary. His story is set in the crusade’s past, and, once again, it looks at an unexamined aspect of Sabbat life. What came as a surprise to me when I read it was that somehow… somehow… he successfully blends two things that should not in any way go together, except as a joke. And this is not a joke. What in lesser hands might be regarded as a ‘mash-up’, a cheeky and inadvisable cocktail of incompatible styles (like, for example, a Jägerbomb) is here rendered with an utterly straight face, complete conviction, and a total mastery of pace and character. It is a complete and perfect story in its own right. It shouldn’t work, but it does, and I think that’s because Matt handles it with an incredible lightness of touch, never pushing anything too far, and never adding too much of any ingredient. I never thought you could mix 40K with… well, I won’t tell you. That would just spoil it. But even now I’ve read it, several times, I don’t know how he managed to merge these genres and still create something that is utterly and genuinely canon.

Oh, and one last thing… No, that would spoil it too.

‘Mister Noverin!’

I couldn’t place the voice right away over all the racket in the passenger compartment, so I arranged my features into a mild, accommodating smile before I turned around in case it was someone important. Around me, the crowd seethed. The pilgrims were getting restive. The Barrekat Faltornae had broken warp after nine long weeks of voyaging and the constellation they called the Holy Visage was out there, just beyond the compartment doors and the viewport shutters, waiting for their adoration. And instead of being able to rush to the windows and see the face of Saint Sabbat drawn in the stars, here they were being made to line up along the deck like little children in the scholam pen, fidgeting and chattering while my attendants did the rounds.

‘Purser Noverin! Over here!’

Oh. No. Nobody important.

Mowle, one of my junior clerks, came pushing through the throng, shrugging off chatter and questions and the occasional hand plucking at her tunic. She was waving something at me.

‘Almost done, Mowle. Then you can tell me what it is.’ I turned to watch while my crew worked their way through the final dozen squirming subjects. Pinlight into the eyes to check dilation and any unusual visual response. Thermocloth pressed to the forehead to check temperature, pulse, perspiration. A talisman – a silver aquila, an etched-pewter islumbine bloom, a vial of blessed water scooped up from a snowdrift at Balopolis – that they had to hold pressed between their palms with no visible tremble in their hands while they gave their answers. With everyone involved carefully not paying attention to the shotgun that the second attendant was holding to their head.

‘Where is the Golden Throne?’

‘On sacred Terra, heart of humanity.’

‘Who sits upon the Golden Throne?’

‘The God-Emperor of us all, exalted be He.’

‘What does the God-Emperor see when He looks upon you?’

‘His devoted servant for now and for all my days.’

A grunt from the crew, the passenger got to sit down on the scuffed metal deck plate, and then on to the next in line. And once everyone was checked the crew leader would turn to me and say, ‘Sound, aye!’, and I would call it back to him, and then the sealed doors could open, the stuffy air would finally start circulating, these poor folk could finally stretch their legs and remind themselves what the rest of the ship looked like. We’d already heard the distant rumble of shutters as other compartments with fewer people finished ahead of us. It was why everyone was so restless.

‘Summons for you, Mister Noverin,’ Mowle said from by my shoulder.

‘Thank you. Almost done. Five people to go.’

‘Yes, Mister Noverin. I’m to escort you–’

‘Just four, now, Mowle. It really can wait.’

‘–escort you to the Upper Fourth with all haste once you are completed here.’

‘Emphasis on that last part. Look, three left to go.’

‘Begging your pardon, Mister Noverin, but “with all haste” was the part they really seemed to emphasise.’

‘Did they.’ I was too annoyed to ask who ‘they’ might be. This was a tedious job but there was no question of not doing it. Every living soul on the ship, every warp voyage. Mowle knew that perfectly well. She and I had already been through it before we were allowed off the crew decks. And still…

…still she came tugging on my sleeve like this, going on about ‘all haste’. All of a sudden this actually sounded interesting.

‘M-mister Noverin?’

Everyone in the compartment was staring at me.

Oh, right.

‘Sound, aye!’ I called, and the crowd erupted around me, people leaping to their feet and hugging, shouting huzzahs, dancing in circles singing blessings and prayers. Of all the types we’d carried while I’d served on the Barrekat, pilgrims were definitely their own breed.

‘What is all this, anyway?’ I asked Mowle as she led the way out of the compartment, and rolled my eyes when she didn’t answer, even when I asked her again. It wasn’t until we were at the crew lifts that she stood on tiptoe so she could whisper in my ear.

‘There’s been a murder.’

‘Forgive my asking, but how can you tell?’

I was not keen on this. I wanted to be on my way back to my little cubbyhole quarters tucked under the forward mezzanine, where I had a nicely upholstered sleeping nook, a flask of spiced nectar and a chapbook to read until I fell asleep. I was now two decks and four sections away from my lovely little bolthole – I’d been counting as I followed Mowle up here – and I could feel my much-anticipated downtime receding into the distance ahead of me.

‘Tell what, Mister Noverin?’ the lead rating asked. ‘I mean, we’re pretty sure he’s dead.’ He looked up at the ceiling hatch and the rest of us followed his gaze. I was at the wrong angle to see anything except another ceiling, that of the power-channel whose maintenance shaft we were all standing in. Weird, even elegant in its own way, utterly unlike the crew spaces, with its procession of contoured stanchions like curving ribs, the complex veinwork of cables behind them, the mosaics of magnetic repulsor tiles etched with strange Martian ideograms.

This was one of the Barrekat’s arteries, empty and cold now, while we opened it up to extract this little clot, but normally ablaze with plasma pumped forward from the enginarium, ready to power the secondary gravity and life support systems beneath the forecastle, or to feed into the accelerator coils and be jetted out of the manoeuvre ports to brake or turn us. Or even to build up to a killing density inside the firing chambers for the prow batteries, if anything had been waiting for us out here to make us use them.

Apparently nothing had. From what we could tell buried down in the pleb-decks, our breakout from the warp had been as smooth as you pleased. Helm had started the gentlest of burns to guide us around to our materium bearings. The first pulses had come surging down the conduits and…

‘Are we confident that it isn’t an accident, is what I meant, Skosse. Nothing personal, but, well, nobody here is new to void-voyaging, are they? Wheels get greased.’ I wouldn’t normally have used such an indelicate bit of slang, but Senior Deckhand Skosse knew what I meant, and nodded. Voidships are big, brutal creations. The humans who run them are one of the most fragile parts of their machinery and, bluntly, the easiest to replace. Greasing the wheels. Mortal fuel. Expressions like that are as old as spacing and they’ve stuck around for a reason. This wasn’t the first time I’d had to help the Barrekat pick corpses out of her teeth, and it wouldn’t be the last.

‘Perhaps you’d best take a look yourself, Mister N.’

It wasn’t a hard scenario to picture, I thought, as I pulled myself up to the edge of the hatch with two of Skosse’s crew boosting my feet. A work detail had some little task or other to do, splitting up, falling behind schedule, getting careless about checking everyone back in before they sealed the conduit behind them. And someone was still stuck on the wrong side of that hatch when the pulse came roaring down it.

The rest I knew from the little report docket Mowle had been waving at me. The final moments of whoever had died in there had been noticed, or rather, the infinitesimal buzz of interference in the plasma containment field had. Just a microsecond-long itch in the conduit’s magnetised gullet but it had been enough for the pulse to cut out before something could go really wrong. The ship had routed around it, and the helm officer had sent an angry message to the enginarium wanting to know why one of their attitude ports was dead. The enginseers had sent a retort that it wasn’t any of their doing. A service crew had been dispatched as soon as one could be formed. And they had found…

‘Ooough.’

Like I said, not my first encounter with a dead crewmate, but definitely the closest. My head popped up through the hatch and my nose was bare centimetres from, well, where the other nose would once have been. Almost kissing distance, if the heat hadn’t peeled the lips back from the mouth and then scorched them away. The eye sockets were empty, the jawbone hanging crooked. A sneer? A scream? Both thoughts were ridiculous, but there would be sleepless nights to come when I found myself staring into that heat-blasted wreck of a face after I closed my eyes.

‘Not the prettiest he’s ever looked, hey?’ Skosse observed as I lowered myself out of my chin-up and his crew crouched again to set me on the floor. I shook my head. ‘There’ll be a bit of work here. He’s right down in the cables and vanework. There’ll be fragments, that powdery ash is going to be a bastard to clean out. You’ll be wanting to pass that on to them yourself, I’m thinking?’ A little tilt of his head acknowledged the Adeptus Mechanicus delegation who’d been silently watching us from a dozen metres down the accessway. I sighed.

‘Alright, Skosse. You get the poor soul down, and I’ll go and speak with our learned colleague.’ I stepped away and then stopped as something that had been nagging at me came into focus.

‘Why “he”, Skosse? How do you know it was a he?’

He looked back at me. The brass visor grafted to his face took away a lot of his expressions but I got the impression of mild surprise.

‘Big head, Mister N.’ He spread a hand so the finger and thumb spanned his forehead from temple to temple, then tapped the visor. The three green eyelights inside it didn’t blink. ‘If I concentrate on something for a few seconds it brings up an overlay and shows me all the measurements. Fifty-eight centimetres. Seemed too big to be a lady’s head.’

‘It does that? I never knew it did that. Live and learn.’

‘Or not, I suppose, sir, for one of us present.’

‘I suppose not. Alright, Skosse, fetch him down while I go and speak to the enginseer.’

‘Non-optimal and disrespectful.’

The deckhands had managed to drag out most of the, well, the lumps, and rake a little drift of ash down through the hatch. Nothing was connected to anything else. The skull lay on its side, staring past my ankles; a scatter of leg bones lay in among the dirty grey powder. A couple of cinders near Skosse’s foot might have been fingers? Maybe? I was hoping not to have to find out.

‘I infer that the conduit remains contaminated,’ the voice went on. ‘There is no possibility that it can be otherwise given the elapsed time and the nature of the workers.’

Here was something creepy: I knew for a fact that there were six enginseers in the Barrekat’s enginarium coven. None of them looked remotely like one another, but every one of them used the same synthesised voice, sing-song but totally affectless. A few of us had wondered about that over our cups in the refectory after a late shift. Was it some form of Machine Cult devotion whose meaning we didn’t grasp? Was it their idea of playfulness? Were the six ’seers we were used to seeing even real, or were they just puppets for one of the reclusive inner coven of magi whom only the captain ever spoke directly with? Or was that their idea of playfulness, to trick us into thinking that?

Still, really, there was only one thing someone like me needed to know: how to be polite to them.

‘I submit that my crew have performed commendably, Enginseer Tzucha.’ I glanced over to Skosse, who caught it, nodded and made a quiet little brushing gesture with one hand. ‘They have removed the better part of the remains with admirable haste. But to restore the conduit to pristine condition is beyond our humble capacities. Your priesthood made it, and by the nature of the thing it will take your priesthood to restore it.’ Too late, it occurred to me that ‘disrespectful’ might have been referring to regular crew being in the conduit at all, rather than just not cleaning it out well enough.

‘There’s ashes still in there right down in the cables and vanework,’ I said, pushing on, stealing Skosse’s phrase. ‘The corpse was pushed down into them after it was dragged up there. The fine cleaning of the machinery and the remediation of any disturbance is the proper domain of your priesthood, not my crew.’

‘I question your analysis,’ Tzucha said, moving towards the burned remains. I did a hurried shuffle to stay level with him before the trio of servitors following behind him could tread on my heels with their brushed-steel boots. ‘We posit that the damage was caused by the now-deceased attempting to push down to the conduit wall in the hope that being outside the repulsant radius would allow the possibility of survival.’ A jointed metal rod slowly extended from under Tzucha’s hood and swivelled about until it was regarding me with a bright blue eyelight mounted on the tip. ‘You will have observed that this was not a valid expectation. Even from a position outside the magnetic corridor, the radiant heat would have been instantly fatal upon the pulse’s approach.’

‘I understand and welcome your correction, enginseer,’ I said, reaching for the cloyingly polite tones I used for my annual audience with the ship’s comptroller. ‘But without wishing to overstep my place, I respectfully suggest that your dataset may not be complete, and seek leave to add some relevant facts to it.’

A second metal finger peeked out from under the hood. The eye on this one was purple.

‘The victim could not have been trying to climb down to the conduit wall,’ I went on, ‘because the conduits were all flushed an hour before we broke warp, as per regulation. The interior was hard vacuum, and the deceased had no breather or vac-hood. If he had, they would have melted onto him, or left some other trace. And even discounting that…’

I walked past Tzucha and stood over the skull, pointing at the centre of its forehead.

‘…this man was shot in the head before his corpse was pushed up through that hatch and down into your conduit. Whatever he spent his last moments doing, it did not include a futile scrabble for shelter among your fragile repulsion machines. The disturbance of your sacred artifices is a shame, enginseer, but if you want an apology you’ll have to ask whoever it was who shot him.’

Skosse went into a coughing fit that I was absolutely sure was cover for a chuckle, and Tzucha’s two finger-eyes moved apart, then together again, then apart, then retracted under the hood and disappeared.

‘And who did shoot him?’ the enginseer finally asked.

‘Ah,’ I said. ‘Well. As to that…’

‘Nobody cares who shot him.’

Deputy Assistant Senior Steward Yebrett was the highest authority on the ship that someone like me would ever get to speak to face to face. If by ‘face to face’ you meant me talking to the side of his head while he scooped starch dumplings and gravy into his mouth, and by ‘speak’ you meant him cutting me off halfway through every sentence I tried to utter.

‘Sir, if you’ll allow me–’

‘You have real work to do, Noverin, and you’re taking up your time worrying that the menials are killing one another. Is this honestly the first time you’ve known that to happen?’

‘I want to make sure you know–’

‘And now you’re wasting my time.’ He managed to spare a quick glance more or less in my direction before another ladleful of steaming dumplings arrived at his lips. ‘I’m a busy man, Noverin. We all knew that this ship would slam into its highest gear once we were before the Visage, and here we are, and here you are with your head full of trivia.’ He gulped, licked his lips and pressed a napkin over his mouth and chin. I waited.

‘You’re still here,’ he said eventually, his words a little muffled by the soft folds of linen. I bobbed my head a little so he wouldn’t hear me sigh.

The here was the ready room above the Long Lounge, deep in the Barrekat’s belly. The lounge was the admin and logistical hub for all the lower foredecks, and had got its name the same way ogryns get nicknames like ‘Tiny’ – not a lot of lounging got done there. Even with the door closed behind me I could still hear the bedlam of the ship’s clerks and ordinates shouting over one another to get orders processed and messages out. I didn’t think I’d ever heard it as crazy as that.

‘This is the first food to pass my lips in nine hours, Noverin,’ he went on. ‘The first time I’ve taken my weight off my feet in, oh, call it at least seven.’

‘At least seven it is, deputy assistant senior steward,’ I said. Yebrett narrowed his eyes and dropped the ladle into the bowl.

‘Notice anything on your way in here?’ he asked me. ‘Did the Long Lounge seem a little busier than usual to you?’

‘Since you ask, Mister Ye–’

‘How long until the shutters go up, Mister Noverin?’ Yebrett finally deigned to swivel his deep-set little brown eyes and his long disapproving nose around in my direction.

‘Six hours? And a half?’ I squinted at the shift clock on the far wall. The centre of the dial was an embossed image of the Golden Throne, the hour marker a little model of the Barrekat that orbited it once per shipboard day. Oh. ‘Four hours.’

‘Four hours, sir. And in that four hours our shift has to iron out the hauler snarl-up that has over fifty crates backed up at the freight shafts. Which we have not yet managed to do.’

‘Yes, Mister–’

‘And make sure both the refectory kitchens have the crew service out of the way and are ready to feed thousands of pilgrims churning through the port galleries, which I do not believe they are.’

‘I understand, sir–’

‘And make sure the shipwardens and ratings are all formed up for crowd control the way we drilled them. Which I am not convinced that they are.’

‘Well…’

‘Which I had you listed as helping to organise, Mister Noverin. Which you are not doing, because you are still here. Still bothering me with a matter beneath both of our notices.’ He looked longingly at his dish again. There was still some savoury steam rising from it. I didn’t get to see food that fancy on my own plate except at Candlemas and the captain’s birthday. Certainly not brought to me at my own table. ‘Am I really going to have you ruining both my schedule and my dinner every time some nameless indentured deck-grub pops a cobbled-together laslock into someone’s face over a jug of rotgut or a dice game?’

I held my tongue and stared at the dish along with him. Finally, Yebrett sighed, loaded up an extra-large ladleful of dumplings and bent down to slurp them up. I spoke as quick and clear as I could while he was bulge-cheeked and chewing and couldn’t interrupt me.

‘The weapon wasn’t some gimcrack job from the swelter-decks. The traces Tzucha found in the skull were from a frangible ceramic round that only the shipwardens’ guns can fire. But the killer wasn’t a shipwarden, because all the wardens are accounted for, because of the crowd control deployment you were just accusing me of not paying any attention to. And the victim’s not a menial because all the rating decks were locked down under the warp-transition census and none of the work crews are missing anyone.’

Yebrett was glaring at me as his mouth worked and starting to make mnff mnfff noises through his food – I was running out of time. I produced the yellow message flimsy from my sleeve and held it up so he could see what it was, although not so close he could read it for himself.

‘We do, however, have one reported disappearance whose timing is tenably linked to the corpse in the conduit. As such I seek permission to enter the forward premier decks to make enquiries…’

‘Mnff!’ Yebrett was shaking his ladle at me. I took a step back to avoid any flying droplets of gravy.

‘…about the missing esholi.’

‘What…’ Yebrett coughed, gulped, and glared at me. ‘What the blazes is an esholi?’

‘Well, I am one, for a start.’ It sounded like the sort of answer that should have been accompanied by a smile, but the girl’s expression didn’t change from the look of melancholy concentration she had been wearing since she had shown me into the library.

I hadn’t known the Barrekat Faltornae even had a library, but by this point I was honestly a little numb to new wonders. I lived in the mid-decks and spent a lot of my working time down in the menial sections and the swelters. Living on a deck where you had to stretch your hand right up to touch the deckhead could lead you to think you were pretty fancy, until you pinned a pass to your collar and came up here.

There were gardens up here: actual gardens under rotunda domes decorated with frescoes of the saints and primarchs, with galleries – sometimes two or three of them! – swooping around overhead. The staterooms opened into companionways broad enough for a dozen people to walk abreast, some of them two levels high with balconies so that the nobles and dignitaries in their suites, their whole apartments, could step out and watch me walking underneath them. The central spine of the primary deck was a soaring colonnade that ran the Barrekat’s entire length, whose arched exterior windows reached up a dozen metres over my head. They were still filled with the featureless grey-brown of the shutters, but the crowds were already jostling in front of them, haggling over their assigned spots, fidgeting as they watched the time tick down. Three hours to go, now, until they opened the windows and let us look at the Visage.

Three hours. I was supposed to be back down in my own decks by then, back at work and then straight to sleep shift. I had found myself wondering if there was going to be any way I could linger up here long enough to see her for myself.

I suddenly remembered I was in a conversation.

‘I do apologise, mamzel. The occasion is overwhelming my manners. May I ask you to repeat yourself?’

‘Or I was,’ she said, ‘until just before this voyage.’

She had a quiet voice and lovely, strong-boned features. The artisans who maintained the devotional murals in the crew chapels would be able to capture her in half a dozen smooth, confident brushstrokes. Her accent was one I had heard before, one I associated with bright silk robes of blue and green…

‘You’re from Hagia?’ She nodded and her expression grew slightly less haunted, although she didn’t meet my eyes. ‘Some bad fighting there, I heard. Saint bless you for escaping it.’

‘She did.’ And that was that, going by her tone, so I squared my shoulders and got back to the point.

‘Did you know an Esholi Brillin? Was he posted with you here?’

‘The name isn’t familiar, I’m sorry.’

‘But an esholi is a librarian? A scribe?’

‘A scholar. We spend…’ She blinked hard and shook her head. ‘The esholi spend their lives immersed in study. In every field of knowledge in the Emperor’s light. We learn so that we can teach and guide, until something in our learning calls us to… to a different way.’

Whatever event had ended this girl’s days as an esholi, it was clearly not that long ago, and it had not been kind. I decided I didn’t want to press for details.

‘Esholi Brillin.’

‘No,’ she said, ‘I didn’t know him. I know there are a number of Hagians aboard, but we don’t all know one another. When the chance to travel out to the Visage came around, a lot of us took it. Our world has been scarred by the Archenemy. When we heard this ship was taking the faithful to see the Visage it seemed like a grace offered from the Throne itself.’

I remembered some of the petty officers gloating about the Ecclesiarchal charter in terms rather less pious and more financial, but it didn’t seem tactful to mention that.

‘If the esholi are scholars,’ I asked instead, ‘then where do you think Brillin might have been if not here in the library? As an– as a former esholi yourself, can you tell me where on the ship he might gravitate to?’

‘Something’s happened.’

‘What makes you think so?’

‘If he’d just wandered off and found himself in the wrong compartment then why not just wait until he turned up again? It’s not as if there’s anywhere he could go. If you were truly concerned you could ask for him over the casters and wait for him to present himself. Not come around asking questions about where an esholi might go.’

‘Very good, Mamzel…’ I glanced at my slate. ‘…Sanian. So. Where might an esholi go?’

‘No esholi came through here. MOVE THAT NOW.’

Overseer Quan had quite the pair of lungs on her. It wasn’t just me who flinched when she boomed out that order: the nearest deckhands did too, and they worked for her all the time.

‘You’re sure?’ I asked. I was trying to be as tactful as I could in case she turned that sledgehammer of a voice on me next.

‘Yes. There are a few sorts of devotees who dress pretty similarly. He would have been wearing these off-white sort of robes and a mantle, cut out to about here, maybe with a grey or black clasp along here. Head would have been shaved except for a– WHY is it taking three of you to lift that by HAND?’

Swear to the Throne, my hearing fuzzed out a little bit when she really opened up. She was a little grey-haired stick of a thing – where did that voice come from?

‘Wheel-lift’s missing, mam!’ one of the deckhands called back. Three of them, all top-heavy with muscle-grafts and wearing the green-and-gold headscarves of senior deckhands, were trying to heft a freestanding pulpit along the grand colonnade. There was an iron aquila worked into the front rail, and an arch overhead, made of heavy ship’s chain with the links welded into place, was decked with sculpted islumbine, the leaves worked in etched brass and the blooms in silver. I hated to think how much the thing weighed.

All along the colonnade frantic crews were engaged in last-minute preparations, sweeping, scrubbing, hefting altars and statues into position. From what I’d been able to glean from various cranky and flustered officers, a crowd of pilgrims and clerics had been unable to contain their enthusiasm and started an impromptu parade up and down the colonnade while I was in the library. Mobs of revellers from Far Halt and Nonimax, who do their worship through enormous pageants and carnivals, had poured onto the upper decks in their brightest colours, forming great dancing and shouting columns carrying eagle banners and effigies of the Saint down the centre of the colonnade. By the time they had turned at the portals to the bridge complex and started back they were also carrying over two dozen of their own number, whose devotional ecstasies had peaked early and sent them tottering off their feet, convulsing and shouting. They were borne away on the shoulders of their fellows, whooping and singing in celebration of the divine touch on the shuddering body they were carrying. More than one had apparently pissed themselves, too. I could smell the sharp tang of counterseptic from several knots of crew frantically scrubbing away puddles on the deck. It mixed with the lingering stink of flash-powder from fireworks let off as the parade hit its peak, and the sickly smell of the fire-suppressant gel that had automatically followed. The whole thing sounded utterly delirious. I was delighted to have missed it all.

But it didn’t seem to be the sort of thing to draw a Hagian, whose ayatani priests and imhava pilgrims embraced a more sedate and cerebral kind of piety. Certainly not an esholi, who by all accounts were more reserved still. Sanian, who seemed to still think like an esholi for all her protestations that she wasn’t one any more, had tucked herself away in the library. And Brillin, according to the manifest I’d called up when the disappearance was called in, had appointed himself to Anchorites’ Row. Choosing to spend a multi-week voyage saying prayers outside locked doors and pushing the occasional bowl of gruel through a feeder slot didn’t suggest the sort of man who’d then daub himself in wild colours and dance beneath a paper aquila. It made sense, but it was damned inconvenient. The parade had been my shot at finding somewhere a vanished esholi might fetch up, and now I was back at…

‘Well, WHAT is it doing down THERE?’ Quan was going off at her intendants like a salvo of concussion bombs. ‘The formal procession to the viewing windows begins in an HOUR. Do you have a PLAN for getting all this DONE with only TWO wheel-lifts? Or is someone going to go down to Anchorites’ Row and FETCH it?’

That got my attention. It was tenuous as anything, but it was a connection. Maybe, Throne willing, I wasn’t right back at square one after all.

 ’I doubt I can shift a pulpit,’ I put in when the little overseer drew in a breath for her next assault, ‘but I’m not too old to push a wheel-lift. May I offer to fetch it for you?’

The Barrekat Faltornae, like a lot of ships that did heavy service for the Ministorum, had cribbed a few features from planet-bound temple buildings over her long life. One of them was an anchorhold, a long street of cells retro-built into a midships compartment one deck up from my usual rounds. The light was poor, the air stale, the feel gloomy and oppressive. When the echoes of the hatch clanging shut behind me had died away, the silence was eerie. I don’t think I’d ever experienced that kind of quiet in my whole time aboard. The anchorhold corridor stretched away from me into the gloom. The cell doors were in the left wall; the right was covered in frescoes, portraits and Ecclesiarchal maxims rendered in ornate calligraphy, sometimes in gold leaf, more often in patches of dark grey utility primer where someone had peeled the gold leaf away. Most of them were difficult to make out in the murk in any event.

As I walked past the endless procession of sealed doors, I wondered what it would be like in those cells, your whole universe bounded by six metal bulkheads barely larger than your outstretched arms, just you and your thoughts and the Emperor watching over you. Did they ever regret it? Want out again? Each door had a quatrefoil window set high up in it, but in every one I passed the inner shutter was pulled down. It could only have been a few minutes but it felt like hours before I finally saw a feeble yellow light up ahead. Just before it ended, the passage’s right wall curved out into a semicircular space lit by a dirty yellow overhead lamp. It was empty of people, but clearly not permanently. Squinting around, I made out two writing lecterns, a food-cart pushed against the far wall and a pair of sleeping pallets. No sign of anyone. This was definitely where Brillin had taken up station before he fetched up in that conduit. Would it be sacrilegious to knock on one of the doors and ask where the other caretaker had gone? Not that they would have any way of knowing. Was I going to have to rummage around in the pallets to look for clues?

‘You!’

I almost jumped clear off the deck, and the only reason I didn’t yell was because my throat closed up with the shock and I started coughing instead. I used that as cover to try and get my nerves under control before I turned around. If whoever owned that gravelly, overused voice had been going to brain me, I told myself, they would have done it without yelling to attract my attention first.

And frankly, if this man had been intent on braining me he probably could have. He was lean, but a hard, wiry, weather-beaten lean, not like the spidery, gangly builds voidborn tend towards. His hands were the first thing I really took in: battered, scarred and callused, the kind I saw on the menials who fought in the swelter-deck barefist circuit in their off shifts. The second thing was his face, the features tightly and angrily bunched, the eyes a startling bright blue-green.

‘Me,’ I said, for want of a better way to stall. He wasn’t in a ship uniform, nor in anything I recognised from any of the Ecclesiarchal contingents we had on board. Dusty dark-red tunic and dusty grey pants and a long jacket. He could have been anyone, from anywhere.

‘Noverin,’ I said, and tapped the rank-badge under my left lapel. ‘Purser’s staff.’ It wasn’t much of a rank to intimidate with but if this ruffian had violence on his mind as well as in his face then hopefully he’d realise there would be consequences to assaulting one of the Barrekat’s own. ‘Who else is working down here?’

 ‘Me.’ The man folded his arms and I relaxed a little. That wasn’t the posture of a man still intending to kill me with his fists. ‘I’m looking after the cells. The others are… away. Doing their work.’

‘That would be Esholi Brillin and Junior Steward Sahr?’ I’d stopped on the way down to call up the formal crew assignment for the anchorhold. Sahr was the only name on it for this voyage, but it wasn’t a surprise to find she had company here. The Barrekat was flooded with priests and pilgrims, groaning at the seams with them, and plenty of them had simply appointed themselves to jobs on the ship and started doing them. Sanian in the library, Brillin down here along with… this guy. ‘Your name?’

‘Holtch. Gofnar Holtch. With respect.’ Those last two words came out of his mouth like they’d been pulled with pliers.

‘You’re not crew, then, Holtch?’

‘I transferred from the Keres Everhearted in the last intake before we broke warp at Boniface Cardinal,’ he said quickly, as though I were timing him. ‘I boarded that ship at Phantine after service with the Missionaria Galaxia there and at Unida and Anselmo.’

‘Some great victories there,’ I said. ‘Stirring stuff to have been a part of, I imagine, even a small one after the fact. Throne be praised.’ He mumbled something without meeting my eyes.

‘Now, I do still have my work to do, humble as it is next to triumphs like those. Do you perchance have a wheel-lift registered to the colonnade deck here? Perhaps one that you used to, oh, bring meals for the anchorites and maybe haven’t had the chance to return yet?’

I watched Holtch shifting from foot to foot, waiting for him to grab one of the easy outs I was giving him. It was his eyes that gave me the answer: he kept glancing at a point behind my shoulder. I turned and peered into the shadows at the end of the passageway.

‘Splendid! You’re done with it? I assured the colonnade crew I’d be back with it directly. They’re expecting me.’

The wheel-lift was sitting right against the very last cell door, pushed in at an untidy angle and its brakes not properly engaged. The charge light was still green, though, and the motor hummed beautifully when I bowed to the little cog icon between the handgrips and thumbed the activation rune. There was a faint but unpleasant smell to the air back here, and I wondered if Holtch or one of his comrades had been caught short and nipped back into the shadows rather than slog down the passageway and back.

I was out of practice with steering a wheel-lift, and the sudden anxiety about what I might be treading in didn’t help, but eventually I manoeuvred the bloody thing out of the doorway and pointed it down the passageway.

‘They’ll be so happy to have this back!’ I called to Holtch, now a dim shape lurking by the sleeping pallets. ‘Thank goodness for the beacons, eh? Or we might never have found it!’ Still babbling my relieved thanks and farewells over my shoulder, I sped the lifter up until I was trotting along behind it and made for the hatch. My wish right at that moment was to never have to lock eyes with Gofnar Holtch again for as long as either of us lived.

Funny how things turn out.

‘Do you call this ACCEPTABLE CONDITION?’

Maybe I was still euphoric from that feeling of a narrow escape from the anchorhold but I didn’t let Quan’s voice bowl me over backwards this time.

‘Madam overseer, I may be a little rusty steering one of these things but I am certainly capable enough not to be responsible for that.’

We were in a cul-de-sac towards the aft of the spinal deck, sheltering from the pomp and ceremony that had consumed the main colonnade. Quan and four of her senior crew were all collected in a knot around the wheel-lift, clucking and muttering about the dings in the bright green paint and the scratches in the yellow-and-black bordering tape. Nobody had thanked me for slogging down to that rank little dungeon and fetching it back for them, either.

‘Just so you’re prepared to say this is the shape you brought it back to us in,’ one of the deckhands said over her shoulder. ‘Look, even the wheel rim’s scraped, an’ all! We’re not wearing the blame for this when it goes back.’

‘Back? This isn’t assigned to your crew?’ I hadn’t even bothered to check the assignment code in the thing’s beacon. Down on my deck a wheel-lift with a working beacon was a mythic event on a par with saintly manifestations; I’d forgotten it was even a thing you could do.

 ’Requisitioned it, aye,’ she said, straightening up with a wince and a hand in the small of her back. ‘And they can’t have it back yet, either, we’re still using it.’

 ’I wouldn’t have dreamed of suggesting otherwise,’ I said, gesturing behind me. The boisterous din of that first impromptu revel was gone, replaced by the slow, sonorous pageantry of the formal Ecclesiarchal processions. Every priestly delegation was one moving part in a scrupulously choreographed, agonisingly slow and courtly dance. They crept along the colonnade in formations laid out to preserve the tiniest nuances of seniority and deference, and arranged themselves in front of viewing windows allocated through fierce diplomatic haggling more than a year before the voyage even began. They had first begun while I was down in the anchorhold but they would be going for hours yet. The Barrekat was the first ship to make this voyage since His brave soldiers had pushed the Archenemy far enough back for the trip to be safe; this was the first time in living memory a pilgrim ship had been able to reach the right point in space to see the Visage in all its perfection. Nobody wanted to go home and tell their bishop or eparch or abbess that they hadn’t rated a place in the first viewing.

‘Mister Noverin.’

The tired, tinny voice had us all looking around in mild surprise. It was Quan’s intendant, an indentured rating with the distinctive red-and-black metal harness clamped over his mouth and ears through which he spoke with the Barrekat’s Dispatch and Logistics command, buried beneath the bridge tower. He was the one who’d asked for the beacon-call that had found the vanished wheel-lift.

 ’Mister Noverin, you are the subject of a Dispatch and Logistics summons. Please check in.’

‘Originator?’ All I could think of was that Yebrett had finally got fed up of my chasing a vanished passenger around the upper decks and wanted me back down in my place.

‘Deck-clerk Mowle. Header: About the conduit. Remainder of message for direct transmission, eyes/ears. Shall I acknowledge?’

 ’Thank you. Uh…’ I looked around, ignoring the curious stares of the crew. Direct D&L missives were hard to wrangle – whoever heard of a deck clerk being granted one to page a junior purser? Now I just needed to find somewhere I could take the damn thing. And then I thought of a place.

‘Acknowledge and note that I’m en route to the crew station in the library. I’ll take receipt of the full message there.’

The intendant’s head and eyelids drooped and muttering and crackling sounds trickled out of the harness grille. I sighed. Suddenly the slog back to the library felt like a lot further than it was. I’d been on my feet too long today.

‘As you’re heading that way,’ Quan barked from behind me, ‘perhaps you’ll consider returning their JUNK?’

‘Their what?’

She was pointing to something stuffed in the little carrier basket under the wheel-lift’s steering grips, something I hadn’t registered was there. A book. A smallish one, but beautifully made, the hard covers bound in creamy-white cloth, the fittings of brass and leather. It was locked with a bulbous clasp I recognised straight away. I’ve never seen a Hagian chelon, but there’s not a soul in the Sabbat Worlds who doesn’t recognise the design of its shell. One of the tokens of the Saint.

Not just a book. One of the sacred books.

And hanging from its spine…

I grabbed the book with both hands and strode off, leaving Quan and her crew behind.

‘You didn’t tell me that books, sanctified books, had been stolen from the library.’

‘I didn’t know!’ Sanian was staring wide-eyed at the book I was holding up. We could both see the stub of brass chain hanging off the spine that had held the text to its shelf. It had been crudely hacked through with some kind of double-bladed cutter. Cable-shears, if I were any judge, and I was because every crew member on the lower decks had at least a couple of sets of them in their locker. I knew the marks.

‘How? How did you not know, Madam Sanian? This isn’t just… whatever these things are!’ I swung my arm around at the scroll racks that lined the bay we were standing in. ‘This is the Doctrines and Revelations! Part of the Sabbatine creed! What were you doing putting on all those pious airs about coming from Hagia if you come on board my ship and let something like this happen?!’

I might have been getting a bit big for myself with the ‘my ship’ bit, and I would have been for it if Yebrett or someone had been around to hear me. But I was tired, and confused, and getting angrier by the minute. Too many little oddities, little things out of place, that seemed to point to a pattern in front of my nose that danced away from me just when I thought I saw it. And now this. Holding a stolen sacred book in my hands and, I was sure, being lied to about it.

I’m far from the most pious man you’ll ever meet, but come on. It was the gospel of the Saint!

‘Enough shouting!’ came a new voice from just outside the bay.

‘You’re shouting,’ I shot back as the owner of the voice came into view, and then immediately clamped down on my bad temper and started to frame a grovelling apology.

I knew who Curator Tolleon Wymes was, although there was no reason to suppose the reverse applied. The Barrekat had appointed a curator about five years back, when we started taking so many contracts from the Ministorum that we apparently needed a dedicated ward-officer just to manage the relics and icons that the high-paying faithful expected to be surrounded by when they travelled in style. I didn’t recall the name of the original curator, some old mumbler who never came down to our deck, but since he’d taken over the post a year ago Wymes had made several visits to the midships. Each time he’d summon a random couple of dozen low-ranking officers into an assembly room and question and hector them for an hour or more about their devotional habits and whether they were holding on to any consecrated items that were ‘above their station’. This was not a man I wanted knowing my name.

Looking at his face, though, I wondered if he’d remember my name now even if I chanted it at him for the next twenty minutes. Wymes looked stricken. The flesh of his round face was loose and pasty with shock, and his eyes were red-rimmed and staring. His lips were pursed and he was breathing hard. He affected shoulder-length braids on each side of his head but they were pulled askew and fraying now, as if he’d been dragging at them. His forehead gleamed with sweat.

‘May I ask, curator, in the spirit of respect and duty, if you were aware of this?’ I held the book up again as I spoke. Wymes recognised it straight away and I saw his face crease in actual pain at the sight of the severed chain.

‘Theft,’ he said eventually, his voice an exhausted sigh. ‘Blasphemous theft. I heard you before. You were right. That’s no ordinary book. And it’s not the only sacred thing to have been taken.’ He stared at me. ‘Noverin, is it? Good, good. Well done, Noverin, you… Well done.’ He put his hand to his eyes for a moment and actually swayed in place. I wondered uneasily if I’d be in less or worse trouble if he keeled over in front of me.

‘Is there a way to find out who requisitioned the wheel-lift from the library, curator?’ I asked. ‘This book was in one of the compartments. You say other sacred things have been stolen – perhaps the thief was using that lifter? They were careless, or got interrupted, and didn’t take the book out when the lifter was taken away by the colonnade crew.’

Wymes’ posture had recovered a bit from its sag, his hands gripping the front of his robe. He stared down at them, forced his fists to open with a visible effort of will, and looked at me again.

‘The wheel-lift,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir. Found in the anchorhold, if you can believe that! The colonnade crew who were using it had no idea where or how, but that’s where it was.’

‘I understand. Dumped in the anchorhold with the Doctrines and Revelations stuffed into the compartment like an empty food-pail.’ Wymes’ voice was hoarse. ‘Do you ever wonder what manner of man might commit an act like that, Noverin? Sanian?’

We shook our heads. Even in the state he was in, Wymes had a weird sort of charisma, more teacherly than preacherly, but enough to sweep us both along.

‘And books,’ he said, ‘books can be rewritten. But think of the things that were taken from the reliquary, the ossuary. Urns of martyrs’ ash. A mappa imhava, a thousand years old, drawn in the Hagian sunlight.’ The name meant something to Sanian; she looked up, eyes wide.

‘A feather from the psyber raven that carried the garland over the catafalque when the White Scars took the Saint home to her rest,’ Wymes said, his voice shaking harder with every word. ‘What did… what have… when you finally see what it means…’

He bit his lips together and pressed a palm against his forehead. Sanian was staring down at her interlaced hands. We made a tableau like that for I don’t know how long until the distant clang of a crew-chime came drifting in from the library vestibule.

‘That’s me,’ I said, meeting their stares, feeling like someone who’d just farted in the middle of a funeral oration. ‘I used your crew station to check in for a D and L summons when I got here. Uh. Sorry.’ Wymes waved the apology away.

‘Do your duty,’ he said. ‘All of us have a duty. Whether or not we… no. Go. Go. Sanian, go with him. From now on, no one enters here without your eyes on them.’

Don’t worry, no offence taken, I thought but didn’t say as I hurried past his wet-eyed gaze. Sanian stayed on my heels until we were out through the doors.

The library vestibule was a solemn space, a high cylindrical chamber whose stone ribs framed frescoes of scholars and scribes, staring disapprovingly down as they held up plaques of scripture for inspection. The crew station that opened off it was considerably humbler and much more to my taste. Plain walls, low ceiling, scuffed plastek furnishings, cupboards along the walls with badly fitting doors, a wash station and a badly painted portrait of the captain against the far wall, over the message cradle. I yanked the reception cord and stood there avoiding Sanian’s stare while distant clanks and wheezes came echoing through the message pipe. Dammit, Mowle, whatever you had to tell me so urgently better be worth it.

‘Is he going to be alright, do you think?’ I asked her eventually, for want of any better way to break the silence.

‘He went out among the procession when the shutters were opened,’ Sanian said. ‘He looked out at the Visage. The sight of it can change people. I have read many accounts in my studies.’

‘You’re not going to go and look at it yourself?’ Her whole posture stiffened and she shook her head violently. I wondered if I’d offended some odd Hagian taboo by asking until I realised she wasn’t offended. She was terrified.

‘I can’t. I can’t. No. Uhh!’

She cried out with shock as the message shell – finally! – clanked out of the pressure-tube behind me. I spun around and grabbed it out of the cradle, cursing and juggling it until the brass cooled enough that I could grip it properly and start wrestling with the cap.

It was as much an excuse to avoid talking to Sanian as anything. It feels like an unworthy thing to admit but I didn’t feel in any shape to hear why the thought of going out to behold the Holy Visage, the whole point of a voyage that would take up to half a year out of her life, suddenly frightened her out of her wits. As it turned out I was going to hear it anyway.

‘You don’t understand,’ she said, in a voice almost as distressed as Wymes’ had been. ‘I saw Hagia saved. I was there! I saw the Doctrinopolis burn and then I saw the light from the tomb. I saw it! I saw that poor soldier take on the Nine Wounds and the ershul burned in the snow. I saw it all!’

‘Good for you. Unstick, damn you.’

‘I saw it happen and I took up a weapon because I thought my way was clear. I stepped off the esholi path but then it was the soldier, not me, and they said it was a machine. Not her light, not her voice. A machine that would have worked for anyone. How was I to know what to believe? I still don’t know what to believe!’

‘That’s, uh…’ What do you say to someone who’s having a fundamental crisis of faith right in front of you? Years of haranguing deckhand crews about sticking to their shift rosters hadn’t prepared me for this.

‘This was going to be my last hope. I came out here to see her face in the stars. I’ve prayed for it every day since we took ship.’

‘Well…’

‘What if I stand in front of the Visage and all I see are stars? What if her face is just imagination? Lines on a map? What if I never hear her? What if it’s empty? All of it? Just empty?’ Her voice was soft like a child’s. Her eyes were on me but I don’t think she really saw me.

I’d been trying to hide behind a cranky, worn-out mask for long enough to get away from her, out of all this craziness so I could just catch my breath. But the mask was slipping. I couldn’t find it in myself to just walk out and leave her like this. I took a few moments to weigh up my words.

‘For whatever it’s worth, Sanian, coming from a tired old man who was supposed to spend this entire voyage down-deck and never even set eyes on the colonnade, let alone look out the windows at the Visage… go and look. Then you’ll know. I suppose the preachers will say that faith is stronger than knowledge, but I say, you’ll know. In a way you don’t know now. Whatever grief that knowledge might bring you if the Visage doesn’t show you what you hope to see, it’ll be something you can heal from. You’ll never heal if you hide in here and spend the rest of your life wondering.’

She didn’t answer me. I bowed and left her. And as I crossed the vestibule the shell finally opened and I was able to read Mowle’s neat little cursive hand on the blue message film inside.

Sir

Body recovered from plasma conduit is not repeat not Esholi Brillin

M

Oh, COME ON.

The whole business had gone to crap. Worse than that. Crap could get piped away, boiled, filtered, the water squeezed back out of it, churned back into the mulch beds to nourish the fungus and beetles whose mash we chewed down most mealtimes. Crap was salvageable. What was there to salvage from this? I wasn’t even back to square one. This mess would see me sliding right back down past square one to who knew where. I was too old to go back to swelter-deck haulage duty. Not that that would matter once the demotion was signed off. I’d work until my hearing went and my back broke and I fell into the machinery and, well, wheels get greased, we all knew the saying. It was how most deckhands expected to go in the end. I supposed I’d been an idiot for thinking that managing to clamber up to a low-tier supervisor’s post meant a chance of dying in bed.

In this cheerful frame of mind, I went shuffling down the colonnade again. I passed an archway into a viewing gallery standing empty for a few minutes between delegations, and I decided it was time I followed my own advice. A quick look up and down the nearest parts of the concourse and then I ducked into the dimness and stood at the enormous portside windows.

I won’t say it wasn’t stirring. But it was stirring just for its own simple nature. We almost never got to see out into space, and now here I was not fighting for a spot at a scuffed little porthole but looking through a window-wall so clear it might as well not even have been there, into the depthless black and the blaze of stars. It wasn’t until I heaved in a lungful of air that I realised I’d been holding my breath.

But that was all it was. Even without one of the little printed maps they’d been handing out to the faithful, the lines of the Visage were clear to me. I could see the shape of the face, tilted as if looking up just over my left shoulder. I could make out the curve of the brow and the eyes, nose and mouth; the set of the cheekbones, the angle of the chin. It was startling. I wondered who had first flown out this way, set eyes on these stars from this place and found it. But…

But that was all it was. A striking array of stars, lovely, unforgettable. But I felt no spirit touching mine. I heard no voices, saw no visions, spoke no prophecies. No fire consumed my heart. I wondered if telling Sanian to come here had been the right thing to do after all.

‘Crewman.’ Something hard nudged me in the back.

Two Adepta Sororitas were standing behind me. Orders Militant, armoured in white and black, hung with green silk vestments and icons on golden chains. I had never seen them up close before. They were majestic.

The thing that had poked me in the back was a gun, a boxy, heavy-bored thing that looked as if it’d dislocate my arms if I tried to lift it. It must have been a boltgun; it certainly didn’t look like any firearm I knew.

‘Your place is not here, now,’ the closer Sister said. They were both helmetless, their expressions as cold as the statues out on the colonnade. I nodded, and they stood back to let me pass. I had half expected them to drag me out of there by my collar, but instead, when I turned to bow to them, they both returned it and smiled.

‘Beautiful, isn’t she?’ one of them said, and I found myself smiling back.

‘She is.’

That lightened my spirits enough that I was smiling most of the way back down to my own deck. Until I found Mowle fidgeting outside my compartment door.

‘Remainder of your sleep shift is cancelled, Mister Noverin, sorry. Sorry.’

‘Don’t apologise for what’s not your fault, Mowle. Just tell me the rest of it. There has to be a rest of it.’

‘Mister Yebrett is waiting for you in the Second Medicae. I’m to escort you there with no delay.’

That I had not expected.

‘What the hell’s Yebrett doing in the medicae?’

‘I’m not to tell you, Mister N. He said he wanted to see your face.’

‘You’ve got a gift, Noverin,’ Yebrett said. ‘One you’re honing to perfection, for all that you found it late in life. You are uncovering a gift from the Emperor Himself for spoiling my meals. So you’ll appreciate why I feel no need whatsoever to make your day any more pleasant in return. What? Yes, good, give it here.’

I watched him snatch the little plypress tag from the robed and veiled medicae attendant and press his signet ring to it. There was a click and a hiss as it burned his mark into the tag’s corner, and he held it up for me to see.

‘That is what should have happened hours ago, Noverin. You pull that rubbish’ – he half-turned and gestured to a familiar charred skull sitting in a basket behind him – ‘out of the conduit, apologise to the enginarium for their trouble, bring me the tag to sign off the death and get on with your damn job. I thought you were big enough and old enough to understand how this works. Not go flapping about the high decks stirring up our betters on some wild fantasy about a murdered priest.’

‘Esholi, Mister Yebrett.’

‘What?’

‘The esholi aren’t priests, technically, they’re more a sort of schol–’

‘Are you trying to ruin my next meal as well in advance, Noverin? Because you’re giving me proactive indigestion. You got it wrong, Noverin. I can see you know it. You’ve worked for me for too long for me to not see it. Look at you there, sagging your shoulders and avoiding my eyes. When I realised exactly how badly you’d fouled this up I decided the least I could do for myself to take the edge off was to be there to see your face when you realised it too. Apropos of which, thank you, Mowle, I do know you went and spoiled my lovely surprise today.’ Beside me, Mowle went pale and shrank back behind my shoulder.

‘There’s no call to bully her, Mister Yebrett,’ I said. ‘Or to snap at the medicae. Or anyone except me. Fine. I’ll take it on myself. Just tell me who it turned out to be and then tell me what you want me to do next, and I promise your next meal will be the most peaceful you’ve ever had.’

‘It doesn’t matter who it was, Noverin. That was the first damn thing I tried to tell you when you came panting up the Long Lounge to tell me about this whole squalid business. Go to your quarters and enjoy them while you still have them. I’ll send for you.’

The silence drew out, and drew out. I closed my eyes for a moment to think. And what I mainly thought was: screw it.

‘No.’

‘I beg your pardon, Mister Noverin?’

‘No, that doesn’t fit. You can’t sign off the death because this wasn’t one of your crew. Remember? Everyone was accounted for.’

‘Noverin, if that’s the case then obviously you’ve been even sloppier than–’

‘No!’ I cut him off again and his eyes bulged. ‘No. I’m good at my job, sir, and everyone was accounted for. That’s not one of ours… and by the way, how do we know that’s not Brillin? I’m supposed to stand here and look at my shoes and admit I’m wrong without knowing that? You!’ The medicae jerked in surprise as I stepped forward and jabbed a finger at them. ‘You made out the tag. What name is on there? I want to know!’

The voice from under the blue cloth turned out to be a woman’s, pleasantly husky with a slight Orestean accent.

‘Standard rundown. We filled out the dossier for the remains with information from the recovery site from a crewman… Skosse? And when it was taken up for filing the logister threw a yellow flag that we had to confirm. That’s why your superior is here to sign.’ I didn’t dare look at Yebrett’s face.

‘What kind of flag? That doesn’t make any sense. What’s there about those remains that would snag in the logister?’

Nobody was even trying to answer. I looked from silent, staring face to silent, staring face. Was I going crazy? Was this what it felt like? I ground the heels of my hands against my temples and groaned. Think, Noverin, think!

‘What information was it that triggered the flag?’

‘Wasn’t identified,’ said the woman promptly. ‘Sorry.’

‘Then…’ Deep breath. ‘Then with respect, mamzel, what was it the flag said? Are you able to tell me that?’

‘It just said “Crewmember”. I didn’t have authority to reverse the redaction on the name.’

‘See, Noverin? Crewmember. Not this priest of yours,’ Yebrett added. I held up a finger.

‘Not a priest. Esholi are… No. No, it still doesn’t make sense. How can it be one of ours, this random menial everyone keeps insisting on, if the name is redacted? Since when do we keep them off the books? Since when do we identify–’

I stopped.

‘Mam, you took the extra information my crewman Skosse gave you and added it to the file.’ The veiled head nodded briskly. ‘And that was what snagged in the system and brought a yellow flag down for Mister Yebrett.’ Another nod, from both of them. ‘The information Skosse added was the dimensions of the skull. He told me that. His visor measured it automatically. Fifty centimetres? More than that, I can’t remember the damned number but that’s what it was.’ My hands were rubbing my temples again. Mowle was looking up at me saucer-eyed.

‘I know this,’ I muttered. ‘I know this. This is it, this is what I was missing. The skull! The measurement of the skull! Who has their measurements taken? Who has all their bones measured in advance so a place can be made for them in the ship’s ossuary when they die? Whose names are struck from the crew records because they’ve surrendered their identities to the ship itself?’

I looked around. Come on, was nobody else going to put it together?

‘The most holy people on the ship! The only ones who’ve truly left their old lives behind and let their faith consume them completely! Forget the passengers, the bishops and canonesses and whatnot, I’m talking about the holiest of the crew! Our own!’

I was shouting now, but I didn’t care.

‘The anchorites! They forsake their name when they enter their cell, they earn a permanent place in the ship, first at their prayers and then in the ossuary when they die! I knew it! I could feel it! Something was so bloody wrong down there!’

I took a gulp of air, stopped waving my arms around and composed myself.

‘Mister Yebrett, if you would like to see me really disgrace myself, then you can help set me up to do it right now. Please summon us an escort – some good strong deckhands would be fine, but armed shipwardens would be even better. Maybe ask if the doctor here would care to join us. A D and L page to the library would be wonderful. And… are we able to call up deeds of passage for a particular name? Including the sponsoring crew member? If you’re authorised to do that, Mister Yebrett, I have a name in mind.’

I was feeling dizzy all of a sudden. Maybe excitement was a young man’s game. But one way or another, the game would be over soon.

And do you know, I almost didn’t think they would go along with it. There was a moment there, surely no more than a moment, although it felt like a whole extra shift slid by while I stood in front of Yebrett and the medicae, when I was sure I’d finally burned through my last chance and I was about to be shackled and marched away. But maybe I’d earned enough credit with Yebrett over all the time I’d answered to him, or I’d reeled off too many oddities for him to be able to just wave away any more, or there was some private caprice of his that I’d never know about. Whatever it was that got him to go along, I was grateful for it.

And I was grateful they thought to bring lamps. Even with an armed and visored warden on each side of me I didn’t like the walk back into that deep gloom at the far end of the anchorhold. Emperor willing, I never wanted to set foot in it again after today.

The lamps shed a cold green-white light that made everything look dead and bilious. Our shadows jumped and lurched against the walls around us. The little living area looked just as it had when I had first come down here. There was no sign of Holtch, let alone Brillin or Sahr. I could still smell that faint stink in the air as I crouched down at the very last cell door. The doorframe was scraped, scuffed and battered, as I’d been sure it would be. I could see traces of green paint and black-and-yellow tape. Wheel-lifts are a bastard to steer if you don’t have practice with them, every menial decker knew that. Like, say, if someone who’s never used one before steals one from a work crew to move their stolen goods in.

‘This one,’ I said over my shoulder into the glare of the lamps. Nobody volunteered to come and be the one to open the door, so I squared my shoulders, yanked the locking lever back and swung it wide.

Everyone else was standing well back, the cowards, so I was the one who got the full blast of the stink. I back-pedalled until I hit the far wall of the passage, sleeve over my mouth and nose. It wasn’t just the excrement I thought I’d smelled before. It was the sweet, meaty stink of a rotting body.

The good news was that there was no chance of anyone lying in wait in there to jump me, not in that filthy fug. The bad news was that meant I had to go back in.

The good news was that I’d been right.

I had no idea how anchorite cells were traditionally furnished, but I was pretty sure that piles of pack-boxes weren’t usual. Holy books and icons made more sense, but I didn’t think they’d be scattered and trampled all over the floor. And, of course, there were the corpses.

‘I suppose that’s your missing esholi,’ Yebrett said at my side. I nodded, impressed he could draw in enough of that reeking air to speak normally. Brillin’s body was slumped against the cell’s right-hand wall, a crater where his left eye should have been. The body had been in here a while, and it was visibly decaying. That was where most of the stink was coming from.

The second one was a bit more of a surprise.

Gofnar Holtch lay full length on the floor, just his head propped against a small carton of fake pipe islumbine garlands, still wearing a startled expression. He’d been shot like the anchorite, neatly above and between the eyes, and as with Brillin there was no exit wound. Frangible ceramics again. They unpack into a cloud of fibres after they punch into flesh, liquefy whatever they pass through and never burst out the other side. As I’d pointed out to Yebrett when all this started, only the wardens carried weapons that could fire them.

The warden’s weapon that had fired these was lying on the floor by Holtch’s hand. I didn’t doubt that we’d find three rounds gone from it. Maybe four, if Attendant Sahr had died the same way.

I became aware of the rumble of machines as someone got the ventilators for the passageway into a higher gear. The new air circulating in was stuffy but not chokingly foul, and Yebrett, Mowle and I moved forward to the cell again with a warden right behind us. So we all got to see the worst part of it all at the same time. I had begun to have suspicions about what the sacred materials stolen from the library had been destined for, but being sort-of-kind-of prepared didn’t make it any easier. I could only really take it in in glances. The scrolls soaked in urine. The icons propped against the crates, the eyes of the Emperor and His saints gouged out with a knife-point and leering grotesques painted across their faces in what looked like blood. The parchment streamers bearing scriptures and psalms now scrawled over with some barbarous calligraphy and strange semi-geometrical patterns that made me avert my eyes.

‘Holtch wasn’t a real pilgrim,’ I told Yebrett. ‘You know, in case you were still wondering. I asked him if he was crew and he rattled off a potted travel history for me. Too much information and too quick and pat a delivery. So he was hiding something. I don’t think we’ll ever know exactly where he did come from.’

‘Filth,’ Yebrett said.

‘I know. Trust me, I breathed in more of it than you did. Once we’re done I’ll send a clean–’

‘No. Filth. Filth! Traitorous, blasphemous filth.’

‘Oh, yes. Utter blasphemy. Traitorous? Only if he were once loyal, surely? Technically? And, you know, I don’t reckon he was. I don’t think this is a loyal son of the Throne who fell into madness. Look.’ I leaned forward to inspect the corpse. ‘Those scars across his palms, you can see them from here. They don’t look accidental. The stories say the Archenemy’s slaves feel compelled to mark themselves in some way, even the spies. I suppose someone more senior than us will know what to make of it.’

‘Looks like madness to me,’ Yebrett grunted, and Mowle nodded her agreement. ‘What thinking mind does this?’

‘One that knows the exact value of what it’s doing,’ I said. ‘You’ve read the same tracts I have, sir. We’ve listened to the same sermons. The Archenemy, the darkness that nourishes it, it’s not just some blind force of nature, is it? It’s not gravity. It has intent. It’s gravity, but capable of malice. Gravity that wants to toy with you before it pulls you down and smashes you into a planet. Gravity that knows exactly what it’s doing when it pulls your child down off a ladder and breaks them in front of you, and rejoices in it because it means so much more than just clashing giant rocks together in deep space.’

‘That’s a good one, sir,’ Mowle said. ‘You ought to be a preacher.’

‘In context, Mowle, I shall take that as a compliment. Thank you. Where was I?’ I glanced back into the cell, but it wasn’t long before I had to look away again. ‘Holtch wasn’t some broken-headed madman just lashing out. He was stealing the holiest items he could find, the things that carry our weight of faith. The holier the item, the more powerful the blasphemy when it’s defiled. Can you think of holier objects than the ones we brought here to be carried out and blessed in the light of the Visage? Can you think of a more potent act of defilement than to take them out of the light of the Throne and bury them in witch-filth?’

‘Until it caught up with him,’ Yebrett said with satisfaction. ‘Pity you couldn’t have caught him before he did quite so much damage, Noverin, but it’s over now. The blaspheming turd dead by his own hand. There must have been a little spark of decency left in him after all.’

‘With respect, sir, I’m not sure the evidence at hand points to quite that conclusion.’

‘Noverin! You’re veering perilously close to spoiling my appetite again!’

‘For which I apologise, Mister Yebrett, but it perishes in a good cause. We have to see through the delusions the Archenemy places in our way.’ I tilted my head towards the cell door. ‘Even ones as hasty and clumsy as this one. I’m sorry, sir, but there’s no way Holtch shot himself. The gun’s lying at his feet, not in his hand. There’s no scorching on his head around the bullet hole, which there would have to be at the range the shot would have gone off at. As with his crimes, so with his death. He couldn’t have managed alone. He had help.’

I looked past Yebrett, past the doctor and the wardens, to the gowned figure that was standing stock-still in the middle of the passageway behind them.

‘Didn’t he, Wymes?’

The curator didn’t answer. He didn’t twitch a muscle. I was too far away to see for sure but I don’t believe he was even able to blink.

What was weird was his face. The cadaverous green-white lamplight didn’t do his already pale complexion any favours, but that gutted, grieving expression that had so disturbed me in the library was gone. His mouth was hanging slightly open, and he closed it. If he had made a single move that had looked to me like going for a weapon I would have shouted to the wardens to gun him down, lines of command be damned, but he just hung his hands by his sides and stared at me.

Finally, weirdest of all, he smiled. Tears began to glint on his cheeks. He sank to his knees and closed his eyes.

And didn’t speak a word, so I kept speaking for him.

‘I could buy Holtch getting onto the ship. The nobles and the high priests might all have been vouched for, but the pilgrims came mobbing on board by the brigade. A halfway clever and all-the-way determined enemy would have been able to ride the waves in and hide himself away in any number of places. The Barrekat’s a big ship. Bustle in somewhere and make yourself useful and people aren’t going to ask too many questions, even when there’s a war on and they know they really should. It’s kind of frightening when you think about it. Sorry, Mister Yebrett, I probably shouldn’t be admitting this in front of you, but it’s true.’

‘You think it’s bad down at the deck crew level?’ Yebrett snorted. ‘I can tell you stories from the wardroom that’d curl your hair.’

I would have time to think back and be retroactively stunned by that little bit of candour plenty of times after that day, but for now I kept going. I could feel the whole thing, the whole crime, balanced perfectly in my mind, everything making sense. I needed to get it out of my head and into these others before I lost my grip on it and the whole thing collapsed back into nonsense.

‘But he couldn’t have done it all. A self-appointed emptier of anchorite chamberpots isn’t going to be able to push a wheel-lift into the library and start trucking boxes of texts and icons down to his little hidey-hole. He won’t have passage through the upper decks. He’ll get stopped. A man who has the passage – the ship’s curator, for example – can’t do it. He’ll get noticed. The two of you together, though… I suppose we’ll find out how you arranged it, Wymes. I checked the records. I know you were the one who sponsored Holtch’s passage on board. You’d been on board for some time before that. A deep agent, yes? Part of a fifth column that sent Holtch your way? The same people you were going to deliver your defiled holy works to, for whatever unspeakable purpose they had in mind for them? I suppose we’ll find out. Or someone will.’

Wymes nodded. He was still smiling. He seemed so at peace. I envied him that. My mind was still full of that mad whirling as I tried to keep everything in place long enough to articulate it.

‘The anchorhold was such a perfect spot to hide your handiwork until you could smuggle it off the ship. Nobody had any reason to think there was anything in these locked cells apart from the people who were supposed to be in them, praying. Of course, you had to get one of the occupants out and get rid of the body before you began your thefts – and there was another clue that there was more to this than Holtch doing his own wet-work. That conduit was up in the passageway ceiling. Two men could hoist a man’s dead weight up through that hatch, one wouldn’t have had a chance.

Everything shaped up pretty well after that, didn’t it, Wymes? Holtch doing the muscle work, you using your rank to ease his movements. It must have been annoying when another passenger had the same idea Holtch did, except genuinely rather than as a cover. Poor Esholi Brillin. Came down and started volunteering to help you care for the anchorites. And got shot and dumped into a pit of defilement for his pains.’

I snapped my fingers and pointed at the cell again.

‘That’s another thing to itemise, by the way, sir, while I think of it. I told you those rounds were from a warden’s gun. But they’re available to officers, too, as a matter of tradition, even in posts where they do no fighting. I think you’ll find that the gun in there tracks back to the weapon locker in the curator’s ready room on the high deck. Three rounds missing.

‘But even then,’ and I rounded on Wymes again. ‘Even then, you could probably have managed it. Give it a little bit of luck, a bit of calculated nastiness by Holtch, a bit of string-pulling from you. Even if you’ve no other conspirators on board – and we will find out if you have – you might well have got away with it. Except for a great, big, bright, out-of-context problem.’

‘Your murderer over there might know what you mean, Noverin, but drop the pantomime.’ Yebrett was trying to appear stern but I could see the light in his eyes. Emperor forgive my vanity, but I loved that I had him hooked.

‘He saw her,’ I said simply. The doctor got it immediately, nodded and made the sign of the aquila. Yebrett just scowled at me.

‘He went onto the colonnade when the shutters first opened and he saw the Holy Visage.’ Wymes was weeping and nodding so rapidly his brains must have been rattling. ‘After spending who knows how many years as an enemy of the Golden Throne, not just living in enmity but conspiring against it, desecrating its holies right under the noses of its priests… And then he goes out for a walk to the windows, just to keep up appearances, Wymes, am I right? And that was it. A transcendent moment. An honest-to-Throne religious awakening.

‘It’s almost a little miracle on its own, isn’t it?’ I asked, turning back to Yebrett. ‘That the Saint should reach out past so many other souls on this ship and choose that one to touch. I think I even know when it happened. I thought that gutted expression you were wearing was just your basic-issue religious fervour. Or maybe a crisis because you hadn’t felt anything when you looked the Saint in the face.’ I felt a twang of bitterness at that, remembering my own little vigil staring out at the inanimate stars, but I turned away from it before it could get a hook into me. ‘But I was seeing a man transformed. She showed you what you were and you finally understood it.’ Wymes had slumped forward until his face was almost on his knees, his shoulders shaking. I sighed. My exhaustion was finally catching up with me. ‘I’d love to know, Wymes. Did you try and talk Holtch around? Did you tell him what you’d experienced? Did you try and get him up to the windows so he could see what you’d seen? Did you kill him when he wouldn’t accept what had happened to you? Or did you just kill him?’

Wymes sobbed something that I couldn’t understand. I shrugged and turned back to Yebrett.

‘If you track the access tickets he requested you should find ones for the decks under that conduit. And there’s bound to be witnesses who put him and Holtch on the colonnade when that lifter was stolen. Oh, and the wheel-lift they were both so hopeless at steering. Look at the marks they left on the cell doorway. You’ll probably find matching ones at the utility lift into the rear of the library. There’s another esholi working there who can probably help you look for them.’

It didn’t strike me as odd until much later that I still trusted Sanian implicitly, no matter that she’d been working so closely with Wymes. These days, of course, I understand why. Right then, all I could do was sway slightly in place and wonder if I was about to just drop to the deck and fall asleep.

An arm fell about my shoulders, so heavily that my knees almost folded on me then and there. I looked around into Yebrett’s beaming face.

‘Noverin. My dear fellow,’ he said, and leaned in for emphasis. ‘I never doubted you for a second!’

I finally found her at the windows.

She had left it right to the last to come out and see. There was less than half an hour left until the shutters were due to close. As I’d left my home decks they’d already started corralling the menials and sealing the compartments. The beautiful concourses and chambers of the upper decks were emptying out and going dark as the toffs and the dignitaries sealed themselves away in their velvet-and-gold staterooms. At least half the other people hurrying back and forth on the high colonnade now were other crew, stewards and shipwardens in the grey hoods and surplices they wore for warp travel, carrying their lanterns and bells.

She was in one of the forward viewing galleries, the one closest to her library. Most of the lights had been shut off and the last of the devotees were shuffling towards the door, shooed respectfully on by the wardens, twisting and stretching to try to draw out their last ever look at the Visage for as long as they could. Then they were gone and it was just Sanian and me.

She was sitting in the centre of the curve of windows, cross-legged on the floor. My footsteps sounded very loud to me as I walked up behind her but she did not turn, or give any sign she had heard me. I stood by her for a little while, looking alternately at her and out at the Visage. The stars were still glorious, but they felt no holier to me than when I had last seen them. It was her face that kept drawing my eyes back.

She was smiling, but I didn’t think she had been smiling for long. Her eyes were red raw and her cheeks wet, and there was a harshness to her breathing that spoke of deep, brutal sobbing not long done. I wondered what the stewards had made of it, but somehow they seemed to not even have realised she was here.

Finally, awkwardly conscious of the time, I sat down on the floor next to her.

‘You found him,’ she said, once I was comfortable.

‘That was what I was coming to tell you, yes. The whole thing passes out of my hands now. I don’t expect I’ll be coming up here again. I wanted to let you know what had happened. That and to thank you. You helped me a great deal.’ I was almost whispering, as though we were sitting in the front pew at some great temple, even though I could hear the voices and the rattle of trolleys and compartment doors from outside. Surely any moment now the wardens would see us and march us out.

‘We helped each other,’ she said. She still hadn’t turned to look at me. Her eyes were anchored to the Visage. I could see its light reflected in the tears that still stood in them. ‘I was too frightened. I would never have come here by myself. Not without talking to you. You were the one who made it possible. Thank you.’

It felt strange, hearing her talk like that. I kept wanting… You know, it took me a long while to understand what I wanted. Not the sort of thing old greyhairs like me are supposed to want from beautiful girls half their age. That never crossed my mind. I wanted her to stand up, so that I could fall in behind her. I wanted to follow her and fight for her. Can you imagine that? Skinny old Noverin with his twingey back and delicate digestion, fumbling with a lasgun as he trots off to war? It seems as ridiculous to me now as it did then, even as I was thinking it. But at the same time, something had changed. I could feel it, sitting there with her. Something felt different, and everything felt possible.

‘Goodbye, Mister Noverin,’ she said, and finally turned to look at me. There was nothing but serenity in her face now. ‘We won’t meet again. But He knows us all, and remembers us all. And I will remember you. Go well.’

She touched the back of my hand, just the fingertips resting on my skin, then placed her hands in front of her again, prayer-like, facing the stars again.

If He knows us all, then He knows that I never ever wanted that moment to end. Even with everything that had happened, all that squalid, petty, murderous, blasphemous stupidity, right then and there I felt the most profound peace and rightness that I can ever remember feeling, that feeling that the universe had come to just precisely the point that it needed to be, with her sitting before the Visage and me by her side.

But eventually I pushed myself away, got stiffly to my feet. The gallery was dark now, and I could only see her in silhouette. I turned my back to her and walked away.

I don’t know exactly when she left the ship. I know we delivered most of our nobles back to Diadem, and we met a huge pilgrim fleet at a shoal point zenith of Metody, where the ayatani and imhava shuttled across and went on towards Verghast and the Menazoid Clasp. The weapons and relics that had been properly consecrated were hauled away when we docked at Balhaut, bound for points to spinward. What happened to their desecrated counterparts, I don’t know.

There was a brief bit of excitement en route to Nuria when one of the senior officers had a religious turn of his own, and tried to take his personal staff with him to jump ship at Anice to take the imhava road on to Tunusk. Yebrett got an acting promotion out of the ensuing shake-up and thought he was in with a chance of a permanent move to the high decks, but it didn’t go through and he came back to us cranky and full of nasty gossip about the bridge staff. And all around us and ahead of us, the war for the Sabbat Worlds ground on, slow as the spin of the galaxy itself or so it seemed.

Sometimes when I’m back in quarters for a sleep shift I still like to take out the scroll of commendation that came down from the bridge for solving the matter. I’ll read it once or twice, roll it back into the tube and think back for a while. I think of those strange few days out in the deep in front of the Visage, and of course I think of her.

We’ve all heard the stories, now, the stories that started a few months after that voyage and flew across the reclaimed worlds. The Saint reborn on Herodor. The Saint casting down the Archenemy’s banner at Lyubov. The Saint walking on Urdesh. I’ve seen some of the picts. In my tired, sad moments I tell myself I’m being an old fool, prey to fancies, but that’s just the shadows talking. I know it’s her. One day, when the years finally get the better of me, I may forget about Wymes, and Holtch, and Mowle and Yebrett and the rest. But I don’t think I’ll ever forget her. And if she breaks her word and forgets me, well, I understand and I forgive her, but if she does remember me then I hope her thoughts are fond.

THE TOMB OF VICHRES

WRITTEN BY JUSTIN D HILL

Preface

I’m a big fan of Justin’s work… A big fan. His Astra Militarum books are highly recommended. They have a great sense of humanity, of real humans, and a wonderful feel of historical authenticity, which is hardly surprising, given the stunning novels he also writes when he’s not working for Black Library. His ability, and his track record with the Guard, got him an instant invite to this collection.

Justin chose to write about the Chaos side, and it was an inspired decision. It is appropriately vivid and brutal. His story is set in the past, in that it begins in an early part of the crusade, but it propels itself forwards from there, and races hungrily towards the future. In terms of time span, it’s probably the longest story in the book. It’s a character arc, a career. And there’s a victory in it too… for someone.

I

After a year of holding on to the front line in the upper spires of Harshen Hive, Okumi Sirdar swore that he would die for a lungful of fresh air. They were his last words. He fell back into the captured bulkhead, blood leaking from the headshot.

His former brothers looked down. One of them tipped the body over with his boot. It was a rare thing, as one of them noted.

‘Clean death.’ They looked to Güyük. He was the sirdar now.

He nodded. ‘Only clean thing this side of Hive Nazeth.’

They laughed. It was true. Cociaminus was a meat grinder of a warzone. For years it had been turning men and women into scraps of flesh and blood and burnt meat. The water was putrid, rations had to be dug out of the mud, and the air was foul with dust, smoke and the stink of buried millions.

As soon as it was safe, Güyük and his brethren used poles to shove Okumi’s body out of the rockcrete bunker. It tumbled down the flakboard facing, and caught on the flay-wire, one arm raised as if in warning.

Months ground over them all. Okumi’s body swelled, burst, and then began to decompose. Rats and maggots did their work. By the time the front line had pushed forward over his body, only his gnawed bones were left, and his masked skull, grinning up at the ruined dome above their heads.

But his replacement, Güyük, had better luck. On the nine hundredth day of the attack, his unit stumbled forward through the thicket of las-fire on hive-shaft nine, and found that there were no reserves to hold their advance. Within hours they had plunged through the lines of the enemy.

The promised breakthrough had come, at last.

Six days later, the remains of Güyük’s unit picked their way back through burnt-out stairwells, collapsed halls and hab-domes, so narrow in places that they had to wait as the thousands of ‘fresh’ troops pressed upwards through the hive.

They were limping ghosts, white with dust. They made their way back to their rough camp, where a small crowd of starved figures saluted their return with the wolf-howls of the Sanguinary tribes. The wounded and the maimed pressed their scarred palms to his armour and Güyük lifted his hand in a defiant salute. His voice was a bare rasp.

‘The hive shaft has fallen!’ he confirmed. The battle could not go on much longer. The upper levels were within sight.

He had three heads hanging from his belt. He cut them free and tossed them onto the victory pile that his company had made by the side of their ridgeboard huts. The heads landed with a dull thud, slid and then settled into place on the festering heap. With eyes rolled up into their skulls, jaws hanging slack, the rot-swollen faces barely looked human any more. But the gods knew, and noticed.

Someone brought out a bottle of amasec. A plundered Imperial sword cut the cork free. The broken bottle was passed around from disfigured fist to fist. They had been blessed. They had been found worthy by their deities, and they knew it.

‘We must thank the gods!’ Güyük swore, as he took a swig of the grog.

He kicked open the door of a stinking lean-to where a huddle of slaves were mending scraps of mail and flak armour. All of them fell to their knees and pressed their foreheads to the floor. Except one: a one-handed woman with needle-filed teeth.

‘Down!’ Güyük shouted. He thumbed the power stud of his chainsword to intimidate her, but she was fearless, and the fearless did not make good sacrifices.

He swung the chainsword. His blow stopped just short of her face. The spinning steel teeth flicked gobbets of gore across her cheek. She did not even blink.

‘Down!’ he snarled.

She smiled a sharp-toothed smile. ‘Yes, master.’

Güyük grabbed the next slave by the hair. The man’s terrified squeal ended as his head was savagely sawn off by the gnawing blades. His body fell as heavily as a sack. Güyük shouted for the gods to witness his sacrifice, then started back to add this new trophy to the pile.

A voice called out. It was the fang-toothed woman.

‘Forgive your worthless servant,’ she hissed. ‘May I ask a single question, lord? I hear our forces are attacking the cathedral complex… Is it true?’

Güyük’s steel-shod boot connected with her midriff. The blow forced the air from her gut, and the slave fell forwards onto her stump, wheezing. He threw the chainsword down at her. It landed with a thud on the matted furs.

‘Clean it, slave!’ If Güyük knew the woman’s name, he did not use it.

The woman struggled back to her knees. But when she lifted the bloody weapon she did so with all the ease and strength and confidence of a trained warrior.

She might have been a slave. But she was not nameless.

II

My name is Briar.

I never knew my father. He was killed, my mother said, when our planet was enslaved. It was the same for all of us. The forces of the Mansa were like a tempest that swept over our world. The survivors were herded into the noisome hangars of the Mansa’s slave-ships and transported to the chattel-camps of the Mansa’s home world – a festering series of slave-shanties that filled the crater pits of the equatorial highlands.

It was not clear why the Mansa had brought us here. In our transport ships we had imagined terrible fates, but the truth was after the cargo-lighters unloaded us into the chattel-camps, we were left to ourselves. It was as if he had lost interest in us. Our fates were now our own. If we wanted to live we had to learn to fight and struggle and kill.

There were irregular water and ration drops. Gangs formed to take control of the plundered food stores. Their leaders grew rich and lived short, violent lives before other warlords took their place. Within months we had all turned against each other. The greatest danger was not heat or starvation or thirst, it was those who we had once shared a planet with. Our comrades had now become our keenest foes.

My mother and I were too weak to survive there. We headed out, away from the crude settlements to the outer craters, which were bleak and exposed wastes of green glassy rock. We scraped out a grub-hut to shelter from the sun. Roofed it with a few precious scraps of flak-board and rusting iron. And so we lived, venturing out only at night, scavenging through midden pits, using scraps of metal to dig up roots and grubs, and boiling them inside a tin can with whatever water we could find.

On my home world I had been born into a well-to-do family. But now I lost all modesty. I gulped everything down. Insects, larvae, beetles – grinding their thin shells with my hind teeth, savouring every last morsel. I was young and hungry for this world, and my mother saw this and often gave me half her portion. She was starving herself. I knew that. But my belly was bloated with parasites, the rest of my body was just skin and bones.

‘Do you remember such and such?’ my mother would ask me in the quiet as we lay, listening to our bellies rumble. The memories comforted her. But I thought only of food. Memories of our home world faded.

All except slab. I could not forget that! In my dreams I could see it hanging above me like a mirage: the wet grey block, still ridged from the tin in which it had been preserved, cut into thick, round, gelatinous slices, and eaten cold. How full it made your guts feel! How well you slept at night without a belly full of worms.

Despite all these misfortunes, my mother kept her faith.

At night before we slept we said our prayers to the Emperor. But the words, for me, were as hollow as my gut. I had no faith, only hunger.

‘Thank the Emperor,’ she told me, and I did not understand her. We lived in the chattel-camps. Why should we thank anyone for that?

I was nine or ten when my mother shared with me the details of my father’s death. We were sitting in a hollow, coughing with the smoke from our pitiful fire, and I was angry with all of this.

‘I don’t believe the Emperor protects,’ I told her.

She could not have been thirty years old yet, but already her black hair was shot with grey, her skin lined with care and worry. When I spoke these words her hand trembled. But she did not chastise me. She sniffed back her tears and said, ‘Briar. You must not repeat to anyone what I am about to tell you. It would be death to us both.’

‘Why?’

She looked about as if someone cared what she was about to tell me, and whispered, ‘Your father was a preacher.’

She paused to let the impact of that sink in, and then the story tumbled out of her.

‘He had a chance to escape but he chose to come with the slave-ships. He knew that we would be cast into the shadows but he wanted to keep our belief alive. To be a candle in the darkness. A hand to the desperate. Strength for us when we feel weak…’

‘Did they kill him for his faith?’

She shook her head. ‘No. They killed him for slab. But he died with the Emperor’s name upon his lips. And prayed that we would prosper.’

She told me many things that I do not remember now, but at last those memories overwhelmed her. She put her head in her hands and started to weep. Dry, retching sobs that shook her whole body.

She had sought to change my mind, but she had made me more determined in my faithlessness. My father had had deep faith, and the Emperor had not protected him, either.

My mother died not long after that.

It was the bloody flux. She could not go an hour without crawling away across the glassy rocks to relieve herself. Nothing was going in, but she kept straining to pass strings of bloody mucus. A coldness had come between us since she had told me about my father. I stopped even the pretence of praying with her, and as she knelt and said her benedictions, I looked away, and then we sat and ate our boiled scraps in silence. But her prayers did nothing for her. Day by day the illness devoured her. She begged for water. I gave her all I had, and still she begged.

In the end I went out in daylight to a mudhole sunk three tiers down, at Rust Tower. Gangers charged for water, but I waited until they had left for the grog-house and stole in with all the other vagrants.

There was a short fight. Victory went to the most desperate and vicious and determined. The rest of them crouched in the shadows, licking their wounds, as I went first.

When I got back to our grub-hab my mother was delirious. I dribbled the water from the can into her mouth so it did not spill. Cradled in my lap, her head was too heavy for her neck, and this world was too heavy for her soul. She knew she was going to die. Her last words to me were, ‘The Emperor protects. Pray to Him and He will hear.’

I could not answer. I choked up. I did not understand my grief. It was like a rope, twisting and curling up inside my guts. I had words of parting, but I could not speak them.

Afterwards I could not bear to look at her corpse.

I was too weak to bury her and I could not bear to leave her. But there was nothing for it. Her body was there, but she had gone. When I kissed her forehead her flesh was cold, her eyes sunken.

‘Farewell, mother,’ I said.

I stood and turned my back and walked away. I have never felt so alone. What was I but a scrawny little thing with dark skin and guarded eyes, and scant hope that I would survive? My mother had been both shield and angel, and once she was gone I avoided other people and crept about under cover of darkness, looking for food. I do not know how I remained alive in the following months. I was more vicious than the others, so they would give way. But I was still just a child.

As the weeks ground on, I dreamt of grubs and insects in the same way that I had once dreamt of slab.

Salvation came one night. I stumbled over a crater-lip, and peered down at a little circle of adults. There were seven of them, all kneeling in the dirt, and a single man standing in the centre, his face up lit by a single flame – as my mother’s had once been. He was tanned brown with the sun. His grey beard came almost up to his eyes. But it was his eyes that struck me. I had never seen such a colour before. They were pale blue. The cold colour of a night sky, once the sun has retreated into darkness. The colour of ancient ice. The colour of fresh, clean, tumbling water. I was entranced.

I got so close I could hear the words that they were saying. They were all speaking in unison. Words my mother had taught me. I wanted to flee, and I wanted to linger.

These people were praying.

I thought of how happy my mother would have been to find solace in the wilderness. These were her people, and she had died without them. She should have been here in the brotherhood of worship! It was the strangled sob that betrayed me.

I did not get far. I fought and bit and struggled, but I was still a child and there were seven of them, grasping, kicking, pulling.

It was the preacher who shoved them back with an open palm. He stood over me, bearded like a prophet, a foot on my chest and a rough, glassy stone in his hand to smash my skull in if I did not speak correctly.

‘The Emperor…’ he began, and I knew the answer from my mother.

‘Protects,’ I wheezed in reply.

His blue eyes, cold as dawn, transfixed me. He dropped the stone, put out his gnarled fist and dragged me up from the dirt.

‘Come, child!’ he said. ‘And join us.’

The preacher’s name was Fjara.

He was ardent in his beliefs. He had to be, because an Imperial preacher was a wanted man.

‘Does the Mansa hunt you?’ I asked him one night, as he hardened a length of wood in the ashes of the fire.

‘He hunts all the devout,’ he told me, his eyes fixed on the turning spike, careful not to burn it too deep. ‘The Mansa is a heretic,’ he said. ‘A magister. A sorcerer. He sacrifices holy men to his gods. They give him power.’

I was silent as I thought. ‘What kind of power?’ I asked at last.

‘Heretical power,’ Fjara said, his blue eyes as clear as the morning sky. ‘Bought with human blood.’

The thought was like a needle blade piercing my soul. ‘Are you afraid?’

He paused, and put the stick and knife down. ‘Yes,’ he said and patted my leg. He smiled sadly. ‘But fear is a gift. It has kept me alive, many times.’

Fjara could be brutal, at times, but he cared for me in his own way, and I went with him, repeated his prayers, but even though I prayed I felt nothing.

We never stayed in the same camp. We moved at night. We did not stop to gather food. Other groups of the devout came to us and gave us roots and grubs, but sometimes they gave us slab. Real slab! Fresh from a tin, stolen from who knows where, just how I had dreamt as a child, still sealed in its own wet, gelatinous skin.

It gave me cramps the first time I ate it. My body was not used to food so rich. But I did not fear pain. I never refused slab.

After we had shared food together, Fjara would lead us in prayer. He had simple ways of explaining the world. His favourite was to talk of the night sky. It has two halves, he explained, pointing corewards, where thousands of stars glimmered, and then rimwards, where the stars failed.

‘The light is the Imperium of Man,’ Fjara said. ‘The dark is nothingness. The lair of traitors and heretics and the damned!’

We always turned corewards for the prayers. We lifted our faces up to the gleaming freckles of light that filled the southern night sky, and Fjara would call out, ‘Hear us, oh Holy Terra!’ before beginning his prayers. Around me, the others were trembling, or speaking in strange tongues, or falling to their knees. But the truth was the God-Emperor did not speak to me. When I stared corewards, into the heart of the Imperium, the light of His worlds cast little light, and no warmth.

Behind me I could feel the darkness – vast, silent, all-powerful! And it was the darkness that kept us hidden from those that wished us ill.

So I lived as Fjara’s attendant, always one step ahead of those who would betray us to the Mansa. We all aged quickly in the chattel-camps, and Fjara had already been an old man when he was enslaved. But now he had more white in his beard than grey and as a preacher, there was a bounty on his head that the gangers would take. It was only a matter of time.

One night, at Rust Tower, we arrived at the gathering and found a scene of slaughter. I knew the men and women there. But they each stood a metre above the ground. Gangers had caught our congregation and impaled every one of them. Their corpses stared up at the sky, barbed shafts of steel erupting from their open mouths. Fjara made the sign of the aquila as he tried to shield my eyes.

One of the men remained alive. ‘It was not I who betrayed you…’ he whispered. But it was clear. Someone had. The servants of the Mansa were drawing in.

Fjara tried hard, but he walked slowly and with pain.

‘We must keep moving,’ I told him. ‘Fjara. The Emperor demands you move!’ I was like a walking stick, helping him along, but I knew that the Emperor did not protect. He would let it happen. He was not coming to save us.

It was halfway through that night when we heard the sirens of the cyber-hounds, and I knew that they were on our scent.

I did not follow his god, but he had cared for me as a father. It was a matter of pride. I could not let Fjara end his days sacrificed like an ox on a pagan altar. I half-carried him to a little foxhole we used to hide. It was with cold clarity that I knew what I was going to do.

‘Sleep,’ I told him. ‘I will keep watch.’

He was reluctant but at last he nodded and closed his eyes.

When his breath started to slow I put my hand over his mouth and drove my knife into his belly. It was just a piece of sharpened scrap, but it was sharp and he was old and weak, and I was strong enough to hold him down as I drove the jagged blade up for his heart.

Blood bubbled up from his mouth. ‘Why?’ he hissed, the word whistling between his bloody teeth.

I put my hand over his eyes. He tried to push me away, but I was not a child any longer. My creed was darkness. It was an act of my faith. He had to understand, there was no light in the world. Light had not saved him.

The last thing that he would see of this world was darkness.

III

‘The chattel-camps tolerate no weakness. They breed the finest Ghulam,’ Mamzel Grimina told me as she ground my teeth down into spikes.

She was a heavy-set woman with strong hands and a thick, stained leather apron. I was a woman now, and sitting in a great metal chair. There were clamps on the armrests, but I refused them. I opened my mouth as she stepped up close.

‘If you flinch…’ she started.

The look in my face silenced her. ‘I will not.’

She raised an eyebrow. I ignored her and settled back as the shrill whine of the drill filled the chamber.

‘This will hurt,’ she said as she bent towards me.

‘I do not fear pain.’

‘No?’ she paused. ‘What do you fear?’

I paused to consider this.

‘Failure,’ I told her.

Mamzel Grimina did not lie. She started at the front and worked her way round to my canines, grinding each tooth into a needle point. It was agony. My mouth filled with tooth dust and spit, and the scent of blood filled my nostrils. The strangled moans were my own.

They were as much pain as triumph, for I had been selected when the chattel-camp was cleared and this ceremony marked my transition from the chattel-camps to one of the Mansa’s Ghulam. Ghulam were his slave warriors. But we were also his eyes and ears and hands. We made up the Mansa’s lifewards, his governors and his administrators. And we were his army. The shield of his world, the terror of his enemies, the hounds that kept the wolves at bay.

Afterwards, Mamzel Grimina gave me a cloth to wipe the bloody spittle from my mouth. I spat out blood and tooth-grit, wiped my mouth on the back of my sleeve.

There was a gun on the table behind the chair. It was a captive-bolt instrument, with which you would slaughter a beast.

She took in the daggers in my mouth and smiled with pleasure at her work.

‘Yes,’ she said as my tongue licked over my sharp teeth, tasting the razor edges. ‘You survived the chattel-camps and the drill-pits. All your trials are done. The filing of the teeth is the last test. Those who cannot endure pain are culled.’

‘Pain is a sign of life,’ I told her.

She smiled, her own teeth sharpened fangs like my own. ‘You have learned well.’

After that she gave me a plumed helmet, a breastplate and skirts of mail, a blade of steel, and placed a laslock into my hand. I stepped out that day, for the first time, as a Ghulam warrior. I was young and hard as the glassy rocks of the camps. I looked magnificent.

I could see it in her eyes as she appraised me. ‘Now you are Ghulam! Go out and kill in the Mansa’s name!’

I remembered Fjara’s face as I slipped the knife inside him.

I have already done that, I thought.

IV

In the next ten years my band waged war across a dozen planets. We named ourselves the Warp Vultures. We raided, occupied, pillaged, and we filled the holds of our craft with slaves for our master and released them into the chattel-camps. Fate would decide which were the ones most worthy of the gods’ favour, and the Mansa would harvest the toughest of the survivors.

My wounds became weapons. I fought harder than any others, honed my desperation into a razored blade. But in those years I learnt new lessons too. How to lead. How to excel. How to beat all those about me. I became more deadly, and step by step I rose up the ladder, till I was recalled to Chalice and made lifeward to the Mansa. I felt such pride.

But when I saw the Mansa I laughed at my pride. He needed no protection from us.

He was terrifying.

The Mansa was twice the size of any man I knew, his vast bulk hidden beneath robes of rich silk. Only his head was exposed. Truth was, the Mansa was ugly: his hairless head had fleshy jowls, full lips and heavily lidded eyes. His eyes were amber, snake-like. Giant fangs stuck out from his oversized jaw and when he spoke his voice was the rumble of falling habs. But I loved him more than any other I have ever met, even though we were nothing to him.

He paid me little attention, until one day – months since I had started in his service.

‘Briar!’ he demanded suddenly. ‘Which was your home world?’

It was all I could do to hold my gaze at his feet. I trembled before him. I – who had the scars of a hundred battles stitched across my skin, made with blade and hard round and searing laser – could barely remember to draw breath.

‘I do not know,’ I stammered. ‘I was nothing until I was lifted from the chattel-camps.’

He regarded me for a long moment and sounded almost weary when he said, ‘You have the look of a Bishrabi. The Bishrabi are tougher than the Magmeta.’

I wanted to speak, but held my tongue.

‘Speak!’ he prompted.

I could not hold his gaze, but he had commanded me. ‘I wanted to say… it is not our blood that makes us hard,’ I told him. ‘I-I-it is the chattel-camps. They cull the weak and make us strong.’

He smiled. A line of fangs, not filed, like mine, but grown from his abhuman jaws. Both a gift and a mark of his honour.

‘Yes,’ he said. He smiled. Then, ‘Briar. Take out your knife.’

I obeyed, though a voice in my head screamed at me that this was sacrosanct within his presence.

His eyes were kind. Don’t worry, they seemed to say. But his fanged mouth said, ‘Cut off your finger.’

I thought I had misheard, but he repeated his words, now loaded with threat. I splayed my hand out, picked the middle finger, put the blade over its central joint, took a breath and rammed the blade down.

‘Give it to me.’

I swayed with the pain, but picked the severed digit up between forefinger and thumb. He held it up, then put it in his mouth. I could hear the small bones crunching between his millstone teeth.

At last he swallowed. The amber light in his eyes flared for a moment. He said, ‘Briar. You have saddened me.’

His disapproval was like a weight of bones upon my chest. I fell onto my face and struggled to breathe.

‘Why have you hidden this from me?’ He put a foot upon my head and pressed down. I thought my skull would burst. ‘You have held secrets from me…’

‘No, lord!’

‘There is a taint in your blood.’

I searched my soul, and was struck dumb. I was consumed with sudden guilt, as I remembered my mother’s face. ‘M-my father,’ I stammered. ‘He was a preacher.’

The Mansa bristled. ‘And you didn’t tell me…’

The confession tumbled out of me. ‘I never knew him. He died when I was taken.’

‘But you hold his blood within your veins. Do I have to bleed it out of you?’

‘If you wish, lord! My blood is yours!’

‘Do you love our enemy?’

‘No, lord! I hate him. I love the darkness. I might be descended from a preacher, but I killed one, too!’

‘Tell me.’

Spittle hung in loops from my mouth as he lifted his foot. I struggled for breath as I pushed myself up. Blood was still leaking from my missing finger. My brain seemed to be pressing against my skull as the images came – Fjara’s face, his last words: Why?

I told my overlord everything.

The Mansa listened silently. When I was done he shook his head in dismay. ‘You should have told me. Why did you not tell me this?’

I tried to speak but my throat was too tight. It was as if his will was constricting my ability to beg for forgiveness.

‘Briar. You are marked. Did you know that?’

I did not.

‘Stand,’ he told me. He beckoned me forward as a holo-map appeared in the air before him. He spun the projection before me. There were worlds I had never heard of. He spoke a word and one system glowed bright, as the rest of the holo-map faded. The Mansa singled one planet out.

Its name was Cociaminus. It meant nothing to me.

‘It is the front line between us and the enemy. They desire it above all things. So we must deny them! Their commander is new. His name is Vichres and he is destined to bring luck to our enemies. The other magisters have begged for my help. They want the Mansa to lead my warriors into the field. They want me to join them. Me? The Mansa! Magister! Warchief of a hundred worlds!’

He roared with anger. It was as sudden as a thunderclap and it made the whole chamber vibrate.

‘They’, I knew, were the other warlords of the outer fringes. All the magisters had come together to resist the enemy. Many of them had paid the Mansa for his Ghulam. We were the most wanted warriors in this sector of space.

The Mansa’s eyes flared yellow. I could feel the heat of his breath as his anger flared. Foolish bystanders and penitents fell to their knees. I trembled like a leaf but I remained standing.

He put a hand upon my shoulder. ‘Briar. Your hand is marked with blood. I make you my khorbaji.’ Khorbaji meant hand, but it was the Ghulam name for etogaur. ‘Take the Warp Vultures to Cociaminus. Show them the might of the Mansa!’

I was chastened by guilt. I wanted to prove my love and loyalty.

‘I will do more than that!’ I said.

The Mansa paused. ‘More? What could you do?’

‘I will bring slaves.’

‘I have millions of slaves.’

‘I will win great fame in your name!’

‘What fame can you add to mine?’ There was a menace in his voice. I knew that I had overstepped myself.

The answer came unbidden. ‘Skulls!’ I hissed.

I had caught his attention now. ‘Whose skull?’

Looking back, I felt as though I was just a mummer, speaking the lines that another had given me. Were those words gifted to me? I did not know, but I swallowed, understanding the magnitude of what I was about to promise.

‘I will bring you the skull of an Imperial general!’

There was a long pause. He put his hand out and placed it on my head. ‘Not just any skull. Bring me the skull of Lord Militant Vichres!’

V

Memorials claim that Cociaminus had been captured twice, and twice retaken, and was being fought over a third time – but for those of us who were there, it was all just one interminable hell of mud and dust and ice and heat. And there was the enemy, of course, who poured onto the planet by their millions.

Life expectancy was so low that we used to joke that if your disembarkation was delayed by an hour, then your time on Cociaminus was doubled. We joked a lot. We had to. Sometimes laughter was all we had to live on.

Our first glimpse of the place showed a clenched fist of rock, bound about with swirling plumes of poisonous gas. We landed at the same time as Lord Militant Vichres launched his first assault. I thought the gods had given me a sign and demanded my Warp Vultures be put on the front line opposite the young commander. We were thrust straight into the front-line trenches and slaughtered the enemy till they lay ten deep. We were a wall of rockcrete. A hedge of blades. A mincer into which the enemy ran.

But it was all a feint. Vichres turned our flank and smashed into Razal Khan’s Hussars and wiped them out to a man. Defeat tasted like ashes in my mouth. I felt that I had been given a chance, and squandered it. In my pride, I had been crushed.

We held on long enough to slow the enemy, and then, after three months of suffering assaults on three sides, we limped back to the support trenches. We had lost half our number and we had not even seen Vichres.

Many of my captains were furious. I fought three duels before the unrest was quelled. I won each one, but I was wiser after that. We were the Warp Vultures. The Ghulam of the Mansa! Not the wild tribes of the outer dark. A well-forged blade, not a sledgehammer. And I had my geas to fulfil. I understood then that I would have to be much wiser. Craftier. I would have to be more ferocious than any other.

After that I stemmed our losses, as Vichres won victory after victory, striking when and where it seemed impossible. I had the best troops on Cociaminus. But I refused to fight on anyone else’s terms. If they wanted my Ghulam, then the other commanders had to send me gifts, and there was only one gift I wanted: enemy captives. Any who wanted my help sent them to me. They brought them chained like slaves. Some were caged. Some walked.

I signalled to Yaguden, my shaman.

‘The etogaur wants us to fight,’ I told him.

Yaguden led the captives inside his yurt. We could hear the sound of sharpening knives, and then the muffled cries of pain.

‘Do you eat them?’ a damogaur asked me after he had brought three captives into my camp. His iron mask muffled his voice.

I laughed. ‘Not until we have made them speak…’

‘And do they lie?’

‘They do,’ I told him, ‘but we find the truth.’

He did not understand.

‘Our shamans cut them open to read their guts.’

‘And what do they see there?’

It was my time to laugh. The sight of my fangs made him take a step back.

‘The future.’

That spring, Vichres launched yet another offensive.

Our armies were driven back as far as the tarpits, ten thousand acres of pitch that stretched about the foothills of Hive Harshen. The pits were an impenetrable bastion upon which both trench networks had anchored their respective flanks. And they held our flank. They were the only thing that stopped a total rout.

Many commanders now sent captives to us as tribute to try and persuade me to commit the Ghulam to their warzones. I refused them all. The auguries were not good and I had been given a mission by the Mansa. It was a geas that I could not fail. But as our situation grew more desperate, the Blood Pact commander sent an etogaur to meet me, accompanied by an honour guard of mukaali riders.

We were camping in the Dune Seas, among the sand-blasted detritus of a battle that had been fought before my time on the planet. The desert had flayed the colours and markings from each tank. There was no way of knowing which were ours and which the enemy’s. Each of the tanks bore the mark of its own destruction. The precise wound of a lascannon; the inward cavity of a mine; the molten ruin of a meltagun; the neatly bored hole of a krak missile.

The dead had not fled. They still occupied their positions. Their blackened cadavers were charcoal. Only their teeth were white. The tribesfolk feared this place, but not us. We were Ghulam. The children of the chattel-camps.

The ferrosteel wrecks were our kitchens. We slept in the lee of blackened cabins. Lay on the racks of unexploded ordnance. We shared our lives with the dead.

The Blood Pact paused and waited for me to approach. The mukaali snorted in the morning cool. I could smell them from where I stood. I didn’t move, but instead waited for him to approach me.

His honour guard dismounted and I noted that they marched in step, like trained dogs. I made a face.

‘Old enemies,’ he explained, ‘now brothers-in-arms.’

It took me a moment to understand. ‘They were the enemy?’

He nodded. ‘Their commander was disgraced. They rebelled. They fight well.’ I gave him a look. ‘Though not as well as the Sanguinary tribes,’ he said.

I watched them more closely now. I felt contempt for them, still marching in step. They had much yet to learn.

‘So you want me to fight?’

‘I do.’

‘And you have a gift?’

The etogaur’s face was hidden behind his mask, but I could see him smile.

He clapped his hands. An albino mukaali was brought forward. Lashed to its back was an iron cage, and trapped inside, shouting the name of the Emperor, was a thing I had not seen for many years: an Imperial preacher.

I feasted the Blood Pact etogaur with great honour and we swapped stories of battles and places we had fought in, as old warriors do, and found that we had served in many of the same actions.

All this time the priest raged and shouted. I knew many of his prayers. They were ones I had spoken myself with my mother, or Fjara. Hearing them took me back a long time to my days in the chattel-camps.

Those years felt an age behind me. I remembered my mother and felt a wave of melancholy. If only she could have seen how I had grown, tall, powerful and strong.

The preacher fought, of course. It took six of us to drag him into Yaguden’s yurt and pin him down and tie him, spreadeagled on tenter pegs.

I slept that night in the back of a Chimera, the flip-down seats my bed, and as I looked up through the open hatches I saw the great darkness, speared by the light of warships hanging in orbit.

Over the priest’s prayers, the only sound in the desert was of Yaguden sharpening his knife. He always worked the knife one way up the gritstone in long, scraping movements, thumb and finger on the top side of the blade, pushing it over the stone. I could picture him in my mind’s eye, sitting cross-legged in the middle of his yurt, bending forward into each long stroke, checking the silver smile along the edge of his blade. Human-augury was a bloody business, but this time he was trying something more ambitious.

At last the scraping came to an end and Yaguden’s hide drum began to beat. We could feel the air go cold about us.

The monotonous rhythm went on for hours. The drum quickened in its beat, like a startled heartbeat. Like the spreadeagled man, I thought, starting to know true fear.

The screams went on through the night. They were muffled at first, as if the man was holding back the pain. And then they burst out in unabashed agony and the priest spewed forth a litany of hatred and curses. We were foul dogs. The Emperor was the supreme being. The only hope for us was to repent and lay down our lives in the service of the enemy. I had heard many of his curses before. They were the kind of things Fjara used to say of the gangers when we sat at night and supped. I would sit quietly and the old preacher would mutter, spitting indigestible lumps out into the dust.

I was asleep when the final scream tore through the night. It was a cry of defeat and victory. But there was something more: a sound both of death and of birth.

Something cold fell onto my face. I sat up. Inside the wrecked tank, snow was falling. I grabbed my war-blade. The thread diamond pattern on the exit ramp glittered with an unseasonal frost.

Light was coming from Yaguden’s yurt. I paused outside. Through the felt I could hear voices speaking. I passed through the flap, and the sight that greeted me inside the tent took my breath away.

Yaguden sat cross-legged. He beckoned me forward. The captive had been subjected to a thousand cuts. His body was scaled like a fish, each scale a wound cut into his flesh. His hands were stumps; his lips and nose had been sliced away, his eyes forced out; and his neck had been slashed open, right down to the bone. The severed ends of arteries were visible, the purple windpipe.

There was no doubt. The priest was dead. But despite all this, the blinded skull turned towards me.

Yaguden gestured me to come closer. ‘The compact has been made,’ he whispered. ‘It might rebel, but it cannot deny us now.’ He signalled that I should introduce myself.

‘I am Briar Etogaur. Scourge of the Arch-heretics. To what do I speak?’

There was a pause. The lipless mouth worked soundlessly. The spirit was struggling against the pact that it had made.

It was Yaguden who spoke this time. His voice was severe. ‘You are bound to speak truth!’

There was a moment of stillness, as if it was trying to remember. It struggled against the bounds that held it. ‘…Pern.’

Yaguden leant forward. ‘You were a holy man.’

The thing paused. Its voice was like the rasp of a knife. ‘Confessor.’

Yaguden was proud of the thing he had created. His face softened as I gave him a questioning look and he nodded and spoke to the thing before us.

‘Tell us your name.’

The thing writhed like a man held over hot flames. There was a long pause as it tried to remember. ‘Confessor Akind Pern.’

The name meant nothing to me. Yaguden leant forward and whispered words that I did not know. There was a tearing sound as its wounds pulled.

‘Who did you serve?’ he prompted.

‘I served the God-Emperor!’ the thing spat.

‘Who did you serve?’

The corpse lifted off the floor in its fury. But it was bound with unholy compacts and it gritted the words out. The words were indistinct.

I caught Yaguden’s eye. There was something he knew that I did not. And he could not wait for me to find out.

He repeated, more slowly, ‘Tell me the man’s name.’

The undead thing had no need of breath, but there was a hiss as it sucked air in between the bloodied teeth and hissed the name at last.

‘Forges.’

‘Who is Forges?’ I said.

‘Lord Militant Forges,’ it answered.

‘Impossible,’ I stated to Yaguden. ‘It’s lying to us.’

‘I was chaplain to Forgessss,’ the dead thing said. ‘And Forges was shamed.’ You could hear the anger in the dead thing’s voice. The hurt, the pain.

This was the weakness that Yaguden had exploited. I guessed then that the troops with the etogaur were Forges’ own… And this was their confessor.

A nasty little tale was laid out before me.

‘Who shamed Forges?’ Yaguden demanded.

The word came immediately from the dead thing’s lips with all the force of vomit. An utterance full of bile and hatred. Even I felt a chill descend down my spine.

‘Vichressss,’ it breathed.

‘Yes,’ I smiled, despite myself. ‘Lord Militant Vichres.’

VI

Sabre Bridge was a little-used crossing at the southern end of the tarpits that cut out the wider loop skirting the loading bays of Harshen Quay. It was not so much a bridge as a collection of causeways that connected the scattered islands in the tarpits, and made them into a coherent route. We had guarded it a year earlier, so we knew it well.

Winter had come early and icy gales were blowing sideways as my captains joined me in Yaguden’s tent. The confessor’s cadaver was rotting. It filled the tent with its stink as I laid out my plans.

‘It would be impossible,’ Todai Sirdar said. He had a forked tongue, but he spoke right.

‘You are right, Todai. The Ghulam would never make it. But perhaps a small band could.’

‘They will see you,’ Todai said, meaning the enemy’s air force.

‘Not if we go on foot.’

‘You would walk in this?’ he said, referring to the cold. He laughed, but I was not joking.

We were Ghulam. What pain did we fear?

All my captains turned and stared as the confessor’s lipless mouth spoke. ‘You must take me with you!’

And so, next morning, we set off. The cadaver, limp with decay, was folded up, so it would fit inside my backpack. The stench was terrible.

I picked each of the hundred and eight who were to accompany me. It was a holy number among the Ghulam. I left Murrai in command of the Warp Vultures. I did not tell him what he should or should not do. If I did not come back then I would be dead, and long beyond caring. That was what I thought, at least.

The short afternoon was already darkening. The promethium tanks at Harshen were still burning and the choking plume of black smoke crept towards us. Ash was falling like snow. I caught one of the flakes on my tongue. It tasted of promethium.

The day had a melancholy air to it, despite everything. I was tense. I had waited years for this moment and did not know what lay beyond it. When I had Vichres’ head, what would I do next? Was there any purpose? If there was, how would I know it?

And how would the Mansa reward me?

We wore camo cloaks over our mail and armour, but we were barely an hour from the camp when the storm came howling down from the upper hives. The wind was as cold as knives. It was so fierce it froze our eyelids open. When we stopped after five hours, I could barely speak; my sharpened teeth were rattling against each other.

I stood in the middle of my Ghulam and all I could hear was the chatter of teeth, the involuntary shiver of frozen bodies, the fierce look of those who were not going to make it through the night.

What passed between us that night was unspoken. We were slaves. Our lives had been forfeit for years. Everything we had achieved in life was a demonstration of our spirit. I could not articulate, so I said everything in the look I gave each one of them.

We pushed on, wrapped in our cloaks. Each time one of us gave up, I gave them the blessing of release. Their blood was a brief warmth, but I found it quickly froze, if you did not wipe it off.

Only ninety-five of us reached the tarpits. They stretched out as far as we could see, a black lake of frozen tar, shimmering in the predawn light. We camped out for the rest of the daylight, making ourselves hidden, as we waited for the night to fall again.

It was here we saw our first armoured patrol. It was a Chimera in the colours of the enemy, trundling out, alone, into the wastes. The troops within did not try to remain hidden. They were soft. They were arrogant. They came from the rich and powerful Imperium, and they thought that they could bring their luxuriant and corrupt ways to the harsh rimward worlds.

Todai’s lips had cracked into bloody scabs. ‘They think they are secure,’ he commented.

I nodded. ‘They did not grow up in the chattel-camps.’

There were eighty-seven of us who huddled down till the enemy had passed by. Only seventy-three of us rose again to start our trek to the bridge. The cold had turned the pitch almost solid. We lost five more in that crossing. As night fell we could not go on, and camped on islands. We ate frozen food, thawed our canteens for a few drops of water.

Fifty-four of us rose next morning for the last trek. We were three hours into it when, at last, we caught sight of Sabre Bridge.

It was like a mirage rising out of the frozen black landscape. The gnarled buttresses were worn by acid rain. The gothic supports were pockmarked with strafing fire. Bomb damage had been repaired with girders and iron plates. Enginseers from both sides had done their best to keep the artery open.

‘So,’ Todai said as we dragged ourselves up onto the rocky shores of the island.

I nodded. We were here. But there was no sign of Vichres.

‘How long?’ Todai demanded.

‘Three days,’ a voice from my backpack stated.

Todai’s eyes met mine. Neither of us spoke. Three days would kill us all.

Less than fifty of us had reached this place. We hunkered down and waited, blue with cold. We spent the night shivering as violently as the possessed. We had already lost more than half our number. We were dying too quickly. On the day that the enemy was expected I had all my troopers make themselves ready, but our bodies were so cold that every movement was an agony.

‘When will he come?’ Todai asked me.

I opened the backpack, where the cadaver was bundled up. But the thing was cold. It was frozen solid. It did not answer my questions. It did not move.

I put on a brave face to my Ghulam.

‘What need we of unholy beasts? We are Ghulam! We are warriors enough!’

It took me nearly an hour to fit the powercell into my rifle. Then we waited as the day wore on, and the storm deepened.

I dreamed myself a child again. It was dark. My mother was carrying me on her back as she picked peels and scraps from the midden heaps. A voice shouted. A lumen pointed our way, and she fell over as she fled into the shadows.

Something nudged me. It was a Ghulam named Qoyar, sliding sideways into me.

I let him fall. He was dead.

But then I saw a distant light. We were lying at the bottom of the bank with the road above us. Along the road a convoy was coming. I could see the searchlights panning for the road.

I had a sudden fear that all my Ghulam were dead about me. Arban was on the other side. I pushed him but he did not move. I pushed Dorben. And Tabun. And Nutuk. But they were all dead. Only Todai showed any sign of life. I crawled towards him, using my elbows.

‘Todai!’ I hissed, though the truth was my mouth could not articulate.

He was lying face down, his face resting in the crook of his elbow. His face was black. His eyes had frozen solid. They were white with ice. I understood that he was dying. The sound that came out of him was not a human sound. It was an animal noise. It was pitiful. A begging sound.

‘Todai!’ I begged, but it was beyond him.

The light of the lead truck fell across me as the tank swung onto the island where we were hidden. I could hear the low rumble of their engines. I could feel the weight of their tracks through the frozen ground. As the convoy rumbled towards us I knew that we had failed. I was alone and there was no way we could kill Vichres, if indeed he was here. If I could, I would have wept.

‘Free me!’ a voice behind me hissed.

I tried, but my hands were too cold; I could not even push the straps from my shoulders.

‘Free me!’ the voice came again. ‘He comes!’

I put my fingers in my mouth to warm them as the line of armour rolled steadily towards us. My chattering teeth drew blood. I could taste it, though my fingers were beyond feeling. I might have been chewing off my own fingers. At last, I felt pain and life return as the cold blue headlights panned across the landscape and I had just enough feeling in my bloodied hands to slowly dragged my war-blade out of its sheath.

I used my other hand to clamp my fingers around the hilt, held Todai’s mouth against my chest and drove the knife into his gut. My arm went up to my elbow before it found his heart. I left my arm inside him and felt the heat in his body thaw my arm.

To have feeling return was all pain. But pain is not always bad. Sometimes it is the only sign of life left that you have.

Without the warmth in my hand I could never have done it.

I dragged the pack off my shoulders. It landed with a dull thud. From the sound I knew that the corpse inside was frozen solid. I tried to open the thongs that held it. My hands were stupid and clumsy with cold. I pulled at the straps but I could not open it.

The pack started to move.

I thought it a dream at first. But it rocked violently, and then the pack tore open, and a hand grasped the edges of the tear, and pulled it wide enough for the thing inside to clamber out. It let out a shriek that cut through the cold like a hot blade.

‘Vichress!’ it howled.

A sound of pain and fury that left me in its wake.

VII

I had not seen the Mansa for over fifteen years. As I stood in the antechamber I was conscious of my mutilated state and set my plumed helmet straight with the stump of my left hand, made myself ready. Young Ghulam stood guard at his gates, their blades sharp, their eyes hard as glassy stone.

Once I had been fit and hale, like them. Now I felt the gulf between us. They looked at my ruined body with a mix of curiosity and contempt. But they were still young and naïve. They imagined there was no foe they could not overcome with courage and strength. I knew better. Cociaminus had cured me of my arrogance. My body had been through war and ice and fire, and each had taken a heavy toll of flesh.

But as for my missing hand, I had cut that off myself at Sabre Bridge, when the enemy fled with Vichres’ body, and I was unable to fulfil my geas. I had thrown my weapons away, and stumbled back alone through the front lines, and let myself be taken as a slave.

I had suffered most in those latter years. It had taken many years to come to terms with my failure. But you light the fuse, and the fyceline will blow. I should have trusted to my luck. If one is destined to be rich, even lead turns to gold.

At last my name was called and I stepped inside his chamber. I saw, to my terror, that the Mansa had not changed. His fangs still protruded from his snout. His bald and ugly head stared down at me. His slit eyes glowed yellow. It was all I could do to force each leg to swing and take me forward.

At last I stood before him.

‘Briar!’ he snorted. ‘I heard many years ago that you were dead.’

I fell to my knees and touched my head to the floor in total obeisance. ‘Not yet, lord. I made a promise to you…’

He saw the skulls that hung from my belt. I took one and presented it to him, between hand and stump.

The Mansa’s hand was enormous. The object nestled in it like a pebble in the hand of a child. ‘This is him?’

‘It is, lord! I was at Hive Harshen when it fell. And I took the skull from his tomb.’

‘Tomb,’ the Mansa mused, amber eyes narrowing. ‘So, you did not kill him?’

‘No, lord. Not I. Though I was the bearer of his death. And I stood by when he died.’

The Mansa listened as I related, briefly, the events that had happened nearly a decade earlier, at Sabre Bridge. Those moments were etched into my brain. How the thing that I had carried had singled out his enemy. The look on Vichres’ face as it tore through his honour guard. The horror of recognition. And my own torment, as his body was dragged away by his men.

At the end the Mansa laughed. A sound that weakened my will. ‘So. It was Vichres who created his own enemy! That is a fitting end.’

I had no more left to say, and bowed to make my exit, but the Mansa stopped me.

‘Briar. You carried two skulls. Who is the other?’

I looked down. ‘A man of no worth,’ I told him.

‘Show me.’

I nodded and lifted the second by the hair that clung to the scalp. It was fresher than the first. An iron grotesque covered its face, now spotted with rust.

‘This is Güyük Sirdar,’ I said.

The Mansa gave me a questioning look.

‘When I failed to bring Vichres’ skull to you, death would have been too easy.’ I held up my stump. ‘I mortified myself. I had once been a slave, and to slavery I returned. Güyük Sirdar was the last who dared to call himself my master!’

The Mansa presented me with this sword that I still carry into battle.

When he was done with me he signalled that I should leave.

I walked away, feeling almost weightless, but at the end of the room, I paused and turned and saw Mansa tip the skull of Lord Militant Vichres upside down, like a bowl, and break it upon his knee, then lift it to his mouth and lick the inside, as if he was a starving man, polishing a bowl clean.

That night I walked out onto the dust of my home world and I stopped at the flay-wire fences. On the other side a new chattel-camp had been recently populated with fresh slaves. I could see figures moving furtively. Men, women, children. Fearful, uncertain, still looking for boundaries, still searching for the purpose of their incarceration.

It was the children who drew my eye. They clung to their parents’ rags, or huddled in orphan bands. Like me, the best of them would fight their way through that hell, and eventually they would be lifted up, and made into the Ghulam of the Mansa.

Night was falling. Soon the rimward sky would be freckled with stars – just a fraction of the billion worlds the Archenemy had at their command. And against all that, all we – the People of the Rim – had was our spirit, and our conviction.

I took in a deep breath.

Those children picking grubs from the dust were our hope and our future. Life in the chattel-camps would make them strong. It would make them hard. It would make them the finest warriors this side of Urdesh.

It would make them Ghulam.

DEEP

WRITTEN BY EDOARDO ALBERT

Preface

A warning: if you’re at all claustrophobic, this probably isn’t the story for you.

I always assumed it would be me, eventually, who would take a deeper (no pun intended) look at the hard-scrabble Roane Deepers regiment and their work as sappers and pioneers. But Edoardo picked them, and who was I to argue? Edoardo, like Justin, has a great reputation for historical fiction outside Black Library. There, and in his Black Library work, he creates an amazing sense of realism, often through tiny details and observations. This story – dark, stifling and oppressive – is set in the crusade’s past, and evokes tunnel rats, mining dramas, and the hellish trench warfare of the First World War, both above and below ground.

Do not read it in the dark.

‘They’re down here.’

The whisper came from behind Sapper Mal Lyhan as he sat, back braced against a wedge of sandbags, feet poised to push the shovel into the clay face in front of him. Lyhan was the kicker of the tunnelling team.

‘Where?’

The question, as quiet as the first whisper, issued from below Lyhan’s feet, where Till Hacquet, the bagger, lay poised to ease away the next wedge of clay that Lyhan dug from the face. Hacquet’s face, arms and body were smeared grey.

Barl Coppet, the trammer, back from pushing the latest load of clay down the tunnel, reached past Lyhan’s shoulder, cutting the silence sign through the tunnel fumes, and pointed.

The three men listened, not moving, the hiss of their rebreathers whispering back down the attack tunnel they were digging. The tunnel was a metre and a half high and one metre wide, braced and supported by timbers and spars and anything else the Roane Deepers could scavenge above ground on Hisk, their only tools a shovel and a handcart set on makeshift rails sunk in the clay floor.

The tunnellers turned their heads slowly, so slowly, that the rasp of cloth might not be mistaken for the cut of spade through clay. Lyhan eased his shovel down, laying it out flat on the floor of the tunnel. The metal of its blade caught the dim light of the snap-lumens shining dully through the fumes. The clay was saturated with pockets of gas, some natural, others the result of the slow downward seep of the heavy vapour residue left by the never-ending rain of artillery far above.

But down here, deep and dark, it was silent. Still.

Then, through the silence, they heard sound: faint and distant as a fading star but just as clear.

The heads of the three listening men turned, tracking as one in the direction of the sound: ahead, above, the gritty scratch of iron cutting into clay.

A faint noise. In the grey clay of Hisk the sound of a team grafting might carry through three to four metres of the heavy subsoil.

The enemy was close.

They listened, not moving, taking in the rhythm of the enemy. They were cutting fast, the kicker kicking his spade into the clay with a relentless, helpless fury; the bagger throwing the wedges back up the tunnel, the trammer running the spoil back. In among the noises of shovels and picks, there came the faint piston wheeze of a cutting machine driving its blades through the clay.

The Deepers’ cutting machines were men.

Lyhan traced the line he judged the enemy to be digging, just above the course of their own attack tunnel. Then he pointed up, at an angle of thirty degrees, and drew his finger across his throat.

‘It was knife work, sir.’ Lyhan paused. He glanced at Markwell, who was waiting, quietly, for his report. The chief sapper was a miner himself. He knew how the memory of the desperate battles in tunnels drew you back into the scrabble and blind slashing, the ceiling pressing down on top of you, with nowhere to escape the blades and the blows for the heavy earth squeezing in on all sides.

Lyhan’s eyes, trapped in memory, glazed. He saw again the narrow tunnel, flowsand oozing through the roughly battened roof. He remembered peering through the thin opening they had cut in between the supports, waiting, listening, as glow gas flowed down through the cut into their own attack tunnel, moving not like water but in discrete lumps, as if it were a stream of trench rats abandoning the tunnel. The mirror, on its stick, pushed warily through the opening, turning to the tunnel face and then the tunnel head. The crawl, as quick and quiet as possible, along the tunnel towards its face, fearing to see the enemy trammer approaching as the sound of the tunnellers got louder. The back of the trammer turned towards them, emerging fitfully from a pocket of glow gas. Knife, right hand. Knuckleduster, left hand. No lasguns, stubbers, bolters: the gases in the tunnels would ignite, roasting then burying all within. The trammer, loading a wedge onto the wagon, seeing them, rearing back, his face a nightmare of scarification. The desperate scrabble along the final metres of tunnel, then jabbing, slashing, hitting, biting, blind in the glow gas.

It was all confused after that. In memory, it lasted for an hour; in time, for less than a minute. Lyhan killed the trammer – in the struggle, he didn’t even notice the cut he took in his thigh – while Coppet and Hacquet, pushing past, dealt with the bagger and kicker.

Only when the knife work was done did the Deepers see that most of the enemy’s tunnelling was being done by the abominable machine he had created, a structure of iron and flesh and teeth, a mole made of what was once a man.

‘We buried it,’ said Lyhan, ‘then set mines as near the tunnel head as we dared go and fired them.’

Chief Sapper Markwell nodded. ‘The attack tunnel?’

‘Some minor collapses, but all cleared.’

‘Very well.’ Markwell paused as the air in the deep mine shelter pulsed: a pressure bomb must have exploded near the head of the shaft that connected them to the surface. ‘How much further do you have to drive the tunnel?’

‘Another thirty metres.’

Markwell got up from his desk. The shelter lights flickered, flared, then died. Backup snap-lumens glowed into light, one after the other, as the men – eating with the steady, ravenous hunger of the tunneller – paused briefly before returning to their food.

Markwell went to the plot table, signing for Lyhan to follow: the reflex to silence ran deep among tunnellers.

The chief sapper looked at the plot table. The Deepers had made the surface from scavenged plasfoam and the geological strata beneath from bags of medigel, stained to represent the different layers of flowsand and grey clay. The main shaft cut straight down through the flowsand into the relatively stable – although generally toxic – grey clay beneath. From the tunnel head at the bottom of the shaft, attack tunnels bored into the medigel, with lateral galleries linking the tunnels to encourage air flow – a constant circulation was the best defence against accumulations of explosive or poisonous gas – and to allow rescue attempts in case of a tunnel collapse trapping the digging team.

The plasfoam on the surface of the plot table had been cut and sculpted into the shape of the trench fields and, in front of the trenches, the long, low ridge that had been the graveyard of regiments of Guard. The Scar. Now it was the Roane Deepers scuttling through the trenches over which the Scar glowered, with the great dug-in bastion at its height.

‘How are your bagger and trammer?’ asked Markwell.

Lyhan jerked a thumb towards where the off-shift teams sat in silent groups, Coppet and Hacquet among them, heads on the table, asleep.

‘When can you go back in?’

Lyhan pursed his lips. A thin stream of air hissed past his teeth as he thought.

‘Six hours.’

‘Four.’ Markwell pointed to the plot table. ‘We’re under operational silence but I received a message from the surface. The general has brought forward zero hour. We’ve got twenty-four hours left to tunnel in under the enemy positions and set the mines.’

The air in the deep shelter shuddered again. Markwell glanced up at the low ceiling, buttressed with a mixture of timber, rockcrete and scavenged plasteel from destroyed armoured vehicles. The supports flexed, letting loose several thin streams of flowsand and a general dust fall.

‘Even if they kept this bombardment up for a month, no matter what the artillery says, I still don’t reckon they would dig the enemy out of their rat holes, and neither does the colonel. But so far as the general is concerned, the Deepers are just bullet soaks, blood bags to catch the rounds meant for his precious Bluebloods. All the really big stuff is being concentrated here’ – Markwell pointed to a section of the Scar east of the Deepers’ lines – ‘and that’s where he’s expecting the big breakthrough. We’re just meant to keep this part of the enemy line busy.’ The chief sapper looked up from the plot table to Lyhan. ‘Your attack tunnel has the furthest to go. But if we can’t blow the enemy bastion by zero hour, it’s going to be us charging those fortifications on foot.’

With the practised eyes of a miner, Lyhan looked at the plot table and the radiating lines of the attack tunnels weaving between the flow layers and clay seams that lay under the upthrust limestone ridge of the Scar. He traced the tunnels of the other teams, seeing how the flowsand forced one lower and another to change its angle of approach. Only his tunnel bored straight on, deep, towards the highest point of the Scar and the bastion dug into it.

‘The enemy knows we’re down there now,’ said Lyhan. ‘They will dig further counter tunnels.’

‘They know we’re digging, but they don’t know where. Your team is the quietest I’ve got, that’s why you’re on A. Keep them guessing.’

Lyhan looked at Markwell. ‘There’s something else.’

‘What?’

‘They’ve got some sort of fiendish tunnelling machine. What we saw was part human, part animal and part machine. It was cutting through the clay five times as fast as we could, though it’s noisy and you can hear it coming from a long way off – probably six metres in clay. Thing is, I think these things might be able to smell us.’

Markwell wrinkled his nose. ‘Not that difficult.’

‘Through clay.’

Markwell nodded. ‘Chaos filth. That would explain why I have lost so many teams.’

‘Sikes and his gang?’

‘Still trying to reach them.’

‘One of those things, the way it cuts through the clay, the enemy could have cut in behind them and taken them unawares.’

‘Which is another reason for getting through. At the least, we will give Sikes and his boys the burial we owe them.’

Lyhan laughed, a sharp cough of mirth, abruptly cut off. ‘We’re already underground. Don’t see it makes much odds to dig ’em out only to bury ’em again.’

‘It makes a difference to us. The rest of the Guard might treat Deepers like trench rats but we look after our own.’

Lyhan nodded. ‘I’ll get back to the boys. Tell ’em they’ve got four hours.’

‘Three and a half now.’

Three hours and twenty-eight minutes later, Lyhan’s team was back at the tunnel face. They had waited, in one of the regular scooped-out passing places, for Wynn and his gang to go past, pushing the trolleys of bagged clay that they had dug out during their shift. Reaching the passing place, Wynn reached up and, in a gesture known to all miners, pushed a twist of seed through the wire of Tavish’s cage. Inside, the little yellow bobbin fluffed out its feathers and pounced on the seed. The passing place, near the junction with a lateral tunnel, was clear for air breathing. Tavish was the guarantor of that. Wynn and his team unlatched their rebreathers, their faces red and bruised, touched the roof supports above Lyhan’s team and headed back down the tunnel towards its head.

The face now empty, Lyhan, Hacquet and Coppet made the ritual payment of seed to Tavish, buckled on their rebreathers, and made their way along the attack tunnel to the face. They moved with care, hunched over, for there was not height for any of them to stand upright, the man following tapping the one in front if he was straying high and coming in danger of brushing or snagging on the roof supports.

Pools of glow gas shifted lazily under the duckboard. Going in front, Lyhan felt the familiar ache in the back of his neck from turning it up so that he could scan ahead. Behind him, Hacquet replaced the snap-lumens as he passed them, twisting a new one into light at each sconce along the way. They did not speak. They would not for the rest of their shift, save for the direst emergency.

Lyhan saw, up ahead, a section of three supports bulging slightly at their middle. He approached and stopped, moving the snap-lumens to look past the supports at the quick-cast rockcrete above. That too showed evidence of bulge, with some cracks opening in the rockcrete. The kicker shook his head. Wynn’s team should have dealt with this during their shift. But with time so short, he could not afford to delay their own return to the face. Lyhan looked back to Hacquet, now waiting behind him, pointed up at the ceiling, and then made the sign for flowsand – a horizontal motion, his hand turning slightly as it went. Then he pointed past Hacquet to Coppet, following behind. Hacquet saw the bulge and nodded his understanding. The trammer turned back to Coppet, the last man up the tunnel, to make sure that he understood the bulge needed bracing while Lyhan continued to the face. With time so short, they could not afford for everyone to stop and fix in fresh bracing: Coppet would do that while the kicker and bagger made a start digging.

Leaving Coppet, Lyhan and Hacquet pushed on to the face. The air from the rebreather tasted of metal and toilets. The soak pads the Deepers added to the rebreathers – rags left for an hour in a solution of vinegar and urine – did a fine job of removing the low-density gases that the rebreather missed, but at the expense of the throat-clutching smell. However, most anything can be become customary, particularly something that stopped the green glow gas that rotted you from the inside. The smell of urine was small sacrifice in comparison.

Reaching the tunnel face, Lyhan and Hacquet set out the listening posts. Hacquet checked the cans and basins, filled with liquid, that were embedded into the floor of the tunnel; he watched them intently for a minute, searching for any sign of vibration. The liquid surface clear and unruffled, he signalled to Lyhan, and the two men picked up the listening tubes that had been left at the tunnel face. Taking opposite sides of the tunnel, they slowly and carefully pushed the tubes into the exposed clay to a depth of half a metre or more. Then they sat, with the open end of the tube in their ear, and listened to the sounds of the deep underground.

Crew fresh to the task of listening expected the earth to be silent; that they would be listening for the sudden noise of miners cutting through it. But the task of detecting enemy miners was far harder than that, for the earth – even the earth of Hisk – was never silent. The underground groaned and it murmured, it rumbled and purred; sometimes, it screamed. There were times when it sounded as if giants battled beneath and around them. At other times, voices, ancient and unimaginably alien, sang songs in the deep, of the making and dying of continents, a music that had no human nor even mortal counterpart, but that the listener felt in his blood and his bone.

And then, overlaying everything they heard, there were the sounds of war: the thud of Basilisk shells and the hiss of multi-meltas, the shift of plasma cannons and the slide of Demolishers. Here in the earth’s depths, as Lyhan and Hacquet lay still, the sounds of the surface war were the ignored backdrop for their listening as they searched for the distinctive sounds of tunnelling: the hasp and rasp of shovel, the repeated peck of pickwork, the trolley wheel rumble and, sometimes, the tread of boot or distant voices, human but perverted into a caricature of speech by the rites and noise of the enemy.

They lay, still, unmoving, for a minute, then moved the listening tubes to the work face, pushing the metal into the raw clay. Another minute listening, the grey clay already staining their hands and faces, then the sign: clear.

Not that ‘clear’ meant no sound of enemy activity. It was there – above all, the thrash-thrum of the tunnel machines that some dark art of the enemy had created – but it was sufficiently distant for them to continue their work.

Withdrawing the listening tube with the same care that he had pushed it into the clay, Lyhan lay back against the wedge of sandbags that provided him support and purchase each time he pushed the shovel into the cut. Hacquet eased himself into position beneath Lyhan, as the kicker took up the shovel and lined the cut up at the top of the face: he worked from top to bottom, so that there would be no unsupported blocks of clay to fall from the face. The shift’s first cut was fifteen centimetres below the tunnel roof. Lyhan braced his feet on the shovel’s shoulders and looked to Hacquet. The bagger signed ready.

Lyhan cut into the clay, a spade’s depth. Hacquet eased the cut block of clay from the face and laid it down beside him on the first of the shift’s sacks.

They were still cutting when Coppet joined them, the first sack having been joined by twenty more, the tunnel face now sixty centimetres closer to target. The trammer set about moving the bags, loading them onto the rail trolley and pushing them back down the tunnel to where the bobbin, Tavish, swung in his cage.

The work continued, without break, without pause, through the first four hours of the shift. Muscles warmed, then wearied. Joints strained. And through and over everything was the weight of the earth above them and the leach of the gases around them, the first a physical presence that could be ignored but never forgotten, the second an irritation to the flesh and a drain upon the mind, for even with the rebreathers and the soak pads, small amounts of the fumes got into their systems, filling their heads with dullness and their bodies with weariness.

After four hours, Coppet signalled a break. Lyhan lay back on the wedge of sandbags, staring without seeing at the tunnel ceiling half a metre above his face. Hacquet twisted over, trying to stretch muscles that had all been bent in one direction for four hours the other way; the pain on his face, and the concomitant sharp intake of breath, drew glances from the other two members of the team.

In the silence and the still, Coppet checked the vibration trays, looking for signs of nearby tunnelling, but the liquid lay still in them. He replaced a snap-lumen, stuttering out in its sconce, with a new light, then passed Lyhan and Hacquet water to drink, sealed into airtight containers to avoid gas contamination, and a handful of food concentrates. The men held their breaths as they unlatched the rebreathers, taking a mouthful of water then putting the mask on again before swallowing, trying to wash down the dryness from their mouths. Only after a few mouthfuls of water did they take the dry concentrates, chewing manfully to try to summon some saliva and make it possible to swallow.

The break lasted less than ten minutes. But before resuming the tunnelling, Lyhan signalled to the listening tubes. Hacquet nodded acknowledgement – it was their standard practice to listen for enemy tunnelling after their short break – and picked up his tube. Behind the two lead men, without having to be asked, Coppet moved the vibration trays to other sections of the tunnel. He walked barefoot: as trammer, he was the only one of the team to move frequently along the tunnel during the shift. The sound of nailed boots carried surprisingly far through the clay; a man walking barefoot could barely be heard in the tunnel itself.

Lyhan and Hacquet inserted their listening tubes into the clay and lay there, head to toe, eyes shut, breath slowed, hearing the sounds of the battered planet.

From above, the constant backdrop that had accompanied their digging: the thrump-thud of artillery detonations as the Guard’s guns attempted to obliterate the enemy’s defences. So far below ground, even detonations big enough to vaporise a Baneblade registered as no more than distant rumours, the grumbles of the faraway surface, where men fought their battles, fleas passing fleetingly over the shell of something infinitely older, vaster and slower. The kicker and the bagger had both quickly learned to discount these and the other noises of the surface conflict: they listened for the sound of men, the scratch and the rhythm of digging or unguarded movement carrying through the clay and the flowsand.

Lyhan, his listening tube inserted into the tunnel ceiling through the gap between supports, eased the tube deeper, slowly rotating it. He lay there, still, for a full minute before he tapped Hacquet’s knee. The bagger looked up. Lyhan gestured him over.

Getting to his knees, Hacquet took the proffered listening tube and, closing his eyes, listened too. Less than a minute later, he opened his eyes, looked at Lyhan, and nodded.

The enemy was digging another counter tunnel and it was now close enough for them to hear it.

Hacquet raised his hands and signalled.

Six metres.

Lyhan nodded. He pointed, about ten degrees from directly overhead, where he judged the sound was coming from.

Hacquet signed his agreement, then pointed parallel to their own track. The bagger thought the enemy tunnel, on its current bearing, would not cross their own.

Lyhan shook his head. He was not so sure. Direction was the hardest of all things to judge by sound: the noise of tunnelling told them roughly where the enemy was, but not where he was going. What was more, in digging his counter tunnels, the enemy sometimes seemed to dig in random directions, side workings expanding out from tunnels in a confusion of growths that suggested the cancer-ridden roots of a tree rather than rational planning. As such, it was less effective than ordinary countermining, but more unpredictable.

Hacquet drew a finger across his throat then signed a question.

But Lyhan shook his head. He tapped the chronometer on his wrist. There was no time. They had to dig on, hoping that the enemy did not hear them, or cut through their tunnel by blind, chaotic chance. He signed ‘three’, and the throat slash.

Hacquet nodded. Countermine if the enemy tunnel came within three metres. Hacquet then put finger to lips: absolute silence.

Lyhan nodded, his eyes grim above the mask of the rebreather. Any sound might alert the enemy. But so long as they could hear the enemy, then he was still digging. The danger came when the rhythm of the enemy digging changed: that could mean that he was laying mines at the tunnel face, packing explosives under the ground to set the clay shaking, bringing it down in a suffocating grey mass into any tunnels close to the explosion.

The danger was greatest of all when the enemy went silent, for that meant he was getting ready to blow his mines.

Lyhan put the listening tube to his ear again. Through the tube came the distinctive cut-swish of the enemy’s half-living tunnelling machines. They were still digging.

Hacquet gestured Coppet forward and pointed to Lyhan, giving the signal for enemy tunnelling.

Coppet nodded. As trammer, he would now place a listening tube into the tunnel ceiling to monitor the enemy activity, checking their activity and distance between each trolley load he pushed back down the tunnel.

Three pairs of eyes, gas-blooded and bleared, checked that all understood what each had to do; then they went without sound about their work. There was still eighteen metres to go before target.

Lyhan cut the clay; Hacquet caught and stacked it; Coppet trammed it.

Cut, catch, push.

Cut, catch, push.

Cut, catch, push.

Cutting through the depths, a spade blade at a time, towards the enemy bastion and the trenches lining the Scar, while above them the Roane Deepers hunkered in their own shelters, awaiting the order to advance.

It was the fatigue that did it.  Normally, Lyhan would have seen the slight telltale bulge in the ceiling, the clay bowing just a little downwards. But he had been kicking the shovel into the tunnel face for hours straight, his bones and muscles set into an unwavering rhythm. As such, he did not notice the bulge as he cut down the face, removing the spade depth from ceiling to floor, and he began a new cut right below the bulge. It was only as he pushed the shovel into the clay that he felt it, the sudden slip, as if all resistance was gone, but the spade movement – push, ease, withdraw – was too grooved to stop. Lyhan pulled out the shovel and flowsand spilled from the cut, running down over the clay face as if it were water and onto the upturned face of Hacquet below.

The bagger jerked aside as Lyhan, stifling the curse that leapt to his lips, lurched forward, trying to hold the flat of the shovel against the cut, like a medpac over a wound, while Hacquet, on hands and feet now with flowsand sluicing off him, pulled a rockcrete fast-pack from next to Lyhan and slapped it onto the clay cut around the shovel. Pulling spare duckboard from the floor, Hacquet slid it over the quick drying rockcrete while Lyhan got his shovel out of the way. Then the two men braced themselves, holding the batten in place, while the rockcrete set around it.

It was like trying to hold back a river. Flowsand spurted through the gaps between the batten and the clay cut like water through a pinched hose, covering their feet and rising to their ankles as they pushed against the pressure. Hacquet had his back against the batten, his feet pressing on the sandbag rest Lyhan used when digging: the kicker had his shoulder pushing it.

Slowly, the pressure eased. Coppet, returning from a spoil run and seeing what was happening, leapt forward and slapped further rockcrete patches on the gaps, closing off the flowsand jets into the tunnel.

It took an hour.

Even when they had sealed the cut, Coppet and Hacquet had to scoop the flowsand from the tunnel floor, loading it onto the trolley and carting it back down the tunnel, while Lyhan brought the tunnel line down so that it ran below the flowsand extrusion. In most places, the flowsand layer lay stable above the clay but occasionally, where a drainage fissure had opened in the clay, it would flow down, welling into cracks and breaks, ready to spill into any space. It was the worst sort of drowning. They had stopped it just in time.

‘We lost two hours, sealing the cut and clearing the flowsand from the tunnel.’ Lyhan looked up from where he was sitting, hollow-eyed, at the mess table in the deep shelter, Hacquet and Coppet beside him.

Markwell nodded. ‘How much further to target?’

‘Reckon about another nine metres.’

Markwell nodded again, then went over to the plot table, boring the line for ‘A’ tunnel further towards its destination. After a few minutes, Lyhan came to stand beside him. The kicker stared down at the plot table, then pointed.

‘D in place?’ He shifted his point. ‘And F?’

‘Loaded and primed. But we lost H and L.’

Lyhan looked up at the chief sapper, the question in his eyes.

Markwell shook his head. ‘We lost Miggs’ team in L. H got lucky – they were loading when the enemy blew.’

Lyhan nodded. He looked down again at the plot table. ‘How long?’

‘Twelve hours.’

‘They ready?’ Lyhan jerked his thumb to the low ceiling. ‘Up there?’

Markwell shook his head. ‘They set the mission seals thirty-six hours back. I’ve had no contact with the surface other than time confirmation.’

‘I can feel the bombardment, even down sixty metres below the Scar.’

Markwell nodded. ‘Maybe they won’t need us to blow all the mines. I was told the general said that the Guard has assembled more artillery for this push than anywhere else in the crusade.’

‘What’s his name?’

‘Who?’

‘The general.’

Markwell shrugged. ‘They didn’t bother telling me.’

Lyhan nodded. He turned back to his team. Coppet and Hacquet were chewing with all the grim determination of men ballasting their bodies for the ordeal ahead.

‘Give us an hour. Then we’ll go back in.’

‘You sure? Wynn and his team can spell you.’

‘They ain’t so fast as us. They won’t reach target in time.’

‘Very well. Better eat something yourself, Lyhan.’

The kicker nodded. He felt too weary to even think of eating, but he knew its necessity.

As Lyhan took his place at the mess table, the row of silent men shuffling along the makeshift bench to make room for him, Coppet and Hacquet looked up, their eyes hollow with exhaustion.

‘An hour,’ said Lyhan.

They nodded. Coppet laid his head on the table and slept. Hacquet picked up a bottle of water and upended it over his head. The liquid left grey streaks on his face but cleaned most of the dirt from his eyes.

Lyhan ate. Mechanically, without tasting anything that he put in his mouth, his mind as blank as the clay face at the end of the attack tunnel they were digging.

‘Last push.’

Lyhan looked at Hacquet and Coppet as they buckled on their rebreathers. Coppet tapped Tavish’s cage, then put a twist of seed through the wire for the bobbin. From up tunnel, they saw the approaching shadows, blocking out each succeeding snap-lumen, of Wynn and his gang returning from the work face. The two teams nodded in greeting as they passed, then Wynn, with his bagger and trammer, turned down the lateral tunnel to join the tunnellers on B while Lyhan, Hacquet and Coppet, hunched over, began the approach to the work face.

They had not gone far – Lyhan had only counted off five measure markers – when Hacquet tapped his shoulder to stop. The bagger pointed to the roof. The supports had been forced slightly apart in a manner that suggested a bulge of flowsand forming above them.

Lyhan shook his head. There was no time to deal with it.

But before they could start moving again, they heard it.

All three men held still, attention focused, slowing their breathing to quiet the rasp of their rebreathers. Glow gas, pooled in livid swells on the floor of the tunnel, lit their calves, its light mixing with the faint light of the stick in its sconce.

Voices. Through the clay, beyond the supports, approaching, the speech a rasp of noise and hissing sibilants, rust mixed with blood. They had heard it, cross-talking over the vox-channels when they had fought in the trenches above: the battle-code employed by the enemy.

Now it was coming closer to them, muffled, obscured by the clay and the supports, but getting louder. Nearer.

Lyhan unsheathed his knife, slipping it from its hasp. Hacquet pushed the spiked knuckledusters he preferred for tunnel work onto his fingers. Coppet combined the two with his own-made knuckledusters, which sported serrated blades, jutting from them like the dewclaw of a dog.

They waited. Silent, as the voices drew closer. The enemy clearly did not bother with the sound discipline of the Deepers. Never mind their talking, they could even hear their footfalls, heavy boots crunching over poorly laid duckboard and ground-down clay.

Then, through the gap in the supports, catching sparks on the rockcrete, lights – winking, sparkle fast, then… passing.

The footfalls grew quieter. The voices more subdued.

Lyhan turned, looking in the direction of the sound, then without further sign the three men started moving back down the tunnel, tracking it. But as they went, the sounds grew quieter, more distant, until they faded away again to nothing.

Pushing the listening tubes into gaps in the rockcrete, they listened, faces taut with concentration. Lyhan looked to Coppet and Hacquet, checking they had heard enough, then signed for them to withdraw further down the tunnel.

The situation required speech.

Back at where Tavish pecked the remains of his seed they stopped, removing their rebreathers – the air circulating through the lateral tunnel allowed them to breathe without masks – and looked at each other.

‘Break in? Clear the tunnel?’ asked Coppet.

‘No time,’ said Lyhan.

‘They don’t know we’re here.’ Hacquet pointed in the direction he had heard the enemy moving. ‘That machine of theirs, it was tunnelling off line from us.’

‘There’s, what, a skin of clay between the tunnels?’ said Coppet. ‘Might collapse, then they’d see our supports.’

‘Didn’t look like they were searching much,’ said Lyhan. ‘Reckon they’re just following behind that machine.’

‘Could be gas inflow – the skin is thin enough for it,’ said Coppet. ‘Might be spark or black gas.’

‘Move Tavish up,’ said Lyhan. When Coppet looked askance at him, Lyhan added, ‘It’s close enough to the lateral to still get the airflow.’

‘And they might hear me moving the spoil,’ said Coppet.

‘Better do it quietly then,’ said Lyhan.

‘Don’t I always.’

‘And keep an ear when you’re bringing up the demo charges.’

‘What did I just say?’

‘If the skin collapses, we got to know, so keep an eye on that too.’

‘Come on!’

Lyhan grinned at his bagger and trammer. They all knew what to do, without being asked. That’s why they were the best team of tunnellers the Deepers had.

Refastening their rebreathers, they started back up the tunnel, taking Tavish in his cage.

They soon reached the narrow place where the two tunnels brushed up against each other. Even without listening equipment, they could hear the distant threshing sound of the enemy cutting machine boring through the clay, and as they listened there came the trundle of undamped cartwheels moving the spoil back up the tunnel to its head.

Lyhan shook his head. At one level, he was appalled at the lack of sound discipline being displayed by the enemy – it indicated a disregard for their own lives that was both confounding and characteristic – but at another level he was relieved to know that the enemy was not about to blow a countermine. That meant they could continue digging the attack tunnel.

Leaving Tavish a little down tunnel from the skin, the three men moved the rest of the way up to the tunnel face with practised silence. Each step was separated, the rhythm broken between them so that they did not fall into the march rhythm that Guardsmen so often adopted without even realising they were doing it. They stepped lightly and hunched over, the pools of glow gas growing more frequent and broader as they neared the face, sometimes lapping over the duckboard completely. Those sections of the tunnel required extra care with foot placement, the man behind watching the one in front.

Reaching the face, Lyhan slid into position. He had counted the measure markers on the way up: there was still another six metres to dig before target. They had twelve hours to do it.

He held up his fingers, giving the count to Hacquet and Coppet, who signed their understanding. It was going to be tight.

Bracing himself against the wedge of sandbags, Lyhan positioned his feet on the shoulders of the spade and pushed it into the clay.

First cut.

As Hacquet bagged the cut and Lyhan moved, automatically, to the next, he thought on what they would do if they got to sixty minutes before zero hour and they were still short of the target area.

Should they set and blow the mine there?

Lyhan knew that if they blew the mine short of the target – the great bastion on the Scar – the effect would merely be to open a huge crater in front of the bastion, creating an instant glacis up which the men of the Roane Deepers would have to struggle: they would then have succeeded in making the ideal kill-zone for the enemy. No, they had to tunnel to the target. Only then could they blow the mine.

The team settled into their rhythm: cut, bag, tram. Cut, bag, tram.

Lyhan moved the distance marker forward with each spade length he removed from the face, counting off the distance to target. Down to four metres now.

Cut, bag, tram.

Cut, bag, tram.

Muscles that had barely had a chance to rest began to cramp. On the floor, Lyhan could see the pain in Hacquet’s face as, again and again, he had to twist almost in two in the confined space to move the bagged clay back to where Coppet could reach it. Lyhan, lying on the sand wedge, could not see the trammer, but he could hear his soft movements as he ran the bags of clay spoil back down the tunnel on the trolley. On the return leg of those trips, Lyhan knew that Coppet would be moving the demolition charges, packs of strapped-together fyceline that Deeper procurers had acquired from the stores of better-equipped Imperial regiments, up the tunnel to the load-out space.

Cut, bag, tram.

Cut, bag, tram.

Marking off the distance. Down to three metres now.

It felt as if someone was slowly pouring acid into his bones, down into their marrow, and from there it was leaching into his muscles, eating them out from the inside. Lyhan felt himself a bag of blood; his vision was beginning to red over.

The kicker signed a break. There was no time, but he could not continue.

He lay back, not moving, staring at the ceiling just above his face but not seeing it. At his feet, Hacquet lay unmoving too, unable even to twist the other way to relieve the cramping of his back. Only Coppet kept going, tramming the spoil back down the tunnel, bringing the demo charges up it.

Lyhan reached beside him, found the water bottle and, unhitching the rebreather for a moment, raised it to drink. But so fogged had his vision become that he did not see the ceiling was too near: the bottle struck against the support, jerked its contents over his chest and then fell, clanging, onto the floor.

The kicker froze. Hacquet, previously unmoving, was now tense, straining to listen. Behind them, Coppet’s stealthy motion had also ceased.

They listened. Lyhan, the shock having cleared both mind and sight, eased his head round and looked at the motion trays – the bowls of water – that he could see from his digging position. The ripples his dropping the water bottle had caused on the surface of the trays were dying away. But even as he watched, Lyhan saw new ripples start.

As one, kicker and bagger reached for their listening tubes and pushed the metal into the clay. They lay there, tuning out the repeated thump of the artillery that was drawing towards a crescendo far above them, tuning in to the thrash-cut of the enemy’s digging machine, the staccato thrum of the enemy speaking and the thump of its footfalls.

They were all getting closer, following the sound trail that Lyhan had left them. Now, with the Deepers all lying silent and unmoving, the enemy had no further clues as to their direction but it seemed that he was sending his tunnelling machine boring into the clay in the remembered direction of the noise.

It was coming closer.

But they could not lie there, waiting. The artillery barrage was moving towards its final climax. After that, there would be the briefest of pauses while the Deepers moved out of their shelters, and then the attack.

Lyhan eased over onto his side so that he could sign Hacquet and Coppet in closer. He needed to speak to them.

‘We carry on. Three metres to go now.’

Hacquet pointed to where the sound of enemy digging was coming from: it was close enough for it to be heard without the listening tubes.

‘They’re making too much noise to hear us,’ said Lyhan.

Hacquet nodded. He glanced again in the direction of the sound. It was nearby. The three men all scanned up and down, trying to tell if the digging was on line to intersect with their tunnel: digging in three dimensions meant that there was always a good chance of going over or under an enemy tunnel. The noise sounded as if it came from above, but whether it was high enough they could not tell.

Lyhan picked up the spade and braced himself. Hacquet lay down again in the clay on the tunnel floor, made into a slurry by the water that Lyhan had spilled. Coppet, bent over, hefted the clay onto the tram.

Cut, bag, tram.

Cut, bag, tram.

The shock of detection had sent awareness surging through Lyhan’s body. He dug now with all the urgent precision that his years excavating the habs back on Roane had given him. Beneath him, Hacquet lay ready, making sure that no stray wedge of clay or occasional stone intrusion dropped from the face to give the enemy any further information as to their position. Behind them, Coppet moved the spoil in what was as close to silence as it was possible to achieve, the fat-greased wheels of his trolley making virtually no sound.

And while they dug and bagged and trammed, with the part of their minds and their senses not turned to the task in hand they listened to the enemy, approaching.

They worked like this for a further four hours. The air, scrubbed through the rebreathers, had gone from tasteless to acidic: it rasped the lungs with each breath. Their soak pads were dry now, and with no time to resoak them each breath was painful. However, the initial onrush of the enemy tunnelling machine seemed to have slowed. Although it was still approaching, the note of its digging had changed, as if the nature of the material it was tunnelling through had changed also. It was a harsher sound, more strident, almost resonant.

And then Lyhan slowly realised that he could taste iron in the air he was sucking in through his rebreather. For a moment he wondered if he had bitten his tongue and not even realised it. But his mouth was dry, gritty with clay dust.

The iron was in the air. And as his spade stopped, suddenly, brought short by an unyielding mass ahead, he realised that the iron was ahead of them too.

He got up off the sand wedge and scraped away the clay with his hand, grabbing the snap-lumen and bringing it closer to the face. Hacquet, seeing what he was doing, got up on his knees to see better.

They both saw the dull grey-red gleam of ore, iron ore, where Lyhan had rubbed away the clay.

The kicker shook his head. No. No, no, no.

Getting down low, he scraped frantically away at the clay at the bottom of the face, Hacquet helping him to clear it. But, again, they came up against the unyielding hard surface of iron ore.

Lyhan looked at Hacquet. Even with the rebreather covering most of the bagger’s face, he could see the despair. It was a despair he was certain was reflected in his own face. To come so far and then to meet an intruding seam of ore… Yes, they could dig through it, but ore took longer to excavate than the grey clay they had been cutting their way steadily through, and it was much harder to cut quietly. There was almost no chance that they could get through it in time – particularly as there was no way of knowing how broad the seam was.

Hacquet signed a suggestion. They could go down and around. Such a seam was often narrow; if it was, they could avoid it and go around it to the target.

Lyhan checked his timepiece. Even assuming the seam was narrow, there was no time to go the long way round it. They had to go through the seam, however much noise that made.

The kicker reached down beside the sandbags and picked up the spike – no more than a scavenged iron bar that he had sharpened at one end – and, looking to Hacquet, he pointed the spike at the face. The bagger paused, then nodded. But now, rather than lying down he got on his knees, close up to the face, as Lyhan searched over the ore face and, finding a seam, pushed the spike in as far as it would go.

Hacquet nodded.

Lyhan pulled, heaving, levering, until a lump of ore the size of an ork’s head came tumbling from the face. Hacquet caught it, but even with his clean catch the sound of the breaking ore was loud in comparison to their previous working. They both unconsciously stopped, listening, but the enemy continued his thrashing, cutting approach, apparently oblivious to any other sound.

Lyhan remembered the sense he had had that those infernal flesh machines could smell through the earth. Maybe it did not need to hear them. Maybe it could smell them.

With silence now less important than speed, Lyhan probed for another opening and, finding it, levered another lump of ore from the surface. This seemed to be going well. As this rate, they might even get through the ore faster than they would have tunnelled through the clay.

An hour later, he had come to realise the stupidity of that thought. Those initial lumps of ore had been outliers, parts of the seam that had been broken off by the immense pressures underground. Now they were into the seam proper and it was welded as tight as the stores of the Munitorum, and he had resorted to using a pickaxe to break it apart. The only blessing was that the ore seemed to have slowed the enemy’s tunnelling machine too.

Lyhan checked his timepiece again. There were only four hours until the artillery was due to fall silent. Up above his head, it was night on Hisk, but a night rendered explosive, incandescent daytime by the intensity of the artillery bombardment. Still, the tunnellers of the Deepers knew better than anyone else above ground how well earth and rock absorbed even the most powerful explosions: in the deep, it was still. The enemy was sheltering in his own deep places, waiting for the bombardment to stop, ready to emerge and man the lasguns and plasma weapons and bolters that waited on the emergence from the trenches of the Deepers. Then the slaughter would begin.

They were too late.

There was still another metre and a half to the target. Even if they cut through to the other side of the iron seam with the next pass, it was still too far to reach the target and prepare the mine in the time remaining.

Lyhan saw Hacquet looking at him, wondering why he had stopped digging.

‘It’s too late.’

Too late even for silence.

‘Why have you stopped working?’

That Coppet’s question was in words told that he already knew the answer.

‘We should go back,’ said Hacquet. ‘Join the attack. It’s not right for us to stay down here and let the rest of them do it.’

‘We can’t,’ said Lyhan. ‘We’re sealed. No contact with the surface.’ The kicker stared, without seeing, at the ore seam that had defeated them. ‘Better go back and tell Markwell we ain’t going to be able to blow the mine.’

‘Why?’ asked Hacquet. ‘He tells them up top, they all know they’re going to die. This way, they won’t know ’til it’s over.’

‘Wait.’ Coppet held up his hand. ‘What in all hells is that?’

The three men turned and looked back down the tunnel. Coming to them, through the pools of light cast by the snap-lumens, bouncing in refracting waves off the supports, tripping over the pockets of glow gas, was a song. A melody of quicksilver notes, trills, squeaks, pops and drills, as if all the improvised instruments of a Deepers marching band were playing the most intricate sections of their respective musical lines all at the same time. It should have been a cacophony but behind it was a musical intelligence, profound and deep in time, playing a song carried in its blood.

‘It’s bloody Tavish,’ said Hacquet. ‘He’s singing.’

‘Bobbins don’t sing,’ said Coppet. ‘That’s why I got him.’

‘This one is,’ said Lyhan. ‘He’s singing loud enough for the enemy to hear him.’ The kicker looked down the tunnel, suddenly stricken with a thought. ‘The skin place. They’ll hear his song through it, and realise they can cut through.’

Although it was impossible to run in the confines of the tunnel, the trammer, bagger and kicker scuttled back towards Tavish, not caring now if they bumped against support or prop. As they got closer, Tavish’s song grew louder, reverberating through the narrow tunnel, notes of cascading silver and squeaks so joyous it seemed as if the small bobbin made merry at the darkness of the galaxy that had confined him to a cage in the depths.

They could see Tavish now. Perched in the centre of his cage, chest puffed out, his whole body turned into a resonator for his song. Coppet, reaching Tavish first, slapped the cage, sending it swinging, but the little bobbin’s song did not falter.

‘Shut him up,’ hissed Hacquet, following.

‘How?’

‘Wring his sodding neck, I don’t care, just shut him up.’

‘Not Tavish.’

‘If you won’t, I will.’

Hacquet reached forward to grab the cage but Lyhan stopped him.

‘Too late.’ He pointed.

A push pick was boring through the gap between the supports. As they watched, another pick, wielded with great force, broke through above and began levering the supports apart. Through the gap, they could hear screams, babbling, an incoherent mess of sound.

Lyhan pushed himself tight against the near wall, making himself as invisible as he could to the enemy. Hacquet and Coppet did the same on the other side of the break. The kicker glanced across the opening gap, and the tools breaking it wider, to where Hacquet and Coppet were waiting, pushing knuckledusters onto their fists.

Right in front of the break point, as if they had been drawn to him, Tavish stood oblivious in his cage, head thrown back, beak wide, singing as if the world was new and he was greeting its first morning. And as the gap widened, Lyhan began to see hands and arms, scarified and self-mutilated, reaching through the gap, reaching out. Reaching for Tavish.

Tavish?

Suddenly, the chaotic sounds he could hear from the enemy’s tunnel began to resolve themselves into something coherent. Among the screams and growls and wails of things no longer human, some vestige of language and thought remained, and it was moaning, muttering, gibbering the same refrain, over and over and over.

‘Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop.’

Lyhan’s sights snapped to the bobbin. The enemy could not bear its song. He gestured to Hacquet and Coppet, pointing to Tavish, and the bagger and trammer signed their understanding.

Wait.

Arms were reaching through, up to the elbow.

Wait.

To the shoulder, fingers scrabbling at the air next to Tavish’s cage.

Wait.

A head, pushing through the gap.

Now.

Lyhan drove his knife into the back of the enemy’s neck, then used the dead man’s own momentum and the knife to lever the corpse forward, sprawling into the tunnel. Other hands, arms followed, sprouting from the widening gap like some monstrous anemone, and Hacquet and Coppet slashed and stabbed with their knives, the serrated edges sawing through flesh and tendon and bone.

Another head thrust through the gap, jaw extended, mouth screaming, ‘Make it stop, make it stop.’ A knife thrust in under the jaw made it stop.

And then it did stop.

Tavish stopped singing.

Lyhan waited, poised, expecting a new attack, but all was quiet. He glanced across the gap, and the bodies lying sprawled in it, to Hacquet and Coppet. Coppet nodded and, retrieving the mirror he carried, cautiously held it in front of the break in the wall.

It was clear. No more enemy were coming through.

Lyhan counted five dead. But they were all still recognisably human; the enemy cutting machine was not there.

Advancing cautiously, Lyhan went to the edge of the hacked-open passage between the two tunnels and waited there, listening. But he could hear nothing. Even the enemy tunnelling machine had fallen silent. He glanced back at Tavish. The bobbin, still silent, was preening his feathers as if it were perfectly usual for him to fill the tunnels with song.

Putting his face up against the hole, Lyhan scanned one way down the enemy tunnel while, from the other side, Hacquet looked the other way.

Clear.

But as he looked down the length of the tunnel, Lyhan saw how it tracked the bearing of their own attack tunnel.

It was sunk from beneath the enemy bastion.

Lyhan leaned over, kissed Tavish’s cage and turned to Hacquet and Coppet. ‘Get the demo charges. We’re going to blow the mine from the enemy’s tunnel.’

Understanding, sudden and complete, dawned in their faces.

‘We’ve got…’ Lyhan checked his timepiece. ‘An hour. Coppet, bring up the rest of the demo charges.’

‘Tavish, you brave bobbin, you,’ said Coppet, before turning and rushing back down the tunnel.

Lyhan called Hacquet over. ‘We’ve got to make sure there’s no more enemy down at the tunnel face.’

Hacquet nodded. ‘I’ll do that.’

‘I’ll seal the lift shaft.’

‘Fuse?’

‘I’ve got the remote detonator.’

Hacquet nodded, then disappeared through the gap, heading towards the tunnel face.

Lyhan hefted one of the demo charges that Coppet had already moved up tunnel. Not nearly enough for a mine, but more than sufficient to close off a shaft.

With charge in one hand and his other holding the knife, Lyhan started up the tunnel towards its head.

The enemy tunnel was broader and taller than their own, but still not high enough for him to move without stooping. The supports and struts were carved and graffitied with stomach-churning pictures and writing that, though in a script unknown to him, scratched its meaning at his eyes so that they wept.

Lyhan had advanced about fifteen metres when he heard it: a chitinous, chittering, whirring sound.

The cutting machine.

It emerged from a branch tunnel and turned towards Lyhan. It was a thing of metal and bone, of teeth and claws meeting and crossing and cutting, but behind and through the flailing limbs Lyhan saw – the final blasphemy – the quiet brown eyes of someone who had once been a human being before the enemy ruined him, grafting extra cutting limbs to his body, modifying jaws into crushing mandibles, mixing a man with some hideous ground-boring creature. Lyhan looked down at his knife as the creature, chittering, turned towards him, jaws clashing in an idiot rhythm as it advanced.

Crouching, Lyhan held out his knife, its blade stropped to a finer cutting edge than the rock-blunted teeth of the monstrosity.

‘Come on!’

The thing paused, chittering, whickering, then came scuttling towards him, eyes closing as its jaws opened. Lyhan threw the demo charge into its open maw, flinging himself back as the jaws, feeling contact, closed, then pressed the detonator.

The charge was a small one. It eviscerated the creature from inside, peeling it open as Lyhan hunkered down on the tunnel floor in a foetal position, arms wrapped over his face and head.

Hacquet found him there a minute later.

‘Face is clear.’ Hacquet pointed. ‘What was that?’

Lyhan held up his arm and Hacquet hauled him to his feet. ‘Cutting machine.’

‘Not much left.’

‘I’m going to need another demo charge. Used mine.’

‘Wait here. I’ll get it.’

Lyhan leaned against the wall as Hacquet scurried back to the break point into their own tunnel. With this amount of noise, the enemy would surely send an attack team down the shaft.

Hacquet hurried back, demo charge and fuse wire in hand. With the bagger leading, the two men made their way up the tunnel, moving as fast as they dared.

The branch tunnel from which the tunnelling creature had emerged was clear. The tunnel broadened and heightened as they went, so that they were able to stand upright. Hacquet pointed ahead to the bottom of the lift shaft. Lyhan counted off the paces as they rushed forward, tallying the distance from where the branch tunnel left the main channel.

Lyhan and Hacquet stepped into the tunnel head, moving together, scanning for enemy. But the space was clear, although littered with the filth of his presence, every surface scrawled and daubed with pictures or the vile, eye-scratching script of the Archenemy. There were two other tunnels radiating out from the tunnel head. Lyhan nodded to one, positioned himself by the other.

Clear, signalled Hacquet.

Lyhan’s tunnel was clear too. The kicker pointed up.

‘We’re right under target.’

Hacquet hefted the demo charge over to the lift shaft and, standing in it, started to strip the insulation from the end of the fuse wire.

The lift cable started rolling.

Hacquet threw one end of the fuse wire to Lyhan and, ramming the charge into the lift wall, started wiring it to the detonator pins while Lyhan unspooled it, spinning the drum as he stepped backwards. Hacquet glanced up, then back to the detonator pins, winding the fuse wire round one, then the other. At the other end, Lyhan cut the wire – he had only unspooled six metres – and, dropping the coil at his feet, started attaching the fuse to the detonator switch.

Hacquet glanced up again, looked at Lyhan.

‘Blow it!’ he yelled.

But Lyhan was still fixing the second wire to the switch.

Hacquet threw himself forward, running, as Lyhan fixed the second contact. He looked up. Hacquet was barely out of the tunnel head but he was screaming, ‘Blow it, blow it,’ and Lyhan pressed the contact.

The explosion propelled Hacquet like a missile down the tunnel. He slammed into Lyhan, sending him over. The kicker lay on his back for a moment, stunned, ears ringing, then sat up. The lift shaft had collapsed. Whoever had been coming down in that lift would stay in it.

Hacquet was lying in front of Lyhan, face down. The kicker grabbed him, turned him over. Hacquet stared up at the ceiling, gasping with pain, his right leg bent backwards.

‘My leg. I can’t move.’

‘You’d better set the charges then.’

Lyhan looked round. Coppet was standing there, loaded up with demo charges.

‘Don’t need no legs for that,’ the trammer added. ‘We’ll carry you out when you’re done.’

Hacquet nodded. Lyhan hauled him into a sitting position as Coppet dropped the first load of charges by them and set off back down the tunnel, a human explosives mule.

‘Go help him,’ said Hacquet.

Lyhan looked at Hacquet’s face, white and drawn. ‘Sure?’

For answer, Hacquet set to strapping the demolition charges together.

Lyhan set off after Coppet. Together, the two men relayed the demo charges from the attack tunnel to where Hacquet sat, fixing the explosives into the face of the shaft fall, his face set into a rictus of concentration and pain.

They had moved maybe half the demolition charges when Hacquet stopped Lyhan after his latest drop.

‘Listen.’

Lyhan, heart pumping, tried to slow down his breathing so that he could hear, but he did not have to quiet himself much to hear the thrash-cut of the enemy’s cutting machines, like a hundred knives slicing through the earth. The sound was coming from three directions: above, from the shaft, and horizontally from the direction of the two other tunnels that ran to the tunnel head.

Lyhan turned his head, listening.

‘They’re close,’ said Hacquet.

Lyhan nodded. ‘Not close enough.’

‘How long?’

Lyhan checked his timepiece. ‘Twenty-three minutes.’

‘Get a move on, then.’

The kicker started back down the tunnel while Hacquet set the demo charges he had brought.

‘That’s all.’

Lyhan put the last demo charge down next to Hacquet. He turned his head, listening. The sounds were closer now, much closer. He put his hand on the tunnel wall. He could feel it shaking under his hand.

Coppet looked at him. ‘They’ll break through soon.’

Lyhan grinned. ‘They’ll get a surprise if they do.’ He turned to Hacquet. ‘Come on, let’s get you up.’

But the bagger did not move. He held up the detonator. ‘This is all the fuse wire we’ve got.’

‘But I brought a reel,’ said Lyhan.

Hacquet pointed to the fall blocking the tunnel head. ‘It’s under there. You dropped it when the charge blew.’

The kicker stared at the clay face, then started pulling at it with his hands, scrabbling at the dirt.

Coppet grabbed him, pulling him back.

‘There’s no time,’ said Hacquet. He looked up at Lyhan and Coppet. ‘I’ll give you as long as I can. Now go.’

Lyhan stared down at the bagger, sitting with his back propped against the mine, detonator in hand. He nodded.

Hacquet smiled. ‘Like you said, they’ll get a surprise when they break through.’

The kicker and the trammer turned and started running down the enemy tunnel, heads low, the flesh on the back of their necks involuntarily shrinking as they waited for the whoosh of fyceline to come down the tunnel after them, but they reached the break point and dived through into their own attack tunnel.

They had gone nearly halfway when Coppet stopped, Lyhan running into him.

‘Tavish,’ said Coppet.

‘I’ll get him,’ said Lyhan. ‘You go. Get the blast doors shut.’

Coppet set off down the tunnel.

Lyhan turned back, ran to the cage and picked up the bobbin. Tavish chirped expectantly, as if expecting a seed twist, and then indignantly as he was bumped around in his cage.

Lyhan checked his timepiece. The final seconds were running down. There was no time to get to the end of the tunnel.

But there were other ways of sealing off a tunnel. Putting Tavish down, Lyhan grabbed the crosspiece across the gap between the tunnels and began to haul on it. It was here where Hacquet had noticed the bulge, which had made them stop and alerted them to the enemy tunnel. Muscles cracking, bones creaking, Lyhan pulled and pulled and pulled, trying to break the crosspiece from the grip of the rockcrete.

The enemy, in breaking through, had cracked the rockcrete in many places. Without that, it would have been impossible to shift, but with effort Lyhan felt the crosspiece begin to move. As it did, the bulge in the clay above it swelled and, like a blood blister, popped.

The flowsand knocked him backwards, immediately covering his legs up to the waist. Lyhan struggled against its force but it was implacable and every moment more of it piled on top of him. It was rising up his chest now, crushing him beneath its weight, and spilling through the skin into the enemy tunnel, filling that too.

Lyhan flailed with his hands, trying to dig the lower half of his body out, but the flowsand covered each scoop with more. Pressed up against the side of the tunnel, the flowsand up to his armpits, Lyhan struggled desperately but its weight was such that he could not move his legs at all.

It was up to his neck now, flowing with the speed of a warp tide. Lyhan heard a desperate cheeping and saw Tavish, his cage jammed up against a support, the flowsand rising up and up towards the little bobbin.

The flowsand rose to his chin. Lyhan held his arms up over the rising sediment, trying to make some sort of air pocket around his face, but he knew it was useless. He was about to drown in sand.

Then Hacquet blew the mine.

The pressure wave came down the enemy tunnel and reached the break, pulsing through the flowsand and hitting Lyhan with the suddenness of a hot shot. He did not even have time to remark on Hacquet’s success before the underground dark swallowed him.

Lyhan woke, choking. Flowsand plugged his nose and filled his mouth. He coughed, but the sand held his body tight as a vice: he could not move. The flowsand rasped in his nose as he struggled not to breathe but, opening his eyes, Lyhan realised he could see, dimly. The top of his head was clear. He strained, strained with all that remained in his body, to turn his head, to move it just a little. The flowsand shifted, trickling back, and he felt air upon his face and in his mouth and he breathed, a great gulping-in breath that became a paroxysm of coughing as the sand in his mouth went down his throat. But he could breathe.

Lyhan felt the sand shift again, flowing off him and, turning his head, he saw Coppet, using his hands as shovels, scooping the flowsand away from him.

‘He did it,’ said Coppet. ‘He did it.’

Lyhan nodded, spitting flowsand from his mouth as Coppet freed his legs. The kicker stared at the breach. The pressure shock had sealed it as firmly as a rockcrete seal.

Coppet pulled Tavish’s cage out of the flowsand and then hauled Lyhan to his feet.

The kicker stared up the tunnel.

‘He bloody well did,’ he said.

Six hours after zero hour, when operational isolation was lifted, the first lift from the deep shelter of the Roane Deepers reached the subsurface bunker. Chief Sapper Markwell, with Sapper Lyhan and Sapper Coppet, emerged into the light.

Although the light was gloomy, filtered through tunnels to the surface, it seemed blinding to men who had spent the last three weeks below ground. Markwell blinked, trying to see clearly.

Around him, on makeshift stretchers, were casualties. But the floor of the bunker was not covered: there was space. Between them, medicae circulated, tending to the wounded. One looked round to see the men, standing like ghosts at the entrance to the lift.

‘You. Who gave you permission to come here? You’re not wounded.’

‘Where’s the colonel?’ asked Markwell.

‘He’s moved the colours to the top of the Scar,’ said the medicae.

Markwell ran his fingers down over his face. ‘They’ve taken it,’ he said.

The medicae stopped and looked more closely at Markwell, Lyhan and Coppet. ‘You didn’t know? Seems like the earth just exploded and swallowed all the enemy trenches and redoubts as we were about to attack. Most likely their ammunition store. After that, it was straightforward. Pretty bloody elsewhere but we’ve broken through and we’ll turn the front from here.’

Markwell nodded but Lyhan was looking at the injured men lying on the makeshift beds. He turned to the medicae.

‘These are Bluebloods,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said the medicae. ‘Of course.’

‘But it was the Deepers on this sector. Didn’t any of them get hurt?’

The medicae laughed. ‘That rabble. The general decided two days before zero hour that they would never take this sector so he gave it to us and moved the Deepers down the line. Just as well he did – from what I heard, the Deepers did just what you would expect and messed up their attack. Heard it was over fifty per cent casualties. Still, who would miss them?’

Lyhan stared at him. ‘Yeah, who would.’

The medicae turned away but Lyhan grabbed his shoulder.

‘One thing. What’s the name of the general?’

‘Dorf. Didn’t you know?’

‘No. No one told us.’

Warmaster Slaydo looked up from the data-slate to the aide, Commissar Sharma, who had presented it to him.

‘So you are telling me that the landslip that swallowed General Dorf’s quarters and took that bloodstained ogre down into the depths was not natural but a deliberately planted mine? A mine planted by his own troops?’

‘Yes, lord general,’ said Commissar Sharma. ‘I am afraid I am.’

‘Who?’

‘That, I have not yet established. But I thought I had better apprise you of this urgent finding before I return to continue the investigation…’ The commissar’s voice trailed away. He watched as the Warmaster closed the data-slate and, slowly and deliberately, set it to clear all memory.

‘Warmaster?’

Slaydo looked at the commissar. ‘The mad old bastard had his victory. This way, I won’t have to suffer any more of them.’

‘But, Warmaster…’

Slaydo held up his hand. ‘What do you think would happen if there ever grew up among the men the thought, even the hint of the suspicion, that this might be possible? That one of our generals died not by the enemy’s hand, but by the troops under his own command?’ The Warmaster handed the blank data-slate back to Sharma. ‘The investigation is closed, commissar. General Dorf will have his victory memorial, finally, and we can get on with the crusade.’

‘Yes, Warmaster.’ Sharma saluted and turned to go.

‘Oh, and commissar?’

‘Yes, Warmaster?’

‘Transfer the Roane Deepers to General Bulledin’s command.’

‘Yes, Warmaster.’

ARMADUKE

WRITTEN BY JOHN FRENCH

Preface

Another story set in the crusade’s past continuity, written by another High Lord veteran of the Heresy series. John French absolutely knows what he’s doing, and what he’s doing is writing memorable, atmospheric and often lyrical stories.

Here, he delivers a tale about an ‘old favourite’ from the Gaunt’s Ghosts books, exploring events that took place before said favourite’s first appearance (in Salvation’s Reach). It’s gripping, it’s deeply linked to the series’ continuity, and it weaves a fabric of credible myth and old folklore that seems like it’s always existed. It’s about custom, habit, tradition, legend, superstition… plus a modicum of shooty-death-kill-in-space, obviously.

John’s story is called Armaduke. I’ll say no more than that…

‘Out to sea my love waits for me… waits for me…

But a ghost my love is and will ever be… ever be…

My love sung to me… sung to me and the shadow at my back I didn’t see…

Didn’t see, didn’t see… and now my bones my ghost love keeps from me.’

– Refrain from a gang crew song popular in
Battlefleet Sabbat during the later crusade

769.M41
THE 14TH YEAR OF THE SABBAT WORLDS CRUSADE

VERGHAST – HIGH ANCHOR

‘It’s an active post, front line.’

‘The front line has moved.’

‘Warships move too.’

‘Warship? I looked it up, pulled its records. It’s practically in the wreckers’ yard.’

‘The most revered ships of the fleet, of any fleet, are the oldest.’

‘Not this one. It doesn’t even have a battle group designation. You know what that means? Escort duty, shepherding transports between back-worlds.’

‘Verghast is hardly a back-world, you arse! The size of the shitstorm that went off there! It was a full-sphere engagement – macro casualties, mass enemy engine deployments. The Heritor himself was there, and died.’

‘“Was” – the key part being it’s done, and the only reason that a ship like this one is going to have for being there now is to sit guard while the Munitorum pick up the pieces on the surface, or to nursemaid supply ships. My first full fleet commission and it’s one up from a punishment assignment. I mean… tell me I am wrong?’

‘You’re probably not wrong.’

‘What kind of a friend are you?’

‘The kind who will listen to you talk for far too long about how the God-Emperor, and the great and wondrous mechanism of His Imperium, has not seen fit to assign newly blessed-with-rank Third Lieutenant Miletus Cern to the most glorious and honour-laden post available in the battlefleet.’

‘Fair point… Accept my apologies?’

‘No need – you’ve already got a long tour in a void-wreck as penance.’

‘Thanks.’

‘My pleasure. What did you say it was called again? The ship, I mean?’

‘The Highness Ser Armaduke.’

‘Stand by,’ the servitor voice crackled from a speaker-grille as the shuttle lurched. Miletus Cern’s eyes opened to grainy amber light. The tone of vibration in the shuttle’s hull had changed. Thrusters were firing, coasting its moment down as it lined up on its docking arc. He blinked. A loader was grinning at him from across the compartment. The man’s teeth were crimson spikes of metal. He nodded. The man grinned wider. The whole frame was rattling now. Ties holding supply crates to the deck creaked. Sunlight came through a slot viewport next to him as the shuttle turned. He craned his neck to look out. Verghast looked back at him through the armaglass, its sun a burning circle above its terminator. He could see other craft, glimmer flecks catching the sun. Gordiol Station was still visible, its rough wheel shape a silhouette against the world beneath.

The station had been busier than he’d expected, but then he had nothing to measure that expectation against. In his head, he had thought that after victory and with the war front already moving, it would be quiet, maybe even deserted, a ghost port send-off for a dead-end posting. He had arrived on a supply transport and got a hop to the orbital station with a lighter carrying an Administratum delegation. Pandemonium, that had been his first impression of Gordiol Station. Ships and people and crates, and the reek of air recycled in different hulls mingling. The lighter had put down next to a macro-lifter stencilled with medicae marks. A column of wounded, some walking, some wheeled on stretchers under tangles of tubes, was slowly feeding into the open doors in the hull. There were soldiers, hundreds of soldiers, all in different uniforms, talking and shouting to each other. Servitors clanked past under heavy loads. Dull-faced Munitorum scribes bent over data-slates and spools of parchment.

He had had to force his way against currents of people, and hunt down a transport destined for the Highness Ser Armaduke. He had almost missed it. None of the docking officers or scribes had known anything about the ship, and only when Miletus had shown them his order docket had they noted the alphanumeric code punched into the edge of the parchment and sent him running down to where an old supply transport was getting ready to cast off. He had made it, just.

The sun and stars moved beyond the viewport armaglass. Miletus twisted, looking; the ship had to be coming into view soon…

A cliff of metal eclipsed the sun, and the world.

The Highness Ser Armaduke was a Tempest-class frigate, a little under one and a half kilometres from prow to stern. She was not a graceful ship. The shipwrights who laid down her bones had made her to fight according to doctrines that framed war in the void as vicious brawls won by those who could out-punch and out-weather their enemies. The Tempest-class embodied that creed. Smaller than a ship of the line, it packed twice the gun yield of other craft of a similar size. Skinned in reinforced armour, it was a short-range mauler that battered its opponents into ruin. Brutal, pugnacious, the Highness Ser Armaduke and her sisters were now a monument to the shifting nature of Naval doctrine, relics that endured by stubbornness rather than favour.

Crenellated slabs of armour and tiered macro-batteries layered the Highness Ser Armaduke’s flanks. Towers, aerials and turrets rose from her back in a jagged mountain range that peaked with the command bastion set two-thirds back on her spine. He could see the mouths of gun batteries grow in his eyes as the shuttle banked closer, each fifteen metres across, at best guess. Porthole lights gleamed here and there, and guide beacons blinked on the tips of sensor arrays.

The shuttle came level. The ship’s flank grew in the viewport until it was all Miletus could see. The slot opening of a hangar bay briefly flicked past, and then the shuttle was turning in, engines growling and whining. The frame juddered as it settled onto the deck. The cargo compartment lights sputtered from amber to green. The loaders were already on their feet, releasing straps holding the crates. Miletus released his own harness, slung his kit sack and dragged his kit chest down the ramp as it opened.

‘You are late,’ came a clipped voice. ‘Get the load clear in five.’ He looked up as he reached the deck. A woman in the uniform of the Commissariat was walking across the deck towards them.

‘Gonna take longer than that,’ said one of the loaders, who had not seen who was talking. He stiffened as he looked around.

‘Five minutes and decrementing,’ said the commissar. Her blue gaze was like the aim of a gun barrel. ‘This deck will be clear.’

The loaders nodded and began to hurry, snapping straps and cargo nets free, dragging crates down the ramp with mag hooks. Miletus glanced around, aware of the quiet in the hangar bay. It was empty apart from the shuttle and a scattering of armsmen and tech-priests.

‘Your assignment docket.’

The words snapped his head around. The commissar was right next to him. Her gloved hand held out. He fumbled a salute before putting his kitbag and chest down.

‘Here, commissar,’ he said, holding out his commission and assignment paperwork. She unfolded it, eyes scanning the words and seals while tapping on a data-slate. She had grey tabs on the shoulders of her uniform that he did not recognise.

He swallowed with a dry mouth. The Commissariat had a presence in all Naval and Astra Militarum units. Hard, often brutal, they were not to be treated with anything other than complete respect and a lot of caution. But why was this commissar the only officer in the almost deserted hangar?

‘Did you have any interaction with anyone on Gordiol Station?’ she asked, looking up from the paperwork.

‘No… I mean, yes, commissar. I had to find a shuttle.’

‘Is that why you are late to report?’

‘I was not given a transit schedule, commissar.’

‘Did you show your docket or mention the name of your assigned ship to anyone?’

‘Yes, to the dock officers and scribe – I couldn’t find the shuttle.’

‘Time and location of these interactions?’

He gave them to her, hearing himself hesitate as he tried to remember if he had looked at a chron. She waited, tapping details into her data-slate as he gave them.

‘Anyone else?’

‘No, commissar.’

‘Did you notice if you were observed or followed?’

‘No, commissar, not that I was aware of,’ he replied, wondering what these questions meant.

The last of the crates were clear of the deck. The loaders were hurrying up the ramp and the shuttle’s engines were cycling up.

‘You are not part of the ship’s complement until you have submitted to the shipmaster. This hangar is a secure area, so you will have to remain for now. My name is Commissar Kader. You will follow my commands until you get to the shipmaster, understand?’

‘Yes, commissar,’ he said.

‘Good, now get out of the way. You move, speak or do anything without my order, and I will sanction you.’

He saluted, suddenly very aware of the bolt pistol holstered at her hip. The shuttle was boosting out of the hangar bay as he fell in behind her; she strode across the hangar deck to where the armsmen and Mechanicus priests waited. Miletus felt his mind folding over and over. What was going on? One of the armsmen gave him a desultory salute, which Miletus returned. They all wore metal pressure armour and were carrying stockless shot cannons.

‘You’ll need this, son,’ said an armsman with the flash marks of a sergeant-at-arms, holding out a breath mask. Miletus pulled it over his head, fumbling with straps and flow valves. He remembered the first decompression exercise in training, the sudden thump as the compartment vented and the panic as he tried to breathe in and found that he was drowning in vacuum.

The sergeant-at-arms glanced at a wrist-mounted data-console.

‘Shuttle will be out of the exclusion zone in four minutes, twelve seconds and counting, commissar.’

‘Full alert,’ said Kader, pulling on a compact mask and goggles. ‘The cargo will be coming in as soon as the zone is clear.’

Safeties clicked off guns. Behind them, the tech-priests clicked and buzzed at each other. Miletus felt his already rising disquiet reaching up his spine. What in the Throne’s name was going on?

The deck began to vibrate. The outer hull doors pulled wider, opening the whole width of the hangar bay. The glittering tension of a void field blurred the stars and blackness beyond. He could see a sliver of Verghast at the edge of the view. Ship lights and trans-atmospheric engines blinked close to it. One began to grow brighter, the dot swelling to a disc. For a moment, Miletus thought it was a single craft closing with them. Then the light separated, and he saw that it was not one but five. They accelerated, two sets of engine lights curving wide as three pushed forwards.

A close escort formation, he thought. The two craft peeling away would be interceptors that would watch over the remaining three as they pushed through the void shield envelope and into the hangar. His ears popped as the pressure in the hangar shifted. The temperature dropped.

The lead craft was a bulk lifter, the kind used to shift tank squadrons or heavy engine units from orbit to surface: a hog with a big gut and bigger lift. Green-and-tan camo covered its hull. Fresh blocks of spray blanked its unit markings.

Twin Vulture gunships followed it in, their doors opening. Figures in grey puzzle-pattern fatigues and breath masks dropped to the deck as the gunships held steady, thrusters screaming. The troopers spread out. Miletus had seen Naval security forces and Imperial Guard as a cadet, and he could read the hard professionalism in the way the troopers moved. They ringed the bulk lifter as it settled to the deck, guns ready. The noise of the engines rolled from the walls and deck. Miletus could feel it vibrating through his skin into his bones.

‘Stand by,’ said Kader, and Miletus blinked at the sound of the vox inside his breath mask.

The lifter’s engines were still whining at full power and the gunships still hovering as one of the troopers jogged over to Kader. The commissar drew and levelled her bolt pistol. Miletus felt his mouth open in shock. The trooper stopped, aiming a bullpup fitted carbine back at the commissar.

‘Authenticate,’ said Kader.

‘Code alpha-one-niner-two-gimel,’ said the trooper. ‘Reciprocate.’

‘Code phi-gamma-seven-two-one,’ said Kader.

The trooper lowered his carbine.

‘Major Hexil,’ he said.

‘Commissar Kader – special secondment,’ the commissar replied with a nod. ‘What is the status of the cargo, major?’

‘Secure, stable. We have one squad inside with Mechanicus minders. All report and corroborate that the objects are secure and inert.’

‘Alright, let’s not hang around – offload.’

Hexil nodded, turned and raised a hand. The doors on the belly of the bulk lifter opened. Gas vented into the frigid air. Miletus was staring, eyes fixed on the space beyond the unfolding tongue of the shuttle’s cargo ramp. More troopers in puzzle-greys backed out, guns pointed into the hold space. The gun mounts on the hovering gunships twitched.

A shape came into view on the cargo ramp. Tracked battle servitors flanked it, and tech-priests in deep red walked behind it, incense smoke puffing from censers. At first, Miletus was not sure what he was looking at – it looked to be a litter of black iron on heavy tracks. He could see tangles of pipes and humming mechanisms clinging to its sides. The blue-white dome of a stasis field cloaked its upper surface. The air hummed and swam where it met the field. There was something inside, something beneath the shimmering surface of stopped time. He could see pieces of chromed metal, shapes that looked like great bladed wheels, segmented lengths of brass and carbon-black substances. There were marks on some of the objects. It was like a pile of metallic flotsam thrown up on the shore of some strange, oil-dark sea.

Something in his mind did not like the shapes. His eyes could make no sense of what they were supposed to be. He could see soot and dust and ash clinging to some pieces. Were those bones amongst the metal: vertebrae fused into cogwork, femurs wrapped in steel? He blinked. His eyes were stinging. His mouth was dry. He could taste acid. Somewhere at the back of his head he could hear something… echo sounds… like a metallic lock clicking…

A hand on his shoulder brought his head around. The sergeant-at-arms was looking at him.

‘Orders are not to look directly at ’em, sir.’

Miletus blinked again and then nodded. He was breathing harder than he’d thought. He kept his eyes down, aware that the first litter was rolling across the hangar, and that another was coming down the shuttle’s ramp, the shadow of a third behind it.

‘What are they?’ he asked out loud.

‘Be silent!’ snapped Kader. He looked at her, noticed the lines of tension in her face above her breath mask.

Miletus kept his gaze down as the procession moved across the hangar. He could hear the tech-priests humming a low dirge and taste the sharp electrostatic tang of the stasis fields. A tech-priest hurried between each of the litters, checking pieces of machinery, before turning towards Kader and Major Hexil and making the sign of the cog.

‘Cargo unloaded,’ said Kader into the vox. ‘Proceed to lockdown.’

The shuttle ramp closed, and the vessel rose back into the air, pivoted and pushed back into the void.

The tech-priests who had been waiting in the hangar hurried forwards. Servitors dragged great blocks of machinery next to the three litters. Thick cables were connected to sockets. A fresh pulse of active charge rose to blend with the hum of the stasis fields. The hull doors were grinding shut. The gunships settled to the deck, engines spooling down. The hull doors sealed with a dull boom. Hexil and his troopers were moving, unloading heavy weapons and tripod mounts from backpacks. Heavy mag-locks clamped the litters to the deck with dull thumps. The tech-priests’ drone rose to a chorus, the incense thickening as displays lit on the blocky machines. One of the priests glided towards Kader. Spines of charge coils projected from its hunched back and multiple limbs of articulated brass hung inside the sleeves of its robe. Its face was a mosaic of crystal lenses inside a deep hood.

‘The specimens are sanctified by field and system,’ it said, its voice a flat buzz. The charge coils on its back sparked in time with its words. ‘Primary and auxiliary power connection and interface have been made. Sensory oversight has been ordained. The rites are complete.’

Kader nodded, pulling the breath mask from her face and putting the peaked cap of her office back on.

‘Major?’ she called to Hexil.

‘We are secured, commissar.’

‘Good, then I had better go and talk to the shipmaster.’

She turned and began to walk towards where more armsmen waited beside an exit hatch. Hexil fell in beside her, two of his troopers with him. The sergeant-at-arms and a cluster of the armsmen followed. The sergeant tapped Miletus on the arm as he passed.

‘You too, sir,’ he said. ‘The shipmaster will want you to report soon as your feet are on deck.’

Miletus shook himself, picked up his sack and chest, and followed. He paused once as he stepped through the hatch out of the hangar and glanced back to the three blurred shapes under their shrouds of flickering blue.

What in the light of Terra are they?

‘I appreciate your authority, commissar, but now is the time for those answers you have been promising.’

Shipmaster Spika sat in the worn leather of his command chair, gaze levelled at Kader. His features were hard, but old, like wood baked by sun and dried by salt. To be near his stare felt like being in a gun’s sight line. Miletus – watching from the side of the command platform, just behind Kader and Hexil – felt as though one flick of Spika’s eyes and he would be lost to a shell blast.

‘This ship is–’ began Kader.

‘My ship,’ said Spika, his voice level. ‘The Highness Ser Armaduke is the God-Emperor’s, and I am the one ordained and ranked to look after her on His behalf. I have orders to report and take on board a cargo of damaged Mechanicus materiel and transport it to an unspecified location. Since arriving, you have found me, showed me the letter from fleet and crusade command ordering my full cooperation, and I have given you that. Now I have just taken on a cargo with a vermillion-level security docket and you are telling me that my shift orders are no longer true. You are going to have to fill in a lot of the blanks before this ship moves.’

‘Shipmaster, this mission is–’ began Major Hexil, but Spika cut through him.

‘I did not address you, major. You will be silent until I do so.’

The major closed his mouth. The Imperial Guard officer had identified himself and his unit as part of the Urdeshi Fourth Light, seconded to Commissariat auxiliary duty. Hexil oozed the kind of lean hardness that demanded caution and respect. The hardening in his eyes as he looked at Spika made Miletus want to shrink even further back from the exchange. If Spika noticed, he gave no sign of caring. He raised his eyebrows, his gaze still fixed on Kader.

‘Commissar?’

Kader’s mouth thinned, then she nodded. ‘Neither of us have the luxury of spending time on drawing out lines of authority.’

‘Neither of us have the luxury of being less than frank with one another,’ said Spika, eyes glittering.

Miletus had read everything he could find on record about the shipmaster. A strong man, cited for participation in several bold and decisive actions in the early stages of the crusade, decorated for personal action and for maintenance of command under fire and extreme difficulty. There were other sections of the record too, but they were inaccessible to an officer as junior as Miletus. There were just the details of his postings, promotions and noted actions – the whole reading like the charted journey of a man climbing a mountain only to drop down a chasm. Promotion and service had seen him move up, steadily. He had served on some of the most hallowed ships of the fleet beside some of its most feted officers. He had been first lieutenant under Vice Admiral Tralgo, no less. Ship command had followed, as had a number of favourable citations, then the cliff and the fall into marginal duties.

That meant one of two things: a serious failure in duty that had not been a matter of record, or a catastrophic loss in the political manoeuvres of the fleet and crusade command staff. Looking at Spika now – radiating command while eyeball to eyeball with a commissar – Miletus thought he had a good idea which was the case.

After a long second, Spika rose from his chair and walked towards a set of wood-lined doors at the back of the command deck.

‘All officers of the deck, attend.’

Kader opened her mouth to speak.

‘Not a point I am going to give on,’ he said, before her objection had reached her tongue.

Miletus hesitated, unsure of where he should be. As though in answer, Spika looked directly at him.

‘Mister Cern, until you are allocated a station you are an officer of the bridge. That means you should be following.’

Miletus saluted and hurried to join the officers making towards the doors. The space beyond was a stateroom, small compared to those of some ships. Pictures hung on the walls, scenes of mythic idylls in faded oil framed by heavy gilt. The table in the middle of the room was polished wood. The image of an old Terran compass rose sat at its centre, inlaid in yellowing bone. Miletus noticed that small pieces of the inlay were missing. Busts of stern-faced Naval officers that he did not recognise looked down at him from niches.

The room and all its details felt like a microcosm of the ship as a whole: old, its grandeur worn down by use, its style and pride fitted to a different place and time. Filled with bodies it felt cramped, a space put to a use that it was not intended for. Miletus noticed that most of the officers looked either young or old, with little in between: a Master of Artifice with her white-grey hair cropped close above a creased face, a second lieutenant who barely looked older than Miletus. At the back, standing next to the sealed doors, he noticed the sergeant-at-arms who had been in the hangar. The face that had been under the pressure helm was clean-shaven, glossy scars webbing the dark skin. Blue augmetic lenses sat in place of his eyes, and half of his jaw was an arc of brushed steel.

Spika looked around at his officers and then at Kader. Major Hexil stood next to her.

‘Proceed,’ said Spika.

Kader paused for a second.

‘There are details of this mission that are sequestered and cannot be revealed.’

‘My experience is that there are rarely missions when you get the whole story,’ said Spika. A murmur of nervous laughter flitted through the room. ‘Let’s start with what you have brought onto my ship.’

Miletus noticed Major Hexil shift and glance at the commissar. Kader kept her gaze on Spika.

‘You are aware that the enemy action on Verghast was initiated and commanded by one of the Archenemy’s high warlords.’

‘By the Heritor Asphodel, may his soul and works burn for all eternity.’

‘Just so, and that the Heritor brought with him to war not only armies enslaved to his will, but weapons and devices of war.’

‘War engines, corrupted Mechanicus battle machines,’ said Spika.

Kader shook her head. ‘The Heritor did not only corrupt. He created. Devices and artifices that fuse machine and the warp, and even flesh. Some the size of Titans, some no larger than a bullet casing. No two are the same, but all of them possess immense capacity for destruction. The Militarum have a name for them…’

‘Woe machines,’ said Hexil.

The officers looked at the Urdeshi major.

‘Devilish things of infinite malice and cunning.’

‘The Heritor Asphodel fell…’ said Spika.

‘He did,’ said Kader. ‘But his woe machines still exist, and we do not know how many he created, or for what purposes.’

‘I think I understand,’ said Spika. His face was grave. ‘You have got hold of some of these woe machines, and they are now sitting in the hangar bay of my ship.’

Kader nodded. ‘Three of them. All were destroyed in the battle. Our associates in the Mechanicus salvaged them and rendered them inert so that they could be transported to a forge enclave and analysed.’

‘For what purpose?’ asked Spika.

‘For victory. More than that you may not know, and I cannot say.’

‘If they were destroyed, why the extra security measures?’ asked the white-haired Master of Artifice.

‘We do not know the full purpose of the Heritor’s creations, nor their capabilities. Some can suborn other machines, others mask their true purpose, all are lethal. Additionally, there is the matter of knowledge and contingency. If the Archenemy knows what we are doing, they will try to stop us. Then there is the question of moral threat…’

‘Moral threat?’ asked Spika.

‘To know is to be vulnerable. This is the high malefic artifice – it threatens even by its presence.’

‘And if we go down, what is one more old mistress of war lost on the tides?’

‘The Highness Ser Armaduke will not be alone. Two other vessels also loaded with specimens will join it for the voyage. They will watch us. We them. This cargo must reach its destination, even if only in part.’

‘And if there is a sign of malefic influence, or if the containment of these hopefully dead devices fails, then we burn each other from the void.’

‘Just so,’ said Kader, and she took a thick packet of parchment from the inside pocket of her coat. Miletus noticed the crests of the Fleet Admiral’s Cadre and the Commissariat on the thick, red seals.

Kader slid the packet across the table to Spika.

‘This is a new order tasking and operating procedure. It covers the particulars of what I have just outlined.’

Spika broke the seals, eyes moving across the loops of quilled sentences and punch-printed data.

‘Major Hexil is in command of the security of the specimens and is under my command. He and I will coordinate with your crew over wider ship security.’

Spika was turning the pages of the order tasking. Miletus did not need to know the man well to know that he was less than happy – furious, more like, but still controlled.

‘Any deviation or failure will be met with immediate and maximum censure,’ said Kader.

‘Break this down and issue orders ship-wide as needed,’ said Spika, handing the parchment to his first officer. ‘Any slip up and I will shoot the bilge slime responsible myself.’ He turned his gaze back on Hexil and Kader. ‘My thanks for your forthrightness, commissar. The Highness Ser Armaduke is ready to serve.’

Kader gave a clipped nod, Hexil a salute, and they moved towards the door.

‘Get to it,’ said Spika to the officers around him, ‘and make damned sure this is done by the numbers. Dismissed.’

A scattering of salutes and Miletus suddenly found that he was the only one standing still. He came to attention as Spika moved towards him.

‘Sir, Third Lieutenant Cern reporting.’

Spika kept walking. ‘Dalbract!’ he called.

The sergeant-at-arms by the door saluted.

‘Third Lieutenant Cern is attached to your section, for the voyage. Mister Cern, your order is to keep your eyes open and your bones out of trouble and to do whatever Dalbract advises you as if he were the voice of Saint Sabbat herself.’

‘Aye, shipmaster,’ said Miletus, saluting again as Spika moved away. He looked around to see the sergeant-at-arms grinning at him. His teeth were black and silver pegs.

‘Best follow me, sir.’

VERGHAST – SYSTEM EDGE

‘No, sir. Stop. Fasten it like that and the moment the helmet pressurises it will crush your neck.’

Miletus’ hands went still on the heavy brass catches. Dalbract’s hands, bulked by gloves, reached up and moved Miletus’ fingers into place.

They were in an arms locker, three decks down from the bridge in the Highness Ser Armaduke’s command castle. Like the rest of the ship, and the command areas in particular, the arms locker had an air of worn and cracked grandeur at odds with the ship’s modest role. The weapon racks were wooden, the major supports carved with eagles that hid scraps of gilt in the folds of their feathers. The gear, too, was old – the stocks of guns worn; armour and pressure suits patched, or clearly unserviceable, but still touched with the markers of a brash opulence: silk and velvet washed of colour, starburst and aquila studs on scabbards worn like the prize ribbons of an old show brawler in a travelling fete. Gaudy reminders of youth now battered down to slow muscles, bones webbed with fractures that would never heal, fists driven by stubbornness rather than strength.

Dalbract stood back. ‘Try now.’

Miletus obeyed, and felt the collar cinch tight as the catches snapped closed. From just below his neck to his groin was now carapaced in plasteel and brass. The battered emblem of a woman with two faces – one set in iron, the other in gold – sat on the cuirass in high relief. Snake scales ringed the high collar that the helm would lock into. Miletus rolled his shoulders. The armour was heavy, but not uncomfortable.

‘I have never seen pressure gear like this,’ he said.

‘Not many have now,’ said Dalbract, taking a helm from a rack. ‘Here, the serpent of the deep, to watch where you can’t.’

He held out a pressure helm with a crystal visor-slit set in a dome of brushed steel. A ridge shaped like a snake ran along the helm’s crown, its head to the back, so that it would snarl behind whoever wore it. Miletus took it and looked for a mag-clamp point on his armour.

‘Hook it here,’ said Dalbract, tapping a loop at the base of Miletus’ back. ‘Won’t come loose. It’s a good friend this set, never had a soul die in it.’

Miletus looked at Dalbract. ‘What?’

‘It’s lucky, and you’re lucky to wear it – not many serpent suits left now. The Armaduke looks after those she knows, and she knows that the body in this gear is fighting for her and the Throne, so she will look after you.’

Miletus blinked. He had been on ships before, of course, even been aboard the battleship Aquilis Rex when it was in harbour. He knew that ships acquired traditions and quirks of culture. On the monitor ship he had served on as a cadet, the crew muttered the name of Saint Sabbat three times each time the engines changed pitch. This, though, felt deeper, older, as though the Highness Ser Armaduke wore a crust of its own history, like an old sea creature with a shell of barnacles and flotsam. He looked at the two faces on his chestplate.

‘This is not the emblem of the ship,’ said Miletus.

‘Oh, they are of the ship, sir, they just don’t sit on its banners. This…’ Dalbract pointed at each half of the two faces on Miletus’ cuirass. ‘That’s her, our Highness herself. Eyes to see to port and starboard and twin voices of thunder. Two sisters, you see, living as one, each looking the way the other can’t, back to back, broadside to broadside. As long as they don’t quarrel, they can never die, but sometimes they do. Two souls you see, one older, one younger. The old bitter and jealous, and with teeth made of broken cannons. The younger all fire and glory and golden dreams. We stand in between and just hope the two faces can make peace when it comes to it.’

‘Ship stories…’ said Miletus.

‘Not stories,’ said Dalbract, his forehead creasing above his augmetic eyes. ‘These are memories. Older a ship gets, the more memories it has, and the Armaduke, she has a lot of memories. Now, to arms.’

Dalbract pulled a heavy pistol off a rack, checked the open breech and action, then held it out. Miletus checked the breech.

‘Clear, and accepted,’ Miletus said, and took the pistol. It was heavy, the barrel a square-edged block of worn metal. The wooden grip gleamed with a patina of use and gun oil.

Dalbract held out a carton of filled magazines, each one a block the size of Miletus’ fist. ‘Blast rounds – from that beauty they will tear through anything that’s close enough for you to see. One for the gun and the rest to carry.’

Miletus nodded, tucking magazines into pouches. ‘I…’ he began, then bit his lip.

He looked up. Dalbract was looking at him. Miletus could have sworn there was a glimmer of humour in the sergeant-at-arms’ augmetic eyes.

‘Yes, sir?’

‘I am not an arms specialist. I mean, I have done the basics, but…’

‘But why has the shipmaster given you to an old sergeant-at-arms and put you with the hard cases of this crew, who will have some great and bloody work to do if this voyage goes sidewise?’

‘Yes,’ said Miletus.

‘Because you have to learn, and there is no way to learn like doing.’ He took down a heavy, cylindrical melta charge and handed it to Miletus. ‘The old and the barely born, that’s what the Armaduke gets as crew now, when it gets new crew at all. Even Spika – he’s here because he has run his rope to near the knot. The Armaduke is a warrior that has outlived her time. So she gets what’s left. Shipmaster does not like that. He likes to fight, what he was made for, just like her. He helms a fighting ship, and if you are going to show you can fight, or learn how, there is no better place than as close as you can get without being a shell in a gun.’

Dalbract turned to another weapon rack, looked along it and then took down a short sword with a broad, single-edged blade. He held the blade out, along with a battered scabbard.

‘Keep close, sir, let the serpents watch your back. Do that and the Highness Ser Armaduke will see you safe.’

Miletus took the blade and buckled it on.

A high note slid through the air, trembling. Miletus winced involuntarily. The sound dipped lower, sinking into the walls. One of the blades in the weapon rack whined in harmony. Dalbract reached out and touched the blade to quiet it, then touched his eyes and mouth.

‘Shadows keep your sharpness to yourself,’ he muttered, the phrase delivered with the rote tone of a prayer. He moved towards the door. ‘They have lit her warp engines, sir. The shipmaster will want us on the bridge for translation to the sea-o-souls.’

Miletus followed him, feeling the weight of armour that no one had yet died in heavy on his shoulders.

It took time for the warp engines to spool up to translation readiness. Miletus thought of it as like a rope being wound into tension. Lights dimmed, even though they had not been adjusted. Distortion edged console displays. Exchanges of words between the bridge crew became shorter, words slightly hushed. A subtle vibration crept into every surface. When he briefly touched a guard rail, he could feel his teeth buzzing.

He remembered what Dalbract had said as they had hurried along a companionway towards the bridge, the paint on its walls worn to metal at shoulder height.

‘The Armaduke has old bones – ghost bones – old before even she was set into the void, bones taken from the dead.’

‘What? She was made for the Khulan Wars,’ said Miletus. ‘I read her commissioning record. Her and a dozen like her.’

‘She was, but those were times of fire and loss, and the forges were starving for want of ore. So they took the bones from the dead, pulled them from wreckers’ yards, even from the warp flotsam. Melted some, worked other parts, spliced old and new together, and sent them back to fight with dead bones and ghosts in their hearts.’

‘There was nothing about that in the records. I read them all.’

‘Not in the ink scratch records, but the Armaduke remembers. Listen sometimes and you can hear the old ghosts sing. They like to fight, and so does she. They remember what it was like to die, you see.’

‘Two ship signatures active in auspex range,’ the Officer of Detection called. Miletus blinked. He had found himself drifting, as though the rising hum of the warp engines had tugged him out onto a tide of his own thoughts. ‘Both converging on us. Hull and energy readings match our convoy. They are hailing us.’

‘Answer and begin mutual code authentication,’ said Spika. The shipmaster was in his chair, hoisted midway between the floor and the sensorium dome in the ceiling. The articulated limb could move him to any station, or up into the dome. Currently he was situated at a point between all possibilities, face set. He had not spoken more than three words since Dalbract and Miletus had come onto the bridge.

‘Shipmaster’s not happy,’ Dalbract had said as they had approached the bridge. ‘Best keep silent unless he issues you an order.’

‘He is upset about the mission?’

‘The mission is what it is – it’s the rest. Secrets, politics, the Commissariat’s gun at the back of our heads. He likes to see what he is fighting, does Spika.’

Miletus had listened to the advice, and other than saluting when he came onto the bridge, he had held to the side of the command platform with Dalbract and the armsmen security contingent.

‘Handshakes complete and code identification complete,’ said the Officer of Detection. The blank-eyed servitors around him were twitching and mumbling in static. ‘It’s them. Signatures and codes verify.’

‘Very good,’ said Spika. ‘Helm, bring us into convergence and start to synchronise for warp translation.’ Spika keyed a control and brought his chair around to the main pict screen. ‘Visual feed, let’s have a look at them.’

A brass-fingered servitor clattered the keys of a console. Static buzzed across the screen then settled into an image of stars and void that flexed as it focused and settled. They were on the edge of the Verghast System, almost at the Mandeville point where they could punch into the other-realm of the warp. The system’s star was now just the brightest dot in a glittering field of night. Two warships slid through the dark towards the Highness Ser Armaduke. Both were of a size with her. Data bracketed their images on the screen, giving their designation and details. The Lights Excelling was a Claymore-class corvette, its hull a block of batteries behind a blunt prow. The second wore the name Cold Steel. A Turbulent-class heavy frigate, it was the largest of the three.

‘Old dogs,’ growled Spika. ‘It’s been a long time since either of them have been on the line.’

‘Most likely they are saying the same of us,’ said Dalbract, half under his breath. Spika looked around, clearly having heard.

‘Most likely,’ said Spika. ‘Old ships that are easy to ignore, and easy to forget if lost. Let’s just hope that they still have their teeth.’

‘Translation process synchronised,’ called the helm officer. ‘Warp navigational bearings matched. Geller field synchronisation established.’

‘Reading sensor locks from both vessels,’ said the Master of Artifice.

‘Reciprocate,’ said Spika. ‘Start the beacon.’

A low chime came from the vox-speakers across the bridge, followed seconds later by two fainter chimes – a call and response, like lights flashed between ships at night in times when voyages were across the depths of seas rather than between the stars.

‘Beacons locked and cycling,’ said a signals officer. ‘Signals from the Cold Steel and Lights Excelling confirm. They wait on your word, shipmaster.’

‘Very good,’ said Spika, and paused.

The Highness Ser Armaduke was the initiating ship for warp translation. It would punch the first hole into the sea of souls and then the Cold Steel and Lights Excelling would widen it and follow the Armaduke through the breach. Once through, they would stay locked to each other, their Navigators following the same course. Typically, ships in the warp could not communicate easily. The anti-reality of the warp broke the laws of nature by which vox worked. The ships in this convoy would share a single, synchronised Geller field envelope, but even in that bubble the pressure of the warp played merry hell with signals and instruments. The best that could be managed was via an ancient tech-rite that, through Geller field and signal synchronisation, allowed single blurts of signal to pass between ships. In this case, the beacon signal would circulate between each vessel at intervals, a pulse indicating cohesion and safety. Modulations could communicate a basic set of messages: emergency translation, route deviation. A break of more than two pings would indicate that the ship had been compromised. The order protocols handed to Spika by Kader made it very clear what happened at that point – immediate sanction.

Spika pivoted his chair around to where Commissar Kader stood at the side of the command platform. She had been there when Miletus had arrived, but had said nothing in that time, just watched.

‘We are ready, commissar,’ he said.

‘Proceed, shipmaster,’ she replied.

Spika pivoted away from her, his chair rising into the sensorium dome above.

‘Initiate,’ he said.

Officers turned to their stations. Sub-orders were called. Hands keyed consoles. Miletus felt his eyes vibrate and then water. A static-laden hum rose from the tech-adepts walking between the control stations. Clouds of incense puffed from censers. Blast shutters lowered over viewports, like lids pressing shut over eyes. Out in the void, a hole would be opening in reality, edges rippling back like torn sail caught in a gale. Beyond the opening, the warp would be churning, tendrils of dream substance reaching into being and dissolving into nothing.

Miletus had heard that on some ships there were whole sections of crew that did not know what they travelled through when their vessel passed between stars. His mouth dry, a pre-migraine ache opening behind his eyes, he almost envied such ignorance.

‘Translation point open, and stable,’ said the first officer.

‘Take us in,’ said Spika.

THE WARP

The sea of souls flowed past the three ships. It had no substance. Everything here was a dream, an ephemeral echo of a thought or desire of a mortal mind. If no one dreamed, or thought, or looked into the dark and saw teeth smiling under silver eyes, then the warp would be nothing – a true void beyond reality where there was no time or distance. But life had long poisoned the deeps, feeding surges into the great ocean that shivered with the desires and fears of billions alive and dead and yet to live. Some called the warp malign, and perhaps it was, but others more accurately thought it toxic – corrosive, and corrupting to life, and in the end lethal. It was hungry, too.

In the skin of the Highness Ser Armaduke, the crew felt the sea of souls press in on the skin of their reality. The hull creaked. Voices slid along the seams of bulkheads. The temperature in cabins and hold spaces dropped to freezing and then rose to foetid heat in the time it took a heart to beat once.

Shipmaster Spika watched as the night fell across the bridge. He had always thought of warp passages that way – as going into the night beyond. Coming back to reality was like returning to the day, like waking up. A strange thought, given that the void of space was considered darkness, but to him it was and always had been bright. Stars near and far put lie to the idea of the void as dark. Their constellations had guided old ships on Terra when the universe was smaller. Those beasts and heroes made of starlight had changed, had become grander, and so had the monsters that waited over the horizon. But the promise of safety that they represented had not changed.

Here in the night of the warp there was no light nor promise, only the slow run of dreams.

Spika tried not to sleep when his ship was upon the sea of souls. On a long voyage, he would have to give way to the demands of his body, but for this passage he had no intention of letting his eyes close. There was a good chance they would not see the end of this, he knew. He had understood why the Commissariat had chosen the Highness Ser Armaduke from the moment the details of the mission began to emerge.

The first reason was secrecy: if the Archenemy had agents in the crusade – and they surely did – they would not be interested in the movements of a ship like the Armaduke. The chances of traitors or infiltrators in his undermanned crew were minimal. It would have to be a very unlucky chance.

Then there was the need for firepower. If the convoy was attacked, it needed to be able to bite back. More importantly, each of the convoy ships needed to be able to kill any of the others in short order. It took time to set well-functioning reactors to overload, but point-blank broadsides from warships of the same yield could kill an unshielded ship fast.

Last there was resource. Simply put, he and his crew and his ship were expendable, the impact of their loss on the main crusade effort, minimal. Forgettable, vicious, and worthless – a trifactor of qualities that had led him and his Highness Ser Armaduke to this long night. Part of him – a lot of him, if he was honest – wanted it to not be quiet; for there to be a fight to win. The ship wanted that, too, he was sure. She was made to brawl, to slam broadsides at range close enough that the shells struck as the recoil was still vibrating through the decks; to have fire roll across her armour; to take damage and to give it and to come out the victor, bloody but grinning.

Or maybe not… maybe just an end to a fight that neither of them could win – a fight with time and change.

He blinked, aware that he was more tired than he cared to admit. Tired and old. From across the deck, he heard the metallic chime of the beacon signal come from the signal speakers.

‘Link to convoy clear and all is well,’ called a duty officer. Spika nodded as around him the ship creaked and shivered, and the night passed by.

Miletus, off watch for four hours, found that the last thing he wanted to do was to sleep. His cabin should have been shared with another three junior officers. The fact that he had it to himself told him how much the Highness Ser Armaduke was under-crewed. The dust on the bare cots told him it had been that way for a while, too.

A big brass-cased chrono sat on the wall, ticking through the minutes. He had tried to sleep. Every time he had closed his eyes, the sounds of the Armaduke had risen up to wrap around him. The vibrating pulse of the engines seemed to grow louder. The creaking metal sounded like something chuckling right beside his ear. The chrono ticked and ticked. He thought of what Dalbract had told him about the shadows, then wished he had not.

It had been after the first watch change post-translation, when the units on the bridge had rotated. Miletus had noticed that the armsmen who took the watch did not have the serpent crest on their helms. He had asked Dalbract why.

‘Simple,’ the sergeant-at-arms had said. ‘They’re from a section that did not survive the shadows.’ Miletus had been going to ask what in Terra’s light that meant, when Dalbract carried on. ‘The arms units here are chopped, and bound numbered, just like they are on any ship in the God-Emperor’s glorious Navy. First unit, Aleph platoon, and on down–’

‘I have read the ship’s complement chart,’ Miletus had said.

‘Good for you, sir,’ said Dalbract, with the smallest edge in the words that said he did not like to be interrupted once he was going. ‘The numbers and unit codes are the same as other ships, but the names are more important. We are the Wyrmyr, we are watched over by the Emperor’s serpents. Those others are not.’

The lights in the companionway they had been moving down had stuttered for a second. Miletus had felt a sharp ping behind his eyes, a tiny flash of white light.

‘Geller pulse,’ Dalbract had muttered, and Miletus noticed him touch the snake crest on his helmet. ‘Steady, your highness,’ he said to the air as the light brightened again. ‘Steady.’

After a second, Dalbract had started moving again.

‘Long time ago,’ he continued, ‘after she slipped from the dock of her birth, the Armaduke was in a war, a long way from here. Those that still know them call them the Khulan Wars. It was a long fight, long and bloody, longer even than the crusade, and the enemy terrible and spiteful, and when they started losing, they turned to the shadows and asked them to help them. The shadows said “yes”, because they were hungry and all they needed was an invitation.

‘The Armaduke and her cousins were cutting and burning across the deeps when the shadows came. Slid out of the edges of starlight and candlelight. Right here inside the ship. They are fast, you see, because they are always behind you, always beside you. You turn and they turn just as fast. You stand still and they are all around, in your breath, at your back. And they are sharp. When you see them flicker in the light, they move like water and smoke, but touch you and that darkness is a razor. There was blood on these decks right here, thick and sloshing, and the shadows dancing through our Highness faster than the blink of eyes. Red and wet all the way down to the bilge decks, red and screaming. Last few that held together pulled up to the bridge, just people and guns and prayers, but there was no sanctuary. We carry the shadows with us, behind us, on the other side of the light.

‘Then the Emperor, who protects all who have faith, sent the serpents – right here on these decks, snakes made from His light and iron and silver, starlight and sun fury, so bright that the shadows could not dance. The serpents coiled around the crew that lived, and there was no corner for the shadows to slip into. They ran back to the deeps then, to the places between the night bells where they hunger and wait. They are still there, though, and so, just like we carry shadows with us, we have the snakes to watch them.’

He had touched the serpent head on the back of his pressure helm, and grinned.

‘Red and sloshing…’

Grinning, and the grin was a snake grin, fangs wide and a throat of shadow.

‘We carry the shadows with us…’

And Miletus could not get away and the grin was cracking wide, and all he could hear were the shadows laughing at him…

He came awake to the sound of the ready alarm blaring in the dark of the cabin, then a fist hammering on the door. He was sweating, shivering.

‘Up and armoured, sir,’ called Dalbract’s voice from the other side of the hatch. Miletus hit the lumen switch, and began to pull on his pressure armour. The hatch opened, and he could see Dalbract and a cluster of armsmen behind him.

‘What’s going on?’

‘Ready alert, sir,’ said Dalbract. ‘Need to be on the bridge, now.’

Miletus swore, and made for the door, his eye catching the watchful serpent on the crest of his helm for a second before he pulled it on. For an instant, he heard the echo of laughter from his dreams follow him.

‘Vox-link to the Mechanicus priests in the hangar?’ asked Kader.

‘No response either, commissar,’ replied the signals officer.

‘Direct pict-feed?’

‘Negative. Warp passage plays merry hell with comms.’

‘Warp passage be damned,’ snapped Kader. ‘We need oversight of the cargo and confirmation of security now.’

The light of the instrument consoles poured shadows into the recesses of Kader’s face as she turned to look up at Spika. The shipmaster was rotating between data-displays in the dome above the command deck. The articulated limb holding his chair hissed as it shifted his position. The air smelled of static, sweat and incense. Lumens were dimmed and set to the frosty blue for warp passage.

‘Major,’ called Spika without looking away from a bulbous display of engine output rhythms. ‘Are your units responding on their own vox-network?’

‘Negative,’ said Hexil. ‘Their vox-sets wouldn’t make it this far through the ship’s hull.’

Spika’s face twitched, lips pulling back from his teeth for a second. ‘Then we are going to have to do this the basic way.’

His chair swung around to face where the armsmen stood at attention. Miletus had not realised the shipmaster had even seen them enter.

‘Vox-link to the lower decks is down. We have negative connection on all sensor systems below deck thirty-one. Mister Cern, you will take your units down to the secure hangar deck, establish the status of our cargo and set up a runner relay as communication. Major Hexil will be coming with you to make sure you link up correctly with his security elements and no one starts shooting because the vox has decided to go dark.’ Spika looked at Hexil. ‘Confirmed, major?’

The Urdeshi officer looked at Kader.

‘How long until we get confirmation that the cargo is secure?’ she asked.

Spika looked around at the armsmen contingent. Miletus felt panic uncoil in his guts as the shipmaster’s gaze found him.

‘Twenty minutes to reach the deck,’ said Dalbract. ‘Depending on situation, five minutes to confirm security, ten to get word back, without allowance for anything being wrong.’

‘If there is anything wrong then it doesn’t matter,’ said Kader.

‘Commissar,’ began Spika.

‘The protocols are there for a reason,’ snapped Kader. ‘If we can’t confirm the cargo is secure then we cut the beacon.’

Quiet followed her words. The eyes of the deck officers turned. Miletus felt himself swallow in a dry throat. If the beacon cut out, the Cold Steel and Lights Excelling would open fire. Unshielded, in a shared Geller field envelope, the Highness Ser Armaduke would become fire and wreckage in moments. Whatever was left would tumble into the sea of souls to be unmade by the dreaming depths.

Spika held his gaze steady on Kader. Around them, alert lights pulsed in the blue-stained gloom.

‘You have your orders, Mister Cern, see them done.’

‘Hatch opening,’ called the man at the doorway, and he pulled it wide. The one behind him in the stack held still, blast gun levelled at the space beyond.

‘In,’ the armsman said, and moved through, gun unwavering. The stack of three others followed, hands on the backs of the one in front, slow and steady as they spread into the passage beyond. A hand signal from the armsman just the other side of the hatch, and Dalbract was moving forwards, Miletus at his back.

Major Hexil followed him. The Urdeshi had dropped into the armsmen’s way of working down through the decks as though he had been working with them for years. He had a bullpup blitzgun tucked into his chest. He seemed to barely be breathing. Miletus was trying to hide his panting after they had dropped down only five decks. Sweat was running down his face inside his pressure helm.

‘Vox-check,’ he remembered to call. Confirmations came back from the unit, chopping with static. He switched channel. ‘Bridge, this is Wyrmyr,’ he called, as they began to move.

A rolling growl of distortion answered.

‘Bridge, we are approaching access to hangar bay.’

Still no answer.

Ahead of him the first group of armsmen were closing on a heavy hatch into the hangar bay. Scuffed yellow and black chevrons crossed the metal. The glow-globes in the ceiling were still alight, just as they had been in every passage and compartment on the way down. The creak and whisper of the ship had faded, too, quietening so that you could almost forget that the ship was sliding through the sea of souls. It was peaceful.

‘Any luck with your troops, major?’ asked Dalbract without looking around.

‘Nothing,’ said Hexil. The major’s voice was clipped, no easing of the tension from him.

‘Sir, if I might suggest that the major goes through first? His units have been out of comms. Given their orders, they might decide to fire on someone they don’t recognise.’

‘Yes,’ said Miletus, but the Urdeshi major was already moving past them and slotting in beside the armsmen next to the door.

‘Sir?’ said Dalbract.

Miletus blinked. The armsmen were ready at the hatch onto the hangar. One had inserted the override key into the lock controls and had his hand on the release lever. The others were stacked one behind another, guns pointing forwards. He noticed the eyes of the snake on the back of their helms staring at him. He shook himself.

‘Go,’ he said.

The armsman pulled the release lever. Bolts released with a snap. The armsmen pushed the hatch wide, and Hexil went through.

‘Friendlies!’ he heard the major shout, and then the armsmen were up and through the hatch, and Miletus was with them, gun up as they spread out into the hangar. Nothing moved. No shots rang out, no shouts, just the sound of their heavy boots hitting the deck.

The hangar lights were still lit. The three litters holding the remains of the woe machines lay just where they had. Stasis fields buzzed above each of them, fizzing with the incense smoke drifting from the burners the Mechanicus priests had set atop poles.

‘Where are they?’ asked Miletus, voicing the question that filled his head as he looked across the hangar. The Urdeshi troops were not there, neither were the tech-priests or their battle servitors. Just the litters and the buzzing domes of energy. All stillness. All peaceful. He looked at them… Blinked.

‘Vedrok? Cazzim?’ called Hexil. ‘Respond and confirm.’

There was no answer. The armsmen had formed a crescent gun line trained on the litters and their stasis shrouds. They edged forwards. Miletus’ eyes were moving across the banks of equipment, and power feeds…

He could see what lay beneath the fields now, clearer than when they had slid from the belly of the lifter. He could look at them quite easily. There was nothing to be afraid of. No sharp-shadows or ghosts from Dalbract’s questionable history of the ship, just collections of objects, laid out, heaped like badly curated exhibits in a museum. The nearest one looked like a vast, broken cartwheel without a machine to make it turn. Bits of articulated metal, and cables; pale pieces that might have been bone but could have been plastek or ceramic. Fine, soft tubes, leaking out from under a twisted gouge in its spokes, like hair, like the fronds of something that billowed in the currents of a lightless sea.

The second might have been the image of a gigantic human sculpted out of lead, its body blown into components. The weapons unleashed on it must have been terrifying. A crust of vitrified dust clung to it. On the lump that might have been its head, a single blue crystal circle sat in a saw-toothed setting.

The furthest one looked like a casket, or perhaps a coffin, though there was no sign of a seam or lid. Its mass was made entirely of interlocking brass levers and cogs. Some of the smallest cogwheels had been smashed or melted.

Was it a lock? he found himself wondering, one great lock holding something within? When he looked at the pattern made by the toothed wheels and levers, they began to remind him of faces… of eyes and brows and teeth.

Hexil turned to Dalbract. ‘This is not secure. Send the runner message now – cargo not secure.’

‘Lieutenant Cern is officer commanding, major.’

‘Send the order!’ growled Hexil.

Miletus did not respond. He was looking at the litters.

‘Send the order, you stupid child!’

‘Calm down, sir,’ said Dalbract, stepping closer to the major, gun lowered.

He heard the snap of a safety being released. His head turned around. Hexil had his blitzgun raised, aim steady on Dalbract. The sergeant-at-arms was very still. Miletus blinked. He found himself shaking his head. Something had clicked over in his mind. He was calm. Calmer than he had been on the bridge with Spika and the rest.

Peaceful. It was so peaceful here. Not like the dreams, not like the spaces with shadows and memories of this old ship sailing towards her death. He wanted it to be peaceful. He did not want to do anything with the fact that he had noticed the power feeds to one of the stasis litters had been disconnected, that whatever field was covering the thing beneath it was not a stasis field, that Hexil was right – the cargo was not secure. He could feel his mouth working, could hear something loud rising from inside him. He didn’t want that. He wanted peace. He wanted quiet, but the sound was roaring up his throat, like steam pouring from a blown valve.

‘Run,’ he heard himself gasp.

The stasis field around the coffin-shaped woe machine collapsed like a soap bubble in the wind. Frost flashed across the deck. Miletus fell, gasping. Nausea and pain exploded in the space left by the false peace that had poured into his head.

Dalbract opened up. His blast gun breathed a cone of muzzle flame across the hangar. Shots hit the woe machine. Brass cogs and tiny levers tore free. The air around it was shimmering like heat haze about a fire. Mirage images swam in its halo: hands, feathers, chains and cogs and teeth. Abscesses of blackness formed and burst in the air. Some of the armsmen were firing. Others were on the ground, vomit spattering the visors of their pressure helms.

Hexil did not flinch but aimed, tucking his blitzgun close. He fired. The flechettes hit the woe machine dead centre. They punched through levers and cogs, tearing into its heart. Hexil kept firing, drilling the wound deeper into the fragmenting brass. A cacophony of splintering metal melded with gunfire. Miletus saw the thing judder in mid-air, trembling. Hexil’s fire paused as he snapped the magazine free from his gun. The armsmen kept hammering it. Shots burst over it. Miletus aimed his heavy pistol. Hexil clicked a fresh magazine in place and pulled the trigger of the blitzgun.

The woe machine turned inside out. Gears and levers meshed and turned and folded themselves through dimensions that were not there. Sound vanished. The gunfire, the ping-ring of falling cases, the sound of Miletus’ breath inside his mask – all gone, all drained into unbeing. The lights blew out, sparks and glass tumbling. Frost spread across Miletus’ helm visor. He could taste something, something rank and heavy, thick with warmth and iron, like air released from a punctured gut. He could not see, but there was something there – something pulsing in the blackness in front of him. Then the flash of gunfire, strobing, the percussive bang of each shot a silent jolt through the air.

Then he saw it.

A silent blackness unfolding towards them, like a symmetrical ink blot poured into the air. In each flash it had changed, and he felt the snap-fire of memories in his head with each blinked image: a flayed equine head, angel wings, a face screaming, a broken cup, open hands.

He pulled the trigger of his pistol. The recoil spun him. Hexil was still firing, backing up, lit by the spit of fire from his gun. Miletus aimed his pistol again, braced. The cloud of darkness was almost on Hexil, extending in shutter blinks, coiling. All without sound, all within touching, all so distant.

Miletus fired. Flash, bright orange against a curdled blackness. The muzzle flare from Hexil’s gun vanished. Miletus fired again, shouting, the sounds coming empty from his throat. The darkness was right there, above him, stretching up and out, like a storm wave cresting before breaking. He heard something then, a single sound in a universe of silence: the clicking whir of tiny gears and brass teeth, like cogwork winding too fast through final slices of time.

A gun spat into the dark from next to him. A hand grabbed his shoulder, and then he was stumbling, breathing. Dalbract was behind him, shoving him back, turning to fire another burst. Miletus felt the hardness of a wall, saw the shape of a hatch release wheel. There were other people next to him, hands reaching to spin the wheel. The hatch opened. Bodies surged through. Miletus turned just as Dalbract came through behind him and slammed the hatch shut. He pushed Miletus, and now they were running headlong through the sputtering light of a narrow companionway. There were three armsmen with them. Sound stuttered in Miletus’ ears: deck plates ringing under running feet, panting breath.

‘Keep moving!’ shouted Dalbract, and the shout was almost shocking in its clarity. The sergeant-at-arms had released the visor in his helm so that he could speak.

‘What–’ Miletus began, between gasps.

‘We have to get word to the bridge, sir.’

‘The hangar is sealed.’

‘Think doors and hatches will hold that thing for long?’

As if in answer, the lights in the passage dimmed and sputtered. A sound like countless tiny sharp edges scratching across metal buzzed through the air.

One of the armsmen raised his gun.

‘Move, sir!’

They were at a ladder. The armsmen ahead of him already had the hatch at the top open.

The sound of crumpling metal echoed down the passageway behind them. Miletus felt a blast wave buffet him. The gust smelled of cold metal and stagnant water. He grabbed the ladder and started to climb, hand over hand, gasping. Frost was forming on the rungs and his fingers as he climbed. Blackness rushed up the companionway as lights blew out. He could hear silence dragging at the sound of his breath, and behind it the whirring, cogwork clicking. Dalbract was just below him. He heard the sergeant-at-arms growl a stream of curses that vanished into nothing. They were not going to make it.

Blackness overtook him. The clicking was all around him. He tried to scream as he kept climbing.

Then the sound of cogs was a fading murmur in the passage beneath them, and the silence drained to the sound of his own gasping breaths. The beam of a stablight shone from beneath him. Dalbract looked up at him from next to the beam.

‘What just happened?’ asked Miletus.

‘Don’t know, sir, but it didn’t seem to think our skins were that important to it any more. It’s got somewhere more important to get to.’

‘Where?’

‘No word?’ said Kader.

‘Give them time,’ replied Spika. He saw the muscle in the commissar’s jawline flicker. She was nervous, he realised. ‘They have time – minutes, by the count of the chron.’

‘Not long,’ said Kader.

Spika opened his mouth to argue.

‘Shipmaster!’ called the Master of Materium. Spika and Kader turned. ‘Output fluctuating in the Geller field.’

Spika swung his chair across the platform to above the Master of Materium and her station. The gilded fingers of system servitors were dancing across control keys. Incense-laden steam vented from data-valves. The Master of Materium’s eyes were pressed into a brass data-viewer.

‘Details,’ said Spika.

‘Attempting to resolve,’ said the Master of Materium. ‘The field is holding, but something is interfering with its waveform.’

‘Interfering how?’

‘It’s a semi-rhythmic distortion pattern that is causing waveform reality fluctuation through the field envelope.’ She straightened from the data-viewer. Inside the brass collar, oscillating blue lines pulsed across a convex screen. ‘It’s making a sound in the warp.’

She pulled a lever, and a sound came from the vox-horn next to Spika. Static and distortion growled and hissed through the air. It rolled and rose, the scratching sound curling over and exhaling into a long scratching note, then tumbling down and up again.

‘It’s like a… like a…’ began the Master of Materium.

‘It’s like a call,’ said Spika.

‘Cut the beacon signal to the other ships!’ shouted Kader.

‘We can’t,’ said the signals officer. ‘The beacon signal is synchronised and meshed with the Geller field rhythm. We don’t have control of it any more.’

For a second, there was just the sound of buzzing systems and the low hum of the ship’s hull.

‘Full alert,’ called Spika. ‘Ship-wide.’

‘It’s damaged,’ Miletus heard himself breathe.

‘Sir?’ asked Dalbract.

Miletus nodded.

‘It took out the units guarding it, but when it took fire from us, it fled. It was taken from a battlefield – it must have taken a lot of damage for us to think it was dead. God-Emperor knows what capabilities it has, but it fled rather than finish us. It’s like an animal. It’s trying to get back to its own element, to feed, to heal.’

‘The sea-o’-souls,’ said Dalbract.

‘That means the Geller fields,’ said Miletus. For a second, he found himself wondering if he believed what he was saying, but something about that moment in the hangar where the woe machine had drowned his senses and thoughts in peace had run through him, like a current. He could feel… something – ideas and thoughts thrown up from the churn and spray. ‘Get to the shipmaster,’ he said to one of the armsmen. ‘Inform him that one of the woe machines is loose on the ship, that it is making for the Geller field generators, and that we are en route there now. Give him our strength and the casualty information.’

The armsman stood there for a second. Miletus could see her blinking behind the visor of her helm. Perhaps she was still in shock. Perhaps she just wanted to hear an order from someone other than a green third lieutenant. Perhaps she realised that what he was saying meant there was a good chance the ship was going down. She began to look at Dalbract.

Fresh alarms began to sound. Red warning lights flashed. Through his boots, Miletus felt a shiver in the bones of the ship.

‘Go! Now!’ he shouted, and the armsman began to run.

Miletus looked at Dalbract. ‘The Geller field generatorium?’ he asked.

‘Five decks down. We take the main port hoist. Fastest way there.’

‘You have the lead,’ said Miletus. He was damned sure that the only command he had here was because of his rank, but Spika had put Dalbract and the Wyrmyr with him to make sure that the job was done. Miletus was not going to go against that intent.

‘Very good, sir,’ said the sergeant-at-arms, and gave a series of gestures to the remaining armsmen. They began to run.

Miletus fell in behind Dalbract. A strange sense of calm had come over him. This was nothing like the combat exercises he had been through as a cadet. It was nothing like the accounts he had read of the great admirals and captains of Battlefleet Pacificus. It was something far simpler, the truth that all the stories and accounts tried to communicate, but could not – a simple choice: to let fear drown you, or to embrace it, to go beyond, to fight in spite of fear.

‘Do you have any idea about how we few might kill it?’ asked Dalbract.

‘No, but we are watched over by the God-Emperor and his Highness Ser Armaduke – something will occur. A serpent of light or perhaps an angel of the deeps come to pull us back to the light.’

‘Just so, sir!’ called Dalbract, and they ran on into the red light and the sound of alarms.

‘Exit the warp,’ said Kader.

‘Negative,’ called the Master of Etherics. ‘The Geller field governors are locked – we can’t begin the synchronisation rights with the warp engines.’

‘Commissar,’ said Spika, his voice controlled, but loud enough to ring clear over the alarms. ‘You will not issue orders on this deck.’

Kader whirled to him. He saw her hand snap the clasp free on the bolt pistol at her waist. He met her gaze.

‘The situation has gone past your protocols. What we have to do now is very simple – we have to fight until we win. For that, you need to let me and this ship do what we exist to do.’

Kader looked like she was about to argue.

A buzzing shriek rose from the vox-horns across the bridge. The servitors wired into the signal machines went into spasm. The sound trembled, ululating. The tech-adepts and enginseers on the bridge raised their hands, calling out in binharic, trying to shout down the cacophony. Incense billowed out. Spika flinched despite himself. The sound rose to a peak, boring into his ears. Via his data-links to the ship he could feel her systems shiver. Then the sound vanished.

‘All stations, report,’ he called. The bridge crew were reeling, dazed.

‘Geller field controls still locked,’ came the first reply.

‘Warp engines engaged, but locked.’

‘Signal control re-established,’ called the signals officer. ‘Shipmaster, our security beacon failed to transmit two pulses.’

Before Spika could reply, red lights flared on the machine consoles around the signals officer. Signal waves flicked over the screens around him, oscillating into flat lines.

‘Shipmaster, energy and sensor spikes on the Lights Excelling. It’s going to fire on us!’

The lights began to fail as the hoist descended.

Flicker-snap… Flicker-snap…

The temperature dropped. Miletus’ breath misted in the air, a white cloud in the blink of light. In the blink, he saw Dalbract put his hand on the twin faces on his chestplate and then touch the serpent crest on his helm. He was muttering.

Flicker-snap… Flicker-snap…

‘Two sisters…’ said Miletus, hearing the forced strength in his own voice. ‘The story of the Highness Ser Armaduke being two sisters – it’s about the wreck material used to help make the ship, isn’t it. There are no faces, no souls pulling in different directions, just a story made from simple facts.’

Dalbract looked around at him, his scowl visible in a blink of light.

‘Stories are truer than facts, lad, every one of them.’ He banged the two faces on the cuirass.

The hoist platform lurched. The light blinked off, then blazed back on. The servitor manning the brass hoist controls was caught in a spasming loop, arcs of electro-charge running from the levers to its hands. Miletus caught a gust of ozone-filled air as the hoist lurched to a stop, gears jammed. The top half of a passage opened at knee height. A stencilled deck code sat above it. The servitor had collapsed into a heap of limbs and pistons.

Quiet. Very quiet. No hull vibration or sound of air-cycling systems.

‘We’re here,’ said Dalbract. ‘Let’s not wait for things to get worse.’ He dropped through the space.

The other armsmen looked at Miletus. He took a breath, then followed.

His feet hit the deck. It was dark, as though the light blazing on in the hoist shaft was part of another world. Dalbract’s helm-mounted stablight reached into the distance. Miletus cursed himself for not having turned his own on before jumping.

‘Watch your feet,’ said Dalbract.

The armsmen dropped down behind Miletus as he lit his helm light. The beam touched the walls and ceiling. They gleamed with hair-fine scratches, rivets ground down to nubs, cable bundles flayed of insulation. He heard a faint splash as he took a step. He looked down.

They had seen no crew on the way here. Most had been cleared from the spaces close to the hangar holding the woe machines, but down here, on a primary engineering deck, there should have been ratings, tech-adepts, servitors…

Miletus felt his gorge rise.

‘Whatever it did to the guards in the hangar… it wasn’t hanging around here to clean up,’ said Dalbract, his voice low. ‘The sea-o’-souls be kind to them that go to its depths.’

‘It’s desperate,’ said Miletus.

‘Not alone in that,’ said Dalbract. Around them the Highness Ser Armaduke shivered. ‘The older sister can feel it, doesn’t want to die again – not like this. Geller field generatorium is just a little further, sir.’

Miletus nodded, trying to ignore the ozone-and-iron reek as he breathed.

‘Go,’ he said, and they began to run.

Spika blinked. In his mind, he was flicking through fire yield and distance calculations. All approximate, all filled with wild errors from the fact that they were within a semi-stable bubble of reality tumbling through the warp. He didn’t need to be precise, though; the approximation was clear enough. They had seconds before the first shells loosed from the Lights Excelling, then minutes before those shells struck the Highness Ser Armaduke.

There was something wrong, too, a summation of facts and possibilities that did not add up. There was a bigger threat. He could feel it, the way an old pugilist could sense the hidden punch as it uncoiled from nowhere to crack his skull.

‘Light our guns,’ said Spika. ‘Shift course, get the Cold Steel between us and the Lights Excelling.’

Kader’s gun was out of her holster and aimed at his head. Her gaze was rock steady behind the dark mouth of the muzzle.

‘Belay that order,’ she said.

‘Shipmaster,’ came another call. ‘The unified Geller envelope is distorting. We don’t have space to move and maintain reality integrity.’

He held his gaze on Kader. The data connections to the Highness Ser Armaduke were fizzing with migraine pain and fever as the ship fought whatever was trying to burrow into its guts.

‘The Cold Steel has readied to fire on us,’ he said. ‘That’s the protocol, but she’s not. That sound and pulse we heard – that sounded like a call. Coordination. That to me suggests–’

‘That the Cold Steel has already fallen,’ said Kader.

‘If we let ourselves die, then the Lights Excelling is alone with a ship that is truly compromised, without help, without aid. The enemy wins, and the mission fails. By the God-Emperor and the Throne of Terra, while I can command this ship, I am not going to see that happen.’

Kader took a breath, then began to lower her gun.

‘Shipmaster!’

Spika turned as an armsman staggered onto the deck. The man was breathing hard, shaking with more than fatigue.

‘Report,’ he called.

‘Word from Lieutenant Cern, sir – one of the…’ The man swallowed. ‘One of the machines is active and loose, we… The lieutenant thinks it has gone to the Geller field generators.’

‘The other woe machines?’ snapped Kader. ‘The guards?’

‘The guards are dead. The other machines were not active.’

‘But not secure,’ said Kader.

‘Armsmen to the hangar deck and the generatorium decks,’ called Spika, pivoting his chair up into the air above the command deck. ‘If in doubt, they shoot.’ He looked at the panting armsman. ‘Go with them.’

‘Aye, shipmaster.’ The man started to move.

‘We could open the hangar doors, sir,’ said a deck officer.

‘No,’ said Spika. ‘Our job is to get those cursed things to their destination.’

Kader turned and made after the armsman.

A single high ping sounded through the bridge. Spika felt its echo over his data-links. Half the bridge crew stopped, looking up, as though the sound was the first flash of lightning in an oncoming storm.

Kader paused for a second, looked back. Spika looked at her, his voice calm.

‘The Lights Excelling is firing on us,’ he said.

The blast doors had been bored through. The hole was smooth-edged, silver. Dalbract paused beside the opening and looked around at Miletus and the other two armsmen.

‘Once we have it in sight, get it into the open. Fire at it and hit, no stray shots. We damage the field generators and we might as well put a bullet in each other now. Once we have a clear shot, open up and keep firing. It’s damaged, like the lieutenant said. All we have to do is to give it more than it can cope with, push it over into the abyss where it came from. Do not turn your backs. The serpent and the sisters are watching us, and they can’t stand a coward.’

There were nods, some hesitant, but all clear.

‘Good.’ Dalbract looked at Miletus. ‘Your melta charge, if you wouldn’t mind, sir.’

Miletus frowned. The sergeant-at-arms’ tone had become almost casual, as though they were talking about the correct way to coil chains or stow personal gear.

‘You’re not rated to use it yet. Best not carry something that can put a hole in something vital until you really know how not to use it.’

Still frowning, Miletus unhooked the heavy charge and handed it to Dalbract.

‘Thank you, sir. Everyone ready – let’s go.’

Then they were up and through the hole bored in the door, into the dark beyond.

The beams of the stablights slid through the dark and across the faces of machines. Pipes and clusters of cables wove across them, like vines grown over the stones of a deserted temple. Some of the machines were cylinders, others cubes or octahedrons of dull, black metal spinning in gimbal frames. Brass and silver, iron, glass and crystal gleamed under a soft layer of white dust. The air tasted sharp and cold. Miletus’ skin pinched inside his pressure suit. He had never been this close to Geller field generators, and the presence of these engines was unsettling. He found himself wondering how different these devices were from the woe machine – how far into something terrifying and sanity-breaking both reached.

He came around the corner of a pillar of crystalline discs. His helm light panned across a row of cylinders each the size of a tank, set on their sides and linked to trunks of copper piping. He turned. Then felt the cold jolt in the back of his brain. He froze and, more slowly, swept the beam back.

The woe machine had changed shape. It had spread across the surface of the machine, its cogwork and levers formed into flat tentacles. The cogs were turning slowly, biting into the material of the cylinder, like a predator slowly feeding on a dying animal. Tiny sparks arced along its form, pulsing. It did not respond to the beam of light. Miletus turned to look to Dalbract and the other armsmen.

A hiss like an unwinding chrono filled his ears. He spun. The woe machine reared into the air, cogwork tentacles pulling free of the generator. Its shape boiled, shifting, pulling and extending like a starburst of golden dust in the dark. Miletus felt the dead silence flow from it again. Frost glittered in the beam of his light. His finger froze on the trigger of his pistol. A whip tentacle of brass lashed out.

Miletus fired.

‘Turn seventy by thirty, hard,’ shouted Spika. ‘All stations, brace!’

Alarums began to sound as crew shouted the brace order into vox-horns.

‘Brace!’

‘Brace!’

‘Brace!’

The helmsman was already spinning his controls. The hull juddered. Decrementing data spun across the consoles in front of Spika’s eyes.

The Armaduke was still turning as the macro-shells struck it across the prow. Explosions blossomed. Chunks of armour tore free, burning and scattering in a smear of fire as the ship dragged itself through the flame. Inside the hull, the shockwave ripped through compartments and internal spaces. Supports in forward holds crumpled. Hundreds of crewmen died as the walls crushed them. Displaced atmosphere blew through old hatch seals and flung bodies into walls. Wiring shorted. Gas vented from conduits and fire burst into being, howling down passages as it ate the air. The screams of the burning echoed through the intra-ship vox until the feeds were shut down. In the chambers where hatches had not been sealed in time, or where ageing seals gave out, more slid down into death, the air stolen from their lungs by a blaze they could not even see.

The Highness Ser Armaduke continued to turn, undaunted. Time and battle had threaded her bones with cracks, and the tide of favour had stolen the gilding from her name, but she had outlived wars and outfought those who had tried to kill her. She kept turning into the fire; debris scattered in her wake, tumbling to the edge of the Geller envelope and unravelling into ash and paradox in the tide of the warp.

On the bridge, Spika felt his ship burn as a flare of sympathetic pain at the base of his skull. He could taste metal. His heart was hammering, the world was the wail of alarms and the growl of stressed metal. His skull was ringing as though he had taken a blow to the forehead. He blinked, grinned. This was the war that his ship had been birthed to: point-blank, a contest of who could take damage and give back more.

The shadow of the Cold Steel blotted out the Lights Excelling in the gunsight data-feeds.

‘The Lights Excelling is getting ready to fire again,’ called the deck officer.

‘Sir, all guns ready to target.’

‘Shipmaster, reading multiple weapon energy signals on the Cold Steel,’ said the Officer of Detection.

‘Targeting us?’

‘Negative.’

‘There is only one other target out here. Lock our guns on the Cold Steel, main mass, core it to its reactors before it can fire on the Lights Excelling.’

A beat of quiet in the crew as the hull shook and the alarms shouted on. Spika felt cold, the breath still in his lungs. He wondered how long the other ship had been compromised – what had become of her crew, and what manner of devilry the Archenemy had worked into devices that could do such things.

‘Guns primed and locked,’ called an ordnance officer.

On the sensor screens he saw the positions of the three ships shift in the battle volume.

‘The Lights Excelling will have clear fire on us in twenty seconds,’ called the Officer of Detection.

He opened his mouth to speak the order.

The half-electronic shout from the Master of Materium stopped the words before they could form.

‘Shipmaster, the Geller field is destabilising. It’s going to collapse.’

In that second, the Cold Steel fired.

Blast shots slammed into the woe machine. Showers of cogs and levers tore free. Black abscesses opened in the air around it, swimming like tar on water. The armsmen went forwards, guns firing. The woe machine folded on itself like the changing image of a kaleidoscope. The cylinder of the generator spool behind it was flickering. Arcs of pink and orange light whipped the air. There was a smell of hot metal and burning dust.

Miletus did not need to be an initiate of the tech-mysteries to know that when these generators failed the thin skin of reality keeping the warp back from the ship would flood in. The great ocean of nightmares would swallow them. He could almost feel it, the true fear of all who sailed the stars, to fall into the depths where the ghosts lurked and the dead ships of ages past rolled on dark tides.

He fired again, going forwards, closing, and the woe machine was shrinking and fragmenting under the hammer-rolling blasts. He felt the beginning of a thread of relief tug at him. They would do this. The enemy was weak and getting weaker, and they would kill it and then this would be over, just another story to wander the Highness Ser Armaduke as a ghost of its past.

His pistol clicked empty. He froze. The armsman closest to him paused to look at Miletus as he fumbled for a magazine. The woe machine lashed forwards. Miletus had the impression of a glittering arc flashing within half a metre of him.

The armsman came apart. Blood and gut fluid burst across the deck. The lash of cogwork flicked through the air and the sound of metal teeth spinning through bones was a shriek as it sawed through bodies. The woe machine flowed forwards. Darkness boiled from its churning centre, ink-thick, curdling light. It might have been damaged, it might have been weakened by what it had done to break free, but Miletus realised that it was still going to kill them all. He felt his hands slam the magazine home. The woe machine expanded in front and above him, a glittering eight-pointed star, folded in its own darkness. All he could hear was the clicking of turning wheels.

A hand yanked him back. He stumbled, falling, shouting out. Dalbract stepped into the space where he had stood. The sergeant-at-arms fired. The blast from the gun vanished into the dark. Miletus saw the two melta charges hanging from the weapon loops at Dalbract’s waist, saw the arming lights blinking on them. The serpent on the crest of Dalbract’s helm was looking back at him. He thought he caught the ghost of a roar of defiance before the woe machine enveloped the sergeant-at-arms. Then came a sound like thunder caught under a god’s glass, and the darkness surrounding the woe machine split.

Miletus dived to the deck. The blast bellowed into being, weaving with a noise like the cry of dying birds. Then it was gone, and the only sounds Miletus could hear were his own gasping breaths and the sound of thousands of tiny cogwheels falling to the deck.

The Cold Steel’s guns were not functioning as they should. Suborned by the malignancy of the awoken woe machines, the cannons and plasma bombards loosed in a ragged broadside. In the open void, at range, against a void-shielded target it would have done no more than irritate. In a pocket of space a handful of kilometres across, it was deadly. The shots hit the Lights Excelling in its belly. Fire and explosives burned into its decks. Macro-ammunition ready to drop into cannon breeches cooked off. Explosions ripped from its mid-section and into its stern compartments. It faltered in its course.

On the bridge of the Highness Ser Armaduke, Spika gave his own order as the first shots loosed from the Cold Steel.

‘Fire,’ he ordered.

The old ship spoke. Her twin souls – the bones of the dead that had been laid into her keel and the golden promise of war, now faded – united. Macro-shells hammered into the Cold Steel’s aft, rolling in rhythm like the beat of a fist. The fire tore through the other ship’s engines and into its core. Plasma conduits ruptured. Bubbles of blue-hot fire tore through its structure.

Still the Armaduke hammered its blows home.

On her bridge the Master of Materium turned and called up to Spika, voice amplified over the thunder vibrating through the air.

‘Shipmaster, the Geller field control has stabilised, but the squadron envelope is going to collapse.’

‘The Lights Excelling?’

‘It’s falling to the edge of the envelope,’ said the Officer of Detection. ‘Its field is failing. Reading fires in two-thirds of its structure.’

Spika set his chair down and rose to his feet. The deck was shaking with the recoil of the guns. The alarms and calls muffled for a second.

‘Re-target our fire to the Lights Excelling. One clear volley.’ He paused, nodding. ‘May the Emperor forgive us,’ he said quietly, ‘and receive those who fall in His service.’

Across the bridge, the crew bowed their heads as the gunfire stilled for a minute and then roared again.

NIADORAL SYSTEM – ADEPTUS MECHANICUS ENCLAVE

Miletus watched as the two litters carrying the remains of the woe machines rolled from the hangar onto the docking limb. Battle servitors ringed them and spider-limbed tanks walked behind them. Incense folded through the air in great clouds.

The tech-priests who had come aboard the Highness Ser Armaduke held back a little from the procession. They had been a terse bunch even for the red priests. Miletus had heard Spika say that they were an enclave of the Urdeshi magi, exiled from their forges by the Archenemy occupation. He wondered what that did to such beings, to have their sacred places denied them? He thought of Hexil, another exile from the same world, all sharpness, like a blade made sharper by the hammer of existence.

The enclave itself was a small moon, orbiting a gas giant set amongst half a dozen of its massive kin in an otherwise lifeless system. The competing gravity wells of the planets had made translation a delicate matter, more so for the Highness Ser Armaduke’s recovering Geller field and warp engines. They had managed it, though, and exchanged layers of cypher coding with a Mechanicus system ship before being given the enclave’s location.

Even once they arrived there had been little interaction except for a series of heavily encrypted messages between Kader and the enclave. A steersman had come aboard – cloaked in deep red velvet and trailing brass mechadendrites – who had guided the ship through drifts of mines and deadfall torpedoes to dock at the enclave. An armoured bridge had extended from the moon, and the priesthood had come aboard and taken possession of the two remaining woe machines. With them had been a cluster of Munitorum officers in the uniform of the Commissariat, who had exchanged words with Kader but no one else. He had noticed that they and a group of adepts with blank-visored masks had remained in the hangar while the rest disembarked.

Miletus had watched all of this quietly beside Spika and the other officers not on watch. He wore his pressure armour and stood with the newly refilled squads of the Wyrmyr armsmen.

He had come to after the fight in the Geller field generatorium with a gun pointed at his head. Kader and a section of armsmen had found him. He had been covered in blood. He had had to answer a stream of questions before Kader had lowered the gun and let him up. They had told him to get to the junior officer’s medicae bay, but he had refused.

He had crossed and recrossed the deck of the chamber even as the enginseers laboured over the machines. There had been no sign of Dalbract. No scrap of armour or shred of flesh. Just a shadow burned on the deck plating, like the spread wings of a ragged angel.

‘All officers report to the bridge as soon as we break dock,’ said Spika as the last of the tech-priests crossed into the docking limb. He looked grim, thought Miletus, but then they all did.

They all looked at the shipmaster as he finished. They had gathered in the small stateroom at the back of the bridge.

‘It’s not right,’ said one after the silence had settled.

‘It is not,’ said Spika. ‘It is also an order from the Commissariat, crusade high command and the Holy Ordos. Little to argue with.’ He sighed, and rubbed his eyes. For a moment, he looked as old as his ship. ‘We serve, we live, on the tides of the sea of souls or the cold void. We can hope for nothing else.’

Mnemonic scrubbing, that was what Spika had called it. The selective removal of a recent memory through chem-infusions and hypno-saturation. The memories of the mission to bring the woe machines from Verghast were to be deleted from the lives of all who knew its details.

‘Will you be submitting to this, sir?’ asked Miletus.

‘Yes, Second Lieutenant Cern. I will be, as will all of you, and you will assist Commissar Kader and her associates to see it is followed through with all crew that this applies to. All those with knowledge of the cargo we carried and the details of what happened to it, and any who you think might have knowledge of it. I am informed that this… process needs to be complete before the memories are too embedded. So, get to it and make it happen. I want it complete and all involved on station when we reach system edge.’

‘The ship will remember who died for her, and why,’ said Miletus as Spika stood.

All the officers looked at him. He could read the signs that he should stop talking on their faces.

‘Mister Cern?’ asked Spika.

‘She remembers,’ said Miletus. ‘Even if the rest of us forget, she will remember one way or another.’

Spika’s face twitched in what might have been a smile.

‘I hope so, Mister Cern. I hope so.’

TANGRAVE SYSTEM – VOID PORT AURIELIS

He woke to the bells ringing general order, and knew they were coming into port. The dream was still clinging to the inside of his eyelids. He shook his head. The brass-framed chrono mounted on the wall clicked its hands over.

He was on his feet, blast pistol in his hand and aimed at…

Nothing.

He lowered the gun. He was shivering. It had been the fifth night of waking like this. He looked at the chrono, watched the cogwork turning through seconds under the dial. It was a fine piece, made to tell time for an officer serving on a great and golden matriarch of war.

His hand twitched on the gun. He did not know why, but he wanted to put a blast-shell right into the chrono’s ticking face. It was the trauma from when the raiders boarded them, and then the Geller field fluctuation. They would suffer dreams and emotional disturbance for a while. That was what the medicae officers had told them all. Nothing to worry about, just a price of war.

He began to pull on his dress uniform. There would be no one to greet them when they docked, but they had seen action, even if it was minor, so the shipmaster had ordered all crew arrayed in full formality and on station as they came into port. He fastened his boots and checked the set of new second lieutenant pins on his epaulettes. A silver serpent had been embroidered in silver thread on the back of his collar.

He stood and made for the door. His new attendant rating was waiting outside, and saluted.

‘Not late yet, sir,’ she said.

Miletus nodded, then paused and looked back into his cabin. ‘Have that taken down,’ he said, pointing at the chrono.

‘Very good, sir, don’t want the cogs to cut your time short.’

Miletus paused, turned.

‘What?’

‘The cogs, leave them running when you aren’t looking and they can cut your time down to nothing, like you never were.’

‘Where did you hear that?’

The attendant looked puzzled. ‘I don’t know, sir. Just a thing down on the decks. Ship story, sir, you know.’

Miletus blinked, then nodded.

‘Very good, carry on.’

‘It’s nice that they gave you a furlough after only one mission.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Throne, you are gloomy. I thought you would be excited. I heard you were promoted. Promoted and cited in reports, no less, for boarding action against a raiding force! I must hear all the details. A mission escorting damaged war materiel back from Verghast and somehow you manage to end up in the thick of it and with a promotion to boot.’

‘Honestly, I can’t remember much about it.’

‘Ah… right. Of course… Are you going to put in for a transfer? You can, you know. Might take a few more hops in the old wreck before you can get a fleet billet, but with a report citation you will be in with a good run at something better, much better perhaps.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘You don’t think so? What in Terra’s light has got into you?’

‘I think I am going to stay with the Armaduke, while I can.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. Why are you surprised?’

‘I mean, I just thought from what you said before – a ship like that…’

‘A ship isn’t just a ship, you know – it is everything that has happened to it, and all the people who have lived and died on it. It is its ghosts and they are its memory.’

‘And now you are, what, part of it? One of its future ghosts?’

‘Something like that, yes. Something like that.’

INDOMITABLE SPIRIT

WRITTEN BY RACHEL HARRISON

Preface

Rachel’s Severina Raine stories show there’s always ample room for another badass commissar ’round these parts. I love them, I love Rachel’s writing, and I think she’s going to be a force to be reckoned with, if she isn’t already. If you haven’t read her stories, do that thing right now.

Like me and Justin, she has serious form when it comes to the Astra Militarum, so it seemed entirely sensible to offer her a place in this collection, not that I needed an excuse. The Sabbat Crusade is a predominately Imperial Guard war, after all.

Lo and behold, that’s not where she went with it. Turns out, she has been longing to get her wings. So strap in, because this is Aeronautica 101. It’s so exciting, so inspiring, it might actually kick me in the seat of my pants hard enough to finally write that sequel to Double Eagle (yeah, I know, sixteen years later… But, full disclosure, I am writing it).

I tell you what, though. I’m really going to have to raise my game to last even ten seconds in the air against Rach’s dogfighting prowess.

Dakka, as they say, dakka!

01

AIRBASE THETA-SIX, BELSHIIR BINARY.
771.M41.

Belshiir Binary’s dawn is blood-red, the light refracted by refinery smog. The wind is hot and urgent, carrying with it a fine mist of pollutant grit that rings against the plasteel roof of the airbase like rain. It blows through the open hangar doors, thrashing against the back of Leana Vidal’s flight jacket. Stinging her skin. Vidal pays no mind to it. Not to the hammer of tools, or the shouting of the deck crew. Not to the thrum of idling transports. She is focused entirely on the aircraft in front of her. A silver-grey Imperial Lightning strike fighter, crouched low on its stanchions.

Her Lightning.

Vidal walks around the side of the interceptor, trailing her hand along the leading edge of the wing. Her hand bump, bump, bumps over subtle notches in the metal. Old scars, filled and patched. Vidal cuts around the tip of the wing and approaches the tail of the interceptor. There’s a flat panel there where the Lightning wears her serial number, and her name.

‘Indomitable Spirit,’ Vidal says.

Beneath the name are the Lightning’s honours. Vidal counts off thirty-two hand-painted red skulls, tallying the interceptor’s confirmed machine kills. There are nearly as many white aquilas to mark the pilots lost to pay for them. Beneath that are four crusade badges. Wreathed eagles, painted in gold. Last of all, there is a peeled and faded silver star, circled by a ten-pointed halo. The scroll beneath it is so badly weathered that Vidal has to lean right in, turning the silver saint she wears on a chain around her neck idly as she does so.

‘Khulan.’

Vidal straightens and turns at the sound of the voice. She salutes, at the sight of her flight leader standing there. ‘Sir,’ she says.

‘At ease,’ Sova replies, with a half-smile. It’s the only sort of smile she can manage, given that the right side of her face is composed of silvered steel plating and ceramics. Vidal drops her salute and glances back at the Lightning. At the old scars, filled and patched.

‘This Lightning flew in the crusade for Khulan?’ she asks.

Sova nods. ‘Not just that. The Spirit flew the siege at Balhaut, too. She survived the skies with me at Parthenope. Brought me home in fewer pieces than my squadron. Than I really deserved, if I’m honest.’ Sova glances down at her right hand. It is silver and ceramic, too. ‘It took me a moment to recognise her when they brought her down from transit,’ she says. ‘All of those refits.’

Vidal’s mind is alight with a dozen questions about Khulan, and Parthenope, but she elects not to ask them, in favour of a much more burning question.

‘If I may, then why give the Spirit to a rookie, sir?’ Vidal asks. ‘Why give her to me?’

‘Because she is a veteran, even if you are not. Because she is fierce, and loyal. Full of fighting joy.’

Sova reaches out and puts her good hand flat on the Spirit’s armour plating.

‘The Spirit has seen a lot. Done a lot. She has killed and been killed.’

She drops her hand away.

‘But even then,’ Sova says, with that half-smile of hers. ‘She’s still the same. She’s still the Spirit.’

Micro-fine grit lashes noisily against the cockpit glass as Vidal puts Indomitable Spirit into a steep banking turn. The Lightning’s airframe shakes, and the instruments rattle in their housings. The silver saint rattles, too, suspended by her chain from the cockpit cage. Vidal can’t blink, though her eyes are dry and stinging. The G-force weighs on her chest, pressing her into the seat. Into the old bloodstain painted like a target on the backrest. Vidal noticed it when she got in. A wide, black circle soaked into the synth-leather. Vidal fancies that she can feel it, damp against her back as though it is new.

Or maybe that’s just the sweat tracing down her spine.

The colossal loading pillars of the Heliodar Dockyards rush by on either side of the Spirit, barely visible through the petrochem smog. Black iron blurs, in the blood-red haze. Around her, the rest of Dagger Flight fly in a tight combat formation, all following their flight leader. Sova is dead ahead, her Lightning’s engines glowing through the smoke. Vidal is so focused on the twin bright lights that she doesn’t truly register the moment they break through the smog. All of a sudden, it’s just clear. Vidal can see everything. The vast iron sprawl of the dockyards, stretching out in every direction. She sees landing pads, and lifter gantries. Part-constructed transit craft, and huge, hanging tethers. Then, there, amongst the loading pillars, their target. The silver skeleton of the industrial promethium storage complex that the Pact have taken for their own. Vidal’s vox-set hisses.

‘There it is, Dagger,’ Sova says, her voice blurred by distortion. ‘Stay on me. We go steep, then straight. Wait for the logis-lock before you loose. We’re doing this in one run.’

There’s a twinned ‘Aye, sir,’ from Daggers One and Two, Fontaine and Eevs. One speaks in a low growl, the other quick and cutting. Neither of them has the catch of nerves in their voice that Vidal does when she answers.

‘Cut to the bone, Dagger,’ Sova says, and she rolls her Lightning over into a steep dive. Vidal takes a breath of recycled air, and meets the eyes of the silver saint, suspended in her peripheral vision.

Lend me your wings, she thinks.

Then Vidal slams the control stick to the right. She feels the giddy lift and float as the world turns around her; then she is falling, the dockyards rushing up to meet her. Vidal’s eyes are streaming, but she finds herself grinning as the altimeter plummets towards hard deck. She has done attack drills before. False flights. Years and years of practice and theory and test after gruelling test. But this is different.

This is duty.

This is real.

Vidal yells into her breather mask. Not words, just a shapeless bellow of joy. The Spirit bellows too, and a heavy judder runs through the airframe. An animal snarl that travels from the Lightning’s bones into Vidal’s own. She thinks she feels it, then. The Spirit’s fierce, fighting joy. Ahead of her, the rest of Dagger snap out of the dive, burners roaring. Vidal tenses her body and does the same, yanking back hard on the stick. The afterburners kick in, thumping so hard that it feels like an extra heartbeat in Vidal’s chest. The G-force bludgeons her. Bones. Brain. Lungs. For a moment, Vidal feels collapsed. Crushed. Her vision narrows until all that she can see is a pinprick circle of light. Vidal’s breath catches. Then, a voice.

‘Still with us, Dagger Three?’

At the sound of Sova’s voice the world comes clear. Vidal takes a loud breath, and blinks away the blurriness in her eyes. Somehow, she has come up level with Fontaine at her two, and Eevs at ten. Sova is up front. Damned near on top of the target. It is coming up fast, the adamantium shell of the complex reflecting the curdled, crimson sky.

‘Yes, sir,’ Vidal replies, breathlessly. ‘Still with you.’

‘Good,’ Sova replies. ‘Let’s get this done.’

Vidal flips the trigger-guard on her control stick and engages the logis-lock for her Hellstrike missiles. The system peals on repeat in quicker and quicker succession. Ahead, Sova looses her missiles, stitching detonations along the complex roof. Fontaine follows suit. Then Eevs. The logis-lock is nearly one long note, now. Vidal takes another deep breath and rests her thumb against the trigger.

Lend me your eye, she asks her silver saint.

Vidal tenses. Readies to fire. And then the Spirit’s combat augurs blare. Vidal catches sight of something ahead and high. A bright flash of bronze. Twin-razor silhouette. A Hell Blade. Her eyes go wide.

‘Pact!’ she yells, into the vox.

‘Throne,’ Eevs snarls. It’s all he gets to say. A second Hell Blade streaks overhead, raking Eevs’ Lightning with a cluster of hard rounds. Eevs’ interceptor comes apart in a bright flare, red and white and gold. The explosion prints on Vidal’s eyes. On her mind, and her heart. She freezes up and overshoots her target, logis-lock screaming. That single, rasped word echoes in her head. Eevs’ last word.

Throne.

‘Break!’ Sova’s voice cuts through for a second time. ‘Vidal, break left, now!’

Vidal yanks on the Spirit’s control stick and puts the Lightning into a messy, spine-jerking roll. A Hell Blade screams through the space she just occupied, guns lit and flashing. Vidal yanks the control stick again, dragging the Spirit back onto its original flight path. This roll is better. Less messy. She comes out of it level and lines up her target. It’s the first time Vidal has ever got a good look at an enemy machine, other than in picts. The Hell Blade is a barbed, oil-slick arrowhead, its edges picked out in dirty bronze. The canopy is dark, the rear engine burning blood red. Vidal can hear that massive engine, even through armaglass and open sky. It sounds like a world’s worth of screaming. Vidal grits her teeth and fires the Spirit’s lascannons. Twin lasers spear out from the snout of the Lightning, stinging the Hell Blade rear left. It is really pissing smoke now. Dark smoke. Vidal grits her teeth and fires again, only for the Hell Blade to roll neatly out of her arc of fire. Vidal curses into her breather mask, but before she can match the manoeuvre, twin lascannon beams strike the Hell Blade from above, right between its pointed wings. The enemy fighter explodes, and a Lightning bursts through the centre of the detonation before corkscrewing up and away again, dragging ribbons of smoke and flame from the explosion along with it.

‘Strike one bandit,’ Sova says, over the flight vox. ‘Nice tag, Vidal.’

Vidal’s breath catches. It’s her first kill. An assist, but a kill all the same. She expects to feel something. A rush. Righteousness, maybe. But there’s no time. The pieces of the Hell Blade have already vanished. The smoke too. Gone, in an instant. Vidal pulls the Spirit up and around to see another black streak painted across the ruddy sky.

‘Strike a second,’ Fontaine voxes. ‘But I’ve got another on my tail!’

He is jinking left and right above her with another Hell Blade in close pursuit, the enemy fighter sticking to him no matter how Fontaine yaws and skids. This one is the flight leader, all bronze, save for gore-red gun mouths, and a black arrow streak along the length of the body.

‘Break high,’ Sova orders him. ‘Now!’

Fontaine pulls into an airframe-buckling climb, kicking the thrust in hard as he goes. His Lightning rockets upwards at near-vertical, but it’s not enough to slip what follows him. The Pact pilot matches Fontaine’s climb and opens fire, stinging him across the wings with a tight burst from its autocannons. Fontaine slews sideways. His climb becomes a roll. An ugly, dizzying spiral. Then his Lightning clips one of the black iron orbital tethers and shears apart in a flurry of silver shards. Gone, in an instant. Vidal can’t see the Pact fighter, either. Just Sova, her engines glowing as she arrests her pursuit and peels off. The vox-channel must still be open, because Vidal can hear her flight leader breathing.

‘With me, Dagger Three,’ she says. ‘We’re running.’

The Spirit’s logis-lock peals before Vidal can answer. She must have flown back into range. Below, the promethium storage complex is burning, but not blown. Still standing. Still serving the enemy.

‘Wait,’ Vidal says. She swallows, heavily. ‘Sir, I still have Hellstrikes.’

‘Not a chance, Vidal,’ Sova answers. ‘It’s a death sentence.’

‘But there is a chance,’ Vidal replies, without thinking. ‘We can still finish this.’

The pause on Sova’s end is fractional. ‘You really believe that?’

Vidal’s words are dry and rasping, but they spill straight out of her. No hesitation.

‘I do.’

Sova breathes out slowly. ‘Alright,’ she says. ‘But there’s no breaking off from this. We commit.’

‘I know,’ Vidal says. ‘To the bone, sir.’

There’s a pause, then Sova laughs, cold and empty.

‘Take the lead, Dagger Three.’

Vidal pushes the Spirit down into a second attack dive. This time there’s no giddiness. No grinning. This time, the judder that runs through the Spirit’s airframe is all rage. The Spirit’s rage. Vidal’s rage. The simple defiance of that last word, spoken by Eevs.

Throne.

Vidal pulls out of the dive a heartbeat from hard deck. She feels everything flex with the pressure of it. The Spirit’s airframe. The cockpit armaglass. Her own bones. Her ears pop and her teeth crash together. The logis-lock peals around her, but it is drowned out by the sound of autocannon fire lashing against the Spirit’s fuselage. The Lightning shudders around Vidal, integrity alarums blaring. Vidal chances a look over her shoulder and catches the briefest glimpse of her attacker. Of the black arrow streak, painted front to back on the Hell Blade’s hull. The flight leader, coming on high and fast.

‘Keep on it!’ Sova says. ‘I’ll get the bastard!’

More autocannon fire clatters against the Spirit’s hull. Behind Vidal, something starts venting with a loud, angry hiss. She swears, but keeps going.

Lend me your sword, she begs of her silver saint. Please!

Vidal flips the trigger-guard for her Hellstrikes, focused entirely on the quickening peal of the logis-lock, ringing and ringing and ringing and ringing until–

There!

Vidal pulls the trigger. Four Hellstrike missiles streak out from their mounts beneath the Spirit’s wings, before arcing down to the target below. They impact in quick succession, throwing gouts of fire high in the air. Secondary detonations trigger along the spine of the complex, ripping along supply pipes and through deep storage. The pressure buffets the Spirit as Vidal pulls up and away. She sees Sova spiralling upwards above her, the Hell Blade hanging at her back. Sova’s Lightning is pockmarked from gunfire, smoke spilling from the undercarriage in thick ribbons. Dark smoke. Vidal opens the vox-channel, but Sova speaks before she can, her voice scratchy with interference.

‘Nice tag, Vidal,’ she says.

Then Sova’s Lightning explodes under the Hell Blade’s guns. Vidal freezes for a second time, her gloved hands locked tight around the Spirit’s control stick. She blinks, her eyes stinging, but there’s no time to feel anything now, either. The Pact pilot is already coming for her, pinpricks of light flashing in the Hell Blade’s gore-red gun mouths. Vidal uses her forward momentum to pitch the Spirit down into an evasive spiral dive. It’s a desperate manoeuvre. Deadly. The Spirit’s airframe rattles around her, the dockyards knotting and blurring through the cockpit armaglass. Vidal feels autocannon rounds crack against the Spirit’s armour plating. She feels the Lightning wallow. She feels the malice of the Hell Blade, hanging close at her back. The Spirit’s bones thrum, and Vidal cuts her speed and kicks in the air brakes. The Hell Blade overshoots her with a bellow, falling directly into her firing arc. Vidal unloads with the Spirit’s lascannons, depleting half the charge. A white-out of laser fire. Vidal blinks reflexively and tenses to fire again, but the sky in front of her is empty, save for smoke. The ace is gone. She stung them. She must have–

A handful of hard, loud impacts jolt Vidal in her seat, and the Hell Blade passes her again, hellfire engine flaring. She can’t hear the scream of it, this time. Something in the cockpit is hissing too loudly. Blinking heavily, Vidal realises it’s not something venting. It’s air, rushing between her teeth. She glances down to see large circles of blood soaking steadily through her flight suit.

‘Huh,’ she murmurs.

Vidal’s grip on the control stick slackens. She hardly notices the Pact pilot break off. Hardly feels the lift and the float as the Spirit pitches downwards, or the thrum of the airframe as the Lightning arcs towards the blasted ruin of the promethium complex, burning far below. Vidal’s vision greys around the edges, closing swiftly like an iris shutter until all she can see is her silver saint, caught in the invisible pull of the fall.

02

LOW ORBIT OVER SRADY BAY, LYUBOV.
778.M41.

From the hangar deck of the Dauntless Heart, Lyubov’s horizon line is a harsh white curve, like a stroke of paint against the face of the void. The planet’s primary sun is rising right in the middle of that curve, as bright as a commemorative medal. Bastien Daire sits cross-legged on the wing of his newly assigned Lightning, watching that bright circle rise and swell, the stars fading by comparison. There are other Navy ships out there. Cruisers, and battleships. Dozens of them, glittering in the orbital sunrise. Around Daire, the launch deck of the Dauntless Heart is frantic with activity, the deck crew of the Lunar-class cruiser working hard to get the Navy fighter wings ready for the drop. Daire busies himself by rolling a silver coin absently across the knuckles of his right hand. He’s been ready for hours. Ready since they translated into system.

‘Not long now,’ he says to the Lightning.

‘Do they ever talk back to you?’

Daire looks down to see one of the deck crew looking up at him. It’s Liva, like always. She has a preflight board in her hand, and a frown on her broad, scarred face. Daire pockets the silver coin and drops off the Lightning’s wing.

‘Only once we’re in the air,’ he says. ‘Then they tell me all kinds of things.’

Liva looks at the Lightning, crouched low on its stanchions. She smiles in a way Daire has never known her smile at another person. Especially not at him.

‘This one will have some stories,’ she says. ‘Serial ten-twelve is an old soul.’

‘How old?’

Liva looks back at him. ‘Older than you.’

‘Most things are,’ Daire says with a grin. ‘Guess that’s how it is when you’re the youngest ace in the wing.’

Liva’s hand whips out and she claps him on the head with the preflight board.

‘This isn’t a joke,’ she says. ‘I want this one back. In one piece.’

Daire rubs at his head where she hit him. ‘Alright,’ he says. ‘Saint’s grace. You need to worry less.’

‘You need to worry more,’ Liva replies, flatly. ‘You’re going after a mass carrier, Bas. We’re not talking four-on-four. Even if half of them are out hunting, there’ll still be dozens of them down there. Dozens of dozens. A whole nest of devils.’

‘I know,’ Daire says. ‘That’s why I petitioned the flight marshal for the right to go after it.’

He looks out of the viewport at Lyubov’s horizon line and thinks about it. A sky black with enemy birds. A smell comes back to him at the thought. At the memory. Smoke, and ash. Blood on stone. It’s so strong he can taste it.

‘If we don’t stop them, nothing will.’ He pauses, still tasting smoke. ‘They’ll burn this world, and then the next. They won’t stop until every world in the sector is ashes, just like Balhaut.’

‘Balhaut was a victory.’

‘In the end,’ Daire says.

‘You speak as though you saw it.’

Daire puts his hand in his pocket, and takes out the silver coin. The design on the face of it is worn nearly smooth from handling, but he can still make it out. A circle of mercantile marks around a row of pointed towers. The Oligarchy.

‘I don’t remember much about Balhaut, but I remember finding this,’ he says. ‘I came across it in the rubble the day the Gate fell. We’d been running for months by then. Years, probably. Me. My ma, and my brother. Though I was on my own by then. Had been a while.’ He rolls the coin deftly across his knuckles, back and forth. ‘I only saw it because it caught the light. One shiny thing amongst all of the muck. I knew it was a silver crown. The kind they say are lucky. So I climbed out into the mess to pick it up, and that’s when I got picked up too.’

‘By the Pact?’ Liva asks, quietly.

Daire shakes his head. ‘By a scout trooper from the Pardus Twelfth with more heart than sense.’ Daire stops rolling the coin and looks at it sitting there on the flat of his hand. ‘It was lucky, I guess.’

There’s a long moment of silence before Liva speaks.

‘That doesn’t sound lucky,’ she says. ‘It sounds like you lost everything.’

Daire slips the coin back into his pocket and shrugs as though it doesn’t matter. ‘Maybe,’ he says. ‘But I was given something, too.’

‘What’s that?’

‘Wings,’ Daire says. He looks over at the Lightning, taking in the interceptor’s pockmarked armour plating, and her old scars. She looks as though she’s been rebuilt, never mind refitted. Tough old soul.

‘Serial ten-twelve, you said.’

‘That’s right.’

‘What’s her real name?’

Liva checks her preflight board. ‘Indomitable Spirit.’

Daire laughs, softly. ‘Sounds about right.’

Launching fighters from the belly of a Navy cruiser is a high-stakes game. It’s the steepest of dives. The swiftest, where even the smallest, most stupid mistake or slip of attention could cost a whole flight of aircraft. On paper, it’s risky. Reckless, even. It should be terrifying. But all that Bastien Daire feels as his Lightning tilts forwards in the hydraulic launch cradle is the thrill of it. The urgent need to fly. He hangs suspended above the face of Lyubov, the unimpeded sun painting hard shadows across the Spirit’s control panel as he performs his final checks. The Lightning’s controls are a muddle of old and new, with cracked dials in places and brand new panels in others. There’s a piece of yellowed adhesive tack over the fuel gauge that has the phrase ‘Low means go’ scribbled on it in a spidery hand.

‘Good advice,’ Daire says to the Spirit, as the launch cradle locks into place with a heavy, bone-jarring thud, angled at near vertical. If Daire wasn’t strapped to his seat he’d be against the cockpit glass, or through it. He glances left at the rest of Reaper Flight. The other Lightnings hang ready in their own cradles, the red streaks of paint on their tails as dark as blood under the void-light. Like the Spirit, they have been modified to carry a single high-capacity incendiary bomb, deployable from a hard point on the undercarriage. It’s a set-up that the deck crew have taken to calling a ‘death wish’. Another thing that should terrify Daire, but doesn’t.

‘Reaper Flight,’ comes the flight marshal’s voice over the vox. ‘The Thirty-Third Callion have confirmed sight of an enemy mass carrier moving through the Sradhive sprawl. You know your orders. Cut through the fighting. Kill the carrier, and whatever crawls out of it. Leave them with nothing.’

The connection severs with a hard snap, and Mosi cuts in. The flight lieutenant sounds as though he’s smiling, like always.

‘Alright, Reaper,’ he says. ‘You heard the marshal. Ready up, double time. Let’s not keep the devils waiting.’

Daire acknowledges alongside Himura and Ido. They are crusade orphans, like him. Fast-thinking, and fast-talking. Aching to prove something. The vox-channel switches again, direct comms this time.

‘Try not to act the fool this time, Bas,’ Mosi says. ‘It’s going to be a mess down there.’

Daire grins, setting the altimeter. It’s the same exchange they always have. As much of a tradition as the pre-launch prayer. ‘I’ll try to try,’ he says. ‘No promises.’

Mosi is sitting in the next Lightning on the line, so he is close enough that Daire can see the flight lieutenant shake his head in mock exasperation. Daire laughs, then the vox crackles again and the launchmaster’s voice cuts through.

‘Serial ten-twelve, Indomitable Spirit, confirm ready.’

Daire checks his instruments one last time, then pats the pocket of his flight coat where the silver coin sits.

‘This is serial ten-twelve,’ Daire says. ‘Confirming ready, all systems in the green.’

There’s a pause as the launchmaster makes her final checks. Then the vox crackles again. Daire’s heart leaps.

‘Reaper Flight, you are clear forward. Prepare for launch on my mark.’

Daire rests his thumb, ready to engage the rocket boost. He grins.

‘Three.’

‘Okay,’ he says to the Spirit.

‘Two.’

‘Let’s see what you can do.’

‘Mark!’

The rocket boost hurls the Spirit from the launch bay like a shell leaves a mortar, all violence and short-lived flame. Daire lets it burn for thirty seconds, dumping enough thrust to get the Lightning clear of the Dauntless Heart’s anchor, and set on its angle of descent. Daire’s world changes rapidly from starlit black to hazy blue, then hot white and red as the pull of gravity takes hold. He doesn’t need the booster now that the planet’s got him. Daire falls hard and fast into Lyubov’s atmosphere, tiny motes of flame catching the Spirit’s edges. Around him the rest of Reaper seem little more than silver darts, streaking downwards. The Spirit is buffeted by the atmosphere. By heat, and then by torrid, bruise-coloured storm clouds. For a moment, Daire finds himself alone inside a thunderhead, his vision black and blue and bright with spreading veins of lightning. It’s beautiful. Brutal. And then it’s gone, and Daire punches his way into Lyubov’s rain-lashed sky. The rest of Reaper are close on his tail, their armour plating snap-cooling in the cold air. They have come down right on top of the Sradhive sprawl, where the hab-towers have been gutted black and hollowed by shelling. Some are still burning, sending up stark columns of smoke. At the heart of the sprawl, Daire can see the mass carrier. A rolling airbase, grinding through the city’s bones on a set of colossal tracks. But between Reaper and the carrier there’s a whole new kind of storm. One made of silvered steel, crimson and brass, punctuated by blooms of fire. It’s a melee in the clouds. A kilometre-wide screen of wing tips and gun mouths.

The biggest damned dogfight that Daire has ever seen.

He feels a smile break on his face as the vox clicks live and he hears the words he’s been waiting for since they broke warp.

‘On me,’ Mosi says, in his smiling voice. ‘Death from above, Reaper Flight.’

Daire wasn’t joking when he told Liva that the aircraft speak to him. They don’t use words, of course. He’s no tech-priest. The interceptors speak to Daire through the roar of their guns, and the bellow of their engines. Through every creak of the airframe. The Spirit is different, though. As Daire falls through Lyubov’s violent sky, she does more than just speak.

She sings.

It’s furious. Animal. Beautiful. The sound of it surrounds Daire as he sights on a blood-red Hell Razor. The Pact fighter is hounding a wounded Thunderbolt. Clinging to it like a second shadow. The Thunderbolt will never outrun it. The Razor is too quick.

But Daire is quicker.

He hammers the Spirit’s afterburners to close the distance. The Hell Razor yaws, and rolls. Then it cuts speed, breaking hard left.

‘No, you don’t,’ Daire says. He kills the thrust and pops the air brake, snapping the Spirit into a matching turn so tight that the airframe flexes and groans. But the old bird is tough. The Spirit pulls the turn, setting Daire on the inside line of the Razor’s flight path, the enemy fighter falling momentarily into the centre of his firing arc. He squeezes the trigger without hesitation, lascannon fire lancing out to strike the Razor amidships. There’s a flash of light. A bloom of smoke and grit. Then the enemy fighter comes apart down the middle, shearing into two distinct pieces. Daire rolls the Spirit sideways, passing by the wallowing Thunderbolt so close that he can read the warning notice painted on the wing.

No step.

‘Strike one,’ he voxes.

‘You nearly struck yourself out, too,’ Mosi says. Daire doesn’t have to look to know that Reaper One is tailing him. Watching his back. It’s how they always fly. Mosi makes Daire the sword to his shield because the flight leader knows that’s what Daire is good for. What he lives for.

‘Nearly isn’t good enough,’ Daire says, rolling the Spirit back level. He is in the middle of the dogfight now. Right at the heart of the storm. It’s dense. Close-quarters. Little more than a series of fleeting, violent moments played out like picter-frames through the cockpit armaglass.

A Locust tearing apart at the edges, spilling fire from inside.

A blue-striped Thunderbolt, wing-struck and spinning downwards.

A Lightning from the 102 colliding headlong with a Hell Razor, each craft crushing the other and sending debris out in a wide, silver arc.

‘Throne,’ Himura says, as he peels away into the melee, Ido hanging on his tail. The two of them bracket a Razor between them, shredding it under their guns. ‘This is hell.’

Daire should agree with them, but he can’t. He won’t. Because it doesn’t feel like hell sitting in the Spirit’s cradle, surrounded by the smell of oil and fuel and steel.

It feels like home.

Daire wings over, feeling the hot rush of vertigo as he falls. The Spirit must feel it too, by the noise she’s making. By the way she drops, swift and straight as an arrow. Daire centres another Razor beneath the Spirit’s guns, shredding the Pact fighter’s starboard forewing. The Razor wallows, dragging along the damaged wing, before spiralling out of sight. Daire doesn’t slow, or look back to confirm the kill. He burns straight through the kill-zone, and into the path of an oncoming stoop bomber. The Pact fighter opens up, hard rounds clattering against the Spirit’s front plating. The Lightning snarls, and Daire laughs. Tough old bird. He doesn’t flinch. Doesn’t blink. He holds course, tagging the bomber along the underside as the pilot breaks to avoid him, streaking by on his left side.

‘Bandit coming your way,’ he voxes to Mosi.

‘You know, one day I’ll tire of clearing up after you,’ the flight leader replies.

Daire laughs. ‘No, you won’t.’

He puts the Spirit into a long, loose roll. Slips by another Razor. Stings another Locust, bad enough to set it limping. He laughs, giddy. Then levels out in time to tag a Hell Talon as it crosses his path. Daire catches the Pact bomber across the wings. Across the incendiaries mounted on the hard points beneath them. The Talon goes up in an instant, disappearing inside a colossal fireball that whites out Daire’s vision. He hits the burners, and holds straight. When the bright spots fade, he is through the fighter screen, staring down at the gutted wasteland of the Sradhive sprawl. Dust billows up from below in great, thick clouds, rolling away from the mass carrier as it moves inexorably towards the bay. The thing is vast, nearly two kilometres of armed adamantium and steel, its toothed launch maws lit red from within.

‘Well,’ comes Himura’s voice, ‘It’s a good thing we’ve got the death wish.’

‘You can say that again,’ Ido replies, flatly.

‘We’ll only get one shot,’ Mosi says. ‘So make it count.’

Daire acknowledges in time with the others. Waits for the words.

‘Death from above, Reaper.’

Daire pitches the Spirit over, dust lashing against the cockpit armaglass as the mass carrier grows to fill his field of view. The rest of Reaper are just shadows on either side of him. Lost to the grey. But then Daire catches sight of something else out there in the clouds. Something massive, shifting in the murk. For an instant, he thinks it’s one of the bombed-out towers collapsing, but then he realises it isn’t falling away. It’s getting closer.

‘Incoming!’ Daire yells over the vox as the something erupts through the dust towards him. It’s a machine. A monster. A brass serpent, one hundred storeys high with armour-plated coils and massive, mechanical jaws. As those jaws yawn wide, a name rushes up inside Daire that he thought he’d left behind long ago. Buried, on Balhaut, along with everything else.

Woe machine.

Daire rolls the Spirit messily aside as a column of laser fire erupts from the woe machine’s jaws with a deafening, animal shriek. The laser catches the very edge of the Spirit’s wing, tearing away chunks of armour plating and slamming Daire sideways in his flight seat. He feels his bones flex and his harness cut into his chest. His head crashes against something, hard. For an instant Daire is blind all over again, his vision burned white by the laser and streaked dark with blood. He drags the Spirit’s nose up, banking back over the woe machine as it rushes beneath him, brass armour blurring. Daire sights on the rest of Reaper through stinging, streaming eyes as the laser spears out for a second time. Mosi yells something over the vox. A single word.

Break.

The command comes too late. Ido and Himura vanish under the white-hot glare of the woe machine’s laser cannon, leaving nothing behind but smoke. Mosi is cursing now. Railing against the machine. But Daire finds that he can’t speak. Can’t move, or blink. He is frozen. Overcome by the smell of smoke and ash. By a memory he thought he’d lost. Another world. A bitter winter. Empty streets, stalked by terrible machines. Running with others, then running alone. Looking back to see them lying there.

Blood, on stone.

Daire blinks. He glances down at the woe machine as it slides beneath him, coiling for another strike. Then he opens the vox-channel to Mosi.

‘I’m going after it,’ he says.

‘Bas,’ Mosi replies, urgently. ‘Don’t be a fool!’

Daire shakes his head. He smiles, though Mosi can’t see him. ‘I said no promises.’

Daire tips the Spirit over her starboard wing as the woe machine’s jaws hinge wide beneath him, a stark white light growing inside. He burns hard towards it, surrounded by the furious bellow of the Lightning. It should terrify him, like the drop should have. Like carrying the death wish should have. But Daire doesn’t feel afraid, staring into the monster’s maw. He feels exactly as he has always felt while flying.

Alive.

The woe machine fires and Daire snaps the Spirit over into a corkscrewing roll, spiralling around the white-hot column of light. The Lightning howls, temperature alarums blaring. Instruments fail, and the cockpit armaglass cracks in its setting. Daire doesn’t flinch. He doesn’t blink. He holds his course as the laser gutters out, falling between the woe machine’s brass teeth and into its clockwork throat. It’s dark inside the machine. Black as the void. Daire can’t see a thing, save for the system lumens flickering on the Spirit’s console. All red, save for one. He rests his thumb against the trigger switch for the incendiary mounted on the Lightning’s undercarriage.

‘Death wish, away,’ Daire says, and he presses the switch, feeling the Lightning judder as the heavy ordnance releases. For a moment, nothing happens. Daire wonders if it was a dud. Then there is a colossal, bone-jarring boom. Explosion pressure slams into the Spirit from below, and Daire’s vision fills with fire. His ears ring with the sound of shearing metal. Not just from the woe machine, but from the Spirit, too. Alarums scream in Daire’s ears as he hammers the afterburners, rocketing clear of the woe machine as it tears apart along its length. The Spirit tumbles clear of the collapsing machine, her wings in tatters, her armour split and sloughing away. The cockpit is full of choking, black smoke. Daire’s eyes are full of blood. He can hardly see the ground as it rushes up to meet him. The Spirit meets the surface of Lyubov with a terrible, grinding crash. Armaglass breaks. Metal buckles. And everything goes black.

There’s a cold wind blowing. It is snowing, too. Daire can feel it on his face. He opens his eyes slowly and finds himself staring up at a stormy sky. There are motes of fire drifting down slowly with the snow, little pieces of gold against the grey. Rubble shifts slowly at his back. He smells of smoke and ash. Blood, and stone.

‘I’m home,’ Daire murmurs, into the freezing air.

‘Not quite,’ says a familiar voice. A smiling voice. Daire blinks, his eyelids sticking. He realises that the rubble isn’t shifting. He is. Mosi sets him down gently, and slides into a sitting position on the rubble beside him. The flight lieutenant is cut and bruised, his jacket scorched black.

‘Thought you were dead,’ Mosi says.

‘So did I,’ Daire says. He tries to laugh, but only manages a cough. Tries to sit up, but only gets halfway before Mosi stops him. His hands are scorched, too, just like his jacket. It’s as though he plunged them into a fire.

‘Don’t bloody move,’ Mosi says. ‘There’s a medicae coming.’

Daire shakes his head. It makes him dizzy. ‘What happened to the carrier?’

‘It’s right in front of you,’ Mosi says.

It takes Daire a moment to see the carrier amongst the ruin. The colossal tracks, unspooled and smoking. The twisted spars of adamantium, jutting up from the rubble.

‘You killed it.’

‘The woe machine’s death did half the work. All I had to do was finish it.’ Mosi smiles, ruefully. ‘Cleaning up after you, again.’

Daire is only half-listening, because he has spotted the Spirit, too. Or more precisely, what is left of her. The Lightning is a wreck, her armour plating peeled away and her airframe buckled along the spine. She is blackened, nose to tail. Burning, slowly.

‘Throne,’ he says, absently. ‘What a mess.’

Mosi looks too. ‘It’s a hell of a crash, Bas,’ he says. ‘You must be blessed, to survive something like that.’

Daire puts his hand inside his flight jacket and takes out the silver crown. He looks at it sitting there on the flat of his hand. One shiny thing amongst all of the muck.

Daire shakes his head.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Just lucky, I guess.’

03

THE POLAR EXPANSE, TYGRIS.
784.M41.

The lock on the reserve hangar is frozen shut, so Avery has to smash it off. The pilot officer uses the butt of her sidearm to do it, as stupid as that is. But then, all of this is stupid. A small part of her knows that. That she’ll be written up for what she’s about to do. Lashed, or locked up. Shot, maybe. But that doesn’t seem to matter. Nothing does, any more. The lock gives with a hard snap, and Avery drags open the sliding door of the hangar. It sticks a little, frozen too. Everything is, except Avery. She’s running on anger and agony and the better part of a bottle of Colt’s fire-whisky. He’d be furious if he knew she finished it without him. But he’ll never know now, because he’s in pieces at the bottom of the Verglas Gorge, just like the others.

Dead.

There’s only one bird on deck. The Lightning glowers in the dark. She is old and battered, the armour a patchwork of refit panels and primer. She has no name. Just a serial number. Ten-twelve. But the Lightning is still in one piece, and that’s all Avery needs. She limps over to the interceptor and sets about loosing the flight locks. Each one takes several tries, thanks to the fire-whisky and the cold. Thanks to the heavy, bloodstained bandages on her hands. Avery has only just freed the last of the locks when she hears a shout at her back.

‘What in the God-Emperor’s name are you doing?’

Avery glances over her shoulder. It’s Cadmuz. The chief of the deck is stamping across the deck towards her, a breather mask hanging loose around his neck, and his coveralls rimed with ice.

‘I’m taking her up,’ Avery shouts back.

Cadmuz looks incredulous. Furious. He picks up his pace, still shouting.

‘The hell you are! You’re grounded. You should be in the recovery ward.’

Avery stands, and turns. ‘I should be in the damned sky!’

Cadmuz shakes his head. He takes another step towards her and reaches out as if he’s about to grab her by the arm. Avery steps back. She does something instinctive. Something even more stupid than breaking into the hangar.

She pulls her sidearm and points it at him.

Cadmuz freezes in place, his hands coming up in surrender.

‘Woah,’ Cadmuz says. ‘Easy now.’

Avery stares him down. Her hands are trembling with the effort of keeping the pistol level. With the nerve damage from the burns she sustained in the crash.

‘I’m going to fly the gorge,’ she says, in a low voice. ‘To finish the op.’

Cadmuz stares back at her. He is sweating now, despite the cold.

‘Don’t be stupid. You’ll die out there.’

‘Like they did, you mean?’ Avery snaps. ‘Shido and Liza. Colt.’

‘It won’t bring them back.’

‘Maybe not. But it’ll make it right.’

Cadmuz’s face changes, turning a little sad.

‘No,’ he says. ‘It won’t.’

A heavy silence falls between them, punctuated only by the wind, and the quiet rattle of the gun in Avery’s hands.

‘I’m taking her up,’ Avery says, again. Softly this time.

Cadmuz shakes his head. ‘I can’t let you,’ he says. ‘You know I can’t.’

Avery blinks, feeling a tear turn to ice on her cheek. She lowers the gun from Cadmuz’s face.

‘I know,’ she says, and pulls the trigger. The gunshot is thunderclap loud in the vaulted space. It shatters Cadmuz’s left knee, sending a thick welter of blood onto the frozen deck. He collapses with a ragged cough of air, and Avery unhooks her vox-bead and throws it at him.

‘Call a medicae,’ she says, then turns away and hauls herself up onto the Lightning’s wing. She hammers the cockpit release, then hesitates for a moment, one hand on the airframe. She looks back at Cadmuz sitting crumpled on the deck, the leg of his coveralls soaked red with blood.

‘You’ll die out there,’ he says, between breaths.

Avery shakes her head and turns away again.

‘I already did.’

The sky over the polar expanse is a monochrome rush. A tunnel, narrowing to a circle of solid black. Visibility is for shit, so Avery flies on instruments and instincts, fighting the polar winds as they rock the old Lightning. The cockpit armaglass keeps riming, and so do the intakes, the Lightning’s engines gasping bad-temperedly at the freezing air. Avery has to compensate with the burners, though it’s a spend on fuel she can hardly afford. The tanks are half-empty, and draining fast. The missile racks are empty too. There’s no chaff in the launchers, and her lascannons are hardly at half-charge. It’ll have to be enough. There’s no going back now. Not after she broke into the hangar and stole the bird.

Not after she left Cadmuz bleeding on the hangar deck.

Avery shakes herself, and checks the heading indicator. She is coming up fast on her target, the icefire eruptions of the cryovolcanoes already visible even through the snowstorm and the darkness. Intermittent jets surge up in blue-white columns, marking the winding path of the Verglas Gorge, and the location of the Archenemy communications hub buried like a bloodbeetle in a vast natural ice cavern at the end of it. Avery fixes on those lights as she dips the Lightning’s nose, bleeding altitude and piling speed towards the gorge. It is a stark, jagged scar on the face of the world. Black as the void, between the burning, blue-white lights. Avery blinks, the cryovolcanic eruptions printing on the insides of her eyelids.

‘Time to finish it,’ she says, and pushes the Lightning down towards the darkness. There’s no hesitation in the old interceptor. The Lightning responds quickly. Much more so than she’d expect of a hangar queen. Much more so than Avery’s old Lightning. The interceptor roars like nothing Avery has ever heard. It’s as though the Lightning knows what’s waiting at the end. As though it knows what she needs to do.

Avery pulls wings level with a hefty thump of burners, a hundred and fifty metres above the base of the gorge. The walls close in on either side, black and jagged and blurred by speed, the bright veins of venting gas leaving streaks of light on Avery’s vision. She rolls and yaws between the eruptions, her hands sweating and slick with blood inside her flight gloves. Collision alarums blare in her ears as Avery stands the Lightning on its wing, barely missing an outcropping of jagged rock. She’s sluggish. Sloppy. Which is bad news, because Avery knows that they’ll already be on her, just like last time. The enemy fighters.

The Pact.

The enemy announce themselves with a hail of hard rounds that jolt Avery in her seat. Bang, bang, bang. Warning lights flicker live across the control panel, and the Lightning snarls. Avery snarls, too, cursing through her teeth. She can’t fly evasive with the walls closing in. Can’t go up and over to get behind them. So Avery does the only thing she can think of.

She cuts the thrust, and pulls the Lightning upright into a full-body air brake.

The interceptor stands on its jets, airframe screaming. It bleeds speed in seconds, hanging momentarily in the air as a single crimson-and-chrome Hell Razor roars past, engines blazing. Avery doesn’t let the Lightning climb. She slams the nose back down, centring the Razor in her firing arc. It only settles there for a fragment of a second, but it’s enough. Avery stings the enemy bird across the port wing, sending it spiralling into the wall of the gorge. The Razor comes apart in a fireball, hurling chunks of stone and ice and armour plating into the air. One of those things hits Avery’s cockpit armaglass, fracturing it from seam to seam. Through the damage, she gets a split-second view of a jutting shelf of black stone as the gorge bends in front of her.

‘Shit,’ she hisses, and slams the control stick hard left.

The world turns sideways, and Avery waits for the impact. For a fireball of her own. But it doesn’t happen. Instead, she hugs the curving wall of the gorge, ice and gas venting all around her in thick plumes. Then something does impact her. More autocannon fire, from a second Razor. A new warning light is blinking on the console. The ident-stamp above it says ‘fuel line’. Avery swears again. There’s no pulling another air brake. Not while she’s pissing fuel. There’s only one thing for it. Keep going for the comms hub as fast as she can, and try her damnedest to get her shadow killed into the bargain. Avery rolls the Lightning into a forward dive, the altimeter plummeting towards the redline.

One hundred and forty metres.

One hundred and twenty metres.

Another hail of hard rounds find their mark, setting the integrity alarums blaring again. Avery shuts them off. The fuel gauge is moving visibly. Steadily. The marker shifting towards empty.

One hundred metres.

Eighty.

Avery can see the gorge basin now, a flat expanse of pack ice, streaked with long smears of black ash. Littered with jagged scraps of silver.

Seventy metres.

It’s the wreckage of a flight of Lightnings, smashed to pieces on the ice.

Sixty.

Of her flight of Lightnings. Shido and Liza.

Fifty.

Colt.

Avery slams the control stick back with a strangled, wordless scream. The Lightning screams with her as she drags the nose up against the pull of the world. Fire-whisky bile rushes up Avery’s throat, and her vision greys out. For almost a second, she can’t see anything. Just a black void. Inside it, she hears something. The clink of cut glass, and the low murmur of an old hymn-caster. Warm, familiar laughter. Then another sound erases it, loud and urgent.

The furious bellow of turbofans.

Avery comes to with a jolt. She’s level, all but skimming the gorge basin between blue-white jets of gas and ice. Avery twists and glances back, but she can’t see the Razor. It must have hit the deck behind her. Smashed to pieces on the ice. Ahead, she sees the cave mouth. A dark, jagged smile in the rock. Her heart lifts, fractionally. She’s going to do it. Complete the op. Honour the dead.

Make it right.

This time, the autocannon fire isn’t so much a jolt as a swift kick to the back of the head. The Lightning bucks and bellows like a wounded thing. It’s the Razor. Not smashed to pieces at all, but hanging high off her port side, gun mouths flashing.

‘Damn it,’ Avery hisses. She’s running out of ideas. Running out of fuel. There’s only one thing she can think to do.

Something stupid.

Avery rolls the Lightning hard left, evading the next hail of hard rounds. The manoeuvre puts her dangerously close to the gorge wall, right along a seam of venting gas. Jets of icefire explode upwards in violent, momentary bursts, catching Avery’s wing tips as she cuts between them, rolling and skidding. The Razor follows her. Matches her, turn for turn. Roll for roll. She can’t shake it. Not like this. An eruption goes off in front of Avery, bleaching her vision white. She stares into it. Then Avery grits her teeth and goes straight for it. Straight through it, punching through as the cloud of sub-zero ice and gas disperses. The Razor follows her. Matches her. Then it comes apart screaming as the icefire jet explodes upwards for a second time. Avery barely looks back. She’s too close for that now. The jagged mouth of the cave yawns before her, filling her cracked-glass vision. She flies straight inside without cutting speed, breaking through into a vast interior. The cavern is cathedrum-big, bathed in intense blue light from the ice and gas moving inside the walls. It is dazzling. As bright as a star. All save for a massive spur of dark iron, fixed to the far wall of the cavern by a series of clawed mooring anchors driven into the ice. The enemy communications hub. Data hardlines spill from it, disappearing through bore holes in the walls and ceiling. Every surface of the thing is shielded by adamantium plates. There’s no chance of collapsing it with lascannons alone, but then that’s not what Avery is planning to do.

She is going to collapse the cavern instead.

Automated turrets turn on her as she thunders towards the mooring anchors, hard rounds ringing against the Lightning’s armour plating. The interceptor rocks with every blow. More cracks appear in the cockpit armaglass, so deep that Avery can feel freezing air bleeding through the gaps. Frost instantly rimes the instruments. Her helmet visor. She can hardly see, but she can’t stop, either. Avery settles her grip on the lascannon controls, and bares her teeth in a smile.

‘Shido,’ she says. ‘Liza.’ Avery takes a breath. ‘Colt.’

Avery fires the lascannons in a continuous, bright white torrent. The lasers carve deeply into the ice around the mooring claws, flash-boiling water and sending clouds of steam into the air. Eruptions trigger deep within the ice, sending deep, dark cracks through the cavern walls. Then it all starts to shift. To collapse. The mooring points. The communications hub. The cavern. Everything. It rolls towards Avery like a breaking wave as she turns the Lightning and hammers the burners, heading back towards the cave mouth. The Lightning gasps as it drains the last reserves of its fuel. As the growing cloud of ice and stone engulfs it. The burners gutter out. Then the engines go. The instruments, too. Avery’s world becomes dark, and deafening. She is slammed back in her seat. Slammed into by something. Then it all stops. The collapse. The rush. The slow hiss of the air-mix, feeding her breather mask. Avery manages to reach up and unhook it, breathing the chemical air for the first time. It burns, like fire-whisky. Avery can’t move. She doesn’t really try to. Instead, she settles back in the cradle of the flight chair. She might close her eyes. It’s so dark it’s hard to tell. Somewhere out there in the blackness, and the shifting ice, Avery fancies that she hears those same sounds again. The low, crackling murmur of the old hymn-caster. The clinking of glasses.

And warm, familiar laughter.

04

NOCTUS PRIMARIS.
789.M41.

Leana Vidal watches as the Lightning strike fighter is lowered to the floor of the hangar by a mechanical lifting claw. The interceptor settles easily on its stanchions, the dawn sunlight catching the edges of its armour plating and turning the aircraft from silver to gold. The lifter clamps release one by one, and then the claw is retracted altogether, leaving Vidal staring up at the Lightning.

At her Lightning.

‘She’s beautiful, sir,’ Callisto says, from beside her. The kid is just a rookie. Thin, and long-limbed, with an Imperialis tattooed on her shaved scalp and an open, earnest face that Vidal can’t stand to focus on for long. It’s because of that look, she thinks. Expectant. Trusting. Full of faith in the war. In her. Vidal has seen it a dozen times before on the other pilots she has trained. It’s always there in the beginning, but it never lasts long.

Either it dies, or they do.

‘She must be new off the line, sir,’ Callisto says, oblivious. ‘The way she looks.’

Vidal doesn’t answer. She just limps towards the Lightning and looks up at the bullish front of the interceptor. Callisto is right about the way the Lightning looks. The interceptor’s armour plating is immaculate. Not a mark on it. No battle damage or old scars. Not on the surface, anyway. Vidal reaches out and puts a hand on the silver plating. It is warm to the touch, as though the Lightning is a living thing.

‘No,’ Vidal says. ‘The plating is new. The armaglass, and the paintwork. But she is old underneath.’

‘If you don’t mind me asking, sir. How can you tell?’

Vidal drops her hand away, and frowns softly.

‘I can feel it,’ she says.

At first glance, the cockpit of the Lightning is just as immaculate as the exterior. There is not a single scuff on the control panel. No oil smears, or pieces of tack-tape. No filler or sealant. Every dial and instrument is intact and correctly calibrated. The cockpit armaglass is spotless. Scratchless. Even the seat has been completely refurbished in brown synth-leather. Everything smells of plastek and polish. But as Vidal climbs into the cockpit, she picks out another more familiar smell, too.

Blood and oil, long soaked-in.

Vidal lowers herself into the flight seat slowly, her augmetic legs grinding at the hip and knee. It has been the same ever since they were grafted. When she asked about it at the time, Vidal was told that it was a failing in the spinal graft, causing phantom pain. The augmenticians gave her therapeutic exercises to do. Pain meds, and stimm injectors to compensate when the meds couldn’t cut it. When Vidal asked them why they couldn’t just fix it, the chief of staff told her that it doesn’t work that way. That with trauma so severe, there will always be some pain. It’s only now, years later, that Vidal realises how true that really is.

‘How’s she looking, Lea?’

The voice belongs to Kash. Vidal’s wingman is prepping his own Lightning for take-off on the next hardstand along. He is the only one to have flown beside Vidal long enough to get on first-name terms. The closest thing she dares to a friend.

‘As if she is too stubborn to lie down and die,’ Vidal replies.

Kash sounds as though he’s smiling when he answers her. Like her, he has spent years rotating from war front to war front. Kash has been downed, and injured out. He has been counted as MIA. WIA. KIA. Refitted, refurbished and put back on the line.

‘One of us, then,’ he says.

Vidal nods, absently, still smelling that old blood. ‘One of us.’

She reaches up and unclasps the silver saint from around her neck, then leans forward and hooks it over the airframe so that it hangs in her peripheral vision. Then Vidal reaches into her flight coat and takes out a small, silver tin. She tips out a handful of pain meds and swallows them dry, then injects herself with a shot of stimms. Neither thing really does much to take the edge off. Not any more. It’s just habit, like hanging up the saint. Vidal secures her harness and fits her breather mask, then looks up to see the silver saint watching her with blank eyes.

‘What?’ Vidal asks the saint, bitterly.

Sabbat does not answer. She never does. Not any more.

‘Close up, Sabre Two,’ Vidal says. ‘You’re wandering.’

The response over the vox is immediate, and full of remorse.

‘Aye,’ Callisto says. ‘Sorry, sir.’

Vidal watches Callisto with half an eye as the rookie adjusts her position until she is hanging just off Vidal’s right wing. The manoeuvre is wavering. Hesitant. Vidal breathes out slowly through her nose.

‘Callisto,’ she says. ‘You are a qualified pilot, aren’t you?’

Callisto is hesitant, too, this time. ‘Ah – yes. Yes, sir.’

‘Then try to act like it. You’re flying like a washout.’

‘Sorry.’

‘And stop apologising. Just do better.’

‘Aye, sir,’ Callisto replies. ‘I will, sir.’

Vidal shakes her head minutely. The vox crackles again, but it’s Kash, this time. Private comms.

‘You all in the green, Lea?’

Vidal knows that he is asking about her, not the Lightning. That she is getting at Callisto more than she should, because she is uneasy.

‘I don’t know,’ Vidal says. ‘I’ve got a bad feeling.’

‘About what?’

Vidal doesn’t have an answer for him. Conditions are perfect. The sky ahead is clear. All red and gold, with the sun rising as a pale white disc at the centre. The wind is at their backs, blowing moderate. There’s not a cloud to be seen.

‘Is it the bird?’ Kash asks.

Vidal frowns. ‘No,’ she says. The Lightning is running like a dream. Engines are firing at optimal. Fuel consumption is optimal. Control response is razor-sharp. No drag, no lag. But Vidal still feels tense. Edgy. She is hyper-aware of that trace smell of old blood. Of the sweat collecting in the small of her back. Of the ache in her legs, and the silver saint, turning slowly with the rumble of the airframe.

‘It’s nothing,’ Vidal says. ‘Just a feeling.’

‘Alright,’ Kash replies. ‘If you say so.’

Vidal notices then that her silver saint has stopped turning. The tarnished little figure is perfectly still, her blunted sword pointed westwards. Vidal follows the saint’s sword to see a blue-black stain hanging over the mountain line. Cloud, or smoke.

‘Heading west,’ Vidal says, into the vox. ‘Do you see that?’

There’s a moment of quiet before Kash replies.

‘I see it. What’s your call?’

Vidal looks back to the saint. Sabbat is turning slowly again as though she never stopped. Vidal swallows, her mouth paper-dry. Then she switches to the flight-wide channel.

‘On me, Sabre,’ she says. ‘We’re going to run the ridgeline.’

‘Just a feeling, huh?’

Kash’s voice is hollow over the vox. Vidal feels it too, facing down the wall of blue-black cloud. It’s not a stain any more. It’s a storm front. A solid, thunderous mass hanging over the ridgeline. Waiting. Growing. Glowering. The wind speed is higher here. More urgent, as though the weather itself is trying to push the storm front away. Even at a distance, Vidal can see that it isn’t working. That the storm front is holding position, like a battleship at anchor.

‘It’s standing against the wind,’ Vidal says.

‘That’s impossible,’ Callisto murmurs.

‘No,’ Vidal says. ‘It’s unnatural. Magical.’

‘It’s sorcery,’ Kash says.

Vidal’s heartbeat is deafeningly loud inside her flight helmet. ‘We can’t kill it,’ she says. ‘We have to call it in.’

Vidal puts the Lightning into a banking turn away from the storm front, Callisto and Kash hanging from her wings. She reaches out and flips the vox-control on the console to engage the long-range comms.

‘Delta-actual,’ Vidal says, her voice hoarse. ‘This is Sabre Leader. We have visual on a witch-storm growing over the midland spinal.’

There’s a howl of distortion, but no reply. Vidal resets the switch and tries again.

‘Repeat, this is Sabre Leader. We have eyes on a witch-storm growing over the midland spinal.’

This time Vidal picks up a fragment of chatter. It takes her a moment to realise it’s not Delta-actual. Not Gothic, either. It’s a glottal tongue. Rasping. Cursed.

It’s the Pact, scrambling her comms.

‘Ah, hellfire!’ Kash voxes. ‘We’ve got company!’

Vidal looks back to see three enemy fighters scything down from the storm front, coming on high and fast. The Pact fighters are clad in black and dirty bronze. Barbed and brutal, with distinct twin-razor silhouettes.

Hell Blades.

‘Break!’ Vidal yells. ‘Break, now!’

Kash and Callisto splinter away to the left and right as Vidal hauls back on the stick, boosting her Lightning up into a near-vertical climb before kicking over the nose and falling back the way she came. Back towards the Hell Blades. Two of them streak beneath her, engines roaring. The third is a fraction slower.

Too slow.

Vidal opens up with the twin lascannons, striking the Hell Blade across the canopy. It’s a glancing shot, but it’s enough to send the Hell Blade slewing off course and straight into Callisto’s firing arc. The rookie leads too far on the first volley, stinging nothing but the sky. Her second barrage catches the wounded fighter across the wings, shearing away chunks of armour plating. The Hell Blade drops its nose, dragging its shredded wing. It spirals out of sight, leaving a thick trail of black smoke behind. Vidal says the words without thinking.

‘Nice tag, Callisto.’

‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Don’t thank me,’ Vidal says. ‘Just stay close.’

Vidal puts the Lightning into a hard turn as a second Hell Blade screams past her. It’s wounded too, but it’s all surface. Not enough to slow it. The Pact fighter pulls up into a climb, with Kash in close pursuit.

‘Little help?’ he voxes.

‘On it,’ Vidal replies. Then, to Callisto, ‘If they slip me, you sting them, understood?’

‘Aye, sir.’

Vidal pulls the Lightning up into another climb. No wingover this time. Just a straight shot that will put her on an intercept course with the fleeing Hell Blade. She hammers the burners, feeling the hard slam of thrust at her back. Her approach vector is good, the angle closing and closing until the Pact fighter cuts into view. Vidal fires her lascannons, stinging the Hell Blade across its curved forewings. That’s enough to slow it. Enough for Kash to catch it. He cuts the Pact fighter apart from underneath, and rockets up past the wreckage even as it tumbles away.

‘Where’s the last one?’ he voxes. ‘I don’t see it.’

Vidal cranes her neck, but she doesn’t see it, either. Not until it is too late. The last of the Hell Blades comes screaming towards her, framed by the white disc of the sun. It opens up with its autocannons, and Vidal braces for impact only for something silver to fill the space in between her and the Hell Blade, taking the shots for her. It’s a Lightning.

Callisto’s Lightning.

Vidal yells the rookie’s name into the vox as autocannon rounds rake her Lightning, nose to tail. Callisto’s reply is undercut with distortion, her voice thick and distant.

‘You said to stay close,’ she says, as her Lightning comes apart.

Time seems to slow for Vidal. To stop. She just hangs there frozen as the Hell Blade rolls up and over her, so close it nearly kisses her cockpit armaglass. Vidal stares at it dumbly. It is an old machine. Bronze to the edges, save for gore-red gun mouths.

And a black arrow streak along the length of the body.

Vidal blinks. She thinks of red skies and dark iron. Of falling, and fire. Of Eevs and Fontaine.

She thinks of Sova.

Vidal slams the control stick hard left, dragging the Lightning’s nose around. She pulls up into a powered climb, burning hard after the Hell Blade as the Pact fighter flees for the storm’s edge. She lights the air with her lascannons, burning off nearly half the charge, but the Hell Blade slips her with cruel ease, yawing and rolling out of her arc. Out of range, even for her missiles. Vidal can’t hold the logis-lock. Not without getting closer.

Not without following it into the storm.

‘Lea,’ Kash voxes. ‘What in the hell are you doing?’

He’s coming around, too. Hanging off her tail as though he means to follow.

‘I’m finishing it,’ Vidal says. ‘You need to break off. Get the intel back to Delta.’

‘Are you bloody mad?’ Kash replies. ‘I’m not leaving you–’

‘No,’ Vidal says. ‘I’m leaving you.’

‘Don’t be stupid! You’ll die in there!’

‘It’s the same fighter, Kash. Belshiir Binary. The dockyards.’

There’s a pause before Kash speaks again. When he does, his voice is softer. Sadder.

‘Kill it, Lea.’

Kash breaks off and banks away as the shadow of the storm falls over Vidal, turning everything inside the cockpit black. Up close, the storm front looks livid. Living. It rears above her, darker than darkness. The Hell Blade cuts straight inside, its infernal engine flaring. Vidal pitches straight after it without slowing. The storm front slams into her Lightning, flaking paint and shreds of shielding from the interceptor’s nose. The engines scream, and the airframe shakes so badly that Vidal thinks it might come apart. That she might come apart, too. Her flesh from her bones. Her heart from her soul. She smells rot. Tastes ashes. She screams, as a momentary flash of light illuminates the cockpit to reveal bloodied figures clinging to it. They scrape their nails and slam blackened hands against the cockpit armaglass in an effort to break through. To get to her. Vidal struggles in her seat. She screams, through her teeth. She tries to look away, but she can’t. Her body is frozen, just like it was after the crash. Paralysed. All that Vidal can do is watch through greying vision as her hands slacken and slide from the flight controls. As her Lightning plummets downwards through the dark, screaming sea. Vidal can’t see the Hell Blade any more. She can’t see anything save for those terrible figures, all clad in tattered flight suits. They all have that look on their faces, even as they burn, and bleed. Their hollow eyes are expectant. Trusting. Full of faith in Vidal, as though she can still save them. As though she has ever been able to save anyone. Vidal feels something run down her face. Tears, maybe. Or blood. She should have saved them. Could have saved them, if only she were swifter. Stronger.

If only she had spirit.

Vidal hears something then, filtering through the screams. It’s a bellowing. A powerful, animal snarl. It travels through the Lightning’s bones into Vidal’s own, banishing the ghosts just long enough for her to see the Hell Blade’s single engine, burning ahead of her in the blackness. Long enough for her to understand just why the Lightning feels so alive.

‘You,’ Vidal slurs into her breather. ‘I knew it was you.’

She drags herself from her stupor and takes up the controls, flipping weapons free on her air-to-air missiles. The logis-lock triggers. Wavers. Falters. Then it peals loud and clear. Vidal glances at her silver saint, hanging in her peripheral vision.

‘Lend me your sword,’ she whispers, and she thumbs the trigger.

A pair of Skystrike missiles streak out towards the Hell Blade as the Pact fighter dumps a dense screen of chaff, and pulls up evasive. One of Vidal’s missiles goes wild, detonating furiously amongst the silver shards. The other tracks the Hell Blade as it pulls up and over. As it spirals back towards Vidal. She gets a fractional impression of the brutal, twin-razor shape of the Hell Blade. Of the indistinct shape of the pilot, barely visible through the oily cockpit glass. Of the gore-red gun mouths lighting in the same instant the missile finds its mark. The Skystrike goes off like a thunderclap, filling Vidal’s vision with fire and smoke and pieces of armour plating. The Hell Blade falls away in what seems like half-time, shedding clotted strings of oil, but there’s a dark spot at the centre of Vidal’s vision that sticks, even after the explosion fades. It takes her a moment to realise that it isn’t printed on her eyes. That she is looking at a single, perfect hole in the cockpit armaglass. Vidal glances down at herself drunkenly, knowing exactly what she will see when she does.

Blood, spreading in a dark circle on the front of her flight suit.

‘Huh,’ Vidal says.

Vidal can’t say how she guides the Spirit down out of the storm. She thinks perhaps the Lightning is the one guiding her. That’s the only explanation for how she ends up making a grinding, messy landing in a bright field of wavering grass, less than fifteen metres from the wreckage of the enemy Hell Blade. The Pact fighter is crushed and bent from the crash, burning steadily. Vidal catches the stink of it as she hits the Spirit’s cockpit release. The harsh reek of burning plastek, and beneath it that same familiar smell. Oil, and blood. Vidal drags herself out onto the Lightning’s wing, then drops onto the grass. The dark circle on her flight suit is wide now. Soaking. She falls several times on her way to the wreckage. Each time, it’s a little harder to stand. To see. To ignore the whispering draw of the soft, green grass at her feet. But Vidal gets up, over and over again, because it’s not over yet. Because she’s too stubborn to lie down and die. She reaches the wreckage and falls against it, leaving a bloody handprint on the bronze plating. The Hell Blade’s forewings are buckled and the cockpit armaglass is completely shattered, leaving nothing but an empty frame. Vidal can see the Blood Pact pilot, still slumped in his flight cradle. His jumpsuit is blood-soaked, his masked face lolling to the side. But Vidal can see the whites of his eyes through the hollows in the pilot’s hook-nosed grotesque. She can see him breathing, fitfully. Vidal raises her sidearm slowly and clicks off the safety.

‘You,’ she slurs. ‘It was you.’

The Pact pilot lifts his masked face towards her. He laughs, wetly.

‘N-nice tag, Vi-dahl,’ he says, in broken Gothic.

Vidal fires. She keeps firing until her pistol’s chamber clicks empty. Until the Pact pilot goes slack in his seat, his flight suit scorched and smoking. Then Vidal collapses against the wreckage of the Hell Blade, sliding down into a sitting position on the grass. She lets go of the pistol. Lets go of everything save for the silver saint, clutched tightly in her left hand. Vidal glances at the Spirit, crouched on its stanchions in the long grass.

‘I almost didn’t recognise you,’ she says, her eyes falling to her legs. They don’t hurt any more. Nothing does. Vidal smiles absently as her eyes flutter closed.

‘Must be all those refits,’ she says, softly.

05

URDESH.
792.M41.

It begins with blood, as all things must.

Hemik, who is called damogaur, marks himself eight upon eight times across his palms with the serrated edge of his rite-blade. All of the marks he makes are new, save for one. The last, which he makes atop his oldest scar. It is a corded, pale thing. Knotted like a noose-rope. Even after so many years, the scar still bears the toothed indentations from its making, when Hemik placed his hands upon the armour plate of the Archon. When he swore himself, body and soul, to he who is called Gaur, the warlord of warlords.

When he made his bloody pact.

Hemik sheathes his rite-blade, and snuffs each of the eight grease-slick candles around him in turn. Then he stands and looks at the silvered aircraft, crouched in the mass carrier’s strobing darkness. It still wears a non-believer’s colours, as it must, for what he means to do. But that does not mean it cannot be anointed. Hemik approaches the interceptor, then circles it slowly, dragging his bloodied, eight-marked hands along the armour plating. He marks the intakes, and the gun mouths. He trails his hand along the leading edge of the wing.

Bump, bump. Bump.

Hemik leaves the interceptor’s tail until last, because that is where it bears its tawdry honours. The Imperial markings are gaudy. Garish. Meaningless. He blacks each one in turn with the pad of his thumb until he comes to the last thing. The most crucial thing. The interceptor’s name. Hemik smiles behind his mask, the cold air crawling over his filed teeth.

‘Indomitable Spirit,’ Hemik whispers, as he wipes away the words.

The sky over the forge world is dark, the clouds hanging low and heavy, as though they have been strung from hooks. Rain sheets against the cockpit armaglass in waves as Hemik banks over the city below. Eltath is dark, too. A vast expanse of habitation and industry. Of immense forges that press weapons for war, and high-stacked dwellings, where those who would wield them are raised and made ready to die. Much of the city is burned, or burning, obscured by smoke and low-hanging fog. Now and then, though, Hemik can see tiny flashes through the mire. The Imperials and the Anarch’s packsons, bleeding one another. Hemik pays it no heed. His target lies elsewhere.

The airbase at Zarak East sits out beyond the sluggish waters of the Reach. It looks like scrubland, or dead earth. Just a flat, functional expanse struck through with rockcrete runways. Several large hangars huddle together on the estuary side, watched over by control pylons and defended by anti-aircraft guns. This is where the Lightning took off from before Hemik downed it during a dogfight over the vapour mills. And he plans to return it there. To burn Zarak East to the ground with the full battery of incendiary missiles tucked beneath the Lightning’s wings. It is why he kept the interceptor’s colours and surface damage intact. Why he kept the Lightning’s former pilot alive for ten full days aboard the mass carrier, until there were words to hear amongst the weeping. Serial numbers and names.

Emergency clearance codes.

Hemik dips the Lightning’s nose, beginning his descent. The interceptor snarls at him, airframe shuddering, but it has no choice but to heed his commands. It is pacted, now. Of the Archonate, just as he is. Then there is another snarling. Static-laced, this time.

The vox.

‘Hailing Lightning strike fighter on approach heading to Zarak East. This is serial two-oh-five. Respond and identify.’

Hemik glances sidelong out of the cockpit armaglass to see another Lightning drop from the clouds. It falls into position beside him, trailing from his right wing. The Lightning is an alert fighter, rain-streaked and war-scarred, with red officer’s bars painted across the tail and wing tips.

‘Hailing Lightning strike fighter,’ says the voice again. ‘This is Captain Alys Ferro. Respond and identify.’

Hemik smiles behind his breather mask.

‘Twenty-oh-five,’ he says, in calm, practised Gothic. ‘This is Lightning serial ten-twelve, looking for clearance to land.’

There is a long pause. Hemik does not panic, because he knows his duty is ordained. Intended, by the gods. He knows how desperately the Imperials seek a returning hero.

‘Receiving, serial ten-twelve.’ Ferro’s voice is colder now. Warier. ‘Request clearance code level alpha.’

Hemik thinks of the words, whispered by Flight Commander Evar Trass as he knelt, blinded and bleeding in the dark.

‘Clearance code islumbine,’ he says, tasting bile at the mention of the sacred flower. ‘Borne by way of the wind.’

There is another pause before Ferro speaks again.

‘Evar,’ she says. ‘It can’t be.’

‘It can,’ Hemik says. ‘It is.’

‘Swear it,’ she replies. ‘On the Throne.’

Hemik tastes bile again. His teeth ache as he opens his mouth to speak.

‘On the Throne.’

This time the pause is longer. Leaden. Hemik frees his weapons, his finger resting lightly against the trigger. He glances sidelong at the Lightning hanging from his wing. Ferro is a dim shape in the darkness, but he can see she is looking at him. Then the vox clicks live again. The voice is a whisper. Winter-cold, now.

‘You’re not him.’

‘You’re right,’ Hemik says, and he triggers the air brake, cutting his speed in two and sending Ferro’s Lightning roaring past him.

‘Damn you!’ Ferro roars, over the vox. ‘Archonate bastard!’

She yaws, and rolls. Hemik matches her effortlessly, afterburners bellowing.

‘I cut his eyes from him,’ he voxes to Ferro. ‘His fingers, and toes. I cut him until he gave up every one of his secrets, and then I took his tongue. His teeth.’

Ferro bleeds her own speed and throws her Lightning into a spiralling dive. Hemik follows her, the world turning around him in a blue-black blur.

‘I took his legacy,’ he tells her. ‘His machine. I bloodied it. Broke it, just as I did Evar Trass.’

His words find their mark. They have Ferro cursing. Angry. Grieving. Careless enough to fall momentarily into the red heart of his firing arc. Hemik smiles, widely.

‘So much for your Throne,’ he voxes, and fires the lascannons, full charge. The triggers click, and the Lightning bucks, but there is no flash. No damage. No smoke.

Nothing.

‘What–’ Hemik rasps. He pulls the trigger again, but the weapons are unresponsive. Dead. Ahead, Ferro pulls out of her dive. Hemik tries to match her, but the flight controls lock in his hands, immovable. Then more systems flicker out, one by one. Augurs. Heading indicator. Fuel measure. Interior lights.

Everything but vox.

‘You can bloody us,’ Ferro says. She positions herself beside him, hanging off his right wing, just as she did before. ‘You can take our eyes. Our teeth. Our tongues. But there is one thing you will never take. Never break.’

Hemik cannot help it. He has to ask, as the Lightning thunders down towards the steel-grey waters of the Eastern Reach.

‘What?’ he asks.

‘Our spirit.’

Ferro pulls her dive, then. She breaks away, rocketing back up into the clouds as the Reach fills Hemik’s cockpit view, edge to edge. Around him, the Lightning bellows, and a heavy judder runs through the airframe. An animal snarl that travels from the Lightning’s bones into Hemik’s own. He thinks he feels it, then, as his vision goes grey and the water rushes up to meet him. Something intangible, that cannot be cut away with a knife.

Something bright and pure, that burns him.

An indomitable spirit.

FROM THERE TO HERE

WRITTEN BY DAN ABNETT

Preface

And so I bookend this collection with… a bookend. Not first and only, this time, but first and last. We placed my stories at the start and finish mainly to keep them as far apart as we could, because they are mirrors. One is the flip side of the other.

This is a brand new Gaunt’s Ghosts story, also set post-Anarch, also turning to the future and sowing the seeds of things to come. It allowed me the rare opportunity to look at a character in detail, a returning character. This storyline would have been out of place and unbalanced as part of a novel. But it’s a sequel, of sorts, to Anarch, and also an interesting companion piece to the recently published Ghost Dossier, The Vincula Insurgency.

The themes that have run through this collection: victory, the aftermath, consequences, loyalty, the handling of the dead, are all here, and it’s another story that looks at something we don’t usually look at. What happens when your story’s done? Will there be another story for you afterwards? Do we just get one chance to shine? How does it feel when the magic goes away?

Welcome home, Milo.

‘From there to here’ was an Urdeshi pledge. It wasn’t formal, just an off-hand phrase that locals muttered as they took a drink. There was no raising of the cup in salute to another when it was spoken, no clinking. The Urdeshi murmured it to themselves, without emphasis and probably unconsciously, as they slugged another shot of amasec or fobraki.

Brin Milo learned it in the liquor-house on Hainehill Street. No one taught it to him, or advised him to say it. He learned it through observation. The other patrons, mostly Urdeshi Militarum or shift workers from the local fab, muttered it casually as they took their drinks, so he started to say it too, mainly so he wouldn’t stand out.

He stood out enough as it was. Tall, dark-haired, not local, an off-world Militarum in combat blacks that curiously lacked any rank pins or unit insignia. That marked him out. That, and the fish tattoo over his eye.

That, and the fact that he always came in alone.

The waters of the Holy Balneary in Herodor Civitas are warm, blood-heat. They cure and they heal. They will make everything better. He walks down the steps to the edge of the pool and–

He woke.

‘I’d like to see the colonel,’ Milo said.

‘Do you mean Rawne? That’s not possible. He’s in the infirmary. Acting Colonel Baskevyl might be available later in the week.’

The commissar’s name was Fazekiel. She was carrying a recent wound, and walked with a limp, holding herself stiffly. Her pallor suggested she had left the infirmary too soon, and against medical advice, but Milo knew from experience that commissars were all about duty, and Fazekiel seemed the type who was all about duty to the point of clinical obsession.

‘I meant, uh, Gaunt,’ he said.

She looked at him sharply, as though he had no business speaking the name without an honorific. She’d been briefed, of course. She’d been told Milo was true Tanith, from the old days, from the Founding, returning to the fold, but still, her expression suggested that he had spoken out of turn.

‘You mean the Lord Executor?’ she said.

‘Yes. I’m sorry, I forget he’s called that now.’

‘There are papers to endorse, Milo,’ she said. Fazekiel had a sheaf of them.

‘For?’

‘For enlistment, essentially,’ she replied. ‘Re-enlistment, I suppose, is more correct. I don’t have the forms for that. Munitorum paperwork is all over the place, as you can imagine, but I found these. I’m sure they’ll serve. I’ll annotate and authorise any amendments.’

They were basic sign-ups, pro-forma, the commitment dockets a trooper made his mark on when he enlisted or was drafted. They were for young men. They were for boys. There were highlighted blocks to fill in, sections that, at a glance, seemed ridiculous. ‘Place of Birth’, ‘Next of Kin’… did he have to fill them in if those things didn’t exist? There was no blank section for prior service record, because the forms were meant for boys who had no prior service to write down. He did, but he had no idea how he’d summarise it, even if there had been a space.

‘Why?’ he asked.

‘Your service history is… ah…’ Fazekiel paused. ‘Spotty. Admin really hasn’t got a record of you since, ah, Herodor. So this is really just procedural, to get you back in the Militarum system, so you can be assigned and pay-graded and so forth.’

‘No, I mean why…’ Milo said. ‘Why any of that?’

Fazekiel frowned.

‘You’re staying with the regiment, aren’t you? Transferring back? That’s what Chief Mkoll led me to believe.’

‘I’d like to see the colonel,’ said Milo. ‘The Lord Executor.’

‘I don’t think that’s going to be possible,’ she said.

The walls of Brachis City start to fall. He raises the old pipes to his lips, to triumph them in through the breach and–

He woke.

There were celebrations rolling through Eltath City, day and night. Firecrackers, street parades, feasts in the open air, riotous assemblies of civilians and service personnel. Milo was told it was like that right across the face of the planet. Urdesh was free. The nightmare of the Anarch was over. It was an Imperial victory. Spontaneous rejoicing filled every thoroughfare and habway. Temple bells rang. Fireworks shivered the skies. It was louder and more explosive than the final, bleak years of the war. Citizens who had flinched at every distant blast and fled for shelter at the sound of aircraft now unleashed skyrockets with manic abandon.

It was in the days following his return from hell that he found the liquor-house.

At the cry, clear and keening, they come up out of the trenches. Eboris has started to burn, fire all the way along the western ramparts. They start to run, to charge. He sees her up ahead, sword raised. If he runs faster, he can catch up with her, and be at her side when–

He woke.

Urdesh had a long and lauded history. It was a proud world of proud people. It was the beating heartworld of Sabbat industry, a world of forges and fabs, second only to Balhaut in significance. Here had been stamped and pressed half the arms that had made the crusade possible and, as some liked to jibe, half the arms that had made resistance to that crusade possible too. Urdeshi weapons and war machines were reliable, well-made, as enduring as the spirit of its people, and ubiquitous. They were stockpiled and used by both sides, because Urdesh had, during its long and lauded history, been on both sides.

The Urdeshi were stoic to a degree that Milo found amusing. Their cultural demeanour was fatalistic, their passions phlegmatic, their warriors fierce as a point of principle, their liquor-house songs woeful and bitter. They had endured wars and invasions, they had weathered occupations and purges, they had withstood enslavements and kill-camps. They had known the loss of being conquered and the sacrifice of being liberated, and they had known both of those things several times over. Milo didn’t fault them for their indigenous temperament, nor did he believe it was excessive or affected, but still he found it funny.

Lose your whole world, he thought, then play me one of your morose fething woe-songs on your fething fiddle.

Lose your way. Lose your purpose. It had taken him long enough to find that for himself, and now it seemed he had lost it again. Milo wondered why he felt so angry, and he had a nasty feeling it was because, in the final moments, he had failed.

‘You did a great work, Brin,’ said Captain Auerben.

‘Did I?’ he asked. They sat together in sunlight, on the stone platforms of the palace battlements. She preferred the air outside, the breeze coming in off the city. She breathed more easily, and used her inhaler bulb less.

Auerben nodded. She’d read the confidential after-action report, of course. All the Beati’s staff seniors had.

‘You were there at the kill,’ she said.

‘For the kill,’ he corrected her. ‘I didn’t make it.’

Auerben frowned. She was physically small, too small, it always seemed, to bear such a weight of duty and purpose on her shoulders. But then the same could be said of the Beati. Auerben’s face was angular, framed by dark hair. He’d long since stopped noticing the burn scars.

‘It’s not personal,’ she said.

‘What does that mean?’

‘You never struck me as someone looking for medals or recognition,’ she said.

‘I’m not,’ he replied, and meant it.

‘Then why do you care? You were there at the kill. You were part of the kill. You helped make it happen.’

But the killing strike was not mine, he wanted to say. He kept his mouth shut, because he knew it would make him sound petulant, like a child. Like a boy.

But there it was. He hadn’t done it. He’d come close, there on the windswept shingle, but it hadn’t been enough.

Milo had foolishly come to think of it as his purpose. No, more than a purpose, a destiny. He had secretly convinced himself it was the reason the Beati had chosen him to walk at her side, as though, through some miraculous intuition, she’d known from the moment they’d met on the dustscapes of Herodor that he’d be the one. That, one day, he’d be the man who would kill the Anarch.

So she’d been wrong about that, or he had failed. Neither thought made him comfortable.

‘Has she woken?’ he asked, changing the subject.

Auerben smoothed a fold out of her mulberry long coat. She still wore the uniform of her old company, the Jovani Vanguard, just as he still wore the black camos of the Tanith. The Beati’s staff retinue had no uniform of its own. When you joined, you shed the patches and badges of your old regiment, but kept the uniform. The Beati said that this was a mark of respect to the units she had drawn her followers from, a visible demonstration of the idea that she stood for all and any. But Milo knew it was more to do with meagre resources. The retinue was like a scratch company. You wore what you stood up in. You scavenged and salvaged for kit and clothes. You lived humbly, like an esholi, making do and asking for nothing. He’d kept his pipes, his straight silver, his ghost cloak, but all of those were now gone, lost when he was captured by the Archonate at Oureppan. Mkoll had given him the blacks he was wearing, taken from stores on his return.

‘No,’ said Auerben. ‘No, she has not. She sleeps still. Oureppan, and the fight with the woe machine… they sapped her. Her light faded for a while.’

Milo nodded. ‘I’d like to see her,’ he said.

Auerben shook her head. ‘We are considering…’ she began.

‘What?’

‘Taking her back to Herodor Old Hive,’ said Auerben. ‘So she can heal in the holy waters.’

‘I think that’s a good idea,’ said Milo.

‘It is all but agreed,’ said Auerben.

‘When do we depart?’

She glanced at him. ‘No, the retinue. By “we”, I mean the retinue.’

‘Am I not part of that any more?’ he asked.

‘Yes, and always, Brin. But your place is here now.’

‘There is no place here–’

‘With the Ghosts.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I left that life behind, and I was never truly part of it. There is no place to come back to.’

‘She thinks there is,’ said Auerben. ‘This is the path you must walk now. She has said as much to me, and to several others.’

‘You said she was sleeping still, Auerben,’ said Milo. ‘How can she have said anything?’

The captain looked at him. He abruptly became very aware of her burns. They all carried scars and marks. She’d got hers on Morlond, in a pyrochemical attack. Milo had always felt that the scars he bore were the loss of Tanith, but suddenly it seemed he was about to get the real wounds he would be obliged to carry for the rest of his life.

A pulse quickened behind his breastbone, the old instinct, harbinger of misfortune.

‘You know how,’ she said quietly.

He did. He knew the way she spoke to those closest to her. In dreams. He had not dreamt like that since his return from hell. He had thought that the lapse was because she was unconscious, and that the dreams would resume as she recovered.

But, no. The others were still dreaming the dreams of islumbine. None for him.

‘Am I cast out because I failed?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know,’ said Auerben. ‘I don’t think so, Brin, because in my eyes, you did not fail. But I think she has another purpose for you now, and it’s here, not at her side.’

‘Why didn’t she tell me herself?’

Auerben shrugged.

‘I think she is. I’m sorry it feels cruel.’

He rose to his feet and looked away at the distant haze on the horizon. He would not let Auerben see tears in his eyes. He would not show his hurt, his disappointment. He would not seem like a boy.

‘Did you question her choice when you came to walk with her?’ Auerben asked.

‘No,’ he said.

‘Then why question it now?’

‘I want to see her,’ he said.

‘She’s sleeping, Brin. It’s not possible.’

He heard her rise to her feet behind him.

He heard her say, ‘It’s not personal.’

Siprious, the last day of the assault. Engine-kills ablaze across the field below the bulwarks. A scent of islumbine. He sees her, shining like a star, but he can’t reach her. It’s too far, and every time he starts to run–

He woke.

‘Another,’ said the Urdeshi at the bar. ‘Another, and one for my friend here.’

I’m not your friend.

The barman poured fobraki into little glass beakers that looked like jars.

‘You Militarum?’ the Urdeshi asked.

No.

‘You look Militarum,’ the Urdeshi said, pushing one of the beakers along the bar to him. ‘But no unit pins.’

Long lost.

‘Yes, Militarum,’ said Milo, accepting the drink. It was in a jar. A washed and repurposed camo-paint jar. War had left so little intact on Urdesh, they made use of what they could find.

‘Forty-Eighth Urdeshi Light, me,’ said the man, raising his jar and studying the piss-yellow liquor with dulled eyes. ‘Here’s to you, and your service, brother.’

He muttered the toast, so off-hand it could barely be made out, and snatched back his drink.

‘The Emperor protects,’ Milo said, and followed suit.

‘Now, no, you see?’ The Urdeshi said, wiping his mouth on his frayed cuff. ‘He doesn’t. No, sir. You protect yourself. You fight for what’s yours. Tooth and nail.’

‘Of course,’ said Milo.

The man pawed at his arm.

‘I mean it,’ he said. ‘That’s the way of it. Every Urdesh-born soul learns that early. You fight for what’s yours. You’re not going to get given anything. If you want it, you fight for it. Tooth and nail. We have lived too long in the halls of war, we don’t know another way.’

On that, I agree with you.

‘So, which unit? Which unit are you, friend?’ the man asked, waving at the barman for another round.

No unit. No nothing.

‘I asked you, which unit?’

Say something.

‘Uh, Tanith,’ said Milo. ‘Tanith First.’

The man gripped his arm.

‘Are you taking the piss?’ he asked, hot liquor-breath in Milo’s ear.

‘No.’

‘You’re one of them Tanith? The Big Man’s boys?’

No, and not for a long time, and never properly.

‘Yes.’

The man slid off the bar stool and raised his hands and his voice to the room.

‘Hey! Hey! Shut it!’ he bellowed. ‘This fellow here, this man with me. No, bloody shut up and listen! He’s Tanith! He’s one of them Ghosts! Sitting right here, my friend here! One of Gaunt’s bloody Ghosts!’

There was a commotion of cheering. The man seized Milo’s hand and forced a shake, then pushed on into an unwelcome embrace.

‘You were the ones!’ he cried. ‘You, and your fine High Lord himself! You gave Urdesh back to us!’

No. Not really.

‘Let me shake you by the hand, friend.’

You just did.

‘You’re a saviour, you are. A saviour. I never thought to meet one of you to look in the eye!’

And you still haven’t.

‘Another drink! Another drink for my fine and brave friend here!’

The barman poured more. Even the barman was flushed and smiling.

‘On the house,’ he said.

The Urdeshi raised his jar and toasted Milo.

Ask him.

‘What is that pledge?’

‘What?’

‘The thing you say when you drink?’ Milo asked. ‘I’ve heard it a lot, but I don’t know it.’

‘Here’s blood in your eyes?’

‘No, the other thing.’

‘Oh, from there to here? You mean that? From there to here. It doesn’t mean anything. Just a thing.’

Milo raised his jar.

‘From there to here.’

What was the path? It was measured in battles, in passing worlds, one scrap-fight after another. Herodor, of course, the start… Brachis City, the rimwalls of Tenzia, Ashwarati Valley, the Flood Plains, the trench lines of Eboris and of Gant Hive, the long winter on Khan III, the Siprious Assault, the ravening of Cygnus City, then Pinnacle Spire in Oureppan.

Others too. Others he had forgotten. Herodor was always the start, as it seemed to him, the start of a life he felt he’d actually chosen and not merely stumbled into. Before Herodor, nothing seemed to matter, not even Tanith. And after Pinnacle Spire, nothing mattered either.

At the Spire, he’d come close, and failed. Afterwards, at Coltrice Fastness, and then at Orchidel Island, he’d merely been present.

He dreamed of them all. They mingled, decomposed, one place decaying into another, like bodies in a shallow grave, obeying dream logic instead of factual sense. His life as an esholi, at her side. From Herodor to Urdesh. His life as an instrument of purpose. From there to here.

He didn’t dream of her. He hadn’t since Orchidel.

Or if he did, she never spoke.

He woke.

The billet was a fine set of rooms off the Circular Court of the Urdeshic Palace that had been deemed appropriate for the personal brigade of the Lord Executor. It was quiet, a blue gloom of cots in rows. Men slept, a few snoring. The place was half-empty. Several companies had been given furlough, and had gone down into Eltath to enjoy the celebration of the city’s liberation. The coloured flash of fireworks blinked at the billet windows now and then.

Milo rose. He didn’t know these people. There were far too many new faces, and pitifully few old ones. The Tanith seemed outnumbered by hard-faced Verghastites and coolly professional Belladon. It was the Tanith First, but it wasn’t. If you changed the blade and the handle, was it still the same warknife?

Too many old faces had gone. Too much of the past left buried in shallow graves on a multitude of worlds. And the faces he did know didn’t seem to know him. Varl, Ifvan, Elam, Raglon… the rest, the long-timers, the survivors… time had passed differently for them. Milo had heard the story. A transit accident on the return from Salvation’s Reach. Missing, presumed lost, adrift in the warp-ocean, ten years passing in real time.

Ten years that Milo had lived out. He was as old as them now, older than some. Full-grown, tall, a stranger. Certainly not the boy they had known, the company mascot, the lucky charm, the only civilian survivor of Tanith. He knew their faces, but they didn’t know his, and it made them awkward around him, unsure of what to say.

He’d always been a stranger.

Only the fish tattoo over his eye seemed familiar to them.

Milo walked down the row between the cots, silent as a ghost, and opened the billet door. He stepped into the night air.

It wasn’t just the separate lives they had led, nor the dislocation of lifetimes, which had returned him to them as a man they didn’t know, older than he was supposed to be. It was personal. War bred a comradeship, an intimacy that could not be faked. They had all been through wars, but not the same ones. They could all compare wounds and stories, but they weren’t the same wounds and they certainly weren’t the same stories. He could tell them of Brachis City and Ashwarati, and all the rest – not that he had much desire to do so – and they would listen, and they would be interested, but they wouldn’t know. And they, in turn, could tell him of Ancreon Sextus, and Jago, of Salvation’s Reach and even of the Tulkar Batteries here in Eltath, and he would be keen to hear, but he wouldn’t know either.

War was the only life that he and any of them had lived. It was a constant, and it was an inclusive bond. But the respectful fellowship of veteran soldiers was not the same as the blood-bond of comrades in arms who had endured in the same places together. It wasn’t a matter of details, or particular specifics, or even private jokes. To go through a battle with others, and trust them with your life, was to be tempered in the same fire. Since Herodor, he and the Ghosts had been forged in different flames. The fires looked the same to outsiders, but they burned differently and left unique patinas on mettle.

It was hard to explain unless you had known war. The experience of a soldier, of a Guardsman, of a common lasman, was universal, but it was also entirely personal. You never, and could not, love someone as much as the souls that had been through the same fire with you.

It was a blood-bond. Stronger than birthplace, stronger than a company banner, stronger than family, like an unspoken and unbreakable oath taken through experience. A bond, a pact. A blood pact.

Milo laughed at where the words in his mind had gone.

‘Laughing in the dark. Not the best indicator of sanity.’

He looked around. She’d been there all the time, sitting by a pillar in the dark. He hadn’t seen her. He didn’t know her either.

‘Something amused me,’ he said. ‘And no, it’s not.’

‘You’re Milo,’ she asked, but it wasn’t really a question. ‘I’ve heard about you. They talk about you. The boy.’

‘Not any more,’ he said.

‘Clearly.’ She got up. Her accent, that was Verghast.

‘I hated being called the boy,’ he said.

‘But you were a boy. A child.’

‘Yes. But I hated it. And it’s the only thing I haven’t managed to lose.’

‘That’s not true,’ she said. ‘You obviously haven’t lost your ability to feel sorry for yourself.’

He blinked. ‘What? I’m not– Feth you.’

‘Just an observation.’

‘Feth you anyway.’

She stepped closer. She was slender and athletic, her black hair tied back. She held out her hand.

‘Zhukova,’ she said. So this was the infamous Zhukova. He’d heard of her. A Verghast-intake officer who’d accepted a demotion so she could join the scout cadre. First woman they’d let in, and it had been by Mkoll’s invitation.

He shook her hand.

‘They talk about you too,’ he said.

‘Oh, they always have,’ she replied. She paused. ‘Who’s “they”?’

He shrugged. ‘Mach Bonin. Caober. The chief mentioned you.’

The list was short, now he came to think of it. The only Ghosts he’d had any real conversations with since his return had been the scouts. Mkoll had brought Milo back in, saved him at Coltrice, done the deed when Milo had failed on the beach at Orchidel. Mkoll had brought him back, so the scouts had automatically accepted him, given him a cot, scared him up some kit. But the scouts were all loners at heart, conditioned to silence, so the conversations hadn’t been of any real substance. They hadn’t questioned him about his time with the Beati. They had just carried on, with him among them, as if he’d never been away. Was that supposed to reassure him, or was it just the detached indifference of the career scout? Mkoll was a great man, but he was hardly the expressive, paternal type.

‘In my experience,’ Zhukova said, ‘self-pity has no value. Self-recrimination, it rots you inside.’

‘Why are you telling me that?’

‘Because you’re feeling sorry for yourself. Because you feel like shit, and you don’t know who to blame. Because the world’s against you, and you’re taking it out on the only person you can. Which is you, by the way.’

‘I didn’t say anything about–’

‘You didn’t have to, it’s obvious,’ she said. She stood beside him and stared out into the midnight gloom of the court. Coloured flashes underlit the streaks of night cloud. ‘You lurk about the place like you don’t belong. You keep to yourself. You don’t smile.’

‘You’ve been watching me?’

‘Everyone’s been watching you. Most of us because we don’t know you, and we’ve heard the stories. The boy with the second sight. The piper who went to march at the Saint’s side. But your friends, the ones who remember you–’

‘I don’t really have any friends,’ he said. ‘It’s been a long time.’

‘They remember you,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard them talk. I’ve talked to them. Larkin and Rafflan. Obel. Bray. Shoggy. They don’t know what to say to you. They don’t know how to approach you. They want to, but there’s a look in your eyes that keeps them at bay.’

‘Look, I appreciate you’re trying to do something… I don’t know what… but you really don’t know what you’re talking about,’ he said.

‘There, exactly like that,’ she said. She pointed at his face. ‘A barrier. And I do know what I’m talking about. And what I’m trying to do is steal the chief’s straight silver.’

‘What?’

‘I’m saying, I’m not meddling in your business, you churlish gak. I was out here, doing something, and you walked out, and so I spoke–’

‘What?’

‘–you interrupted me, not the other way around.’

‘You’re trying to steal his warknife?’ he said.

She grinned.

‘Oh, that. Yes,’ she said.

‘What… Why?’

‘Mkoll’s given me a shot, but everyone expects me to fail. One, I’m a woman. Two, I’m Verghast.’ She started to count the strikes off on her fingers. ‘Three, I’m an officer, or was. Four, I have no background in recon specialties, and I sure as shit don’t have that Tanith tree-magic crap baked into me. Five, I’m a woman–’

‘You said that.’

‘It bears repeating. They’ve given me a shot at it, and I’m working my arse off to make the grade, but they are all waiting for me to fail. Even Mkoll. So I’m putting in the extra hours. Like now, Milo, until you interrupted me. One of these nights, I’m going to get in there and lift his straight silver while he’s sleeping. That’ll wipe the fething smirk off their faces.’

‘You won’t.’

She sniffed.

‘Not you as well,’ Zhukova murmured.

‘No,’ he said, back-tracking fast. ‘Because it’s Mkoll. None of us could do that.’

‘We’ll see.’

‘Seriously, set yourself an easier challenge.’

‘Why?’ she asked.

He started to answer, but didn’t know what the answer was. It was a genuinely good question.

‘Nearly got it, two nights back,’ she said. ‘He didn’t stir. But I couldn’t reach the blade. So I left a flower on his bolster instead.’

‘A flower?’ Milo asked.

‘Yes,’ she said. She gestured towards the stone planters that framed the courtyard. ‘One of those things. I picked one of those and left it.’

‘Islumbine,’ he said.

‘Yeah. It grows everywhere.’

‘It does now.’

‘What?’

He shrugged.

‘He was livid,’ Zhukova said, with an involuntary snigger. ‘Thought it was some kind of joke or something, which I suppose it was, but he didn’t get it. He thought Bonin had done it.’

Milo smiled.

‘The knife,’ she said. ‘Next time. Thought I had a good shot tonight, except you came blundering about.’

It didn’t seem to warrant an apology, so he made none.

‘What did you mean?’ he asked. ‘Just now. You said you know what you’re talking about?’

‘Self-recrimination,’ she said. ‘That was my vice for a long time. It eats you up, so stay away from it, that’s all I’m saying.’

‘I’ve lost a lot,’ said Milo.

‘I have no doubt.’

‘It feels like I’ve lost everything,’ he said, ‘except a nickname I despise.’

‘Well, loss is often a factor,’ Zhukova said, quite matter-of-fact. ‘Actual loss, or a feeling that you’ve lost your way. Or the feeling that you’re not good enough. That you’re an imposter, and someone’s going to call you out any second. That was mine.’

‘How did that work?’

‘I’m a career soldier, Milo,’ she said. ‘It’s what I wanted to be, what I chose for myself. I’m not bad at it. Got a commission. A mention or two in after-actions. But my whole career, I’ve been dogged by rumours. By gossip. I only made officer school because I’m a good-looking woman. I only made captain because I’m easy on the eye. I only got a command post because I slept my way through the academy. I only got anything because, I dunno, tits.’

She looked at him.

‘Everything I’ve got, everything I’ve done… no one ever thinks it’s on merit. On ability. Unless banging your senior instructor is considered an ability, which I did not do. I began to believe it. That rots you from the inside. So, there’s my advice, free of charge and speaking as one who knows. Don’t do it.’

‘What changed?’ he asked.

‘The chief gave me a chance. The first person to actually evaluate me on ability. That’s why I resigned my pins and went for it. And that’s why I am not going to feth it up.’

‘He brought us both back in, then,’ said Milo.

‘What?’

‘Mkoll. Brought us both back in.’

‘I guess so. Well, you’d better not feth it up either, then, had you?’

He nodded.

‘They’re in awe of you, you know?’ Zhukova said quietly.

‘What? Who are?’

‘The Ghosts. Your old friends. You walked with the Beati. Fought at her side. Fought at the chief’s side on that fething island and killed the Anarch. They’re in awe of you. That’s why they keep their distance. They have no idea how to talk to you.’

‘They can talk to me like they used to.’

‘Call you “boy”?’

‘I don’t mean that.’

‘No, I know what you mean,’ she said. ‘You should tell them.’

‘I honestly don’t know how.’

‘Well, you need to find a way. If you’re staying.’

‘I don’t even know that.’

‘Wow, boy,’ Zhukova said. ‘You are stubborn. Well, it’s been nice meeting you.’

‘You too,’ he said. But she’d gone. Vanished without a sound into the blue shadows.

He could see why Mkoll had given her a shot.

In Cygnus City, the turret guns are hammering. The next wave of Aeronautica has just gone over, dropping dazzle-flares to paint the redoubts. They’ll need to stay in cover when the shockwaves come, then get up and start moving before the smoke clears. He can smell islumbine on the air, but it’s not in the air, it’s in his head, and so is Cygnus City. It’s a memory of the scent of islumbine, a hole that something used to occupy, like the space left in a gun-case when the gun has been removed, but you can still see the fitted depression for it. And the empty memories are just inside a dream anyway, and this is just a fething dream again, and she’s not in it, not even a space she used to occupy and–

He woke.

On his fifth or sixth visit, he finally realised why he liked the liquor-house on Hainehill Street. It had certain advantages. Locals drank there, Urdeshi locals, and off-world Militarum didn’t venture in.

But most of all, the building was old. Its frame was timber built.

The barman saw him when he entered, and had a jar of fobraki waiting on the wooden bar-top. The bar itself was framed with thick, worked timbers, stained almost black with varnish and smoke and the grease-dirt of years. Posts cut from single tree trunks held up the ceiling, and the rafters had been cut from the same forest.

Not nalwood. He could tell that by the grain. But not local. This timber had been shipped in years before, maybe cadderwood from Taliscant, or Far Halt cedar. Maybe it was nalwood. The Tanith mills had traded off-world for centuries, and it had been a long time since he’d walked the forests, perhaps so long that his knowledge of knot pattern and heartwood grain had waned.

But it was wood. It was Great Timber, cut by loggers from an old forest, brought here from there. The warmth of it, the feel of it, it reassured him. And if he squinted, after a few jars, he could imagine the upright posts as trees standing in leaf, and smell the damp musk and leaf-litter of the forest floor, and hear the wind sigh as it stirred the boughs above.

The pulse had never left him. The throb behind his breastbone, beneath the old tattoo he couldn’t remember getting. It had been there since his childhood, since the time when he really was just a boy. Instinct, intuition, a warning knot in his gut, call it what you like. Milo didn’t call it anything, because he couldn’t explain it, and people looked at him warily when he tried to.

She had never questioned it. In fact, the Beati had trusted it, and looked to him when a certain expression crossed his face. It wasn’t a curse or a blemish to her. It had been a gift from the Throne, and one to be cherished.

He hadn’t felt the pulse since Orchidel Island.

He’s on the shingle. The air’s cold, a strong wind off a grey, wallowing sea. There’s no scent of islumbine, there’s just a sense of purpose. The bastard will die. The bastard will die, now and here. This is how it’s supposed to end. This is what he’s meant to do, no matter how much his ears are ringing from blast concussion, no matter how weak his limbs are, no matter how much his stomach heaves or his head aches from translation sickness. The pulse beats right under the gristle of his breastbone. This is where his path has been leading him. This is where she saw him going. This was why she let him walk at her side, so he could come here and do this.

Everything has led here. From the deep woods of Tanith, from the dust of Herodor, everything, from there to here.

The wet shingle slithers under his feet. Kicked stones skitter. There’s the weight of the grenade in his hand. He wants to fall down and vomit and pass out, but he won’t. The bastard is right there. Just ahead. A ragged shape on the beach, trying to get up, dirty robes flapped by the inshore wind. The magister doesn’t look like anything. He doesn’t look like a creature that has dominated the stars, or razed worlds, or united hosts of fanatics with his voice. He looks pathetic, fallen, broken. This, in the end, will be easy to do. An easy kill, quick and–

He woke.

The wood in the Hainehill liquor-house was painted pale blue, the walls white, and the lipped edges of the low tables yellow-gold, the three colours of the Urdeshi banner. Between the thick ceiling posts, most of the liquor-house was given over to seating: low wooden benches around squat wooden tables, no more than a foot off the ground. The tables were oblong, with thick, raised lips around the edges, almost like market pallets. Milo supposed that’s what they had once been: market pallets, or ware boards, or maybe dough trays from a bakery, repurposed as tables just like everything else in the place was repurposed. Jars and trays, even the mismatched bottles that were used to store the fobraki, they had all been something else originally. They had been used for a long time, they had served their purpose and, when they were no longer needed, they had been pressed into service in a second life, to serve in a different way.

The paint was so thick, it was hard to see the grain of the wood. The tables and benches were so low, patrons sat hunched, like men around a campfire, except for those who had found benches against the white walls which allowed them to lean back.

Up in the rafters, old, moth-eaten banners had been strung up: the faded flags of long-lost Urdeshi companies and brigades, or the threadbare pennants of local labour guilds and fab worker unions, once paraded through the streets on high days and festivals.

Milo admired the Urdeshi resolve, their steadfast nature, unbowed and dignified after centuries of hardship and war. Where did that come from? Was it some special alloy struck in the alchemy of the forges? Suffering and loss broke some cultures, but not the Urdeshi. It seemed to make them stronger.

But not stronger so they would rise up, renewed, and win. Just stronger to endure the next loss, and the one after that, and the one after that. They expected loss. They expected suffering. Victory seemed like an awkward surprise.

‘You Guard?’ asked the man in the machinist’s smock. ‘You Imperial Guard?’

The Sons of Sek were the archenemy. Worse than the Blood Pact, because their feral nature was tempered by a greater discipline. They had harnessed rage and murder like no others.

Milo had been fighting them for a long time, first with the Ghosts and then at the Beati’s side. He loathed them, but he also respected them. You had to respect such a capable foe or you’d lose the fight.

And the Sons had lost. They were gone now, broken. Milo had fought them, and he had been their prisoner, and he had hidden in their midst long enough to get some measure of them. Not an understanding, or a sympathy, but enough to get a degree of insight. The devotion to the cause, the certainty of their calling.

The corpses of five of them, mob-killed, were strung from a gibbet at the corner of Hainehill. There were gibbets just like it all across Eltath. The bodies would hang there until decay made suspension impossible. They would be abused, and spat at, and pilloried by every passing citizen, day in, day out, a reminder of someone’s victory and someone’s defeat. Milo was sure that, when decay finally took its toll, the remains would be dragged to the bastion walls, and skulls put on spikes, and bones in iron cages. The defeated enemy, humiliated and desecrated. The Urdeshi victory would be made to endure too.

At Brachis City, Ashwarati and Siprious, the Sons had displayed Militarum skulls on stakes. Milo remembered it clearly.

What must it feel like to have lost? Milo had no sympathy, but he could imagine. To be so certain. To be so united in one cause and one purpose, unified by a single voice, and for all of that to just disappear. The Sons had lost their voice. They had lost their way.

Better to rot from a gallows-tree than live with that.

Am I like you, corpse? Am I so different? Loyal, driven by a purpose I believe in with all my heart, fighting for a cause? Answering a voice without hesitation? When our bones hang side by side from a gibbet, or rot side by side in the grave, could anybody see a difference? Duty and faith, honour and belief, those things rot away long before flesh and organs.

You found your way from there to here, and here, for you, is a rope and a crossbar and ignominy. Somewhere, on the road from there, I lost my way.

And all I can do is stand and look up at you. I am breathing, and you are simply swaying in the midday breeze. Beyond that, is there any real difference between us?

‘You Guard?’ asked the man in the machinist’s smock. ‘You Imperial Guard?’

Milo nodded. The man sat down on the bench beside him, uninvited. They sat hunched over the blue table, like friends around a firepit on a cold night.

‘This is no place for you, lasman,’ the man said.

‘What?’

‘This is an Urdeshi place. Not for your kind.’

‘My kind?’ Milo turned to look at him.

‘Look, I mean no offence,’ the man said. He waited as the passing server filled his jar again. ‘But others might.’

‘I don’t know what you’re saying,’ said Milo.

‘Then you’re a fool. Urdesh has lived Archonate, and Urdesh has lived Imperial. More years the former. This is just another thing. Urdesh is Urdesh.’

‘But we won,’ said Milo.

The man in the machinist’s smock laughed. He smelled of grease and metal dust, the work-waste of the forge.

‘This time,’ he said. ‘You won, lasman. Urdesh didn’t. The cities burn. The land burns. You are just a different master.’

‘Is that what you think?’

The man shook his head. ‘Not me. Some do. Many do. Urdesh is strong. It survives, no matter what. Archon or Throne, one year or the next, carving their tithes and their tributes, crowing their commands, making promises and never delivering. Urdesh is Urdesh, in the end. Not my sentiments, but out of respect, I wanted to mention it to you. This is no place for you. Coming here, alone. What do you come here for anyway? Praise? Thanks? Deference? Undying gratitude?’

‘No.’

The man shrugged.

‘What then, lasman?’

Milo didn’t know what to say. He couldn’t say the reassurance of the old timber, or the solitude, or the anonymity, because those things sounded feeble.

‘I like it here,’ he said.

‘Here, friend, is no place for you.’

There, on Tanith, when he is a child too young to remember it happening, he is given a tattoo over his breastbone. There, in Tanith Magna, when he is just a boy, a pulse of premonition drives him to escape the fire, and allows him to live. There, in the heat of Vincula City, just months later, a tall man in a commissar’s uniform unpins his shiny unit badge, and hands it to him to acknowledge his formal entry into the Tanith regiment. There, on Hagia shrine world, the dreams of islumbine begin. There, in the dust of Herodor, the same tall man hands him a straight silver to replace the one he has lost, so he can carry it with him as he walks at the Beati’s side.

There, from each there, each step on the path, to here. To the shingle. To the inshore wind flapping the ragged robes. To–

He woke.

To the dirty liquor-house on Hainehill. To the low, blue timber tables. To the creak of a gibbet rope outside as the breeze sways a voiceless corpse. To the jar of fobraki in his hand. A toast, my friend, my friendless friend, my dreamless friend, a pledge.

To Tanith. To Urdesh. To duty. To dreams. Here’s to them. Here. From Tanith to Urdesh. From there to here. From–

He woke.

But he did go back. Damn the man in the machinist’s smock. Damn his friendly advice.

Another night of fireworks in the skies over Eltath. Music and laughter in the streets. A victory, of sorts, for some. Enough for most to celebrate. Deliverance, from there to here.

Milo walked up the steep streets alone, avoiding the celebrating crowds, the pit-roast grox and the bands, the bunting strung from gutter to gutter, the kegs rolled out and tapped at the kerbside, the liquor-houses and dining halls where the Militarum went off duty to make merry with the locals and wash the war out of their minds with fobraki and amasec, and ale and laughter.

He wandered up Hainehill, into the quieter streets, past the fab and the manufactory row, past the gibbet, creaking and stinking in the night air. Fireworks flashed behind him. The lamps in the liquor-house made a reluctant invitation.

It was subdued. Locals, drinking silently, hunched. A pledge murmured as a jar was lifted towards a mouth. Milo felt he knew what it meant now, the Urdeshi pledge. It was entirely in keeping with their stoic character. A stubborn acknowledgement that here was little different to there, and all that mattered was the persistence in between. A sour, resentful toast to the effort of enduring, a salute to the weary, unending slog of seeing it through.

The barman saw him come in, and wiped the blue, painted wood of the bar with a dirty cloth. He set up a jar, and unstoppered a bottle. No greeting. Grudging eyes on him from all sides.

Milo lifted the jar.

‘From there to here,’ he said, and knocked it back. He was a lone figure at the bar, an outsider, dressed in unmarked, un-badged black, but the locals had long since decided who he was. Not local, a saviour or just another invader, a stranger with a fish tattoo, at the very least not them. Militarum. Imperial.

‘So this is where you take yourself?’

Milo looked around. There were ghosts in the doorway, dark shadows. They stepped into the lamplight, and were still ghosts.

‘What are you doing here?’ Milo asked.

‘Thought we’d come and join you,’ said Mkoll.

‘Nice fething arsehole place you’ve found to crawl into,’ said Varl, glancing around in distaste.

‘Honestly, what are you doing here?’ asked Milo.

‘Oh, what? We can’t step out for a little laughing juice?’ asked Larkin, with a grin.

The three of them surrounded him at the bar.

‘What is that stuff?’ asked Varl, nodding towards Milo’s jar.

‘Fobraki.’

‘Looks like piss.’

‘Tastes like it,’ said Milo.

‘You really know how to have a good time, don’t you?’ Larkin chuckled. Mkoll held up three fingers for three more jars. Dubious, the barman set them up and filled them. The three ghosts raised their glasses to Milo.

‘From there to here,’ said Milo.

‘What’s that? That’s fething stupid,’ said Varl with a frown. ‘Forever the same.’

‘Forever the same,’ chorused Mkoll and Larkin. They drank. They made faces. They put down their empty jars, and stifled coughs.

‘Let’s take a table,’ said Mkoll.

Milo took a full bottle from the barman, and left some coins on the counter. He followed the others to a corner table. Forever the same. He’d forgotten that. The old Tanith pledge. Milo didn’t think he’d heard it since Tanith Magna. Surely, sometime since then? Sharing a flask some night with Bragg and Corbec and Feygor? It was hard to say. But just the sound of it, those three words, was an instant memory, like the smell of nalwood or the musk of a forest floor.

It was an honest pledge. And, just like the morose Urdeshi one, it was a salute to perseverance and endurance, to duty and resolve, to the journey, not the destination. But it didn’t seem so mean-spirited or grudging. He guessed that every culture had their own version, expressing the same stalwart sentiment.

Even the silenced Sons.

They sat on blue benches around a blue table that had once been a ware board.

‘What’s wrong with these seats?’ Varl asked. ‘Why are they so fething low?’

Milo shrugged. He put the bottle on the table.

‘And why is the table so low? And what is that fething filth?’

‘We won’t be needing it,’ Mkoll told Varl. He nodded to Larkin. The old marksman grinned and furtively slid a ceramic flask out of his satchel.

‘Proper stuff,’ he murmured as he filled their jars with sacra.

‘Why are you here?’ asked Milo.

‘Bored,’ said Varl.

‘Fancied I’d stretch my legs,’ said Mkoll.

‘Oh, don’t feth with him,’ said Larkin. He looked at Milo, showing his bad teeth in a vulpine smile. ‘We were worried about you, Brinny boy,’ he said. ‘You haven’t seemed yourself. Not since you got back from all your high and holy adventuring. Thought we’d come and keep you company. Perk you up.’

‘I’m fine.’

‘Yeah, you are,’ said Mkoll. ‘So it’s probably time you stopped acting like you’re not.’

‘What?’ said Milo, taken aback.

‘It’s not a good look,’ said Larkin.

‘Makes you look like a right arsehole,’ said Varl.

‘I didn’t say that,’ put in Larkin, ‘but it’s not a good look, Brinny. It’s not you. You’re a Ghost, boy, not a–’

‘Right arsehole,’ said Varl.

‘I said we should have rehearsed this,’ said Mkoll quietly. ‘You two are hopeless.’

‘Rehearsed?’ Milo echoed.

‘She said he was glum,’ Larkin said to Mkoll.

‘Yeah, she said we should talk to him like normal. Just like we always did, so that’s what I’m doing,’ said Varl. He looked at Milo. ‘Do you feel better yet?’ he asked.

‘I don’t know what’s going on,’ said Milo.

‘Someone told us, on the hush, that you were feeling out of sorts,’ said Larkin, ‘and that we, and by we I mean everyone, were being a bit stand-offish. Like we didn’t know what to say to you.’

‘We don’t know what to say to you,’ said Varl. ‘To be fair.’

‘We don’t,’ agreed Larkin, ‘but she said we should just talk to you. Settle you down. Say whatever. But that’s not easy, because you keep pissing off on your own every night.’

‘Who’s “she”?’ Milo asked, but he knew.

‘So here we are,’ said Larkin.

‘How did you find me?’ Milo asked. Mkoll gazed at him steadily.

‘Really?’ he said.

‘This is where you go, is it?’ asked Varl. ‘Why here? Is it the stink of the latrines? The lice? The piss-water?’

‘It’s the timber,’ Milo said.

They all thought about that for a moment.

‘I get that,’ said Varl. Mkoll raised his jar.

‘Forever the same,’ he said.

They echoed him, and necked the sacra.

Feth, that was more like it.

They were on their third shot of sacra, and Varl was telling a story about Brostin and a jammed flamer. Varl was gesturing theatrically, but his movements were tight. Like so many of them, he had come out of the Eltath fight wounded, and he was still healing. They all had scars. They all had wounds. Varl was just getting to the punchline when a figure appeared behind Larkin, leaned in, and put something on the table in front of Mkoll.

‘What the feth?’ said Varl.

‘Thought you’d want that back,’ said Zhukova to Mkoll.

‘What the feth?’ Varl repeated.

Mkoll stared at the warknife on the table with remarkable composure.

‘That’s mine,’ he said.

‘It is,’ she said. ‘You boys have a good night, now.’

She walked away towards the door.

‘What the feth?’ Varl exclaimed.

Mkoll picked up the knife. There was a tiny smile on his face.

‘I lost mine at Tulkar Batteries,’ he said. ‘This is a replacement. Got it out of stores when we came back. I’ve only had it a few days. Not worked it in yet.’

He held it out to Milo.

‘You better take it,’ he said. ‘I’ll get another. You’ll need one.’

Milo hesitated.

‘You will need one, won’t you, Brinny?’ asked Larkin.

Milo nodded. He took the knife.

‘Fill the jars,’ he said to Larkin. ‘I’ll be back in a minute.’

He caught up with her in the street outside. Rockets and flares over the harbour were lighting the long slope of Hainehill.

‘Wait!’ he called.

Zhukova looked back.

‘What?’ she asked.

‘You told them.’

‘Obviously.’

‘Well, you didn’t have to,’ he said.

‘Clearly, I did,’ she said. ‘You weren’t going to. Or, if you ever got around to it, the God-Emperor would have woken up by then and everything would be over.’

‘You don’t need to fight my battles, Zhukova,’ he said.

‘Oh, but that’s the point,’ she said. ‘I do. And you need to fight mine. This life, Milo, it’s a group effort. We’re a regiment. We count on each other. Otherwise, what’s the point? You couldn’t do it, so I did. One day, it’ll be the other way around. And you’d better not feth up.’

‘I won’t.’

‘That’s all right, then,’ she said. ‘Now go back to your friends, boy. You’ve got some stories to hear, and some stories to tell.’

She turned, and started to walk away.

‘Thanks!’ he called.

‘It’s not about the thanks,’ she called in reply, without looking back.

He waited a moment. He decided to watch until she was out of sight, but he lost her in the shadows almost immediately. Showing off, probably.

He turned, and walked back up the hill towards the liquor-house lights.

‘You don’t listen, do you?’ said the man in the machinist’s smock. He was standing in Milo’s path. In the mauve gloom of the evening street, his friends stepped into view. Six of them. Four big fab workers. Two soldiers. All Urdeshi.

‘You have a problem, friend?’ asked Milo.

‘Not your friend,’ the man said. ‘Not your friend, “hero”. Not your friend, “lasman”. I told you to stay away. For your own good.’

‘For my own good?’

‘That’s right. Just a word to the wise, but you didn’t listen. You want us to thank you? Buy you drinks and say what a great man you are?’

‘No.’

‘But you come in every night. Ignored my advice. Urdesh is Urdesh, and you’re not Urdesh, arsehole.’

Milo sighed.

‘I’m pretty tired of people calling me “arsehole” tonight,’ he said.

‘Oh, you should be used to it then,’ said the man in the machinist’s smock. He let a stout chair leg slide into his hand from his sleeve. It was wood, painted blue. Hard wood, repurposed yet again.

‘It depends who says it,’ said Milo.

‘Yeah, when I say it, it’s affectionate,’ said Varl. He and Mkoll and Larkin were standing behind the men.

‘You were gone a while,’ said Mkoll. ‘Come back and join us.’

Milo nodded.

‘I will,’ he said. ‘And maybe we can stand these fine gentlemen a drink to celebrate victory over the Archenemy.’

‘Imperial arseholes,’ said the man in the machinist’s smock.

‘You know what that sounds like?’ Varl asked.

‘Yeah,’ said Mkoll. ‘It sounds ungrateful.’

She says, ‘The path is what matters, Brin. The path. That alone. Not where it takes you. It’s how you get there. It’s how you carry yourself. It’s how you take the steps.’

‘But surely–’ he starts to say. The scent of islumbine is very strong. Chief Mkoll was saying almost the same thing last night, over sacra in the liquor-house. But that can’t have been last night, because that had been Eltath, on Urdesh forge world, and this was…

…where? Siprious? Gant? Ashwarati?

‘Paths shift,’ she says. ‘They shift all the time. Goals. Opportunities. Possibilities. Even destinies. Victory is only part of it. The trick is to find the path. To find it and follow it, and when it shifts, find it again, and follow it again, and never lose your way, no matter how many times it changes. I’m told the Tanith are good at that. Their famous scouts. I know them to be renowned pathfinders.’

He nods, and–

He woke.

The hallway in the Urdeshic Palace was cold, and they were obliged to wait on wooden chairs. When the Prefectus officer appeared, they all stood.

‘The commissar will see you,’ he said.

‘I hope it’s Fazekiel,’ Varl whispered. ‘I can sweet-talk her. Pretty sure.’

‘Or Blenner,’ Larkin whispered back. ‘He’s an easy touch.’

‘As long as it’s not Hark,’ Varl murmured.

‘Keep quiet,’ Mkoll hissed.

‘You first,’ the Prefectus officer said, pointing to Milo. Milo glanced at the others: Larkin with his black eye, Varl with his split lip, Mkoll with his bandaged knuckles.

‘Behave yourselves,’ he said. ‘I’ll take the rap for this.’

He walked into the office alone. The officer closed the door behind him. Milo stood to attention, eyes front, waiting for the dressing down and the list of punishment details.

‘Drunken brawling with Urdeshi locals. You put four of them in the infirmary. That’s not the responsible behaviour of the Militarum.’

Milo didn’t reply. It wasn’t any of the commissars he’d expected.

‘This isn’t the reunion I imagined,’ said Gaunt. He was sitting behind the large desk. He put down the incident report, and looked up. He seemed older, yet the same. His eyes were very different. His uniform too: austere, severe, vengefully commanding. Not the garb of a colonel-commissar. Not the uniform Milo had once pressed and repaired and button-polished.

‘Anything to say?’ asked Gaunt.

‘No, my Lord Executor.’

‘You sure?’

‘I am… surprised to see you. I had been told you were busy. Your new duties. I…’

‘I shouldn’t be here,’ said Gaunt. ‘I have seven lords militant waiting for me in the war room, and army lists to review. This is not my job any more. This is so below my duty level, in fact, that Macaroth would scold me if he found me doing it. But Beltayn noticed some names on the overnight watch list, and brought it to my attention. So I asked Commissar Hark to step out for five minutes. He’s getting some recaff.’

‘Yes, lord.’

‘Brawling in the street,’ said Gaunt.

‘No excuse for it, my Lord Executor. My fault entirely. The others aren’t to blame. They just stepped in to protect me.’

‘Mkoll, Larkin and Varl?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

Gaunt sat back.

‘The report says you were defending the honour of the Astra Militarum against local malcontents who were expressing anti-Imperial views.’

‘Still no excuse, my lord.’

Gaunt rose to his feet. Milo had grown tall since their last meeting, but he had forgotten how tall Gaunt was.

‘I’d wanted to see you,’ said Gaunt. ‘Intended to, when I heard you were back. I thought you were gone, you see. Dead at Oureppan. The Beati told me so herself. Turns out she was wrong. Even saints are fallible. So I wanted to see you, of course. To welcome you. But things have been so frantic. There’s so much work to be done. The next phase…’

His voice trailed off. He looked at Milo with his unfamiliar and unforgiving eyes.

‘No excuse for it, though,’ he said. ‘I should have made it a priority. These are hardly the circumstances I imagined.’

‘I don’t think I’m a Lord Executor’s priority, sir,’ Milo said.

‘I think you’re wrong, Brin. I should have made the time before now. I understand you’re rejoining the First.’

‘I don’t seem to have an option, my lord.’

‘Do you want an option?’ Gaunt asked.

Milo hesitated.

‘No, sir. I don’t.’

‘Good. Good to hear. Fazekiel’s got the paperwork in hand. You’ll need to get your kit up to spec. Badges, pins, the rest. Get the Munitorum on it.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘I hear…’ Gaunt said, then paused. He cleared his throat. ‘Chief Mkoll tells me you might feel you’d lost your way. After the Orchidel action, after Sek. A loss of confidence, perhaps. Or regret at your detachment from the Beati’s staff. You’d been with them a long time, seen a lot. The Tanith First might seem a backward step.’

‘I… felt disconnected, my lord. I felt like I’d failed the task that had been set for me.’

‘Failed?’

‘I didn’t kill Sek,’ said Milo.

‘No, not single-handedly. But then neither did Mkoll. And neither did I, and neither did any single soldier of the Astra Militarum. What you did do could hardly be regarded as a failure.’

‘Yes, my lord. I have had time to reflect on it. And now, I don’t see it as a backward step.’

‘What changed your mind?’

‘A few things. Common sense, mostly. And Chief Mkoll told me that it’s about the journey, not the destination.’

Gaunt frowned.

‘That’s his philosophy?’

‘Apparently, my lord.’

‘I find it troubling that my head of recon thinks that.’

There was a knock at the internal door. Beltayn looked in.

‘Two minutes,’ Gaunt said. Beltayn nodded and stepped back out.

Gaunt returned his unblinking gaze to Milo.

‘Duty calls,’ he said. ‘Tell those idiots outside they’re cleared. No write-up. Sweating in a hallway is punishment enough. Oh, and I have your pipes. Tell Beltayn to arrange a meeting where I can get them back to you, and where we can have a decent conversation.’

‘When might that be, my lord?’

‘Feth alone knows. Now, dismissed and on your way.’

Milo saluted and turned.

‘No, wait.’

He looked back.

‘Do you remember Vincula City?’ asked Gaunt. ‘Back on Voltemand?’

‘Longer ago for me than you, but yes, my lord. I do.’

Gaunt unpinned the Tanith crest from his jacket, and tossed it across the room. Milo caught it neatly.

‘Seems only right that I welcome you back in the same fashion,’ said Gaunt.

The woods close in. This deep in the heartwood, the trees shift and stir, and paths never stay true for long. The green canopy rustles like a hushing ocean, and the light is emerald. The child is alone, just a boy, alone on the blurring track.

But he’s not afraid. The nalwoods murmur and sigh, and the pulse is a reassuring knot behind his breastbone. He can’t get lost. He knows where he’s going, and if the path fades, he’ll find it again. He knows how to get from here to there. It’s a talent he was born with, always and forever the same. Someone calls his name and–

He woke.

About the Authors

Dan Abnett has written over fifty novels, including Anarch, the latest instalment in the acclaimed Gaunt’s Ghosts series. He has also written the Ravenor, Eisenhorn and Bequin books, the most recent of which is Penitent. For the Horus Heresy, he is the author of the Siege of Terra novel Saturnine, as well as Horus Rising, Legion, The Unremembered Empire, Know No Fear and Prospero Burns, the last two of which were both New York Times bestsellers. He also scripted Macragge’s Honour, the first Horus Heresy graphic novel, as well as numerous Black Library audio dramas. Many of his short stories have been collected into the volume Lord of the Dark Millennium. He lives and works in Maidstone, Kent.

Graham McNeill has written many titles for The Horus Heresy, including the Siege of Terra novellas Sons of the Selenar and Fury of Magnus, the novels The Crimson King and Vengeful Spirit, and the New York Times bestselling A Thousand Sons and The Reflection Crack’d, the latter of which featured in The Primarchs anthology. Graham’s Ultramarines series, featuring Captain Uriel Ventris, is now seven novels long, and has close links to his Iron Warriors stories, the novel Storm of Iron being a perennial favourite with Black Library fans. He has also written the Forges of Mars trilogy, featuring the Adeptus Mechanicus, and the Warhammer Horror novella The Colonel’s Monograph. For Warhammer, he has written the Warhammer Chronicles trilogy The Legend of Sigmar, the second volume of which won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award.

Robert Rath is a freelance writer from Honolulu who is currently based in Hong Kong. He is the author of the Black Library novel The Infinite and the Divine, and its companion short story ‘War in the Museum’. His other short fiction includes ‘The Freelancer’, ‘The Garden of Mortal Delights’ and the Assassinorum tales ‘Divine Sanction’, ‘Live Wire’ and ‘Iron Sight’.

Marc Collins is a speculative fiction author living and working in Glasgow, Scotland. He is the writer of the short stories ‘Ghosts of Iron’, ‘Respite’s End’, ‘The Shapers of Scars’ and ‘Champions, All’ for Warhammer 40,000, and ‘Cold Cases’ for Warhammer Crime. When not dreaming of the far future he works in Pathology with the NHS.

Matthew Farrer is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Crossfire, Legacy and Blind. He has also penned many tales set in the Sabbat Worlds, including the Iron Snakes novel Urdesh: The Serpent and the Saint, the novella ‘The Inheritor King’ in the Sabbat Crusade anthology, ‘The Headstone and the Hammerstone Kings’ in Sabbat Worlds and ‘Nineteen-Three Coreward, Resolved’ in Sabbat War. For the Horus Heresy he has written the short stories ‘After Desh’ea’ and ‘Vorax’. He lives and works in Australia.

Justin D Hill is the author of the Necromunda novel Terminal Overkill, the Warhammer 40,000 novels Cadia Stands and Cadian Honour, the Space Marine Battles novel Storm of Damocles and the short stories ‘Last Step Backwards’, ‘Lost Hope’ and ‘The Battle of Tyrok Fields’, following the adventures of Lord Castellan Ursarkar E. Creed. He has also written ‘Truth Is My Weapon’, and the Warhammer tales ‘Golgfag’s Revenge’ and ‘The Battle of Whitestone’. His novels have won a number of prizes, as well as being Washington Post and Sunday Times Books of the Year. He lives ten miles uphill from York, where he is indoctrinating his four children in the 40K lore.

Edoardo Albert is a writer and historian specialising in the Dark Ages. He finds that the wars and cultures of the early Medieval period map very well on to the events of the 40th and 41st millenniums. Silent Hunters was his first novel for Black Library. For Warhammer 40,000, he has also written the short stories ‘Green and Grey’, ‘Last Flight’, ‘Born of the Storm’, and the novella Lords of the Storm.

John French is the author of several Horus Heresy stories including the novels The Solar War, Mortis, Praetorian of Dorn, Tallarn and Slaves to Darkness, the novella The Crimson Fist, and the audio dramas Dark Compliance, Templar and Warmaster. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written Resurrection, Incarnation and Divination for The Horusian Wars and three tie-in audio dramas – the Scribe Award-winning Agent of the Throne: Blood and Lies, as well as Agent of the Throne: Truth and Dreams and Agent of the Throne: Ashes and Oaths. John has also written the Ahriman series and many short stories.

Rachel Harrison is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novel Honourbound, featuring the character Commissar Severina Raine, as well the accompanying short stories ‘Execution’, ‘Trials’, ‘Fire and Thunder’, ‘A Company of Shadows’, and ‘The Darkling Hours’, which won a 2019 Scribe Award in the Best Short Story category. Also for Warhammer 40,000 she has written the novel Mark of Faith, the novella Blood Rite, numerous short stories including ‘The Third War’ and ‘Dishonoured’, the short story ‘Dirty Dealings’ for Necromunda, and the Warhammer Horror audio drama The Way Out.

An extract from Urdesh: The Serpent and the Saint.

‘LISTEN!’

His voice slammed against the tiled walls, rolled through the passageways, broke and rolled back, interleaving itself into echoes all around him.

‘I speak of Ithaka, the warriors of Ithaka, the Iron Snakes of Ithaka. The Adeptus Astartes of the Reef Worlds, who proved their valour upon the waters!’

His eyes were closed as he concentrated on sounds and echoes. His great shoulders bunched and released, his arms opened to embrace the air. His fists unknotted and his hands spread wide.

‘Armoured in devotion, armed in purpose, united in service, side by side on the road from the Throne to the stars, march the brothers of Ithaka!’

He opened his eyes. Over these gloomy subterranean chambers his imagination painted the storm-tossed sea of his home world, the deep and endless sky, the rough rock of the ocean cliffs, the watching faces of his brothers. His Chapter. The tunnels were full of the soft lap and chuckle of water in the town cisterns, but in his mind he could almost hear the sigh and boom of the surf against the cliffs below the Phratry’s fortress, taste the clean, sharp sea-scent in the air.

‘Listen and I shall tell you. There came a day when word arrived of war, of desperate need. Word came that the Archenemy walked among the stars again, tales of worlds burning and then worlds extinguished. The sorrows and prayers of the Sabbat Worlds were poured out like the waters of the oceans.

‘And as the call sounded, the blood of the Phratry stirred to answer it, as its brothers emerged from their stern counsels to declaim over the ocean’s roar the names that would muster to carry the weight of the undertaking.

‘Brother-Captain Cules, who commanded his brothers to glory in the halls of the traitors of the Yandine Drift, undertook this. Brother-
Captain Priad, whose lightning-wrapped blades had known the blood of the daemon, the ork and the primul, stood by his side. And to their banner came twelve names, a dozen banners, full sixscore warriors of the Phratry, sworn now to take ship from the Reef Stars, and with the might of their arms lift from the Sabbat Worlds the despair and the oppression of war!’

He had half-consciously taken a step forward and found the modulation of the echoes had changed ever so slightly as he had moved. He began to move in slow half-steps, listening to the way his voice rang through the stone and tile of the tunnels, seeking out the best position.

‘And so soon the Archenemy was to feel the coils of the snake, the iron of its armour, the speed of its strike! At Ambold the Snakes of Ithaka fell upon the foe as they laid siege to brave soldiers of the Throne, to break their grip and their back, so that Ambold might again call itself free. Upon Fornax Aleph the foe birthed the warp-dreamed form of the daemon, the enemy beyond, but the jaws of the snake closed upon it and its malevolent breath was dissipated like the foam on the swell of the wave.’

His voice had sped up, the echoes piling into each other and mashing together, blurring his words. He compensated, shifted position again, changed his cadence.

‘And then to Presarius, poor forsaken Presarius, whose darkened forges teemed with the misshapen enemy, spite-ridden, machine-merged, moving beneath their cities like the turbid tide. Like a spear of lightning before the storm, Brother-Captain Cules led the Snakes of Ithaka among the hives of Presarius, and in the darkness beneath the cities the hordes of the enemy closed about them.’

Then, in among the echoes, directly behind him, there was a gap.

‘And so began the Nine Days of Presarius, spent in the deep shadows of the forges and labyrinths, every brother of the Phratry with bolter-breech ringing empty, flamer and plasma all thirsting in vain for fuel, missile and grenade long since dispatched into darkness. And in the darkness before the breaking of the last doors to the Tetradine Stairs the Iron Snakes slew with fist and cleaving blade, chainsword and sea-lance, with their hearts never veering from the fight and the victory, as steadfast as the mariner’s compass.’

Something was directly behind him, out of his field of vision, motionless. Soaking up just enough of the sound that his exquisitely fine-honed hearing could spot the change in the echo layers. Someone was in here with him, silently watching.

‘It came about that while the brothers of Ithaka paid honour to their dead among the stones of wretched and ill-starred Presarius, a new banner was brought among their assembly. In amongst the heart of the foe’s ruin the steely snake and the golden aquila stood together, as Captain Cules and Macaroth the Warmaster bowed their heads together in sober conference.

‘“I bring you the Warmaster’s salute,” Cules’ words went, when the talk among the commanders was done and he had come back to his brothers, “for he has seen our prowess and resolve, and the ruin that we make of any enemy who stands against us, united in our undertaking. But the tides of war ebb and rise, and so we must chart a new course among its changing currents. The Warmaster is spreading his armies, to drive at the divided Archenemy and find the foe’s weaknesses as a storm surge will race through all the low places of the rocky coast.” And so, the undertaking to the Sabbat Worlds became many undertakings, and the voyage became many voyages, and the Iron Snakes strode onward through the war amid the smoke and the ruin of the Archenemy’s retreat.’

He still had not turned around, but his picture of his observer was rapidly building. Human proportioned, on the small side, unarmoured. His scent was clean: harsh laundry soap and ablutory scrub. Imperial Guard. Trooper level. His nostrils twitched. A quick under-scent of oiled wood and boot leather. A whiff of islumbine.

‘And so now I must speak of Urdesh, great Urdesh draped this way and that in her necklaces of volcanoes among her surging and teeming seas, honoured Urdesh whose bright Mechanicus spires raised their golden peaks above the ashen plains, Urdesh the mighty forge around which the tide of fortune had ceaselessly churned. Urdesh who would witness the reunion of brothers long separated by the twisting currents of war.

‘Five banners the Phratry planted on Urdesh’s ashen soil, five hands poured out the water so that Urdesh’s seas and Ithaka’s might be forever joined. Five names were spoken to its smoke-laden winds.

‘Priad of Damocles Squad we shall account first into the fray, for it was noble Damocles who broke the teeth of the fortresses upon the Peshelid Sea. Shoulder to shoulder with them in the fury of the landings came the venerated Sergeant Symeon, bearer of bright Akanthe, leading the brothers of Erasmos Squad who had torn open the Styger Gate at Presarius. Hard behind in their steps, across the basalt-black teeth of the Ghentethi islands, came Platonos Squad, merciless as the rieve-shark, guided by the far-piercing visions of Hamiskora the seer and the hunter’s cunning of their Sergeant Iapetos. Kalliopi Squad, the tip of the Phratry’s lance behind their Sergeant Kreios, blood burning as hot as the flames of their jump packs. Andreos Squad, the hammer-handed, the breakers of armour, who marched beneath the banner of Sergeant Londas and left the corpses of enemy tanks burning behind them on the Eotine Walk.’

His feet were firmly planted now: he had found the acoustic sweet spot, and just the right pitch and projection of his voice. He was almost smiling.

‘Five names, and five banners carried to the soil of Urdesh when the Iron Snakes fell upon the enemy among the white light of their starship’s wrath, breaking open the crowns of the atoll citadels and crumbling their walls into the waters.’ His voice rose from declamation to a triumphant shout. ‘The Iron Snake is swift of strike and keen of guile. It coils around the staff of the Saint and its hide shines with the light of the Throne, the light that the Archenemy has learned to fear! And so you must listen, listen as the deeds unfold, the deeds of the liberation of Urdesh!’

He let the echoes die away and looked down, lowered his arms, relaxed his fingers. He was not out of breath. Three lungs and inhumanly high blood oxygenation would not permit it.

No sound from behind him. There was a certain cheek to that. Brother Xander, sergeant of Damocles Squad and warrior of the Phratry of the Iron Snakes, turned around.

‘Well?’

‘Sir?’ the boy asked. He was leaning back against the grey-tiled cistern wall by the same entrance Xander had come in by, slender white hands folded.

‘We’re not under attack. You’re too calm.’

The boy considered that, and nodded. ‘You are correct, sir.’

‘We’re not launching an attack. I’d have been told.’

‘I am not aware of any such, sir.’

‘Well then?’ He walked forward, covering the distance in four unhurried steps, watching his visitor carefully. Not tall and burly like the Volpone troops, not compact and blocky like the Pragar. He was wiry, lean and pale, dressed in black fatigues almost devoid of markings. A cameleoline cape was draped at his shoulder and fastened back with a regimental pin Xander didn’t recognise.

But he did recognise its owner, now that he was bothering to make connections. One of the Beati’s retinue, one of her closest, so constant and quiet he might as well have been her shadow. The one you forgot was there until you almost stepped on him. Xander must have been told his name at some point, but as far as he knew every Space Marine in Damocles Squad just thought of him as ‘the boy’.

They’d been wrong to, though. Xander’s initial impression had been of a youth barely older than he could dimly remember being when the Iron Snakes recruiters had taken him away, but he realised he had been way off. The trooper was nearly middle-aged, his face lined and a little brush of grey starting to show at his temples. Still, Xander towered over him.

‘Enough with the wasting of both our time. What’s the message?’

The trooper shook his head. Despite his annoyance Xander was rather taken with his calm. Most people began shifting and stammering with a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes looming right over them. It was a useful thing.

‘No message. I apologise if I misled you.’

‘If there’s no emergency, and no message,’ Xander said, bending forward to stare into the human’s eyes, ‘then why did you seek me out?’

‘I see the misunderstanding now, sir. It was this place I sought out, not you. I was waiting for you to finish.’

To the Space Marine’s annoyed surprise, the trooper pushed off from the wall and walked around him, still with that same odd calm. He took position – in exactly the spot Xander had stood in, he noticed – and brought something out from where it had hung beneath his cape. A set of musical pipes, made from soft hide and elegant dark wood, much worn but kept in beautiful repair. Looking around him as his arm began to work the bellows, the man caught Xander’s stare.

‘I like the acoustics in here too,’ he said, and turned away, tucking the pipes under his arm.

As Xander walked out of the cistern chamber towards the stairs, he could hear the man from Tanith begin to play.

Priad
Rhole Cliffs

There hadn’t been much of a fight for the Rhole Cliffs the last time this stretch of coast had changed hands. The place had never been fought over very hard at all. It had no strategic role on the transport lines from the ocean farms, and it was not part of the web of Adeptus Mechanicus forge-shrines or vast manufactory hubs that stippled Urdesh’s seamed and smoky surface. It was just there, one of those odd corners in the interstices of the landscape’s greater workings where people and homes gradually accreted, and a village grew into a town without anyone really intending it, coasting onward on peaceful inertia.

There was no particular reason to fight over it, and so thus far nobody had. If one side or the other ever managed to conquer this world for long enough then Rhole Cliffs would be somewhere down the list for places to march through and pacify. But Urdesh had changed hands three times during the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, five times in living memory, seven times in a millennium of history. In all that time this had been the little coast-city’s remarkably effective defence: that it was an afterthought.

This did Brother-Captain Priad’s humour no good at all.

He prowled along the cobbled promenade that edged the clifftop, looking out over the rampart. The spacious streets and dignified buildings of the uptown were at his back; before and below him the dense jumble of the lowdown buildings packed the bay between the cliffs and the waterfront. His ceramite boots crunched and grated on the stone, covering two metres at a stride. He was dressed in the armour of his Chapter, a gunmetal grey that matched the overcast sky. On his left shoulder pad, a steel-blue snake coiled across a white field. His head was bare, his thick black hair bound back with selachid skin and pinned with sea-snake bone. Despite his resolve to master his resentment and concentrate on the task at hand, he was glowering like a storm front over open ocean.

He was tracking the little grey speck that had come swinging in from the bay, looping in over the eastern tip of Rhole Cliffs and then arcing back past him, following the line of the water’s edge. It was hard to pick out from the grey sky behind it, even though he knew its trajectory. The wind whipped in from among the islands, breaking up sounds, but as the speck made another pass, close enough for Priad to see its outline, he could just start to hear its engines.

The sound was a welcome one, a touch of familiarity, with associations built up over decades of campaigning. The keening of turbofans meant extraction, reinforcement, bombardment. It meant support and comrades, the sign that his battle-brothers were nearby.

The previous morning it had been a less comforting sign. There had been a burr in the running of the port fan, barely audible even to Adeptus Astartes hearing but clear once Pyrakmon had pointed the sound out to them, and even fed it from his Techmarine’s instrumentation into their audio pickups so they could hear it more clearly. Pyrakmon had spent ten hours working on the engine, and then another one in rituals designed to make peace with the machine for the insult of dismantling it. He was up there in the craft now as Crethon put it through the most punishing manoeuvres their enhanced physiologies would take, making sure nothing might induce the fan to begin misbehaving again.

Abruptly the engines cut out. All of them. Priad’s expression didn’t change, not when the Thunderhawk tumbled in the air and not when the engines blasted back into life and shot the blocky craft up in a parabolic curve over the lowtown rooftops. The shout of the turbofans was clear now, echoing up and down off the angular black cliffs. Priad felt a prickle of uncharitable amusement as he pictured people below flinching from the noise. There should have been few people left at the Cliffs who were unprepared for the noise of war machines by now. As far as Priad understood, any townsfolk the war hadn’t driven away were long since evacuated. With as little obvious fuss as possible the place had been turned into a guardhouse, just in case anyone remembered it was here.

The thought brought the scowl back to Priad’s face again. That was exactly why this was the wrong place. Wrong for him, wrong for his Iron Snakes, wrong for… her. That was as plain to him as his own hand in front of his face, but not to the people he had spent days arguing with, around in circles, trying to push his case through the endless briarpatch of their objections.

He growled and shook his head. He had come up to watch the Thunderhawk’s air tests precisely to give him something practical to think about, get his head clear of all that for a while, and here he was dragging it with him. He looked up again.

Crethon was hanging the craft in the air, letting it tilt this way and that, keeping position by feel in the choppy air coming up off the water. Priad focused his long-vision and watched it, reassured by the steady note of the engines, proud of the skill his pilot was showing. The Iron Snakes required every member of their Phratry to train on every weapon and machine they fielded. Every member of Damocles Squad could fly the gunship if they had to, but none with Crethon’s artistry.

The Thunderhawk skated sideways through the air and pushed through the headwinds until it was over the seawall. Priad walked to the promenade’s rampart and leaned over to watch what it would do next.

It arrowed down towards the central wharves, combat wings unlocked, still twisting in the air to orient itself as it vanished behind the stately domes of the seafront buildings. Priad heard the echoing crunch as it crashed down.

A moment after that, he was over the rampart and dropping like a stone through the air.

Priad
Rhole Cliffs

They could have simply gunned the enemy convoy to pieces as it rolled down the ferry ramp onto the dock, but the Iron Snakes had been on campaign away from Ithaka for a long time now, and supply lines had never been sure. Finding ways to spare power and ammunition were second nature by now.

So Crethon had brought the gunship down in a barely powered drop onto the convoy’s lead vehicle for an impact that would have stunned any normal human crew, and wrecked any lesser craft than an Adeptus Astartes Thunderhawk. After the gunship’s hull bounced off its roof the Salamander command tank juddered on for a few more metres, its top bowed in and its sides bowed out like a stomped-on ration-can, before it simply stalled. It had barely made it off the wharf and into the feeder road that would have taken it towards the uptown. The rest of the motley little convoy, four more pieces of military armour and two civilian haulage trucks, were left jammed nose to tail all the way back to the ferry ramp. Easy prey.

Crethon pulsed the engines and took the gunship aloft again. As the Thunderhawk accelerated towards the cliffs, the hot shockwave of its exhausts swamped the SteG-4 light tank second in line, leaving the burning hulk sinking onto the melted remains of its tyres. The rest of the convoy became dim shapes in a cloud of smoke, grit and dust. A couple of dull red snaps of las-fire came from somewhere inside it. Emperor alone knew what they thought they were shooting at.

The Thunderhawk wrenched itself out of its collision course with the cliff by sheer brute force of its vectored engines, screaming up into a half-loop and flipping to come back down at the convoy. It passed over Priad’s head as he picked himself out of the rooftop he had landed on. The drop had not hurt him at all, but had driven him up to his ankles into the brickwork. He sprinted around the roof’s central dome to the far side, took a second to look over the lip of the roof and then stepped up, turned and dropped, arms out, the wall blurring upward less than half a metre from the tip of his nose. He had one short moment to pray that no one came out of the building’s front entrance, and then he was kneeling in a crater of chipped cobbles in front of the tall double doors. As he looked up they parted and half a wide-eyed face looked out at him.

Click here to buy Urdesh: The Serpent and the Saint.

A Black Library Publication

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

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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Lorenzo Mastroianni.

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