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More Warhammer 40,000 stories from Black Library

BLACKSTONE FORTRESS
Darius Hinks

LORDS AND TYRANTS
by various authors

· DARK IMPERIUM ·
Guy Haley
Book 1: DARK IMPERIUM
Book 2: PLAGUE WAR

WATCHERS OF THE THRONE: THE EMPEROR’S LEGION
Chris Wraight

· THE HORUSIAN WARS ·
John French
Book 1: RESURRECTION
Book 2: INCARNATION
Book 3: DIVINATION

· VAULTS OF TERRA ·
Book 1: THE CARRION THRONE
Book 2: THE HOLLOW MOUNTAIN
Chris Wraight

· RISE OF THE YNNARI ·
Gav Thorpe
Book 1: GHOST WARRIOR
Book 2: WILD RIDER

SPEAR OF THE EMPEROR
Aaron Dembski-Bowden

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Lords and Tyrants’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

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

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

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

Come, let me tell you the woes of the soldier, and how many are his superiors: the general, the troop-commander, the officer who leads, the standard-bearer, the lieutenant, the scribe, the commander of fifty, and the garrison-captain. He is awakened at any hour. He toils until the disc of the sun sets in his darkness of night. He is hungry, his belly hurts; he is dead while yet alive.

– Fragmentary text from the archive of the Logos Historica Verita, attributed to Wenemdiamun, Scribe of Ancient Gyptus on Terra.

One

‘Remember Yama, old friend?’ said the nemesor, with a wistful sigh. ‘Those blasted swamps… eating bugs… wading through filth… but we made what we could of things, eh? Messy as it was, I sometimes think we were our best selves back then.’

Vargard Obyron grunted: the barest reply, like the grating of shifted stone. Stars had lived and died in the time since he had bothered to verbally acknowledge his master’s reminiscing.

‘Too many think war to be a matter of will,’ Zahndrekh continued, gesturing at the fire-streaked sky beyond the capital barge, as if addressing a crowd only he could see. He might have been, for all Obyron knew.

‘And indeed, Yama was a battle of wills, was it not? Ours, and that of the separatists… a great contest to see who could stick it out for longest.’ The nemesor sighed again, although no breath moved from his body. ‘But will alone does not make a warrior, Obyron! We could have seized Yama in days, had we fought dirty – and the enemy could have held it for years, had they not conceded when honour demanded. But then, who would any of us have been afterwards, eh? Will without honour is nothing, I’m afraid. And I’m beginning to wonder if our current foe, clinging senselessly to the threshold of defeat as they are, has forgotten that spirit of honour.’

It went on and on. Obyron’s eyes could not close, but he dulled his oculars and his auditory transducers for a moment, in what passed for brief respite. With the nemesor just an indistinct blur, and his voice reduced to a muted drone, it was almost as if they were back on Yama, when these same interminable sermons had seemed fresh and inspiring. For that short moment, Obyron felt a glimmer of what might have been longing, but was probably just sadness. No matter. To feel anything, these days, was bliss.

But then a bloom of fire in the middle distance snapped his senses back to perfection, and the feeling was snatched away. They were, after all, a long way from Yama now.

An enemy bulk lifter, lumbering to reinforce the front line, was dying. Hammered by the Sautekh guns, its primitive shields had collapsed all along one side, exposing its fragile hull for a fraction of a second. That was all it took. Turning at speeds that would have collapsed the innards of a mortal pilot, a trio of Night Scythes broke off from their attack run on the enemy guns, locked into a new formation, and screamed towards the stricken lifter. The crescent-shaped fighter craft fell into a tight spiral as their guns charged, leaving a triple helix of superheated exhaust in their wake, then spat their lightning at point-blank range. The shots set off a chain of explosions down the giant vessel’s flank, and it listed to one side with a thunderous groan.

‘Ha!’ cried Zahndrekh, rising from his command throne. ‘A fine blow struck! A cheer for our pilots!’ There was no answer. The retinue of lychguard on the capital barge just stared ahead, death’s-head faceplates flickering with reflected fire, as their nemesor rambled on. And below them, labouring across the plain in a tide one million strong, the soldiery marched. Skeletal figures plated in lustreless silver, their oculars aglow with dull green fire, they did not so much as raise their heads as the leviathan ruptured.

This was, Obyron supposed, what passed for glory now. After three years of campaigning, they were on the brink of seizing this system from its usurpers, and adding another star to the domain of the Stormlord. The enemy – the deranged human machine cult calling themselves the Adeptus Mechanicus – had put up a ferocious defence, but had finally been beaten to their knees. The nemesor’s legions were now just fifteen leagues from their primary forge, and while the advance had stalled on this plain for days, victory was inevitable. Under Zahndrekh’s orders – regardless of the depth of the madness from which they rose – it always was.

Obyron surveyed the sprawling plain below them, making a mental inventory of what they had left to destroy. There wasn’t much. He might not have had Zahndrekh’s eye for the flow of a battlefield, but he certainly knew the edge of defeat when he saw it.

Most of the machine cult’s credible assets were gone by now. On the horizon behind them stood a line of wrecks: a trio of the superheavy walkers the humans called Knights, which had strode proudly from the forge gates to meet the invaders, only to have their engines cooked off at range by the nemesor’s artillery. They hadn’t even got close enough to fire a shot of their own, and now their ruins were surrounded by the oncoming Sautekh reinforcements, like islands in a river of molten lead.

What war engines the enemy still possessed were clustered together on a distant ridge, a desperate rabble of ancient guns, coughing out the last of their shells under columns of smoke. Under constant assault from Night Scythes, their crackling shields were shrinking by the minute, popping one by one as their generators gave up. It was only a matter of time before they failed entirely, leaving the lumbering cannons next to helpless.

But still, the Mechanicus had not given up. Indeed, they were still forging weapons for the fight. Behind the teeming trenches of the enemy infantry, a steel river of their own stretched all the way to the forge-city’s ferrocrete walls: four-legged walkers, hulls still steaming from the assembly line, marching straight from the foundry into carnage. The doomed endeavour was admirable in its way – almost a crude imitation of their own ability to recall troops for redeployment. But doomed it was, as it would never be enough to replace losses.

With so little left in the field, the last dregs of the humans’ armoury – all the exotic relics – were now being ferried to the front by transports like the one now slowly collapsing from the sky. A huge tracked thing, almost as large as the lifter that had carried it, had been flown in the previous day – but it had immediately broken down, and been pounded into slag by a bombing run, even as its crew had swarmed over its flanks waving censers.

Since then, not a single lifter had made it within a league of the front without being downed, as the enemy no longer had any combat aircraft with which to contest Sautekh air superiority. The craft now foundering – presumably their last, as it was their largest – had only got as far as it had by virtue of its sheer size.

In the end, for all their pathetic toys, and their obsession with machines, the humans were forced to rely on flesh. Virtually all that stood between them and the capital now were the toiling legions of the Mechanicus’ skitarii, their red robes blackened to the colour of bruises under this world’s fierce blue sunlight. Their weapons sparked and burned their bearers, and their bodies were riddled with radiation damage, either from the miserable world itself, or from their own cantankerous technology. Why, Obyron wondered, would they seek to become one with machinery, when this is what it did to them? Catching the irony of his own thoughts, Obyron grunted in an approximation of a grim laugh. Yes: the humans ought to be careful what they wished for.

Despite all the warped symmetries between the cultists and their conquerors, however, the humans were worse than Zahndrekh’s forces at absolutely everything – except perishing. They were, at least, quite good at that.

There was always room for surprises, however. A shift in the tone of the dying lifter’s engines triggered the vargard’s circumspection protocols, and he found his hand moving to his warscythe as he realised what the humans were doing. Zahndrekh was already ahead of him.

‘Blood and starfire!’ bellowed the nemesor, thrusting his staff towards the vessel. ‘The dogs are steaming ahead!’ And sure enough, they were. Rather than attempting a controlled landing as it fell from the sky, the bulk lifter was picking up speed, plunging forwards with all power driven to its crude engines. On its current heading, it would strike the heart of the Sautekh lines right beneath the nemesor’s barge. It was a very… human stratagem.

Obyron ran a rapid divination on likely debris trajectories, but found no threat the barge’s shields could not handle. Still, the impact would likely wipe out most of the thirteenth decurion, and necessitate hours of close-quarters fighting with whatever troops survived the crash. As the lifter’s prow dipped towards the trudging horde – who still did not even raise their heads – Obyron readied his blade.

For long minutes after the impact, all was dust and smoke and thunder. Zahndrekh was an indistinct figure in the cloud, raging at the foe’s impropriety in between bouts of coughing and spluttering. Obyron’s curiosity had long since died on the matter of his lord’s respiratory affectations, but he still found them tremendously irritating.

Right now, though, his mind was on other things. Down below, in the ruined ground surrounding the lifter’s carcass, there were new shapes moving in the smoke. Huge, bulbous constructs, they waded from a ragged hole in the transport’s side, bleating out the weird, strident code-songs of their masters. Although armed crudely with solid munitions, they were making quick work of the first phalanxes to move into the impact zone. Zahndrekh barked in frustration, wafting dust from his oculars despite their capacity to see in a thousand arcane spectra.

‘Obyron, old fellow, your eyes are sharper than mine – tell me, what’s that blasted racket? What do you see down there?’

‘The engines they call robots, my nemesor,’ replied Obyron. ‘We faced them before, on the fifth world of the system.’

‘Robots? Pah!’ spat Nemesor Zahndrekh in disgust. ‘How unsporting, to field soulless machines against necrontyr!’

Of course, Zahndrekh himself – as well as Obyron, and every one of the soldiers below – was a soulless machine. They had been so long enough to see mountains worn to sand. But the nemesor either could not – or would not – see it. Once again, the vargard weighed the urge to correct his master against the certain knowledge he would be ignored, and decided against it. And once again, he looked for the opportunity to channel his frustration through his blade.

‘Shall I translate down and see to them, lord?’ asked Obyron, using the tone he reserved for those moments when he wished to gently prompt an order from his master. But Zahndrekh gave a dry, grating chuckle, and held out a palm to stay him.

‘Not so fast – there’ll be no need for my noble vargard to dull his blade on these unworthy hulks. Your place is not always in the fray, oh eager servant! And besides,’ he added, encompassing the silent lychguard with a sweep of his staff, ‘without your company, I’ll have only these taciturn dullards to watch the sport with. No, Obyron, stay with me.’

And so Obyron stayed, and watched the fight play out, as his nemesor held forth on the poor manners of fielding machines in place of living troops. It was maddening – but it got worse. As the enemy’s shock troops rushed forwards to the wreck, consolidating the toehold the robots had won them, Zahndrekh began talking about how pleasant the weather was. The radiation from the world’s swollen blue star was so fierce as to make even the ancient home world seem benign, and would have curdled an unarmoured body in hours, yet Zahndrekh registered it as balmy sunshine.

By the time his master finally began to ruminate on the issue of driving back the enemy, Obyron had resorted to inspecting the capital barge via its maintenance scarabs, hoping to find some minor imperfection to put right. In truth, he was bored. One by one, he projected into the beetling constructs via ocular scry, peering through their optics in search of some error in calibration, but found nothing. Every soldier was in perfect condition, every surface spotless. The whole length of the barge was still, like a garden of dead statuary.

Then something moved.

It was only a flicker, and only for a few thousandths of a second, but to his vargard’s instinct it may as well have been a solar flare. There, against the mass of glyph-carved stonework at the barge’s stern – a shape. A human form: an assassin.

While Obyron had not yet encountered a baseline human capable of seriously challenging him in single combat, specimens such as this were at least good sport. If he had possessed a heart, it would have raced in readiness – this might not turn out to be such a tedious day after all. But while his reflexes screamed for him to turn and activate his blade, he remained still, and kept watch via the scarab’s oculars. Excitement was no excuse for poor form – it would be best to let the mortal get closer, within range for a quick kill.

As the vargard waited, the truth of the situation became irritatingly clear. In the context of this surprise incursion, the enemy’s wild manoeuvre with the bulk lifter made sense. Its primary purpose had not been to carve a hole in the Sautekh lines at all. It had been a feint, designed to tempt Obyron away from Zahndrekh and into a close-quarters fray, leaving his master vulnerable. And he had been ready to play right into it. Until Zahndrekh had commanded him to stay, that is. Another happy accident of nemesorial whimsy, Obyron thought to himself, suspecting the exact opposite.

Switching his scry to one of the warriors wired into the barge, he watched the assassin creep forwards across the deck, thinking itself undetected. And indeed, to the muted consciousness of the barge’s retinue of troops, it was. But Obyron, peering through their oculars, could see it well enough. The human was slight, moving with an odd, liquid gait. And there, affixed to its arm, was the unmistakable glint of a C’tan phase blade. Ah, thought Obyron, retrieving a name from the suite of low-grade engrams he reserved for alien concepts, a Callidus. This would be good sport indeed: the Callidus creatures were fast even by his reckoning, and – alone among humans – were arrogant enough to make use of the blades forged by the necrontyr’s ancient former masters.

In the old days, such a blasphemous intrusion on royal ground would have made Obyron bristle, but he had seen too many such transgressions over the years to really care any more. Indeed, this would be his sixth Callidus, if his engrams were to be trusted.

‘What should we do about this damnable robot business, then?’ queried Zahndrekh, tapping metal fingertips on the prow rail as he observed the fight below. The question was directed at Obyron, but he knew he was not expected to answer – he had ever been the silent partner in the nemesor’s thought process.

Zahndrekh continued.

‘See, their troops are concentrated in the shadow of the wreck. We could always pull back, let them overextend themselves. Or perhaps we should keep their backs to the steel, and see how much they’ll commit to the foothold. What do you think, old friend?’ As Zahndrekh spoke, the assassin stalked forwards, tight as a coiled spring, just paces away from pouncing range.

For a brief, wild moment, Obyron entertained madness. What if he were to let the human stalk three more steps, and leap? He would never have to hear the anecdote about Uttu Prime ever again, or have to sit through another joyless banquet, pretending to enjoy wine from a chalice that had been dry half of eternity. He might even, at long last, see realisation dawn in the nemesor’s eyes, as the assassin’s blade sunk in. Would it be worth it all, just to see the old general wake up to reality at last?

But even as he thought this, his warscythe was in his hand, and aglow. Without Zahndrekh to endure, he was not Obyron. And so, for once, he answered his master.

‘Let them commit, my lord,’ he said, in his doleful husk of a voice. ‘Let them feel victory is within reach… then take everything from them.’

The assassin’s head snapped round at the sound of Obyron’s voice, and he exploded forwards, warscythe sweeping in a wide arc. The human dived into his strike, shunting his weapon aside with its own, and the impact of the phase blades rattled the cracks between dimensions.

As the vargard spun round from the impact, the assassin kicked out at his forearm with a force that would have shattered ceramite, but barely challenged Obyron’s balance. If anything, it was remarkable the mortal’s leg stayed in one piece. Still, the slight offset in his equilibrium was enough to buy the creature time for another attack, and in came the phase blade.

Obyron let the strike connect, shaving a strip from his thorax as he swivelled to face the assassin once more. And then he paced backwards, inviting another lunge. He even drew back his scythe, holding it overhead in the ancient form known as the spearfisher’s poise. Sure enough, the human came forwards, swiping at him piecemeal as it weaved around the shadow of his blade. Each cut carved a new silver gash in his necrodermis, but it mattered little. His body would repair itself in seconds; the assassin’s would not. He would only need to connect once.

Zahndrekh, being Zahndrekh, had not even looked around, so engrossed was he in his pondering of antiquated tactics. From the sounds of it, he was trying to recall an amusing mnemonic from his youth.

‘Ah yes!’ said the nemesor, with a satisfied sigh. ‘That was it – Take a drubbing, let them advance… wait for the moment… seize your chance! And I do believe this is our moment, dear vargard. Signal the Doomsday batteries to fire on the wreck, and let’s be done with this.’

‘As you wish,’ answered Obyron, wishing he had teeth to grit, as the assassin made a feint and dived sideways, hoping to get between him and his master. It was tempting to channel his frustration into a flurry of blows there and then, but he hadn’t kept Zahndrekh alive this long by acting rashly. So he cast an interstitial command to the batteries as ordered, and circled round to face off against the interloper once again.

As the human ducked in and out of his range, slicing shards from his body, Obyron found – to his profound irritation – that he had the nemesor’s accursed rhyme in his head. Take a drubbing… he thought, as he felt the distant rumble of the guns charging. Let them advance… wait for your moment…

And there it was. The human’s ankle wobbled on a chunk of loose stone – an imbalance so small mortal eyes would have missed it. But living death had its advantages, Obyron supposed. Quick as a striking snake, his scythe came down, driving straight through the assassin’s leg and pinning it to the floor. In the same instant, the Doomsday cannons fired, drenching the sky with actinic light as the wreck below was obliterated.

Releasing his grip on the scythe, Obyron switched his oculars to wavelengths far beneath the visible, and surged forwards onto the assassin. Blinded by the artillery’s fury, the creature was helpless to avoid his backhand swipe, and fell to the deck with its chest half-flattened. Obyron slowed his chronosense, allowing himself the briefest instant to savour his victory, before bringing his heel down onto the assassin’s head. A second stamp saw the skull crack, and a third smashed it flat in a gush of blood. It was the death it deserved.

‘A brilliant stratagem as ever, my liege,’ rumbled Obyron, once the echoes of the explosion had begun to fade.

‘Well, quite,’ answered the nemesor, pleased with himself, as he peered over the prow rail at the inferno below. ‘Now come, and let’s watch the fire together.’

With a rare sigh of his own, Obyron picked up the carcass of the interloper – he couldn’t allow it to stain the royal barge any longer than necessary, after all – and trudged over to his master. As he dumped the body over the rail into the conflagration far below, Zahndrekh gave him a queer, sidelong look, and chuckled to himself.

‘Glad you stayed?’

Obyron did not need to reply.

Two

While it was neither the largest nor the most heavily armed vessel in Sautekh space, Nemesor Zahndrekh’s flagship, the Cairn-class tomb ship Yama, certainly had the most sumptuous banqueting facilities. The nemesor took considerable pride in what he insisted on calling the Yama’s ‘famous hospitality’, and an embarrassingly significant portion of the vessel’s interior was taken up with gloomy kitchens and sculleries, where not so much as a morsel had been seen since the War in Heaven. These halls were patrolled by legions of cooks, servants and food tasters: glum husks possessed of less wit even than warriors, with no work to do and an eternity to do it in.

And here, at the apex of this purposeless warren, was the nemesor’s great feasting chamber – a soaring vault of emerald and silver, whose singularity-forged crystal windows offered a panoramic view of the conquered world below them. Its ring-shaped table was inlaid with mosaics of Zahndrekh’s most famous victories; in each image, the oculars of the troops gleamed with precious stones seized from the world they had conquered. To a being who could appreciate such things, the chamber would have been near-indescribably beautiful. Scanning the grim faces sat around the table, however, Obyron permitted himself the amusement of considering who wanted to be there least.

It was not Zahndrekh. He was in full flow, goblet in hand, holding forth about his successes on the campaign. Soon after the victory on the plain, the enemy’s primary forge had been shattered, and after that the Imperial capital. The feint with the lifter and the assassin had turned out to be the humans’ last gasp of ingenuity, and Zahndrekh had been disappointed to encounter no more surprises thereafter. With every major world in the system now in Sautekh hands, all that remained was to burn out the last vestiges of resistance among the moons and asteroids. Zahndrekh called this phase of a campaign the ‘epilogue’, and would generally spend it writing awful poetry and throwing victory dinners, while the soldiery mopped up. And so the nemesor at least was happy.

It might have been Lord Batregh, sat eighty-three degrees round the table, with fury radiating from his death mask like radiation from stellar cinders. Broad and ash-blackened, Batregh had awoken from the great sleep outraged at having lost his good looks and charisma, and pitied himself mightily. But as far as Obyron could remember, he’d never possessed much of either. He’d certainly not lost his sense of entitlement, though: Batregh came from a grander house even than Zahndrekh, and was forever waiting for the day the nemesor would show himself up as an incompetent. He dreamed of the battle where Zahndrekh would make his fatal mistake and leave the way clear for him to take his rightful place on Gidrim’s throne – and each time it didn’t happen, he fell deeper into bitterness. Adding insult to injury, Batregh had also been in command of the thirteenth decurion, which had suffered six per cent recall failure after being wiped out by the crash of the lifter. He himself had been half blown apart during the fight – and reassembly rarely brightened anyone’s mood.

It might have been Lord Akhenik, sat bolt upright opposite Zahndrekh, and clutching his empty goblet tightly enough to leave dents in the metal. The gaunt noble also considered himself Gidrim’s rightful lord, but unlike Batregh, he wasn’t waiting on Zahndrekh for an opportunity to take the throne. Perhaps it had been coincidence that his deathmark snipers had been deployed so peculiarly during the battle of Tobos III, at the start of the campaign. Then again, perhaps it hadn’t. Either way, Obyron had been sadly unable to prevent the accidental overloading of their transport’s engines, before any of them had accidentally shot Zahndrekh. Akhenik was perhaps even more incensed than Batregh, as his decurion had been the one sent in to contain the Mechanicus advance right before the Doomsday battery had fired, and had suffered even graver losses.

Then there was Lord Kethyst, who had been a keen duellist in life, and retained all of his scars, carved into his necrodermis with belligerent pride. Kethyst hardly even pretended to conceal his plots any more. Indeed, Obyron noted he had brought two barely concealed blades to the feast, and Kethyst was giving him a look that suggested he didn’t care all that much that the vargard knew. Perhaps Lord Arbaketh, who had recently lost a legion of glyph-cracked immortals as mysteriously as he had acquired them. He clearly wasn’t too pleased either. Or Lord Penthehn, with his odd fascination for bombs. The list went on.

In truth, all the lords around the flagship’s table were fuming to be there, because it meant Zahndrekh had won glory yet again, and they still hadn’t managed to remove him. The nemesor, needless to say, was blissfully unaware – he thought the lords were his friends and drinking companions, just as he thought there was fresh meat piled on the dusty platter before him. But there was as little love in this room as there was nourishment. It was a feast attended only by ghosts.

Obyron was about to conclude that he himself was the room’s most miserable occupant – since his duty meant he couldn’t afford to speed his chronosense and skip the speeches – when a small, choked sound drew his attention to the seat he was standing behind.

Oh, thought Obyron, of course. There was always someone worse off than oneself: in this case, it was the Imperial governor. Zahndrekh had captured it when the capitol spire had fallen, and – thinking it to be necrontyr – had insisted on treating it as an honoured guest until its ransom was paid.

The human was out of its mind with fear. It couldn’t understand why it wasn’t dead, and why it was sat at a foodless banquet with towering iron ghouls, who were speaking a language it had no hope of comprehending. And now, one of the chamber’s scarabs had taken an interest in it, clicking its mandibles from its empty plate, and it couldn’t keep the madness inside any more. Obyron might have pitied the thing, were it not vermin.

‘Are you quite all right, my good man?’ asked Zahndrekh, pausing to turn to the governor. ‘Bugs being a little overzealous in cleaning your leftovers, what? Ha! Pay them no mind, old Zahndrekh wouldn’t deny you a good feed… even despite your poor form on the field.’

Not comprehending Zahndrekh’s words, and seeing only a glowering cadaver turn to it with flashing eyes, the governor turned deathly pale, and Obyron’s olfactory transducers told him it had voided its bowels. At the rate its heart was beating, Obyron began to wonder if the creature would die on the spot, untouched. But Zahndrekh carried on, too engrossed in his own speech to be concerned long with his guest’s odd behaviour.

At last, as Zahndrekh’s oratory threatened to extend into its third hour, Obyron was saved: a projection was coming through to the chamber’s orbuculum. Scrying the interstitial receivers, Obyron was surprised by the power in the message’s seal – it bore the sigils of the crownworld Mandragora. The missive could only be coming from one source: the Stormlord Imotekh himself.

Most nemesors wouldn’t dream of taking a projection of such importance in public – the political advantage conferred to rivals would be far too great. But most nemesors weren’t Zahndrekh, thought Obyron wearily. And Zahndrekh had a loyal vargard to do all his worrying for him. And so he called for the orbuculum at the table’s centre to be activated, and the chamber dropped into deep darkness.

The Stormlord’s eyes became visible first, cold green embers glaring down from the chamber’s apex as the connection assembled itself from interstitial whispers. The signal strengthened, and the phaeron’s shape grew more distinct: a vast and terrible form sketched in shivering chrysoprase. For a while the colossus stood in forbidding silence, until audio resolved itself. Out of the crackling interstitial static grew the low howling of wind, swelling occasionally with bursts of distant gauss fire. The sound of war. If Lord Imotekh was hailing them from the midst of his own campaign, this was a matter of some urgency.

For a moment, the phaeron’s gaze flickered to the human governor, but it did not linger – Imotekh was well aware of Zahndrekh’s madness, and would often let these minor absurdities go unremarked. Even so, a king’s tolerance was not a thing to be tested, and Obyron winced at the way his nemesor greeted his lord. He could only presume the old general thought himself drunk on imaginary wine.

‘Ah, my king!’ toasted Zahndrekh as he stood up, with a flourish of his goblet that would have slopped drink on the floor, were there any to spill. ‘A rare pleasure. Do you see, Stormlord, I have gifted you another world?’

Even in the ancient days, such overfamiliarity would have been dangerous. And nobody, least of all the phaeron, had grown softer in an eternity of living death. But if their king was wrathful, he did not show it. An arch-pragmatist, he had long accepted that whatever was wrong with the nemesor could not be fixed – and that it mattered little, so long as he was still winning wars.

‘I see,’ said the Stormlord, in a voice like solar carrion tearing round a black hole. His words seemed to suck all sound from the room, and Zahndrekh’s composure stiffened rapidly. Mad he may have been, but royal instincts went far deeper than engrammatic damage, and he knew better than to act the fool now.

‘My most abject apologies for any frivolity in my manner, my king,’ said Zahndrekh, lowering his gaze and dipping to one knee. ‘It has been a long campaign, and I may have perhaps taken too much liberty in celebrating. My only wish is that–’

‘Enough,’ commanded the Stormlord, with the slightest twitch of his clawlike hand. Without a word, the matter was dismissed. ‘You have done well. But there is no time for rest, nemesor – further work awaits you. I require a… troubled dynasty returned to the fold, and your experience recommends you to the task.’

Something about the phaeron’s words alarmed Obyron on a level he could not quite parse. Knowing Zahndrekh’s foibles, the Stormlord would often frame his conquests in terms of crushing rebellions against fellow necrontyr, as that was how the nemesor would inevitably see them. But the word ‘troubled’ – and the way the phaeron had flashed a meaningful glance at Obyron as he said it – had given him pause. Something here was different.

‘Go now to the place I will indicate to your vargard, and bring with you a force nimble enough to deploy immediately, yet equipped for the heaviest resistance. Take none of your subordinate lords. At the staging point you will meet with an old ally, and together you will go forth and bring me victory. Do not let illusions cloud your vision, nemesor, and do not fail me.’

With that, the Stormlord’s image faded from the air, and light returned to the chamber. There was a long pause as the lords around the table exchanged glances, attempting to calculate what this meant for them – with Zahndrekh away, they would be left to prosecute the remains of this war between them, and an almighty squabbling would ensue. At last, the nemesor broke the silence.

‘Splendid!’ he proclaimed, clapping his hands with a clang and a shower of sparks. ‘I hope you will all forgive me for cutting short the festivities, but it transpires I have another war to attend to. Before I go, however, it is only right that we toast the magnanimity of our grand king. My lords?’

In deathly silence, the seething nobles rose to their feet, and extended their empty goblets with expressions of unconcealed hatred.

‘To the glory of the Stormlord Imotekh,’ cried Zahndrekh, ‘Phaeron of the Sautekh dynasty, taker of one trillion hands and master of three hundred thousand suns. And to a successful hunt for your beloved nemesor. May our enemies tremble!’

Only Zahndrekh pretended to drink, but he made every appearance of enjoying it, as he made a deep hum of satisfaction before tossing his goblet aside for the scarabs, and sweeping from the chamber.

After the nemesor left, Obyron stood there for a time, looking silently at the lords as they glared back at him. Though they knew very well that the vargard would be able to scry in and hear their arguments from anywhere on the flagship, there was no way they’d give him the satisfaction of beginning while he was in the room. Like a pack of beaten hounds, they might despise each other, but they despised him more. No matter, thought Obyron, so long as they knew who held the chain.

At last, before turning to follow his master, Obyron remembered the governor – he would have to ensure the creature choked unfortunately on its food before his departure. But as he put his hand on the mortal’s feeble body, its head lolled back, purple and lifeless. It appeared the thing’s heart had given out, in the end. Good; the corpse would be another indignity for the nobles to bicker over.

As Obyron followed him down the long passage to his quarters, Zahndrekh ran through a rambling inventory of his forces, like a young noble choosing which beasts to take on a jolly hunt.

‘Nimble yet heavy… What do you make of that, old friend? I’m thinking light cruisers for a start, with maybe a Scythe-class or two for good measure. Cairns will be too ponderous, I feel, so we can’t take this old brute,’ Zahndrekh slapped one of the Yama’s bulkheads with affection as they passed, ‘but the Horaktys and the Tephnyt could be perfect flagships, eh?’

Obyron offered nothing but his presence, as he was too busy looking over the coordinates sent to him from Mandragora following the Stormlord’s projection. The nearest world to their staging point was a barren rock called Doahht, alone in orbit around a dim red star. It had once been a tomb world, but all records of its founding dynasty were lost, and who knew what dwelled there now. The vargard suspected nothing good, as Doahht was in the depths of the m’wt, the region of dim, dying light on the far eastern fringe which the humans called the Ghoul Stars.

His people were far too old to be superstitious – and in any case, what haunting did it make sense for the dead to fear? Even so, the m’wt was not a place to enter lightly. There were whole worlds there ravaged by the flayer curse, and far worse beside: things so weird they confounded even the most learned of the crypteks. And they were being sent there with the sparsest instructions, and only the promise of an ‘old ally’ for support. What could the Stormlord have meant? Obyron knew of very few true allies left to the nemesor, and certainly none based in those desolate reaches of space. Indeed, the only dynastic presence he knew of in the m’wt was the Bone Kingdom of Drazak, desmesne of the foul king Valgul. And they would find little friendship there.

Obyron had shared their destination with his master, but his trepidation was clearly not shared: Zahndrekh was now perusing projections of his forces, as if selecting robes for a feast.

‘Nimble… hmm. Tomb blades are a must… and doom scythes, naturally. Perhaps a wing or two of night shrouds, even? Alas, if agility is the order of the day, I suppose our old friends the doomsday arks are out of the question, and I certainly shan’t be able to play with the megalith again. More’s the pity. Annihilation barges, though… they’re nimble enough. And a seraptek cohort or three will more than make up for any deficiency in firepower, without sacrificing speed…’

Feeling it was time to make at least a token contribution to Zahndrekh’s thoughts, Obyron grunted in assent, while continuing to chew on the Stormlord’s orders. That word, ‘troubled’, kept rising to the surface of his mind. Which of their many enemies could Imotekh have meant? Over long years, Obyron had come to understand the various meanings behind the things the Stormlord said to Zahndrekh. A ‘reckless’ dynasty to be suppressed meant a war against the green-skinned barbarians known as the orks, while a ‘stubborn’ dynasty meant the elite parahumans who called themselves the Adeptus Astartes. But never before had he used the word ‘troubled’.

There was only one thing Obyron could take it to mean, and he very much hoped he was wrong. Because even at the suggestion of the thought, he experienced a feeling so unfamiliar that he was only just beginning to recognise it for what it was: fear.

Three

The staging post was as dismal as anywhere could be – a great shattered crescent of stone, birthed from the sundering of a planet during the wild dying days of the War in Heaven, and orphaned by the obliteration of its sun. A tombstone for a star system. Obyron wondered if there was any poetic symmetry to his people being marshalled for war here, being themselves grim remnants of the same cataclysm, but he had never had the head for that sort of thing, even when he had possessed a soul.

He did know it was dark. Behind him hung the green constellations of the nemesor’s war fleet, stationary in the freezing void, while ahead was the m’wt: a tattered veil of dying orbs, beyond which was only extragalactic night. Only by amplifying his oculars could the vargard make out the weak light of Doahht’s star at all, and even then it was a feeble presence, a flickering red candle in an infinite night.

‘Bit chilly out,’ remarked Zahndrekh from behind him, as they trudged across the world-shard’s dust. Although there wasn’t an atom of atmosphere here to carry sound, the nemesor was speaking with his audio projectors anyway, and Obyron wouldn’t have heard him at all had he not thought to activate their carrier wave link.

‘Yes, my lord,’ agreed Obyron, wishing he had forgotten to do so. ‘It is cold, indeed. But look, we’re almost there.’ A boulder field lay ahead – the worn remnants of ancient standing stones – lit by a single beacon of green tomb-light. This was the rendezvous point where they were due to meet their old ally, and where Obyron was curious to discover what friends they had left. Rarely an optimist, he held his warscythe ready.

But when they arrived, the circle of boulders was empty, save for the silent light of the beacon. As they waited, Zahndrekh passed the time by kneeling to inspect the worn glyphs still visible on the old stones. The nemesor fancied himself as something of a historian, which he was, if one didn’t count the last sixty million years of time. Obyron, meanwhile, kept his eye on the shadows. Surely, Imotekh would not have ordered them all this way just to have them eliminated, when there had been so many willing daggers back on the flagship? Even so, he was wary. As well as his own oculars, he had a low-level scry cast by the fleet’s sensors, ready to expand to full band if they saw even a grain of dust shift on the world-shard’s surface. Nobody was going to creep up on them without him seeing them first.

As such, the vargard was surprised – to say the least – when he saw something scuttle rapidly between the circle’s outer stones. It had been the briefest glimpse, but something about the serpentine motion was sickeningly resonant, speaking to a memory burned so deep in his engrammatic pathways that it took a moment to bring it to light. A moment too long, it occurred to Obyron, as Zahndrekh cried out behind him.

Spinning round with his scythe aglow, he was presented with a tableau that would have filled him with dread, were he not too focused on the fight to come. Looking down on Zahndrekh from atop the stone he had been inspecting was a vile serpentine creature that must have been twenty kubits in length: bone-pale, with a cluster of ice-blue eyes and squirming, bladed limbs at its fore. The thing reared up in a sinuous arch, mandibles spread, and Obyron roared for the nemesor to get back, charging to put himself between his master and the beast. But Zahndrekh did not move.

‘Sepa!’ cried the nemesor, as the beast lunged forwards, and with some enthusiasm, he began patting it on the head. Obyron skidded to a halt in the grit, his circumspection routines collapsing in a failure cascade as the creature began to nuzzle Zahndrekh. As if he could be confounded further, a second creature now came bounding over the rocks, undulating on two dozen razor-clawed legs, and knocked his master to the floor.

‘Sata! Dear Sata!’ shouted Zahndrekh, booming with laughter, as he tussled with the writhing horror, and the other beast slunk down to bat its slithering feelers against the nemesor’s face. As the absurd scene played out, recognition began to crystallise at last in Obyron’s mind. These were not some ghastly spectres of the m’wt; they were heralds of something worse.

Resigned to what he knew he would see there, Obyron turned slowly back to face the centre of the circle. And sure enough, there he was, casually inspecting the immaculate cream plating of one hand by the light of the beacon.

‘Hello, vargard,’ said Setekh.

Of all their people – at least of those who had made it through the great sleep – only Setekh had known Zahndrekh longer than Obyron. Born half the galaxy apart, but into the same elite echelon of nobility, they had met at one of their people’s most celebrated military academies, where they had both been sent away to study.

Even now, Zahndrekh would all too frequently regale Obyron with tales of his days there, which in many ways he saw as the best of his life. To Obyron, it sounded dreadful: a sweltering pressure chamber of ambition, betrayal and impossibly cruel pranks, disguised as fun and camaraderie by a veneer of fine wines and brash laughter. But then, Obyron had been born a soldier and not a noble, and so tended to assume he just didn’t have the breeding to understand such delights.

In any case, Setekh had become simultaneously Zahndrekh’s most bitter rival and his closest confidant – closer even than a brother, as the nemesor told it. And while Zahndrekh had been unmatched in his mastery of the battlefield, Setekh had excelled in the warfare of the mind – propaganda, espionage, and the manipulation of psychological weakness.

After winning their commissions, the two young nobles had each been given an army, and sent off to fight in the swamps of Yama, during the bloody feuding of the Wars of Succession. This had been the campaign where Obyron, already a veteran, had been assigned to Zahndrekh as his vargard, and he had stood guard at many a feast thrown by the two young officers. He had watched them spar together, hunt together, and roar with laughter together as they celebrated victory after remarkable victory. He had seen them bicker and argue over maps, and watched on as, deep in their cups, they had pledged eternal loyalty to one another.

But he had also seen the way Setekh spoke about Zahndrekh to the other lords when he wasn’t there, and the look in his eyes as Zahndrekh told Setekh his secrets. More than once, he had seen him use information given in the confidence of the feasting tent to snatch victories in the light of the next day. And at last, on the eve of the battle that would win the war on Yama, he had been there as Setekh finally acted on his plot to kill Zahndrekh. That time, he had resolved to do more than watch.

Setekh’s instruments had been his twin skolopendra hunting beasts: the very same pair now filling the interstices with their chittering as they roughhoused with his master. They had been flesh then, rather than the canoptek constructs which now housed their minds – but they had been no less lethal. Obyron had found them creeping through the marsh towards the back entrance to the royal tent, and only his skill with a blade had driven them off. Even then, it had been a close thing, and to this day Obyron’s metal body remembered the wounds their mandibles had inflicted on its prior form.

Of course, Setekh had covered his tracks well enough that Obyron could prove nothing, and in the morning his wounds had been laughed off as the result of some nocturnal misadventure. Then had come the battle, and the triumph, and Obyron had never breathed a word of the assassination attempt to his master.

For many years afterwards, he had told himself it was a matter of protocol. Clearly, for a soldier of his caste to accuse a noble of treason was tantamount to suicide. When that excuse had worn thin beneath the grindstone of his conscience, he had told himself that Zahndrekh would never have believed his word anyway, against that of Setekh. Finally, he had accepted the truth: he had not told Zahndrekh because he knew the truth would destroy him.

In time, the silence had become easier to keep. After Yama, Zahndrekh had been given the world of Gidrim, and his path had split from that of Setekh. The last the vargard heard, during the madness of the War in Heaven, was that the other officer had slaughtered his father and so seized his dynastic throne for himself. Then had come the horror of biotransference, and the apocalyptic lunacy that followed it, and after that the great sleep.

Obyron had been one of the first on Gidrim to wake from slumber, many years before Zahndrekh, and spent his long solitude learning all he could about what had come to pass, so as to best prepare his master for the galaxy he would be waking into. He had soaked himself in the growing tide of information reaching the senses of the awakening tomb complex, and naturally, he had searched for news of Setekh’s fate. It had been with some relief that he had discovered the noble’s crownworld had been cracked open by a supernova some thirty million years previously, and so he had put the whole business behind him, where it belonged.

But then here was Setekh, attended by his awful beasts, at the grim edge of the galaxy. And they were to fight together again.

‘Zahndrekh, you stupid old bastard!’ said Setekh, in a voice as smooth as his bone-coloured necrodermis, ‘stop mucking about with the hounds and come and embrace me. It’s been too long.’

‘Setekh!’ replied the nemesor, getting up and brushing the dust from himself. ‘I’d heard you were dead, you wily devil – is there no pickle you can’t slip out of? Well met indeed!’ The two nobles embraced with a clatter of plating, and Obyron looked away rather than see the smirk Setekh would be giving him over his master’s shoulder.

‘Why, you don’t look like you’ve aged a day,’ said Zahndrekh, in mock exasperation, before gesturing at Setekh’s staff. ‘I see you’re still using the same old stick, too.’

A nemesor’s staff was a crucial signifier of rank, engraved with symbolic designs and glyphic records of the bearer’s standing. Usually, it was a matter of grievous insult for a noble to commission a staff too similar to any other, but on winning their commissions, the two young officers had decided to commission matching weapons as a mark of brotherhood. And indeed, save for the blue light blazing from its power core, in contrast to Zahndrekh’s green, Setekh’s was identical.

‘Oh, this old thing? Yes, I suppose I never did get round to replacing it with something better,’ said Setekh, before nodding to Obyron. ‘Speaking of which, I see you’re still keeping that old lump hanging about the place, eh?’ At this, Zahndrekh barked with laughter.

‘Ha! Quite! Well, one has to have something around to get in the way of the enemy’s spears, what?’

Obyron could not object on grounds of protocol, as this was the standard fashion by which officers discussed lower-caste necrontyr. Despite all his accomplishments – he had been decorated seven times with the Order of the Tomb Fly, and granted a sepulchral chamber larger than those of minor lords – he would forever be just a soldier. He had not been born in the same universe as Zahndrekh and Setekh. And yet still, especially given the irony of Zahndrekh’s jibe, it hurt.

‘I see age hasn’t dulled the edge of your banter, brother. But let’s hope your blade remains as sharp – we’ve got a war to win, you know.’

‘So I hear,’ said Zahndrekh, conspiratorially. ‘Damned separatists again, from the sounds of it. When will they learn? And this lot must be particularly dense, if they’re going up against the two of us! It’ll be just like Yama all over again, hmm?’

‘Quite, Zahndrekh, quite. Just like that.’

‘Well then,’ said Zahndrekh, with his customary clap, ‘shall we get down to it? Assuming you’ve brought an army, that is. I don’t want to make things awkward, but if it’s just you, Sepa and Sata joining us – magnificent beasts though they are – I’d dare say you’re not pulling your weight.’

Setekh said nothing in reply. He simply raised one hand, clicked his fingers, and the night filled with stars. Suddenly, where there had been nothing but the gloom of the galactic fringe, there was an armada at least the size of the nemesor’s own, blazing with lights as cold and blue as Setekh’s eyes.

If nothing else, this explained how Setekh and his beasts had approached the beacon undetected – clearly they were using some form of cloaking hex. But while it was a simple matter to confound the senses of the galaxy’s more primitive inhabitants, Obyron had yet to encounter a glamour potent enough to hide things from necrontyr oculars. It troubled him deeply – and the sly glance Setekh gave him, as Zahndrekh marvelled at the sky like a child at a conjurer’s trick, suggested the other noble knew this all too well.

‘Marvellous, Setekh, simply marvellous,’ gasped Zahndrekh. ‘You never cease to amaze. I shouldn’t have doubted you. I shall have to go and prepare my troops for inspection, so as to be sure we’re not overshadowed. Perhaps we’ll meet on the morrow, to plot our opening moves?’

‘Indeed, brother, I shall look forward to it.’ There followed a long series of fond farewells, which Obyron waited patiently through, before finally speaking up as Zahndrekh prepared to depart.

‘I will follow shortly, my nemesor, after sharing our interstitial protocols with Setekh. I’m sure that he’ll need the correct freq–’

‘Zahndrekh!’ exclaimed Setekh, interrupting him. ‘Your spearcatcher seems to be talking – and what’s more, it seems to presume my needs? I’m sure it means well, but it does rather appear to have forgotten its manners. Go on, vargard, run along.’

Zahndrekh paused, clearly uncomfortable, but if he was considering contradicting Setekh, he clearly thought better of it.

‘Yes, Obyron,’ he murmured, ‘come along. There’s much to be done.’

Shooting one last look at Setekh, Obyron followed his master. He’d have to wait to get the answers he wanted, but that was all right. He was good at waiting.

Four

Any mortal would have been crushed by the ghost ark’s acceleration as it rumbled away from the Horaktys, down towards the forbidding red world. Cursed with immortality, however, Obyron just stared forwards into the racing void, unblinking and soaked to his core with the cold of the abyss. It was in these moments that the cruelty of biotransference was most unbearable, in that it had given the necrontyr bodies to withstand the unthinkable, but no new instincts to match. As it was, Obyron’s mind screamed for him to breathe, but there was no air, and he had no lungs. So he forced down the madness, and concerned himself with the fight to come.

In almost any other war, they would have translated the troops down onto the surface, either via the enormous invasion beam cannons mounted on the capital ships, or via tethered wormholes, hooked into place by Night Scythe fly-bys. But in this forsaken place, their control of the interstices was being jammed, preventing all translations and disrupting carrier wave communications. Until they had a foothold on the surface of Doahht, things had to be done the ancient way.

And so an entire armada of ghost arks had been launched, bearing the combined might of the tessarions between them. Obyron’s was the very tip of the spear, heralding the first wave of four thousand craft – one hundred carrying lychguard to carve a beachhead, supported by a thousand more of immortals, and the remainder filled with warriors to secure their landing. In addition to the arks, some threescore flights of attack craft and bombers were headed to Doahht, as well as hundreds of canoptek spyders, sleeting through the night with heavier assets borne in their claws.

It was a mighty force, and in any other war, the sight of it would have filled Obyron with wrathful pride. But out here on the bleak fringes of the galaxy, against this enemy, he could not shake free of the fear it would not be sufficient. He would find out soon enough.

Until then, rather than thinking about the trial to come, he passed the time examining the lychguard in the ark, making sure they were prepared for combat. This phalanx, glittering with small furies as the solar wind whipped across their armoured carapaces, were ten of the nemesor’s very best. More than that, they were Obyron’s personal phalanx – soldiers who had fought alongside him on a thousand worlds, and survived more battles than a mortal historian could have hoped to list.

And although they were bound to his will and that of the nemesor, they were not identical drones, like the common warriors of the fleet. Each of these elite soldiers was covered in an atlas of scratches, stains and dents which they had elected to retain despite their capacity to self-repair, and these marks – these catalogues of damage endured – were what passed for their identities. While their minds had lost so much more than Obyron’s during the long sleep, they would never be denied these echoes of self.

Looking at them now, the vargard felt a sadness as deep as the cold in his limbs. Obyron had known some of these old soldiers since Yama; could remember training with them, fighting with them, sharing rations and trenchline jokes. There was Sabni, who had been first on the wall at the siege of Rekhmire, and who had always oversalted his food. There was Pentesh, who had fallen over drunk after the triumph on Nahkt, and Mehy, who had wept at the news of his lost sons. And there was Neb – dear Neb – who had once confessed his wish to die by Obyron’s side.

Poor old Neb had never got his wish. But it was all right, as he would not remember, now. None of them would remember any of it. Obyron alone was left to carry their memories; he alone knew the names they had forgotten. These long-ago comrades were just ghosts now, and the steel they haunted would never know Obyron as a friend: only as a master. And yet still, deep in his engrams, the vargard considered them his brothers. As the arks streaked towards the surface of the world, he felt the impact of stardust on their lifeless hides, just as if they were echoes of his own.

Considering that dire red orb, which now filled the whole of the sky, Obyron wondered how many of them would return from this war. For the interstitial jamming affecting Doahht’s surface had another consequence: until they had secured a relay point free of the field, they would be unable to translate damaged troops back from the front, relying on canoptek constructs and the wyrd properties of necrodermis itself to piece the fallen back together. Every warrior damaged beyond repair would be gone forever – an almost unthinkable position for an army used to the endless service of its troops. Obyron knew they would soon be put to the test.

As the ark swarm began plunging towards atmosphere, Doahht’s glowering surface began to flash with points of red light, silent and serene.

‘Hold steady, brave lychguard,’ he transmitted to his phalanx, as if they had a choice, ‘surface-to-air fire incoming.’ There was no answer beyond the faintest hiss of acknowledgement, but it did not matter – just having someone other than Zahndrekh to talk to was enough, sometimes.

Then the barrage hit; within moments, globes of ruby light were streaking through the ark formation, sending chain lightning crackling from the spars of the vessels as they passed. But in this opening volley at least, every shot passed well wide of its target. As the scale of the invasion became apparent, the enemy’s accuracy would only improve, but for now, it would be firing almost blindly.

‘Hmm,’ snorted Obyron to the blank-faced lychguard. ‘Asleep at their guns, perhaps. No matter – let us drag them from their beds.’

‘Bedssss,’ repeated Neb, in what might have been a reflexive attempt at barrack-room humour, but was probably just an expression of confusion at an unfamiliar word.

Obyron did not care: it made him feel better. Making an ancient gesture towards the world below – one he would never have used outside the company of common soldiers – he welcomed the worst it could offer. After so long quietly dreading this war, and the grinding exasperation of Setekh’s reappearance, it was good to be back in the thick of things, with the best of his troops. Indeed, in these moments when he was able to forget himself, the danger made him feel almost as if he were alive. Despite his bond to his master, the line of battle would always be his home: a place where he could express himself as fluently with his warscythe as Zahndrekh could with fine words.

And yet if his nemesor needed him, he would come, despite Doahht’s suppression of their sorcery. His ghostwalk mantle had been forged by the psychomancer Dagon himself, greatest of Gidrim’s crypteks, and was imbued with rites so ancient and potent as to ignore any jamming. The mantle could move him through deeper strata even than the interstices, and could take him to his master’s side at any moment.

Obyron hoped he would not need to use it. Although he was far from trusting of Setekh’s intentions, he doubted the bone-plated nemesor would make his move so early in the campaign. Apart from anything else, it would be too blunt a move for his refined tastes. But if he did decide to seize his chance, Obyron would not be baffled by tricks again. As the fleet had sailed for Doahht from the staging post, he had spent hours calibrating the flagship’s scarabs to spot even the most infinitesimal intrusion on his lord’s sanctum, and summon him there.

But powerful as it was, even the mantle would not be enough to save Obyron, should he be blown to dust on the way to the world’s surface. As he considered this, another shot streaked in, far too close, and his oculars were overloaded with deep red light. When it faded, the next ark along the formation had disappeared, with only sparks of subatomic froth spiralling onwards where once had been a phalanx of old friends.

It was as if Doahht itself were reminding him of its power. But the vargard did not flinch. If anything, he was glad for those soldiers, for their long and deathless duty had come to an end with no dishonour. They could rest now. But Obyron was thankful he had not been sold so cheap. Rest would have been a fine thing, but he was not ready for it while the nemesor needed him – and Zahndrekh would most certainly need him before this war was over.

As the ark passed into Doahht’s thin atmosphere, its prow was crowned with a halo of meagre flames, through which a world of gloomy red dunes became visible. They fell towards a landscape alight with energy. As the enemy’s turrets had lit up during their descent, they had revealed themselves to the guns of the capital ships, and now they were being punished for it.

A rain of emerald fire streaked down alongside the assault craft now, destroying smaller emplacements outright, and weakening heavier positions for obliteration by flights of night shrouds. With no forces of their own in the air, the enemy couldn’t contest the onslaught of the bombers, and while Zahndrekh’s predisposition towards honour had held him back from calling in his squadrons, Setekh had no such scruples. Slipped from their leash, his squadrons of bone-coloured craft were turning great swathes of the desert into glass.

‘Give them hell,’ Obyron shouted over the whipping wind, and raising a growl of assent from the lychguard. It was no empty sentiment, either. Despite his loathing for the bomber wings’ commander, Obyron was at least grateful for his pragmatism. With these defences wiped out, they would be able to land the rest of the invasion force in relative safety. So far, resistance had been piecemeal, but Obyron knew with grim certainty that the worst was yet to come. The real fight would begin on the ground, and under it, and with the interstices locked down by the world’s brute sorcery, every warrior would count.

That wasn’t stopping Zahndrekh from celebrating, it seemed.

‘Superb strike!’ he cried, voice faint and crackling over a feeble carrier wave connection, as another gun emplacement vanished in a searing anti-matter detonation. ‘You know, brother, I’m almost regretting my decision to withhold my bomber wings – your fellows are really stealing the show!’

Setekh scoffed in response. ‘It’s like I always told you, Zahndrekh, sometimes all that honour will win you is scars. But don’t worry, I’ll always be here to show you how to fight properly.’ Obyron rather thought that was the point of honour, but knew better than to intrude on the two nemesors’ merry exchange of insults.

‘On the contrary, dear Setekh, I shall show you how it’s done, once my vargard makes landfall with the lychguard…’

‘I’m sure he’ll do well enough,’ quipped Setekh, underscored by the gibbering of his skolopendra, ‘if the old brute can remember which end of his scythe to point at the enemy.’

‘You wicked devil, Setekh!’ said Zahndrekh, in mock outrage. ‘Go on, Obyron – happy hunting, and don’t show me up!’

Taking this as permission to stop enduring the nobles’ wit, Obyron tuned out their voices, and set an engrammatic subroutine to alert him if either of them said anything tactically relevant.

The ark formation was flying parallel to the ground now, around twenty kubits up, and each vessel was raising a tall plume of fine dust in its wake. There was a lot of dust here, Obyron noted. Doahht was dead and dry, with not so much as a bacterium to be found in its inert crystal sands. And though the thin atmosphere of nitrogen and argon was cold enough to freeze a mortal body in minutes, it sweltered under the sickly red light of the sun. That light permeated everything, from the deep crimson of the sky, to the glassy dunes that seemed to glow from within. Here and there, the sand was broken with great triangular outcrops of black stone, worn by endless sandstorms, and Obyron would have thought them mountains – if he had not known better.

Because Doahht was not as silent as its surface suggested. Beneath those dunes teemed a horde almost beyond reckoning, and the vargard’s engrams shivered with the thought of that deep labyrinth. But there was no point dwelling on it. He could fight that battle over and over in his mind, but it would win them no ground until he fought it in this world. The only way out of this war was through it. And so, as the ghost ark slowed in the shadow of a towering black cliff face, Obyron leapt to the sand and raised his warscythe with an ancient cry of challenge.

A gale was picking up, carrying countless tons of sand with it. Whether it had been stirred by the violence of the bombing, or was part of the world’s inscrutable reaction to their intrusion, he had no idea. But it suited his mood well. He had come to take this appalling rock, in the name of his nemesor, and in the name of the Stormlord.

‘Well landed, vargard,’ intoned Zahndrekh, all whimsy stripped away to reveal the aristocratic steel beneath. ‘Prepare my siege lines. Let Doahht know the sons of Gidrim have come to claim their due.’

As the lychguard marshalled, flowing into perfect blocks as if drawn to invisible magnets, Obyron surveyed the immensity of stone before him. A broad black ramp rose from the sand to meet the mountain, pitted and cracked by the aeons, and wide enough to hold twenty warriors marching abreast. At its apex, twin doors of black metal stood, bolted to withstand eternity, and flanked by obelisks two khet high. Their surfaces had been ground almost smooth by Doahht’s winds, but still they bore rows of markings which Obyron wished he did not recognise. It was time to draw their builders forth.

Turning to regard the assembled legion, now thirty ranks deep as flight after flight of arks disgorged their passengers, Obyron sent an interstitial command to the heavy artillery. A battery of annihilation barges was already arrayed on each flank of the force, but they would need greater engines than those to crack this shell.

‘Let the guns come forward,’ he commanded, beckoning into the swirling dust with his scythe.

And there they were. Visible at first as towering, curving-clawed silhouettes in the gathering storm, Obyron could almost picture them as the dread beasts of necrontyr myth after which they were styled. This moment of fancy was rare for Obyron, and made him wonder if Zahndrekh’s odd way of viewing the world had got into him over the years. But then the engines lumbered forwards out of the dust clouds, and he saw them for what they were.

A cohort of colossal seraptek constructs, five strong, settled themselves before the gates, and the sand itself began to sing with the charging of their guns. As their singularity generators reached full power, they produced a low, mournful howl that would have burst a mortal army’s eardrums, and spilled sheet lightning which crackled across the quaking desert. Obyron raised his warscythe, and the lightning ran wild up his arm, drawn to its fractal blade.

‘Ready to fire at my nemesor’s command,’ said Obyron, keeping his scythe in the air. From experience, he knew Zahndrekh would wait before giving the order (as his lord had always said, what was a siege without a little theatre?) and so he used the time to steel himself for the fight to come, using the sealed portal before him as a point of focus.

But now he looked at it closely, there was something deeply unsettling about those black gates. The rows of eroded glyphs on their surface were eerie enough – but there was something carved on top of them. A scrawl of the same text, but carved with a shakier hand, and forming phrases that made no sense. He had barely begun to make out the words, when the nemesor’s voice came over the instertices, speaking with an authority that even eternity could not dull.

‘Breach the gates,’ commanded the nemesor, and Obyron put the strange text from his mind as he let his scythe fall.

The red world was drowned in green fury, as ten singularity generators fired at once. Huge chunks of the gates simply vanished, as tons of metal were drawn into raging, momentary black holes, and Obyron had to brace himself against the foot of the ramp to resist the tug of their monstrous energies. The rock itself screamed as the fabric of the gates collapsed into points of tortured space-time, before detonating in a volley of molten splashes. And yet still the doors remained standing.

There would be no respite. Already the charge coils of the serapteks were glowing white-hot for a second strike, and Obyron swept his scythe once more to order the shot. This time, it was more than the ancient bulwark could stand. When the light of the guns faded, the doors had been reduced to tattered remnants, with a lake of boiling metal at their base. And behind them was blackness.

‘Hold fire,’ ordered Obyron. ‘Infantry, ready.’

The silence was iron-heavy, broken only by the bubbling of steel as it cooled on the black stone. It stretched on and on, until finally, a low susurration came from the shattered mouth of the mountain. At first, it looked as if dead leaves were gusting out of the depths. And then their forms became clear: beetle-like things, scuttling and flying in short hops, with rust-scabbed shells and oculars glowing the same dull red as the dunes.

‘Scarabs?’ said Zahndrekh incredulously, stifling a laugh. ‘Do you see this, Setekh? They mean to answer us with scarabs? How impoverished must these poor fools be – I do hope this isn’t the stiffest resistance they mean to offer!’

Setekh offered half a laugh, with little conviction, for he knew as well as Obyron how wrong Zahndrekh was.

The scarabs came in a trickle at first, which soon became a flood, and then a tidal wave, as hundreds of thousands of the things came out of the mountain. The first wave was shredded by massed fire from the warriors and immortals, while those behind were burst into drifting sparks by the tesla destructors of the annihilation barges. But still more came – far more than could be repelled – and in no time, they had spilled to Obyron’s line at the base of the ramp.

The lychguard, too proud to use their powerblades on such unworthy foes, planted their weapons in the sand and fought with hands and feet. Silent even in their wrath, they stamped the scarabs into fragments on the stone of the ramp, and crushed them like fruit in their hands. Obyron was beset by half a dozen of the things, and spent a revolting minute levering them from his skin and cracking their shells.

Others were not so fortunate. Knots of the canoptek creatures were now flying over the line in short arcs, descending on individual warriors in a frenzy of scrabbling legs and gnashing mandibles. Although Obyron knew they felt themselves being devoured, the warriors did not even scream as they went down. When the scarabs moved on, they left only slivers of metal, hopelessly trying to reassemble themselves. And still more came from the broken gates.

Knowing this would come, Obyron had positioned a rank of canoptek spyders at the legion’s rear, and they moved forwards now, disgorging their own scarabs as they hovered over the lines. The tiny constructs set upon their opposite numbers, and soon the air was thick with their rattling buzz, dark with the shadow of the swarm.

But the enemy’s scarabs were poorly maintained, crusty things, and soon came apart under the claws of the Sautekh’s own gleaming constructs. Soon, the hostile swarm had been thinned to the hundreds of thousands, and then to the thousands, and finally, the last few were picked off by gauss fire. Wasting no time, the Sautekh scarabs began consuming the carcasses of their counterparts, spinning filaments of necrodermis to repair those warriors wounded but still standing.

The lines had held, and casualties had been few – only three lychguard had been lost to the swarm, and none of his personal phalanx among them – but Obyron felt only fleeting relief. He had experienced their slow dismantlement, almost as keenly as if it had been his own bones being chewed. And this was only the start. As the buzz of the scarabs faded, it was already being supplanted by a ghastly sound from within the mountain: a slow, arrhythmic clanking, underscored by the drag of rust on stone. Obyron commanded the lines to hold once more, and his lychguard picked up their blades in readiness for what was coming.

‘This will be… a disturbing fight,’ he murmured to Neb, who stood to his left in the first rank. ‘But choose your strikes carefully, and we’ll see it through. And if we do not… well, I hope at least to grant your wish.’ Neb turned his head to regard Obyron for a moment, with nothing but faint confusion behind his oculars. But perhaps, on some subconscious level, the words had meant something. There was no time to consider it further, however, as the foe was upon them.

They saw their oculars first: a galaxy of doleful red embers in the darkness of the tunnel, stretching back as far as even Obyron’s most powerful scries could see. And then they shambled into the light. Necron warriors.

They were the same deep umber as the scarabs had been, their poorly maintained necrodermis grown over with rust, and streaked with dark stains from leaking joints. Some hauled rigid limbs into motion, while others crawled, dragging ruined legs behind them as they clawed their way forwards with skeletal hands. Their oculars sputtered, and sparks cascaded from ruined servos. Some had functioning gauss rifles, blazing with carnelian energy as they fired blind into the besieging force. Others still held weapons whose power had given out during the long silence of the tomb, reduced to little more than cudgels, and yet still they tried to fire them as they trudged on.

Obyron’s mind was gripped with revulsion at the ghoulish things, a disgust that went deep beyond his distaste for his own cold body. Although the time would inevitably come when he was forced to grapple with these ghouls, he had no appetite for close-quarters fighting just yet. And so, holding up an arm to hold the legion’s fire, he ordered the serapteks to fire again.

Perhaps five hundred of the wretched things were obliterated in the first volley, but the creatures behind them did not even slow their step, limping onwards over the molten remains of their fellows. It was the same implacable, mindless determination that had driven Zahndrekh’s own soldiers over a thousand battlefields, but here there was nothing behind it – no light of noble genius to guide them forward, or to be bested in a duel of wits. There was just the vast, ancient madness of a machine.

Zahndrekh had been quiet for some time, Obyron noted, as the thought of his nemesor came to mind. After repositioning the annihilation barges to stem the tide of warriors long enough for the serapteks to charge another shot, he sent a carrier wave request for orders. But the nemesor did not reply. Had the jamming intensified to the point where they were now cut off? Or worse – had Setekh somehow got past his monitors and harmed his master?

But at last, just as Obyron was readying his mantle to make an emergency translation back to the Horaktys, Zahndrekh opened a private channel to Obyron alone, which Setekh would not be able to hear. When at last he spoke, his voice sounded almost feeble, robbed of the royal confidence with which he had commanded the commencement of the siege.

‘Obyron, my old friend,’ stammered the nemesor. ‘I… they… they’re us.’

Five

‘Of course they’re us, my lord,’ said Obyron, taken aback. ‘They’re separatists.’ It felt unusual indeed to be the one reminding Zahndrekh of his own delusions, but he had never heard anything like the uncertainty in the nemesor’s voice just then, not in all their years together.

‘But they… they have no souls, Obyron. They seem like us, they resemble us in form, but something has cut away their essence. They’re… severed.’

Obyron was silent, but not through taciturn habit. He was entirely staggered by what Zahndrekh had said, as for once, the old nemesor had seen things exactly for what they were.

A Severed World – for that was undoubtedly what Doahht was – was an abhorrent thing. When the great sleep had begun, each of the necrontyr’s countless tomb worlds had entered a long hibernation, watched over by an artificial mind known as an autonomic spirit. Across the breadth of the galaxy, the lords of the dynasties had waited through their dreamless slumber, with each of their deep graves watched over by these selfless essences.

And when the time came for a tomb to wake, it was the spirit which would begin the process. The canoptek swarms that had patrolled the catacombs for intruders would be repurposed to prepare the halls for the risen lords, and warriors would be woken, temporarily under the guidance of the spirit, in readiness for the command of their masters.

Even under perfect conditions, however, and despite the celestial genius of cryptek technosorcery, sixty million years of entropy was a terrible beast to fight. For while the bodies the necrontyr had been given during biotransference were functionally immortal, their minds were not. The slightest degradation of engrammatic matrices over the aeons could leave a lord’s psyche damaged beyond repair, and Zahndrekh himself was a tragic example of what could befall a noble during the long sleep.

But even Zahndrekh had been fortunate. For any one of a thousand reasons, a tomb world’s hibernation systems could fail catastrophically, entirely destroying the higher functions of every mind interred within. In these cases, the autonomic spirit would still begin its attempt to wake the dynasty under its care, but in finding no lords to take the reins, would attempt to run the entire tomb world in accordance with its limited instincts.

The architects of the tomb worlds, unable to imagine their sorceries might be undone by the brute attrition of time itself, had made little provision for such a nightmare, and so had conjured the autonomous spirits with the compulsion to repel all invaders until such time as their rightful masters awoke from slumber. Unfortunately, given the feudal infighting endemic to dynastic society, the spirits of Severed Worlds took the soldiers of other dynasties to be enemies – and would fight them just as fiercely as they would non-necrontyr.

In some dire cases – if the tales of horror Obyron had heard from the galactic north-west were to be believed – Severed crownworlds could even begin their own mindless wars of conquest, spreading their legions to uncorrupted tomb worlds, and seizing them in an unthinking imitation of phaeronic doctrine. The name of one such world, Sarkon, had become infamous among the reawakened dynasties. And if Obyron’s suspicions were correct, and Doahht itself had been a crownworld, they faced an equivalent danger here.

Fifteen hours later, as Doahht’s long night drew in under a bloody sunset, the Severed were still marching from the tomb’s mouth, and their numbers showed no signs of thinning. In fact, it seemed that for every hour the fighting continued, the flow of stumbling automatons was growing thicker. By now, the enemy was coming in such numbers that the Sautekh gun line – even bolstered by the serapteks’ singularity generators – was insufficient to stop their advance. For hours now, Obyron’s line of lychguard had been fighting a near-constant skirmish at the foot of the ramp. And while casualties had been few, Sabni had been among them, gone down without a word beneath a heap of the rusted, clawing ghouls.

‘How are we meant to advance into this?’ spat Obyron, as he rallied his personal phalanx during a brief respite in the skirmish. The lychguard, of course, had no more idea than he, but the quiet snarls they offered in reply suggested they were just as frustrated.

If Doahht was a crownworld, and Obyron’s studies from orbit had offered every certainty that it was, there might be billions more warriors at the planet’s core, even now beginning their slow crawl up into the light. And with every legion the invaders disintegrated, the world’s spirit would grow more aware and more incensed, bringing more powerful assets online, and opening further gateways to the world’s surface.

Until they could fight their way inside, and commandeer one of the tomb’s translation relays in order to bypass the interstitial jamming, they had no hope of recalling fatally damaged troops to the fleet for repair – Sabni’s loss would be just the start of it. And if they were surrounded before they could breach the catacombs, the campaign might collapse astonishingly quickly, having only achieved the full awakening of a Severed crownworld. Even now, Obyron was receiving reports of warriors streaming forth from the other mountains among Doahht’s dunes, and Setekh had ordered his fleet’s guns to begin firing on those entrances, hoping to seal them and hold back the tide.

‘Just hold the line,’ he barked to his phalanx as they advanced again, with a nod of reassurance that was more for his own benefit than theirs. ‘Hold the line, stay alert, and maintain your faith in our betters – Nemesor Zahndrekh will find us a way in.’

The truth was, Obyron wasn’t so sure Nemesor Zahndrekh would do anything of the sort. Although he hated to admit it, Setekh, for all his treachery, was carrying the entire operation. Since his transmission to Obyron just after the Severed had first emerged, Zahndrekh had been virtually silent, offering only faint, half-hearted encouragements to his forces. The nemesor was clearly stricken by what he had seen, and there was no foresight behind his commands. Though it pained Obyron to say, there was no leadership.

Sometime into the night, Zahndrekh’s communications petered out entirely, and Obyron grew worried. Taking his attention from the fight for a moment, he scried into the Horaktys’ bridge, momentarily dreading that he might find his master lifeless at Setekh’s feet. What he saw was almost worse, and distracted him to such an extent that a warrior’s bayonet came within a forearm’s length of his body before the horror wielding it was cut down.

Zahndrekh was visibly broken. Leaning against a rail for support, his shoulders were slumped, his head was bowed, and his staff had fallen to the deck. His empty goblet – which he had ever thought overflowing – lay smashed on the floor beside him. And as the warriors wired into the bridge’s controls watched absently on, he was weeping.

Without the nemesor’s eternal confidence, no matter how ill-founded it seemed at times, Obyron had no idea what to do. He was a servant without a master, a sword without a bearer. And with Zahndrekh absent, the vargard was effectively commanding the entirety of the Sautekh force. The thought filled him with profound misery – but what choice did he have but to lead? Even if they didn’t lose the entire invasion force here at the tomb’s mouth – which would leave the stage set for a coup by Setekh, let alone the nightmare of a fully awakened Doahht – Obyron knew his nemesor’s honour was hanging by a thread. And Obyron was as much sworn to defend Zahndrekh’s honour as he was his physical form.

But what should he do? What would Zahndrekh do? Holding back the smallest of groans, Obyron realised at once where he would find the answer. Paring back his awareness of the fight to the bare minimum required to fend off the enemy’s blades, Obyron assembled every scrap of engrammatic code relating to Zahndrekh’s lectures, and reminisced. He was no strategist, but if some small shred of the nemesor’s obscure genius had not carried over to him in all those years of listening, then he was a poor servant.

The answer to the predicament had to be somewhere in all those millions of hours of his master’s rambling. Ultimately, the tactical algorithms Doahht would be running on were based on the very same ancient manuals Zahndrekh had spent his interminable life obsessing over. By Gidrim’s name, some of them had been written by him. And if there had been anything the nemesor had enjoyed doing over the many, many years Obyron had served him, it had been talking about his favourite tactical manuals.

When the solution came to Obyron, it was from an unexpected place.

‘Obyron, my good fellow, have I ever showed you how a finger-trap works?’

Zahndrekh had not, and Obyron didn’t really think now was the best time to learn, since most of his consciousness was busy fighting back an upstart lord’s canoptek wraiths via the guards outside the feasting hall. But he had the distinct impression he was about to find out anyway, and so he replied with polite interest.

‘It’s a very simple thing,’ said Zahndrekh, producing a small cylinder of woven reed with an illusionist’s flourish. ‘Little more than a toy, really – a little trick, used to amuse the children of the royal houses. And, of course, to teach them a little bit about war in the process.’ Obyron nodded, unsurprised so far. There wasn’t much in the necrontyr experience of childhood that was not, at least partially, about war.

‘Hold out your hands, Obyron, and I’ll show you. There, index fingers pointing towards each other, just like that. Excellent. And on it goes. Now, pull your fingers free.’ As a lychguard blade despatched another of the thrashing constructs beyond the door, Obyron had tried to free his fingers. With his strength drawn from the core of the small star where his heart should have been, Obyron could have snapped the device apart into a cloud of dust, but he suspected this was not the point.

‘They won’t come free, my nemesor.’

‘Aha! That’s because you’re pulling on the trap, oh foolish servant! And you see, the tighter you pull, the more wickedly it grips. To break free, you must try changing your angle of attack – try pushing inwards, and see what happens.’

‘I am astonished, my lord,’ said Obyron, as the trap fell to the floor, and so did the last of the wraiths.

‘Marvellous stuff,’ said Zahndrekh. ‘And I know it’s a silly lesson, but perhaps it will prove useful one day.’

Classic Zahndrekh, thought Obyron, slamming the butt of his scythe through a warrior’s skull with mute satisfaction. The figment of the nemesor had been right: the longer they resisted here on the surface, the tighter Doahht’s trap would get. They needed to push inwards. But how? The answer to this question was more forthcoming, as it was on his person: the ghostwalk mantle, which could tear through Doahht’s interstitial jamming like wet paper. Crushing his fears beneath the weight of duty, Obyron made his decision, and transmitted a request for a private carrier wave to the bridge of the Serqeht, Setekh’s flagship. To his surprise, it was answered immediately.

‘Vargard,’ said Setekh, with a note of surprised amusement in his voice.

‘I hope you will forgive my impertinence in speaking to you directly, but–’

‘Forgiven, vargard. With certain curiosity, admittedly, over why your own nemesor should not be fit to hear your request…’

‘Signal problems,’ lied Obyron curtly, knowing full well that Setekh would be aware of the situation, and in no mood to dance around the truth.

‘Hmm. Very well. And in his… absence, what do you presume to ask of me?’

‘Permission to advance, my lord. The longer we hold at the tomb’s entrance, the greater our risk of failure.’

Setekh pondered this, before replying in a sly voice.

‘And what aid of mine do you require to enact this stroke of tactical genius?’

‘None, lord. Only permission to advance, with my own phalanx of lychguard.’ The line fell into silence then, and Obyron felt a brief stab of pride at having caught Setekh’s tongue.

‘Go on then,’ he drawled at last, as if agreeing to wager some petty sum on a scarab fight. ‘It should be entertaining, if nothing else. Happy hunting, Obyron.’

The acidic echo of his true master’s words made Obyron bristle, but this was no time to speak out of turn. He had nemesorial permission for at least part of what he was planning, and that was enough to maintain honour. There was no need for further conversation. Terminating the connection, he pulled his phalanx back from the line, and assembled them in a tight circle around him.

‘Brothers,’ he began, with some uncertainty. He had never been a good speechmaker – that was Zahndrekh’s territory – and it was hard to know what to say when you did not know what your audience could even understand. But he had to say something.

‘You have served long, and you have served well. You have done all your lords have ever asked of you, and so you have lived well. You must know, what happens now will likely mean your death – but in death you will be commended, and you will at last find rest. I suspect, even if you do not fully comprehend why, that rest is what you desire. So come, and find it with me.’

The circle of grim metal faces nodded, and to Obyron’s surprise, he saw none of the usual bafflement in the posture of his soldiers. On some level, they understood. Obyron nodded back, but before he raised his voice to address the troops at large, he found he had one more thing to say.

‘Neb, make sure to stay by me.’

‘Yes,’ said Neb.

Turning from his lychguard, Obyron addressed the whole of the legion before the gates.

‘On the mark of my translation, begin the advance into the tomb. Do not stop until my signal comes, or if it does not, until the last warrior falls. In the name of Nemesor Zahndrekh, I command you.’ This was, admittedly, something of a reach from the permission he had been given – but if he lived to face the consequences, it would not matter.

Activating his mantle in a ripple of black energy that swallowed the lychguard around him, Obyron translated forwards, into the throat of the monster.

Obyron’s youth had been very different from Zahndrekh’s. In a sandy yard under a baking sun, along with thousands of other soldiers, he had been trained by a bastard whose rod was as hard as his heart, and who would sooner see his charges dead than idle. Unlike the nobility, who came into the world knowing the debt of respect the rest of the necrontyr owed them, the soldiery were born nameless. Any identity they hoped to gain, they had to fight for.

For the nobles, equal to their subjects only in the savage brevity of their existence, the purpose of life had been to prepare for its end. To put everything into carving out a legacy, so their descendants might at least know them by the size of their tombs. Soldiers, by contrast, knew the best they could expect was a shallow hole in the desert, and perhaps a mention in someone else’s marching song. For those of Obyron’s standing, life had been about living.

And for a soldier, to live well was to become a flawless instrument of another’s will. Death was inevitable, and not to be feared, but life was still something to be spent as dearly as possible. Attaining glory was the easiest thing in the world, his bastard drillmaster had always said – you just had to keep fighting, and the trick was simply not to die.

Obyron found himself in clanking darkness, with his phalanx around him, at the heart of a nightmare. Beyond the shoulders of the lychguard, a sea of baleful red oculars sprawled in every direction: a thousand mindless faces, turning blindly towards the intruders. Immediately, the blades of the phalanx were alight, and hacking into the thickets of rusty limbs around them, each strike calculated to maim as many bodies as possible. They were quicker by far than the spirit of the tomb, but against such appalling numbers, even they would not last long. They did not need to: their lives would be spent giving Obyron the briefest, but the most vital, of head starts.

As the mass of rusted warriors pressed in and the slaughter began, Obyron left a final message of good luck, an old soldier’s blessing, in the minds of the lychguard. They might not recognise the meaning of it, but they were owed it anyway. They would have to do what came next with what remained of their own minds, as he could not carry the bandwidth.

Orienting himself towards the depths of the tomb, Obyron slowed his chronosense to the limits of his capacity, and brought online a battery of arcane senses, including a potent divination algorithm that would offer him a degree of foresight. With his mind alight like this, he could fight like a god – but not for long. Every moment spent on this wild plateau would burn out irreplaceable engrammatic pathways, leaving him forever depleted. Each second crawling past in real time would sear away his memories, his habits, and even what remained of his personality, until he was whittled down to the emptiness of the ghouls all around him.

But what was the point of hoarding himself? Obyron wondered. What was it to be necrontyr, if not to spend what cruel measure of time you had been allotted? Then he stopped thinking, because even in this deep layer of time, it was a waste of the precious moments his old friends had bought him.

Obyron exploded into motion, vaulting over Neb’s shoulder just as the first bayonets plunged glacially into his breast, and the momentum carried him deep into the crowd. As he landed, he swung his scythe with immortal precision, and cut down a dozen Severed before the first limbs had time to hit the floor. His blade was a ribbon of light, every movement optimal beyond the dreams of mortal swordsmen, and he moved through Doahht’s horde as if he were waving away cobwebs.

Wading further into the press, it was a constant temptation to lose himself in the precision of his scythe, to give in to the whispered promise of ecstasy and let the subjective hours fly past, until time swallowed him whole. But the thought of Zahndrekh’s despair anchored him – the old general needed this victory more than ever, and it would not come if his vargard surrendered to madness. He had to focus.

From the time he had spent alone on Gidrim as the tomb there had ground to life, Obyron knew well the protocols by which an autonomous spirit commanded its warriors. After taking inventory of its assets on awakening, it would have assigned a degree of decision-making capacity to a single unit in each region, and slaved every lower-ranking asset to the executive function of that command node. If Obyron could get deep enough to find the local node and extinguish it, the warriors in the region would fall into complete disarray. The chaos would only last long enough for the spirit to identify a new nodal command point, but with its wits still sluggish from sleep, that might be long enough for the legion at the tomb’s entrance to press the advantage.

And there was the command node. Further along the passage, where it widened into a sepulchral hall, the mass of warriors was lit from above by a flickering red glow. A resurrection orb, held aloft by something which had once been a lord, but was now little more than a puppet, a blasphemous parody of its former self. Suspended in the air like a marionette by the weird sorcery of the tomb, the gaunt creature turned to look at Obyron with the slowness of hourglass sand, and something entirely other regarded him through its oculars. It had to be destroyed.

But already, Obyron could sense the limits of his heightened state. He couldn’t operate like this much longer, and already, the warriors were beginning to press in on him, bogging him down. Hands were beginning to clutch at the edges of his armour, and eventually, enough would latch on to slow him to a crawl. That would be the beginning of a slow and dishonourable end. As Obyron assessed the dwindling options left to him, words floated back from his past – this time, from the training yards. The trick is not to die.

Ignoring a dozen screaming fail-safe routines, Obyron reached into the core of his body, and commanded his central reactor to convert fully half of its remaining energy into mass. It was a desperate, catastrophic move, with every chance of turning him into a pool of molten slag, but even that was better than being torn to pieces in the dark. And as it happened, it worked.

With tons of hyperdense mass temporarily distributed throughout his necrodermis, Obyron’s momentum became unstoppable. It was as if a torch ship’s engine had ignited behind him, and as he picked up speed, he began to smash warriors aside like saplings. Soon he was moving at a thunderous pace, plumes of gas streaming from his skin as the exotic metalloids dumped by his reactor sublimated. Every warrior he touched was sent arcing into the dark, until nothing was left between him and the puppeted lord.

Bellowing Zahndrekh’s name in challenge, Obyron took a mighty leap from the skull of a crawling warrior, and drove his warscythe into the lord’s chest with the force of a small asteroid strike. After that, there was blackness.

Six

Obyron was not capable of being unconscious, but there was a period during which his transducers registered nothing, no new engrams were encoded, and his chronosense was entirely absent. In essence, he was unconscious.

And then he was not, and Setekh was speaking to him from inside his head.

‘Bravo, vargard. I’m not one to admit my mistakes, but I suspect we may have got off on the wrong foot.’ Obyron nearly asked him if he was referring to the assassination attempt on Yama, but came to his senses in time.

He found he was lying on the floor of a stone chamber, scorched and surrounded by debris, while all around him, blundering Severed warriors were being cut down by advancing lychguard. As he got halfway to his feet, only to collapse back to the stone, he recalled his assault on the command node. The fact he could remember anything was a good sign; the surge had not eaten away too much of his mind.

In fact, running a diagnostic scry, he found he had suffered surprisingly little in the way of engrammatic damage – all he had lost during the hard burn had been the memory of taste, and the name of his long-dead father. By cruelty of chance, he had not forgotten the names of the phalanx who had just sacrificed themselves for him, but as far as Obyron was concerned, those memories were a burden he deserved to bear.

The things he had lost were not a bad price to pay at all, considering what had been won. With the local command node cut off, Doahht’s defenders had fallen into disarray as predicted, and his forces – Zahndrekh’s forces, that is – had been able to sweep into the sepulchral hall with little resistance. Now they were in place, it would be a matter of hours before they could commandeer the hall’s machinery and secure a translation relay free of the Severed World’s jamming field.

‘Vargard?’ It was Setekh again, with a definite edge of impatience.

‘Apologies, my lord nemesor. This humble servant thanks you for your favour.’

‘That’s more like it, vargard. Now why don’t you translate up to the Serqeht so I can congratulate you in person. Dear Zahndrekh seems as if he needs a little cheer, and I think you’ve more than earned the right to join us for a victory toast, despite your… recklessness. I look forward to receiving you.’ Setekh clearly didn’t expect an answer, any more than Obyron expected the right to refuse.

And even though he would have rather made another near-suicidal charge into a chamber full of ghouls than join the traitor on his flagship, he had been given his orders. And so, after making sure the sepulchral hall was secured, and seeing to it that the crypteks had the jamming field suppressed, he prepared to return to orbit.

The instant before he cast the translation ritual, Obyron finally realised what had been bothering him about the sepulchral hall. Even as he had fought through it, some minute sliver of his consciousness had registered that there was something odd about the walls. Now he had a chance to observe them, he could see it clearly: they were covered in writing. Of course, the tombs of his people were always covered in writing – reams upon reams of ritual funerary texts would always surround the stasis chamber of even minor lords, and that was all here, as he would expect. But just as he had seen in the instant before the tomb’s gates had been destroyed, there was a second layer of inscriptions carved on the top, meandering over the older text in an unbroken stream of gibberish. It was a deeply unnerving detail, in a place that already filled him with unease.

Nevertheless, he had better things to do than ponder the relics of a mad world. The sooner he got this visit over with, the sooner he could get back to the business of the war, and the sooner they could leave. And so, as the translation energies wrapped around his body, he put the carvings out of his thoughts.

‘Ah, the conquering hero returns,’ said Setekh, rising from his seat as the door to the audience chamber slid open. It was dressed for a feast, with a huge crescent-shaped table set, draped in the blue and cream of Setekh’s dynasty, and walls aglow with the sapphire glyphs of his household. But although the table could have seated seventy lords, it had only two occupants – Setekh, and a haggard-looking Zahndrekh opposite him. Sepa and Sata were coiled together on the dais the table surrounded, antennae waving lazily as Obyron approached.

He wanted nothing more than to go straight to his master, but none of the things he needed to say to him could be spoken in front of that bone-coloured serpent Setekh and his pets. He and Zahndrekh could be no more separated, while still in the same room.

‘How goes the war, old friend?’ asked Zahndrekh in a hollow voice, making a dismal attempt at faking his usual high spirits.

‘Well enough, my nemesor,’ answered Obyron, telling half the truth. For while they could at least now translate troops in and out of their newly won sanctum, making their numbers far harder to exhaust, the odds arrayed against them remained staggering. Doahht’s surface was lighting up with new threat points, with thirteen tomb gates now open and spilling warriors onto the dunes. And while the invasion force had collapsed the entrance behind them when they went underground, it would not be long before it was dug out again by the rusted horde, putting them under attack from all sides. Time was not on their side.

‘We would certainly be faring more poorly, were it not for our brave vargard here – is that not so?’ Setekh actually clapped him on the back at this, and only Obyron’s core-deep fatigue prevented him shuddering.

‘I am reminded, now, why you were awarded the Order of the Tomb Fly seven times over, vargard! And while I don’t recall giving you permission to advance the whole legion in your nemesor’s stead, I’m sure it was just a matter of crossed wires. As you yourself said, there were terrible signal problems. And while I shall leave the matter of your punishment with brother Zahndrekh, as I see the matter, there is much room for leniency.’ He turned to Zahndrekh then, with what Obyron could have sworn was a smirk. ‘What say you, brother?’

Zahndrekh deflated further at this news – this was clearly the first he had heard of Obyron’s decision to move forward the troops, and it would look like nothing less than a usurping of his command in his moment of weakness. And worse, now he thought back on that moment of madness, Obyron could not fully convince himself it had not been.

‘No, no punishment,’ said Zahndrekh, in a near-whisper. ‘On the contrary. Three cheers for Obyron. Hurrah.’

The rest of the occasion somehow made Zahndrekh’s feasts with his nobles back on Gidrim look merry in comparison. Obyron’s master barely touched his empty chalice (which Setekh had made a big show of gifting him to replace his shattered vessel), and said perhaps one word for every five of the other nemesor’s. Still, in all of Setekh’s speech-making, Obyron at least had the opportunity to learn something of the pale lord’s recent history – or rather, those parts of it he wanted the vargard and his master to hear.

Setekh was a privateer of sorts, working as the Stormlord’s concealed asset in the dark gulf of the m’wt. In exchange for freedom to operate, and as penance for sins he did not choose to elaborate on, he had agreed to sacrifice his tomb world, and have it marked as lost to a supernova during the great sleep.

Since then, his small dynasty had been nomadic, based entirely aboard his fleet, and charged with furthering Sautekh interests among the Ghoul Stars. Largely, this meant pruning back the horror of the Drazak Bone Kingdom, and stopping Valgul’s vile reach from extending too far into the Eastern Fringe. But he was also an explorer of a kind, tasked with looking into places which had been dark since the War in Heaven and, where possible, stripping them of useful assets. This was how Setekh had come upon the eldritch cloaking technology his fleet and troops now moved under, and how, just recently, he had found Doahht.

‘You can imagine my thoughts, brother,’ said Setekh, pretending to chew on a hunk of meat. ‘I was taken aback, to say the least. A whole crownworld, lost somehow to wild sorcery, and its people replaced with mindless automata. Naturally, there was only one necrontyr I knew who was up to the task – and so I begged Imotekh to send for Zahndrekh.’

‘You are… most kind, brother,’ Zahndrekh acknowledged, looking like the flattery had slid off him like rain, and could find nothing more to say. Soon after that, Setekh suggested the old nemesor must be tired, and insisted he translate back to the Horaktys to rest. Zahndrekh did not argue. With one last, sad glance at Obyron, the nemesor put down his chalice, and vanished.

After Zahndrekh left, Obyron tried to make his own excuses, but Setekh – now with his oculars dimmed in the suggestion of a sly smile – would have none of it.

‘Come, Obyron, it’s time we spoke. Please, sit down with me.’ It was the first time Setekh had ever called Obyron by his name, and the first time he had ever heard him say ‘please’, even to another noble. But if it was meant to ingratiate him to Setekh, the gambit was poorly judged.

‘Lord nemesor, I am but a soldier, it is not my place–’

‘–to refuse an invitation from a lord of my rank, vargard,’ snapped Setekh. ‘Now, sit.’

Obyron sat.

‘As I implied before, I think maybe we have not conducted our relationship on the most mutually beneficial terms – neither now, nor in the past. In fact, perhaps I’ve misjudged you entirely. It’s clear you made a fine job of leading from the front, back there.’

‘I was not leading, lord nemesor, merely–’

‘Holding the reins while your master was… indisposed. Yes, yes, Obyron, I know how this story goes. You’re a loyal creature, a soldier through and through, never dreamed of power, and so on. But here’s what I can’t fathom – how is it that such a capable leader as yourself hasn’t… taken hold of the reins long before now? Let’s be realistic – it’s not as if you’d even have to do anything. Simply do nothing for as little as an afternoon, and there’d be enough knives in Zahndrekh’s back to forge a monolith from.’

Obyron stiffened in the seat, not quite believing the evidence of his auditory transducers.

‘My lord nemesor, you can’t be suggesting–’

‘I can suggest what I damn well please, but since the implication is not to your taste, let’s not dance around it. You should be leading the sons of Gidrim.’

‘Again – I am a soldier, my lord nemesor, not a noble.’

‘And so was our noble Phaeron Imotekh, once upon a time. A soldier, who became a general. And when he woke amidst the chaos of Mandragora, he became a phaeron.’

Obyron floundered a moment, before finding his words. ‘You have told me often enough to know my place, Lord Setekh.’

‘And well you should – well should we all. But where is your place, Obyron? These are wild days, vargard, and they grow wilder still. Who’s to say what’s ours for the taking? Codes of honour written for a dead race? Lords grown too weak for their thrones? No, my friend, no one can determine our fate now, save our very selves. What is yours?’

Silence hung above the table like a sword, before being broken by the soft click of Sepa’s claws – or Sata’s – as one of the beasts slunk into the shadows.

‘I have no wish for power,’ said Obyron at last, reiterating his most basic truth, in the hope it would steer him away from this black hole.

‘No, not for yourself, perhaps. But surely you’d wish to see the rule of the dynasties restored – and you really think that’s best achieved under Zahndrekh?’

Obyron could not bring himself to answer honestly, so he sat silent and let Setekh continue unanswered.

‘Let me put it this way – do you truly think we are here to exterminate the Severed one by one, hmm?’ Obyron had wondered, in all honesty. Nobody had explained the wider plan for the campaign to him, but then he had not expected them to: his job was to carry out plans, not to make them. Still, as the scale of the former crownworld’s opposition had become apparent, Obyron had come to foster serious doubts about what they were expecting to achieve here.

‘No, vargard. We’re not here on some sort of… pest control detail. Certainly, if we achieve our objective, we’ll extinguish Doahht’s threat, but we won’t do it by waiting for every warrior to walk into our guns.

‘Let me tell you something, Obyron. At the heart of this world lies a treasure of incalculable value to our people. And it lies in the same sanctum as the cores which house the spirit of this world. Our campaign must be a fast one – to move down through this world and breach that sanctum, before enough of the tomb is woken that we are overwhelmed. To achieve such a feat will require not only our combined might, but also leadership, untainted by either doubt or madness. Zahndrekh, noble vargard, is no longer possessed of such a quality. On Doahht, he has seen the very first sliver of the truth of the world, and it near cracked him. He is too gentle a soul for this new galaxy – you must act out of mercy, if nothing else.’

Obyron couldn’t say what angered him more. That the person who had tried to kill his master was so openly trying to turn him to the same cause, or that he was beginning to make sense. Fury blazed like sheet lightning across his engrams, and he had to stop himself smashing a fist through the nemesor’s table.

‘I have nothing but loyalty for Zahndrekh.’

‘Loyalty, Obyron, or love? Because if you think it’s the latter, you’re as deluded as your master. Biotransference cut away our ability to love, if ever we possessed it. There is no such thing.’

Lost for words, Obyron wondered if the best answer he could offer would be the blade of his warscythe. But in truth, so soon after the fight in the sepulchral hall, he wasn’t certain he could prevail – not with the skolopendra beasts so close at hand, and with the arsenal of tricks Setekh had no doubt picked up during his long pillaging of the m’wt. And besides, he couldn’t be sure the nemesor was wrong. So he opted, for the first time in sixty million years of fighting, to flee.

‘The hour grows late, my lord nemesor,’ he growled, forcing the honorifics into the sickly, perfumed air of the feasting chamber. ‘With your leave, I would continue to prosecute this war.’

‘So go, Obyron, by all means. Go and lead. Someone needs to raise the Sautekh banner alongside me. And when you come to realise what shall be necessary if we are to reach the treasures at the heart of this world, I believe I’ve made your course of action very clear.’

Before heading back to the stygian turmoil of the front, Obyron translated to the Horaktys to check on his master, in the hope that his demeanour during the feast had all been a cunning feint: that somehow, the nemesor would have brushed aside the trauma of staring into Doahht’s nightmare mirror, and would be his old self again.

Instead, he found Zahndrekh in the dome of dust and bare branches which had once been his pleasure garden, hunched over an ancient desk. It seemed he had been attempting to write poetry again. And while the nemesor’s verse was hideous at the best of times – not that Obyron was any real judge – this time, it looked as if he had lost his capacity for words altogether.

As the vargard walked softly to stand beside his master, he retrieved a sheaf of crumpled parchment from the floor, and unfurled it to find the page covered in wild, scrawling gibberish – a fevered brew of phoneme-glyphs and numerals that bore no relation to language. Was this Zahndrekh’s psyche finally collapsing in on itself, like the last embers of a dying star? When those tomb gates had been cracked open to reveal the horror within, had Zahndrekh broken too, as he had understood the full scale of what the necrontyr had damned themselves to?

Zahndrekh had been old by the time biotransference had come, but through all the gulf of time since, Obyron had continued to see him as the brash, youthful spirit he had first met on Yama. Now, though, he appeared truly ancient, a ruin as worn as the obelisks on the world below. To see him fallen like this, Obyron could not forgive himself for the years he had spent wishing Zahndrekh could see the truth.

Certainly, to see him bluster along with his delusions had been endlessly frustrating. But the pain of seeing Zahndrekh with his eyes open was worse than anything Obyron had felt since the C’tan biofurnaces had stripped away his flesh.

Obyron stood beside his master for a long time, waiting for him to acknowledge his presence, but all that came from Zahndrekh was the scratching of his quill. Eventually, after an hour, the nemesor spoke. And what he said hit Obyron like a gauss blast.

‘Who are you?’

Obyron returned to the front with thunder in his steps, and rage in his core, although he was no longer sure who it was directed at. He threw himself into the fighting the moment he was back, leading his lychguard on push after furious push against the tomb’s defenders. But no matter how fiercely he drove back the Severed, he could not drive the thoughts from his mind. Perhaps it would be better for the old general to be at rest, rather than tormented by the growing knowledge of his true nature. Perhaps, in its way, the betrayal Setekh was suggesting would be the greatest service he could offer, both to his master, and to the Sautekh throne. Perhaps killing Zahndrekh was love. It was hard to tell, thought Obyron, when you no longer had a heart.

Seven

For a time the campaign saw renewed success; in the days following the capture of the first sepulchral hall, the invasion force fought its way nine leagues underground, cutting through Doahht’s infested crust like a powerblade through flesh. Chamber after chamber was seized, each deeper than the last, and each quickly secured by the Sautekh crypteks to act as a translation anchor for the next push. The Severed continued to boil up from the dead world’s heart, but the spirit of Doahht was too vast, too ponderous, to adapt to the intrusion. Time after time, the once-lords who acted as command nodes were identified and eliminated, leaving the warriors around them baffled and helpless as reeds before a scythe.

Although Obyron hated to admit it, the assault had proceeded even faster when he had finally accepted Setekh’s offer of three legions of deathmark snipers. He had stalled at first, as Zahndrekh had always found the use of any sort of assassins distasteful against an honoured foe, but the deeper into the catacombs he fought without his master’s guiding voice, the more irrelevant his nemesor’s habitual scruples became. They might as well have been just another damaged engram, blackened by the fire of his exertions.

The truth was, Doahht’s cavernous spaces, and the command nodes’ habit of hovering above their legions, offered a perfect tactical environment for snipers. The silent warriors with their single sapphire eyes could snuff out the puppeted nobles from dozens of khet away, allowing the infantry to advance with little or no resistance. Obyron was always at the front, hacking down Severed by the hundred, but the violence did nothing to quench either his fury, or the deep misery beneath the veneer of his wrath.

By the time they breached Doahht’s long-cool asthenosphere, the process of conquest had become so efficient that the expedition’s vanguard was almost perpetually on the march, pausing only briefly to secure each new vault before moving on. Sometimes, they came upon whole decurions of unwoken Severed, heads slumped in their sleep-caskets, and the Sautekh scarabs fell on them to harvest their matter.

Frequently, as Obyron waited in the sepulchral chambers to marshal a new assault, he would look up and see – once again – those strange scrawlings carved over the wall friezes. And no matter how long he stared at them (he tried not to, but they always drew his eye), they remained incomprehensible, somewhere between mathematical notation and nonsense verse. The carvings made him think of Setekh’s words about secrets and treasure, and he wondered often what madness they were fighting their way to the heart of. But he did not let his attention linger. It was not his job to understand the ultimate goal of their campaign, or to ponder the mysteries of this world – he was here to defeat it. Why invite the agony of thought, when there was fighting to be done?

Eventually, the advance began to slow. Like some leaden behemoth growing dimly aware of scavengers at its heels, Doahht was becoming angry. And slowly, but relentlessly, it was learning. The world’s spirit began to designate ordinary warriors, buried deep in the ranks, as command nodes, robbing the deathmarks of their easy targets. Sepulchral assaults became ugly, grinding presses, threatening stalemate until the Sautekh crypteks could run an augury to determine the enemy’s likely nodal structure, and identify priority targets. The rituals took longer and longer as the spirit introduced greater variation in its command patterns, and the fights grew fiercer. And as they moved further down through the tombs, the enemy’s numbers seemed to increase exponentially.

Obyron was no stranger to hordes. His blade had spilled oceans of the fungal broth that passed for the blood of orks, and he had served his master through the cleansing of entire star systems overrun by the vile tyranids (Zahndrekh had thought they were a series of increasingly large hounds). Hordes of his own people, however, were a different matter. And despite the anathema of their condition, that is what the Severed were. Even degraded by time and ill maintenance, they were clad in the same self-repairing necrodermis as the Sautekh warriors, and possessed of the same grim resilience. One on one, they were little match for even the poorest of Obyron’s warriors, but the invasion force would be lucky to see that sort of ratio again, this deep in the world.

On the twentieth day of the campaign, the advance had ground to a halt altogether. Momentum had stalled in an enormous cavern, split by a fissure of terrible depth, and crossed only by three slim bridges. The chasm bisected the tomb galleries for leagues in either direction, and scouting forays by Setekh’s canoptek wraith squadrons had found no easier crossings within range of their nearest translation relay. The crypteks had divined a cost of weeks to carve out a route to another traversal point, and with Doahht growing more vicious each day, it was time they could not afford to spend.

Zahndrekh would have had a plan, but Zahndrekh was not talking any more, and while his silence endured, Obyron’s options as his regent were slim. Even if he had possessed the strategic genius to think around the problem – and he knew he did not – he could not enact any solution without openly wresting control of the Sautekh forces from his master. And of course, whatever strategies Setekh may have cooked up, he was clearly withholding his counsel until the vargard did exactly that. If that was the case, Obyron insisted to himself, the pale nemesor would be sorely disappointed. Because while there was still an enemy before him and a blade in his hand, Obyron could avoid the decision. And so, with only one option left, Obyron had elected to fight at the crossing point.

It was not going well. The numbers massing on the enemy’s side of the chasm were unfathomable, and it was taking everything they had just to hold them back. Artillery platforms had collapsed statuary across two of the three bridges, funnelling the unthinking mass of the enemy across the central crossing, but the Severed kept coming, in waves thick and slow as flowing mud. The press on the bridge was so thick that warriors constantly spilled from its edge and into the depths, but their numbers were inexhaustible.

Obyron’s were not. Fully sixty per cent of the expeditionary force was now committed to Doahht’s underground at any one time, and across every ship in both fleets, repair foundries were operating at full capacity. Their attrition rate was commendably low, especially compared with Doahht’s – the Severed world’s recall mechanisms were in poor repair, and often failed entirely, leaving fizzing heaps of slag in place of warriors after failed translations. But such were the reserves backed up in the planet’s depths, it barely mattered. Doahht could lose a thousand warriors for every one of theirs, and they would still run out first.

And that was presuming their supply lines held. Every day, the Severed World was opening new breaches into Sautekh-held vaults further up in the complex, forcing the committal of reinforcements to defence. Worse yet, Doahht’s translation-jamming protocols were growing more sophisticated by the hour, slowly constricting the bubble within which the invasion force could reliably transmit both communications and fresh troops. Even the ghostwalk mantle, which Obyron had been arrogant enough to assume would always transcend Doahht’s capabilities, seemed of dubious utility now.

This nightmare of logistics and sorcery was not Obyron’s domain. Whatever Setekh might have wanted him to be, he had never been the mastermind behind Gidrim’s successes – merely the muscle which kept it safe. And without Zahndrekh to show him the way forwards, no matter how maddeningly obtuse the route might often be, all he could do was keep flailing at the dark.

‘Lychguard, advance! For Gidrim! For the nemesor!’

These seven words were the only ones Obyron had spoken aloud for days, yet he had bellowed them so often that they had lost nearly all meaning to him. They were not even necessary; he could signal the advance with the same subconscious ease as moving his own feet forward. But still he cried them out since, thin as they were, they were the only illusion of companionship he had left.

The lychguard advanced, for the one hundred and sixteenth time, into the madness of the bridge. For three khet to either side of them, the invaders’ side of the fissure was alight with green gauss fire, answered by a storm of red from the opposing side. The metal surface of the bridge glowed dull carmine beneath their feet, hot enough to have blackened mortal flesh. It was now six days into the battle of the chasm, and the energy released by the hundreds of millions of gauss shots fired had heated the cavern to infernal temperatures. The rock itself glowed, as if the spirit of Doahht, blazing red in the oculars of the Severed, had swollen to possess the entire battlefield.

And the front line had still not moved. Dozens of times, Obyron had led his vanguard to the opposite side of the bridge, only to be beaten back before the toehold could be secured. The battle had boiled down into a maddening, endless fugue, and Obyron swore his chronosense was beginning to break down entirely. Although he had no need of sleep, he would usually spend a few hours each day cycling parts of his mind through shutdown, in order to maintain its efficiency. But there had not been a moment for rest since they had entered the cavern, and as a consequence, he was plagued by memory leaks.

‘Lychguard, advance!’ he commanded again, as he crashed bodily into the front rank of the Severed, driving a wedge through the crowd and sending warriors tumbling into the abyss on either side. ‘For Gidrim! For… the… nemesor!’ His words faltered at the end of the command, vocal routines flooding with trash-glyphs as his mind suffered a brief feedback cascade. But the seizure was only brief, and besides, the sound had been drowned entirely by the fury of the clash.

The time had long passed where there was any point in form or finesse – after this many assaults, the struggle for the bridge was a matter of brute force, and Obyron fought with a basic ferocity that would have appalled Zahndrekh. He laid into the ranks of the Severed like a pit fighter, smashing warriors to the ground with his shoulders, and sweeping them aside with the haft of his scythe. He hammered away with his blade, jamming it into faceplates and puncturing ribwork, advancing kubit by kubit along the bridge through the vented reactor gas of his foes. His lychguard advanced behind him: a wall of blades, hacking apart the Severed left reeling in his wake.

But every time they charged the bridge, they made slower progress. Much of Doahht’s force was still made up of common warriors, and indeed, many of them were now on their third or fourth trip to the front, missing limbs and leaking fluid from poorly mended wounds. But there were plenty of fresh bodies alongside them, and they were joined by more powerful reinforcements. Somewhere around the sixtieth assault, Obyron had begun to encounter the occasional phalanx of immortals among the press, and by now, the bulkier shock troops made up fully one-third of the opposition. They were just as sluggish and mindless as their brethren, but they took fractionally longer to cut down, and in a conflict of attrition on this scale, even the smallest alteration of the odds threatened to tip the scales of battle against them.

As Obyron reached the centre of the bridge’s span, a stack of glyph-pings materialised in the corner of his vision, begging his attention, but he paid them little heed. No doubt they would be another glut of status reports from the crypteks at the relay vault, offering him more bad news he could do nothing about. Since the advance had stalled, there had been little to celebrate: Severed aircraft were now being launched from silos at Doahht’s southern pole, and while they were still handling poorly, they were coming in such numbers that they would soon be able to challenge the expeditionary force for control of the atmosphere. In the last ping Obyron had bothered to acknowledge, there were even reports of enemy capital ships awaking on the outskirts of the system, disgorged from the pocket dimensions where they had waited out the aeons.

Rage surged through Obyron’s limbs as he dismissed the pings from his vision, and he made use of the energy to barrel into a quartet of Severed immortals. Air superiority? Fleet movements? These were not the concerns of a soldier. These were matters for Zahndrekh – old ones take him! – and the old fool was still holed up in his ridiculous garden, wallowing in cowardice. It hurt, almost physically, to curse his master’s name, but Obyron could see things no other way. Zahndrekh had failed him, but more importantly, Zahndrekh had failed the Stormlord.

Not for the first time that day, temptation gripped the vargard’s mind. It would be so simple: all it would take would be one translation back to the Horaktys, one short walk to the nemesor’s pleasure garden, and one swift stroke. It would be over quickly, and the Sautekh forces would accept him as their rightful commander. Then, under the cunning hand of the pale lord, they might finally find a way to put an end to the horror of Doahht. Repulsive as it was, it seemed increasingly inevitable, and Obyron had a dreadful suspicion it was what the Stormlord himself would have willed, were he here.

However, it was also what Setekh willed, and that alone was enough to stay Obyron’s hand. Millennia of enduring Gidrim’s feudal politics had given the vargard a keen sense for the stench of manipulation, and his mind was not yet so eroded by the fight that he could not catch a whiff of it here. Setekh was letting him drown in the immensity of command; letting things play out until Obyron saw betrayal as the only way out. The pale nemesor could not make an open assault on Zahndrekh’s power, as the infighting would collapse the campaign planetside, so he was waiting for Obyron to do it for him.

But while Zahndrekh had been brought low by the sickness in his mind, Obyron refused to stop believing he could recover. Setekh, by contrast, would never stop being a complete bastard. While there was still hope for Zahndrekh – and there had to be – Obyron could not stop fighting in his name. Planting his feet on the smoking bridge as the next wave of Severed came in, Obyron shut down his oculars for a moment, and brought to mind the last time he had seen his nemesor. Who are you? Those had been Zahndrekh’s last words to him, as he had looked up from the depths of his madness. The vargard had been too stricken then to find an answer, but now he knew his response. Obyron brought his oculars back online, and raised his blade.

‘Lychguard!’ he roared, kindling the embers of his conviction into renewed fire. ‘Adv–’

The command was lost to an almighty blast of red fire, and Obyron found himself thrown backwards. Pure luck kept him from plummeting into the chasm, and instead he landed on his back, skidding across the surface of the bridge in a shower of sparks. He barely had time to roll and rise to his knees, before another blast came in, just kubits away. This time he managed to keep his footing, but already another volley of fire was coming in. Barking an order to retreat, he scrambled towards the Sautekh side of the fissure. There was no way they could hold the bridge under a bombardment like this – the first blast alone had wiped out the front rank of his lychguard, and scoured away thirty-two per cent of his own reinforced necrodermis. By the time he made it back to the line, there were only eight lychguard with him.

As more shots arced in to pummel the mass of the Sautekh infantry, Obyron shot a quick glance at the other side of the chasm, and what he saw filled him with despair. Arrayed along an outcropping of masonry, oculars glowering through the boiling air of the cavern, were a full phalanx of Severed Destroyers, and at their heart towered one of their lords.

Destroyers were, without doubt, the worst of all who had once called themselves necrontyr. Zahndrekh had always found them beyond repugnant, to the extent where Gidrim’s subordinate lords were forbidden from fielding them, and even Obyron – who had never shared his master’s sentimentality – hated them with a passion. Driven to nihilistic rage by the trauma of biotransference, they were true monsters, without even the slightest vestige of civility or reason remaining to them. Their hulking bodies retained little of the necrontyr form, as they had lost all hope of returning to it: they had made themselves weapons.

The emergence of Severed Destroyers, Obyron reflected, was really not good news at all. Mortification flooded through him, as he understood what the message glyph he had dismissed during the assault must have been warning him of. How many lychguard would he have retained, had he heeded it? Even as he considered this, the battery was laying waste to the Sautekh force. Gauss cannon blasts were raining into the crush of troops at the bridge’s anchor point, obliterating warriors by the dozen. In the face of such devastating firepower, recall attrition would be horrendous. And worse, Obyron had no counter – he had been so focused on the endless, boneheaded assaults on the bridge, he had done nothing to anticipate such a change in the enemy’s force composition.

He watched the annihilation of his master’s army, gripped by a terrible paralysis. Yet more glyph-pings flooded his vision, as subordinates begged him for instructions, but he could not answer. Finally, he had reached a problem he could not solve by trudging forwards with his scythe, and he felt shame burn through him. He did not know what to do.

Obyron dragged his chronosense down, slowing his perception to the point where the Destroyers’ gauss rounds seemed to drift across the gulf like clouds of flame. But he could not stop time – he could only hide in it, fleeing from millisecond to millisecond as they were seared away beneath him. It was like mortality, in a way, although he had never feared death half so much as he had feared failure.

Finally, after subjective hours had passed, he resolved himself to call on Setekh for help. Much as it would disgrace him, it was surely preferable to watching any more of his comrades vanish in clouds of raging ions. But then, as a nimbus of ice-blue light blazed into existence at the apex of the bridge’s span, he realised he would be spared the indignity.

Even down in the dregs of creeping time, it was fast: one moment, there was nothing on the bridge, and then there stood Setekh, cloak shimmering with the energies of translation, with his canoptek hunting beasts at his side. As Obyron released his chronosense, the nemesor planted his staff on the bridge with a crackle of blue lightning, and thrust the palm of his left hand towards the Severed, radiating lordly defiance. With a sound like a leaden bell being struck, a shockwave raced from his palm, knocking rows of the Severed from their feet down the length of the cavern. Even the Destroyers were staggered, rocking backwards on their repulsor platforms before the force of the blast. Obyron had never seen such a thing, but then who knew what ancient treasures Setekh had found in the depths of the m’wt?

For the briefest instant following the shockwave, the cavern seemed silent, before Setekh filled it with an echoing cry of command.

‘Sepa, Sata… cast off!’ Rearing in delight, the twin constructs emitted a shrill chittering, and raced forwards. Almost immediately, they were under a hail of fire from the massed ranks of the Severed, but the beasts appeared to shimmer in and out of reality, letting gauss fire pass harmlessly through them, and dipping in and out of the bridge’s matter as if it were water.

Like twin missiles spiralling towards a target, the hunters flowed across the chasm’s crossing, and plunged into the mass of the Severed. The rust-red warriors stabbed and hacked with their bayonets, but slow-witted as they were, they barely raised sparks. Occasionally, one of the canoptek creatures would lunge to scissor a warrior in half with their mandibles, but Obyron knew all too well this was just play – once the beasts had a target in mind, they would not be distracted.

Indeed, within moments, the creatures had fallen on the battery of Destroyers, squirming like eels in a hot pan as they clambered over their bodies and snipped away limbs. Then, Sepa (Obyron thought it was Sepa) had slithered up behind the Destroyer lord, and was gripping its hull in an embrace of spiked claws. Like one hand working in concert with another, the second of the beasts – Sata, he supposed – reared up before the pinned Severed, and twisted its head this way and that, as if admiring a morsel of meat. Quick as lightning, before its victim could even raise its cannon, the skolopendra struck, and the lord’s head fell to the floor with a dull thud.

All at once, the enemy fell into confusion, formations collapsing as their command node was snuffed out. Here and there, knots of order were forming as Doahht assigned new hierarchies – it was getting faster and faster at reorganising its nodal structure – but it could not restore cohesion in time to recover the advantage.

Capering almost playfully among the disoriented Severed, the two canoptek beasts chewed the rest of the Destroyers into scattered fragments, before scampering back across the bridge and butting their heads affectionately against their master’s armour. Patting his charges regally, Setekh gave the order for the infantry to open fire once more, and as the gauss storm began anew, he strode from the bridge with his beasts in tow. Obyron was already rushing forwards to the chasm’s edge, assembling a new detail of lychguard. With the enemy robbed of its strength by the elimination of the Destroyer lord, there was every chance an assault across the bridge might hold, this time.

But despite the vargard’s most desperate, illogical hopes, Setekh was not leaving the cavern. He was heading straight to intercept Obyron, radiating cold anger. As the nemesor closed on him, he did not slow, but instead transferred his momentum into a vicious backhand blow across Obyron’s jaw. And despite being nearly twice the slender lord’s mass, Obyron was stunned enough to be sent reeling, taking a step back to steady himself from the blow.

‘Enough of your foolishness with the damned bridge,’ snarled Setekh, loud enough to carry down the front. ‘You know as well as I this war will not be won in this blasted cavern, and I am growing tired with your procrastination. Why do you waste your time? Even if you do take this scrap of stone, you’ll only be bogged down at the next bottleneck.’

Suppressing his rage at the admonition, and finding shame beneath it once more, Obyron bowed his head as Setekh continued, this time in an exasperated, conspiratorial hiss.

‘Do what needs to be done, Obyron. I have shown clemency in forgiving you the mistake of this prolonged indecision, but I do not make a habit of repeating my mercies.’

‘If I am to do this,’ said Obyron, straining not to let his despair show in his voice, ‘please, at least… tell me what we are fighting for.’

‘For our very survival, thanks to your tardiness! For every hour you’ve dawdled here, our odds of ever making it away from this rock have dwindled. But despite your insolence in asking, I can find the generosity to tell you the truth, in the hopes it will be enough to stir you from inaction.’

As Setekh steered him away from the massed troops, Obyron wondered why he did not know the truth already, but he listened anyway.

‘If you had not already pieced it together for yourself, I did not stumble across Doahht in the throes of its awakening, or by accident. It was the object of a long and arduous search, a trail of legends and ghost stories centuries long, and borne from the faintest, most outlandish rumours.’

Setekh gestured at the ancient stone of the cavern wall, with a sneer of disgust.

‘This world was silent as dust when I found it, and the last thing I wanted was to rouse its senses. But if Doahht truly held what it was reputed to, then the hornet’s nest had to be broken open.’

‘What does it hold?’ asked Obyron. At that, the pale nemesor gestured up at the soaring wall of the cavern, where the tomb-friezes were overlaid by that same, jagged scrawl of glyphs that had become more and more prevalent as the expedition had moved downwards.

‘You’ve seen these carvings? They were the work of one creature, it is rumoured.’ Setekh slipped into the tone of a court storyteller at this point, and it swiftly became apparent that he enjoyed the sound of his own voice at least as much as Zahndrekh.

‘A lone cryptek of singular genius, who woke from sleep hundreds of millennia before his time, and long ahead of the rest of his crownworld. As far as he knew, he was the only necrontyr awake in the whole slumbering vastness of the galaxy, and the isolation… made him strange.’

Setekh sighed, and ran a finger over the carvings.

‘He spent an age down here in the dark, consumed by wild theory, and scrawling his workings on the walls. And then, when at last he had reached his conclusions, he found they were more than even his capacious mind could hold, and his sanity cracked. But in his madness, he built something – an engine of sorts, at the world’s centre – whose purpose we can barely guess at.’

‘A weapon?’ asked Obyron, sensing the obvious. He and Zahndrekh had been on many campaigns to deal with planetary superweapons, and those which had actually functioned had generally ended up in Gidrim’s arsenal. They were nothing new to him.

‘No. Not a weapon. Salvation.’

Obyron froze at this, feeling a shiver at the very root of his mind. What did the nemesor mean?

Setekh elaborated. ‘Whatever this engine was, when the cryptek activated it, the mind of every being interred here – from the phaeron himself to the lowliest warrior – disappeared. That’s why our esteemed friend the autonomous spirit is now using everything in this world as a toy.’

‘So their minds were wiped?’ asked Obyron, confused.

‘Not just wiped, Obyron. If the stories are to be believed – and from everything I can make out of these carvings, they are – the minds of the dynasty were… transported. Spirited away, to be restored elsewhere. Where, I do not know. It may not even have been in this reality. But if the text on these walls suggests what I suspect, they were born anew, in bodies of flesh.’

Obyron heard the words, but he could not quite parse them. He had come, over the long years, to understand hope as merely a lighter shade of despair. But this was the real thing. The phantom of a heart caught in his chest, and he shivered all over with the ancient memory of sunlight on real skin. If this was real, it could be the answer to the necrontyr’s curse – the solution to their miserable condition. To think of it was more a relief, even, than thinking on the release of death. It was life. Setekh gave him a moment to let the enormity sink in, then carried on.

‘You can perhaps now understand, vargard, why I realised Doahht had to be woken. For how could I know of such a thing, and not seek to bring it to the throne of Imotekh? Even if it was only the faintest possibility, a tall tale gibbered by the wretches of Drazak, what risk would not be worth taking to find out for sure?’

‘And so you sent word to the Stormlord, and asked for Zahndrekh. Even though you knew he was too soft for the task?’

‘Well, I didn’t know it,’ said Setekh, inspecting the talons of one hand, ‘I suspected it, based on reports from Gidrim. And alas, so it has proved to be. But in truth, it was not Zahndrekh I was after.’

Setekh’s anger had long cooled now, to be replaced with something far smoother, yet Obyron liked it no more.

‘Oh no, vargard. It was not the mind of Gidrim’s war machine I had need of, so much as its body. Zahndrekh’s armies have barely known defeat since Yama – as you well know – and I saw enough in those early days to know where the true strength of them lay.’ Setekh gave him a look then that bored through him, and for a moment he was back in that humming marsh, fighting off the beasts at his master’s door.

‘Me,’ said Obyron.

‘You. And yes, I’m well aware we’ve seen each other as enemies, largely thanks to your love of your master. But it is that same love which now threatens to undo this entire operation. And you must understand, Obyron – the necrontyr have never been creatures of love. If you can overcome this weakness, and rally the armies of Gidrim beside me, then we may yet have every chance of changing the destiny of our people.’

Obyron could not answer. He felt as if he was sinking into the ground beneath the weight of what Setekh had said, and could only shake his head, as if that would make it all go away.

‘You must go now, Obyron. Go, and cut yourself free from the past. Let an old general rest in the glories of the past, and forge the future with me.’

Setekh clicked his fingers to rouse Sepa and Sata, and turned to leave. As he departed the cavern, the warriors parted before him with a wave of his hand. And watching him recede through the crowd, Obyron knew, with bone-cold certainty, that his mind was made up.

Eight

Obyron walked away from the battle of the chasm, and prepared to make his translation up to the Horaktys. He was in no great hurry. Even though the fight behind him had once again reached its full, grinding intensity, all sense of urgency had left him. The front would hold without him, and Setekh was right – neither the campaign, nor the fate of the necrontyr, would be settled on that bloody bridge.

Walking through the supply corridor leading back from the cavern, he shouldered his way through the flow of reinforcements, marching onwards with the same dull clanking as the Severed. None of them even turned to face him as he brushed them aside, and looking at their expressionless faces, he was made freshly, bitingly aware of what they were. Of what he was, too.

At the corridor’s end, he reached the vault serving as the expeditionary force’s forward muster point, where fresh troops were translated in to replace losses at the chasm. The chamber flashed with pulse after pulse of actinic green light, chasing the shadows into the furthest corners as each new phalanx arrived through the interstices.

As soon as he entered the room, a small cloud of scarabs flocked to him, eager to speed the repair of his necrodermis from the damage it had suffered on the bridge. Usually, he would have endured the ministrations of the drones, but now he swatted them away like flies. He’d prefer the agony of the burns to their pestering, and right now, the touch of the things repulsed him. Barely moments after he finished shooing away the canopteks, a gaggle of fastidious crypteks was upon him, waving tablets and plying him with logistical reports. If anything, they were more irritating than the scarabs had been, so he waved them away too, growling with irritation. The time was long since passed when he could hide in the minor details of the war.

Urging himself to act before he could think any further, Obyron stood at the centre of the vault, and began to cast the ritual of translation. The whispering energies of the interstices had just started to gather at his feet, when he broke off the casting. No. He could not do this, not yet. He needed a moment, just a moment, to fortify himself. He needed to be alone.

With a deep ache at his core, Obyron made his way to a small antechamber off the main vault, found a chunk of masonry, and allowed himself to finally sit. As he settled on the rock, he felt the full weight of his body for the inert metal it was, and he leant against his scythe as if he might collapse without it.

Obyron’s great and only talents were fighting and waiting, and now, at last, he could not take refuge in either. He had to act, and whatever he felt about Setekh, he knew the nemesor was right. The necrontyr had not conquered known space with loyalty, or with love. They had won the stars through ruthless brilliance, and the sheer will of individuals to carve out their ambition on the cosmos.

He looked up at the wild scrawlings on the chamber’s wall, and thought of what Setekh had said. If there was even the slimmest chance this trail of madness might lead to the ends suggested, it would be worth any sacrifice to get there. On the scales of his people’s fate, the price Obyron had to pay would be infinitesimal – merely the culling of one speck of weakness, to make way for the strong. But for him, it was everything. It felt as if he were preparing to walk into a furnace. Still, he would walk into anything if it was his duty to do so. Obyron could no more ignore duty, than gravity. And so, with a deep and rumbling sigh, he began to lever himself from the rock.

‘Are you all right, old chap? You seem rather glum.’

Obyron’s initial reaction was complete panic, as he had clearly lost his mind. Finally, the exertions of the campaign had stacked up and, under the crushing pressure of his decision, his mind had snapped like a twig, and he was hearing voices. But no: the voice was entirely real, and so was its speaker. Standing a few kubits behind him, in the shadows of the antechamber, was Nemesor Zahndrekh, draped in a cowl of rough cloth.

Obyron had many, many questions. But they all piled into one another on the way to his vocal actuators, and what came out surprised even him.

‘My lord,’ said Obyron, ‘what on Gidrim are you wearing?’

‘A disguise, dear friend!’ proclaimed Zahndrekh, with a flourish. ‘I’ve concealed myself as one of the peasantry, in order to make my way down here without being bothered.’

Obyron was now completely sure he had gone mad, but since his mind had run away from him, he felt he might as well see where it was off to.

‘It’s these carvings, you see,’ continued Zahndrekh. ‘They’ve been vexing me ever since we first made planetfall, but I think I’ve finally made some sense of them. As you well know, I’ve always been somewhat of an amateur mathematician, and a poet besides. And… well, I rather think at last my little hobbies have paid off. Hah! Who knew that metrical verse would turn out to be such a powerful thing, eh?’

Obyron had no idea what the nemesor – or at least the hallucination of the nemesor – was talking about. But he cared as little as he ever had at such times. Whether real or not, it was such a joy to hear the old general’s ramblings, he could have endured a thousand years of them without moving from the spot. But still, on the off-chance this was Zahndrekh, and not the madness of the tomb speaking, he felt he should at least attempt to make sense of the situation.

‘But my nemesor… the pleasure garden… you were… I thought you were lost, my lord.’

‘Well, it wasn’t my finest hour, I’ll admit. And it’s true. I did feel rather… lost, for a time. But there’s no quandary without a solution, my good fellow, not even the one we’ve found ourselves in. And do you know, I’ve got a tremendous hunch that I’ve found that very solution. I’ll explain along the way – time is short, after all.’

Obyron’s mind was struggling to keep up with the escalating lunacy of the vision. ‘On the way where, my lord?’

‘Well, if you’re up for it of course, we’ve got something of an excursion to make.’

Obyron felt a note of concern, then. Because to talk to a hallucination was one thing, but he had been around madness enough to know that to start acting on the suggestions of one could be unwise.

‘I know this sounds a little rash, but I rather need you to take me to the front line, and then… oh, blast, there’s no point dancing round it. I need you to jump into that big damned hole in the ground with me.’

Letting the nemesor’s words echo around his exhausted mind, Obyron found himself less perturbed than he might have been. On the one hand, the suggestion that he should leap into a measureless abyss was exactly the sort of thing a malignant hallucination would suggest. But on the other hand, it was even more the sort of thing Zahndrekh would come out with.

Either way, the thought of jumping into the chasm was preferable to the task he had been working himself up to before this vision. The task which, he now realised darkly, had moved that much closer into his reach. Zahndrekh was now standing well within his warscythe’s striking arc, and its blade would very quickly differentiate reality from fiction.

After a long moment of consideration, Obyron reached his conclusion. There was one very simple way, ultimately, to decide on his course of action.

‘My nemesor,’ he said, locking oculars with Zahndrekh, and knowing it might be the last exchange they ever shared. ‘Is that an order?’

‘Well of course it is, you bloody fool. You’re my vargard, aren’t you? So it’s one hundred per cent an order.’

And that was that. Obyron nodded once, as the crushing weight of responsibility lifted from his shoulders, and did his master’s will.

After he had been falling for an extremely long time, Obyron began to wonder if he had made a terrible mistake.

With the chasm’s walls rushing past him at considerable speed, it was all too easy to dwell on the possibility that he might have just denied his entire culture the possibility of salvation, on the orders of a hallucination. Then he hit the ground.

Obyron was puzzled at first, as he was entirely intact. Although his body was more robust than the voidborne warships of many lesser species, it was still extremely heavy, and he would have expected at least partial dismemberment after a fall like that. But if anything, his landing seemed as gentle as if he had merely toppled a few kubits. And he had fallen onto a metal surface, which was just as unexpected.

He began recalibrating his oculars to adjust to the darkness, but there was no need, as a bank of green lights bloomed to life right in front of his face. Obyron recognised the pattern immediately; he had landed on the crescent wing of a catacomb command barge – one of Zahndrekh’s own – with its hull still frosty from the void, and crackling from the residual energy of a rapid translation.

‘How’s that for precision?’ quipped Zahndrekh, oculars glowing across at him from the vessel’s other wing, and gesturing proudly at their chariot. Obyron was speechless. Had Zahndrekh just translated the barge right under their feet, while he himself had been falling? Even without Doahht’s jamming field, which now had an iron grip on everything past the bridge’s midway point, to attempt a translation precise enough to place the barge beneath them – and at a matched velocity, too – was lunacy. Or sorcery. At the very least, such a feat could not have been achieved by someone who refused to accept they were a machine. Was this it? Had Zahndrekh just come to cheerily accept the nightmare of undeath, as if it were an unfortunate gambling debt?

‘Ha!’ crowed Zahndrekh. ‘No idea whatsoever how I managed that, but I had a feeling it would work. The dullards didn’t think to block translations initiated from beneath the front, did they?’

There was no arguing with that. As rapidly as Doahht was now adapting to the invasion, there was no way it could have predicted something so completely bizarre. And so there they were, in the lightless cellars of the world, with a single command barge, and nothing but stone and wind around them.

‘Where to?’ asked Obyron, settling himself into one of the barge’s pilot stations.

‘Down, my good vargard,’ said Zahndrekh, reclining into the vessel’s throne. ‘Down, to the heart of the world.’

Obyron flew the barge onwards and downwards, through the honeycombed immensity of Doahht’s interior. It was as if they were plumbing the depths of a cold and lightless ocean, bottomless beneath a sky of stone. Like most major tomb worlds, Doahht had been hollowed out long ago, its mantle chewed through by swarms of mining constructs in order to provide the raw material for its fleets and armies. To keep the crust above from collapsing, the diggers had left columns of rock leagues thick, but the spaces between them were large enough for fleets of voidcraft to pass through.

In this vaulted expanse the nemesor’s barge seemed impossibly small, a mote of dust drifting through a titan’s crypt. They were not alone, however. From time to time, they would see red lights drift by in the distance – Severed canopteks, patrolling aeons-old maintenance routes – but the constructs never altered course to intercept them, nor did they even appear to register their presence. Clearly, Doahht’s spirit had not made provisions for an intrusion so recklessly deviant from its stolid comprehension of war, and so its sensory nodes were not on the lookout for a renegade nemesor and his bodyguard, leagues below enemy lines. They were, in practical terms, invisible.

And so, with nothing to check their progress, they flew on, little more than a rogue datapoint in a mind whose senses spanned a planet. As it became apparent they would not be challenged, their tense watchfulness segued into a sort of companionable silence. Obyron kept himself occupied with the smooth descent of the barge, while Zahndrekh gazed up at the gloom-shrouded vault that crowned the underworld, occasionally making thoughtful noises to himself. The wind moaned softly through the planet’s carcass, and for a fleeting instant, all was peace. But tempting as it was to try to prolong it, Obyron knew he could not. After a lifetime spent wishing his nemesor would shut up, he found he could not wait any longer to hear the old general’s thoughts.

Even so, it was hard to know where to start. Obyron spent a good while grappling with the phrasing of his opening question – even for someone without a soul, he was no wordsmith – but eventually he ran out of patience, and spoke his mind directly.

‘My lord Zahndrekh.’

‘Hmm? Oh – yes, dear servant?’

‘What… would you say… were you… made of?’ It sounded ludicrous, now he said it aloud, and Zahndrekh responded with a laugh so loud he feared it would prick the transducers of every construct in the depths.

‘Sterner stuff than you, by the sound of it!’ crowed the nemesor, over the echo of his outburst. ‘What an absurd question. Why, I’m made of flesh and blood and old war stories, same as you are. Poor vargard, has this war cooked your head at last?’

Obyron rather suspected it had, but he was intrigued by Zahndrekh’s sanguine response all the same. That had not been the answer of someone who had finally realised their mind was forever cut off from their soul, imprisoned within the cold husk of a machine. Still, it was worth pressing further, just to be sure.

‘Forgive me, lord. I only ask because… well. When you saw the enemy, you were perturbed, were you not?’

‘Drastically, yes.’ Zahndrekh’s voice was grave, now. ‘I will admit, as I said before, that the revelation of our foe’s nature was a dark moment for me. And it’s singularly hard to make sense of, even now. At the time I just… couldn’t square it, Obyron. They were so like us, but there was something… wrong. So wrong it hurt to even think about. I developed a monstrous headache, and it altogether drove me out of myself for a time.’

Obyron listened, with some relief. The river of Zahndrekh’s mind, it seemed, had been undammed.

‘I couldn’t gauge what these creatures were at all. But at some point in that mire of despond, I seized onto reason. It was the carvings, Obyron. I found myself consumed with those first images of the gates, from before our serapteks made the breach. There was something in that strange writing, the very start of a thread I knew I had to follow. So I… oh no, Obyron, you’ll surely think I’m mad if I go on.’

‘No, lord,’ said Obyron, for whom the concept of madness was beginning to lose all meaning. ‘Please, continue.’

‘Well, I began to… dream, I suppose. And when I dreamed, I saw through the eyes of the soldiers as they moved underground – even through yours, dear friend. I could see through the eyes of the scarabs, as clearly as if I were watching an interstitial projection. I was a passenger behind their eyes, wandering the halls and taking in everything that was written there. And in time I sent the bugs deeper, scurrying through the cracks, to find more. In my waking hours, such as they were, I wrote it all down. Eventually, Obyron, I found the meaning of those glyphs, and the cloud that had settled on me was burned away.’

Obyron waited for his master to tell him the rest, until a meaningful cough told him it was his turn to offer a prompt.

‘What was the meaning of the glyphs, my lord?’ he asked, trying not to sound impatient.

‘They are a magic spell, Obyron, of some arcane potency. A soaring hybrid of algebra and poetry, clearly concocted by a most wicked sorcerer, for a most dreadful purpose. To turn an entire world of necrontyr into horrid robots.’

Obyron was not what anyone would call a jolly sort, but it was all he could do not to burst out in coarse, booming laughter. After everything Zahndrekh had seen, and all that mental turmoil, that was the conclusion the nemesor had reached. That a wizard had turned Doahht’s inhabitants into robots. The funniest part of it, of course, was that he was at least half right.

As if on cue, the barge passed out from behind the shadow of one of the vault’s colossal supporting pillars, and into a dull red glow. The glow was coming from another pillar, perhaps three leagues distant, which was wrapped around by spiralling bands of blood-red light. At first, Obyron took it for a river of molten rock, until he noticed the stream was flowing upwards round the pillar. As his oculars focused, he saw the light for what it was – the glow from the oculars and the chest-glyphs of millions of Severed, marching in lockstep. An ocean of rust and dull rage, marshalled forth from the pillar’s interior, and making its inexorable way up towards the crust.

That one vista made it clearer than any number of failed assaults in the chasm could ever have done: their invasion had been doomed from the start. There were probably more warriors on their way up that one pillar than there were in the entire expeditionary force, and as Obyron looked further into the distant gloom, he counted four other columns alight with the Severed. While it was a profound relief to have something like the old Zahndrekh back, unless he had saved his most incomprehensible brilliance for whatever came next, this was nothing but a moment of levity before the end. At the sight of the enemy’s numbers, Obyron felt a pressing need to be reassured that Zahndrekh did, in fact, have a plan.

‘Before we jumped, my nemesor, you said that studying the carvings had given you a solution to… the spell. May I ask what it is?’

‘I said no such thing!’ chided Zahndrekh, wagging a finger. ‘I said I had a hunch. Very different. But don’t fret, my servant – it does not become you. I’m sure something will come to me when the time comes.’

‘Of course, my nemesor,’ said Obyron.

After a long time – so long that Obyron had begun to wonder whether they would ever stop descending – they reached a point where they could go no further. Down here, the pillars of the world spread out into buttressed slopes like the roots of gargantuan trees, and Doahht’s thin atmosphere had condensed under such pressure that it was as viscous as water. The nemesor’s barge cruised over this unreal landscape for a long time, seeking its lowest point, until at last, in a broad valley between the roots of four pillars, the rock of the floor began to give way to patches of smooth, unreflective darkness.

‘There,’ said Zahndrekh, as they hovered over the blackstone plain. He was pointing at a raised dais of onyx, ringed in red light. ‘I’ll wager that’s where we’ll make ingress to the sorcerer’s lair. Set us down, and let’s have at it.’

Obyron brought the barge to a halt and, after he had helped his master down from the craft, they walked towards the ring of light, footsteps clinking in the silence. Now they were closer, Obyron could see the red ring was in fact three bands of glyphs, rotating counter to each other and fading in and out of brightness.

‘You know what that looks like to me?’ said Zahndrekh, with relish.

‘A series of rotating bands?’ offered Obyron, out of ideas.

‘No, oh beloved fool, it looks like a puzzle. And I love a puzzle. Now… where are my notes?’

Hurrying over to the dais, Zahndrekh fell to his hands and knees, and produced a sheaf of parchments from nowhere, which he then spread out beside him. When he had seen the sheets back in the pleasure garden, Obyron had taken them to be the nemesor’s poetry, but perhaps they had been mathematical notation. Or perhaps they were poetry after all. Maybe they were both simultaneously – sorcery was confusing at the best of times. Eventually he concluded that he had no interest in understanding, so long as Zahndrekh saw sense in it all.

He certainly seemed to. Over the hours that followed, the nemesor tutted and hummed and muttered to himself, utterly absorbed. Occasionally he would touch the tip of his staff to one of the rings with a sonorous chime, nudging symbols from one ring to another, and give a little cackle of victory. It was the same bookish joy that overtook him when he was in front of a campaign map – the kind Obyron had thought he would never experience again – and it was such a relief to see that he didn’t speed his chronosense by so much as a moment.

But even as it dawned on Obyron that this might well be the last moment of peace they ever shared, he knew he had to disturb it. He’d already initiated more conversations that day than he had in the preceding four centuries, but there was one more he had to start, and it was the most fearsome of all. Never once, in all his career as a soldier, had Obyron ever begun a conversation about his feelings. But there was a first time for everything, even when one was immortal, and if he didn’t do it now, he might never get the chance. So he went to kneel beside his master, and he spoke.

‘Zahndrekh.’

‘That’s Nemesor Zahndrekh to you,’ said the old general, without turning from his work, ‘but do go on.’

‘In the garden, as you worked on these notes… you asked who I was. Did you not recognise me, lord?’

Zahndrekh sighed in faint exasperation at the disruption, but then turned to Obyron with a look the vargard could only interpret as remorse.

‘I recognised you well enough, Obyron. But in that moment – and I’m ashamed to say it now – I doubted you.’

‘Doubted me, my nemesor?’ Obyron felt as if he had sprung a sudden reactor leak; as if his chest were venting gas. Had he displeased his master?

‘I was confused, my loyal vargard. And I’ll admit, I was hurt. I was increasingly sure Setekh was planning to move against me, you know, and that had rather shaken me to start with.’

‘But Setekh is your brother,’ protested Obyron, trying to feign conviction.

‘He might have been once, Obyron. But now, quite honestly, I think he’s up to no good. I think he’s led us here so he can take this magic spell for himself. Now I understand it, I fear the worst – that he intends to use it to raise an army of vile machines, and move against Lord Imotekh.’

Warped though Zahndrekh’s understanding might be, he had a point. Now Obyron thought back to his conversations with Setekh, he wondered just how truthful the pale lord had been in his insistence that he wished to bring Doahht’s treasure to Imotekh’s feet. If he did come to possess the answer to biotransference – or whatever it was that lay beneath them – why would he share it? It wasn’t as if he had shared any of the other marvels he had looted from the Ghoul Stars, after all. Obyron was just considering whether to tell Zahndrekh about the assassination attempt on Yama, when the nemesor waved the whole subject away in exasperation.

‘Ach! Enough of Setekh, he’s not the issue here. His betrayal I could handle – he always had it in him, ultimately. But worse, it seemed he was courting you, and I feared you would turn against me, when I needed you most.’

Obyron stiffened. Zahndrekh said he had seen through Obyron’s eyes in his ‘dreams’ – had he looked in on his audience with Setekh, following the feast?

‘After I turned you away in the garden, I was furious at myself. I had been sulking, Obyron. And I was sure, as each day dawned, that it would be my last. That you would come to usurp me, based on Setekh’s assurances of necessity. How could I have been so foolish? That bastard might have a silver tongue, Obyron, but silver cannot dent steel, and that is what you are. I should have had more faith in you. When I finally had the heart to assess the state of the ground war, I can’t tell you how my soul swelled, to find you still waiting at the front for me, unbowed by his persuasions. You still had faith in me, and so I had to return.’

Shame welled up inside Obyron then, at how close he had come to giving up on his master. How close he had been to striking him down. Would he really have gone through with his plans after the battle of the chasm, had Zahndrekh not appeared to him?

‘No,’ said Zahndrekh, resting a hand on the scarred armour of his shoulder. ‘I will always know my Obyron, even if I lose comprehension of all other things. Indeed, sometimes I wonder if I have lost some of my wits – if maybe I don’t see the world for what it truly is. But that will never matter, so long as I have you by my side. You are, in many ways, the stronger half of me. The better half. Even if you are an oafish, sandborn clod.’ Zahndrekh laughed softly at that, and clapped Obyron on the back.

‘Now, I’m sure you’ve had enough of this mawkish rot. Let me finish dealing with this contraption, and then let’s go and kill a sorcerer while we’re still two steps ahead of Setekh.’

‘Let’s do that,’ said Obyron, as an ember of something he had thought gone with biotransference flickered deep in his breast.

Zahndrekh did some more clucking and tutting after that, before rummaging through his parchments and cursing loudly.

‘There’s a bloody page missing!’

Obyron wondered what Zahndrekh meant, until he remembered. When they had last met, in the garden, Obyron had taken one of the pages of what he had assumed to be Zahndrekh’s poetry. He had been haunted with the feeling that he might never see his master again, or that if he did, he would not want to reminisce on their final encounter. And so he had slipped it into a pocket dimension, as a sort of keepsake. It was a matter of moments to summon it back, and he hoped to slip it beside Zahndrekh before the old nemesor could notice he had it. But no sooner had it appeared in his hand, than Zahndrekh’s own shot out to snatch it up.

‘You old thief, Obyron!’ cried Zahndrekh, delighted. ‘You rascal! Ah, but I always knew you for the sentimental fool that you were. And I’m grateful for it, too… If that page had been lost, well, we’d be hard-pressed to find our way out of this mess now, I don’t mind telling you. But as it happens… there it is.’ After a fair bit of chin-scratching and murmuring over the final page, Zahndrekh collected all the documents together, and tucked them away. Then, moving his staff cautiously to the inner ring, he tapped three symbols with smug precision, and waited. Nothing happened.

‘Oh,’ said Zahndrekh, crestfallen. And then, after a moment, he disappeared.

Obyron just had time to begin wondering where he had gone, before he vanished as well.

Nine

It was not like a normal translation. It was faster, and harder, slamming Obyron through the cracks in space-time with such violence that his whole body seemed to vibrate like a plucked string. Even so, his scythe was alight the instant he arrived, and he fell into a fighting crouch, ready to protect his master. There was no need, however; Zahndrekh was standing just a few paces away, face tilted upwards in awe as if stargazing for the first time.

Following Zahndrekh’s gaze, Obyron could see why. Above them soared a great black sky, twinkling with constellations of faint red stars, and at first, Obyron was sure they had been taken somewhere far from Doahht, to the very dying edge of space. But no; the floor they stood on was solid blackstone, dotted with crimson markings, and as his oculars followed it into the distance, it curved up over their heads in a titanic sphere, a league or more across. It took Obyron longer than he liked to realise what this was: it was Doahht’s core, and thanks to some ancient perversion of gravity, they were standing on its inner surface, with the world’s crust far below – or above – the soles of their feet. As usual, it was Zahndrekh who broke the silence.

‘I must say, this is much fancier than Gidrim. If it weren’t for the state of the place, I’d have to admit I was rather jealous.’

Now he had oriented himself, Obyron looked around them, and was forced to agree. As well as containing the cores that anchored the autonomous spirit, a tomb world’s central sanctum was usually where a world’s overlord was interred – and in the case of a crownworld such as Doahht, that would surely mean a phaeron.

But while this chamber had once been a crypt of stately magnificence, it had fallen hard into disrepair. The statuary was smashed, the dynastic banners were in tatters, and the floor was littered with stains, cables and tech-debris, with every clear patch daubed over with swathes of wild algebraic verse. In short, it looked as Obyron might expect a place to look, had a cryptek spent several hundred thousand years losing his mind in there.

But that rogue cryptek had certainly not wasted his time. Two khet away from where they stood, a jagged ziggurat began to rise from the sanctum’s floor, reaching its apex near the centre of the sphere. Long ago, its summit would have borne the phaeron’s cryptosleep sarcophagus. But now that was gone, replaced by a towering, spider-like scaffold of machinery. The entire rig was cloaked in thick, boiling mist, glowing scarlet from within, and spilling thick cables that ran down the pyramid’s slopes into countless other devices. Obyron was no expert, but he suspected that whatever engine lay at the heart of Doahht’s fate – whether it had redeemed its sleepers, or just damned them further – stood before them.

‘As I suspected,’ said Zahndrekh, with an air of dread. ‘A spell of such magnitude would require a quite remarkable apparatus in order to be cast, and this must surely be it. Obyron – let us ascend the peak and put a stop to its malign influence, so the poor necrontyr of Doahht can rest at last.’

Despite his best intentions, now it came to the task, Obyron couldn’t help but grapple with doubt. His master was clearly intent on smashing the engine – but what if it really could restore the necrontyr, in flesh and blood? What would he be throwing away, for the sake of loyalty? He told himself this was nonsense – that it had just been a tall tale Setekh had told him, because the pale lord had known it was what he wanted to hear. But faced with the engine and all its arcane power, he just couldn’t be certain. Perhaps between here and the summit he could find a way to reason with Zahndrekh, but he wasn’t counting on it.

And besides, there was a more immediate problem to hand: Doahht’s phaeron was rising from its grave.

He hadn’t registered the sarcophagus at first, taking it for just another piece of detritus at the foot of the ziggurat. But now its stone lid was shifting with a bone-deep grating, and a figure was emerging from within. Resplendent in an iridescent cloak and a grand headdress engraved with a stylised orrery, Doahht’s once-great king still cut an imposing figure, despite moving with the stiff clumsiness of a marionette. Obyron’s first reaction was pity: this was the rightful lord of a hundred stars or more, who had gone to sleep at the head of a mighty dynasty, but had never woken up. Once he had possessed a name that made billions tremble, but now his legacy was nothing, and he was little more than a drone, to be thrown in their way as the Severed World’s last, sad line of defence.

Woken too late, it would take the Severed lord time to reach full power – time it did not have, with Obyron and his blade just a few paces away. But the vargard could not simply despatch it like a sick beast. Even on his own account, Obyron could not conceive of treating a phaeron with such disrespect, even if it was just a husk. And Zahndrekh believed in nothing more than he believed in a noble’s right to a fair duel. Fallen though this creature surely was, the nemesor would no doubt insist that Obyron allow it time to prepare itself.

‘What are you waiting for?’ yelled Zahndrekh, throwing out his arm at the shambling atrocity, as if protesting the unfair ruling of a pit-fight umpire. ‘Stab the damned thing in the face!’

Well, that was a surprise, thought Obyron, as he shoved his scythe blade through the phaeron’s left ocular, and it collapsed back into its grave in a puff of red vapour. The vargard felt a flash of perverse satisfaction at how easily the foe went down. He had never killed a phaeron before, and although he relished the novelty, he thought it best not to dwell on it, in case he developed a taste for regicide. Then he noticed that Zahndrekh was applauding.

‘Very pragmatic, Obyron. Disrespect worthy of death, on paper at least, but no one need ever tell the Stormlord, eh? Now, as you were – let’s get to the bottom of this. Or the top. You know what I mean, I’m sure.’

As they reached the ziggurat’s summit, they entered the nimbus of charged mist that surrounded the cryptek’s edifice, and the form of the engine began to take shape. At once, Obyron recognised the cluster of casket-shaped cores that anchored the world’s autonomous spirit. Its thought processes would be distributed to some extent among the masses of the Severed, but it was bound – by design – to these physical units. After all, following their experience of the C’tan, the necrontyr had learned well enough the importance of keeping gods on a short leash.

The cores had been dismounted from their original mountings and hauled up here, where they had been plumbed into a great web of glowing cable. Thick bunches of tubes spilled from their access ports, winding round the pylons that formed the engine’s superstructure, and coming together at the heart of the machine. Following their twisting path, Obyron’s gaze was led to the hollow at the engine’s centre, where something horrible stared back at him.

Suspended in a cradle of sparking brackets, with its back arched in agony and its hands twisted into spasming claws, was the form of a necrontyr. Its single, blazing eye gave it away – this had to be the machine’s architect: the mad cryptek who had turned his crownworld into a monster. The creature’s body seemed somehow insubstantial, and painful to focus on, as if it were trapped perpetually in the instant of translation, and it was surrounded by a halo of something that was either blinding light, or throbbing darkness. The radiation emanating from the cryptek’s form would have been enough to turn any living thing into a slurry of broken-down cells, and the whole assembly threw out a ferocious, scorching heat.

Zahndrekh and Obyron stood on the summit before the thing, and stared.

‘Good grief,’ intoned Zahndrekh, in a whisper of horror, before adding a curse so brutally coarse it astonished Obyron. He had no idea Zahndrekh knew words like that.

‘What happened here?’ said Obyron, as a phantom shiver ran down the back of his neck.

‘It seems that whatever magic this thing sought to enact, it paid… a terrible price,’ said Zahndrekh, and Obyron murmured in assent. He could not begin to fathom what dark bargain the cryptek had struck in its meddling with the fundament of the cosmos. Had this been the final self-immolation required to seal the annihilation of every mind in Doahht? Or had it been a sacrifice – the taking on of a nightmarish fate in order to free a whole world from the shackles of biotransference? Perhaps it had been both. Obyron was grateful when Zahndrekh interrupted his thoughts.

‘My faithful Obyron. As you have ever left the thinking to me, take my lead now, and believe me when I say it will do us no good to think on this at all. Whatever this thing may be, it… should not. And it is connected, somehow, to whatever animates the ghouls of this world. Destroy it, and all of Doahht’s defences will collapse – at least for long enough that we may return to orbit and pound the place to atoms. Then we can put this foul interlude behind us, and have a much overdue conversation with our good friend Setekh.’

‘Why wait?’ said a languid voice from behind them, and Obyron turned around to find the pale nemesor leaning casually against a shattered statue of Doahht’s phaeron, at the edge of the summit. There was no sign of Sepa or Sata, but the vargard knew better than to presume Setekh had come alone. Anyway, the skittering beasts were far less dangerous than Setekh’s tongue, and Obyron didn’t intend to let the bastard say another word. Obyron charged: perhaps there was room for a little more regicide today, all things considered.

He made it about five kubits, before Setekh raised one palm and knocked him flat on his back, with the same blast of force he had unleashed on the bridge. The impact seemed to rock his mind even more savagely than it did his body, and as he struggled to lift himself, he had no choice but to listen as Setekh drawled on.

‘As I was saying, Obyron, there’s no reason not to speak sooner, rather than later. Indeed, maybe there’s still time for you to avoid making a drastic mistake.’

‘I’ve made no mistakes beyond listening to you,’ snapped Obyron, straining to rise with half-numb limbs.

‘So I lied,’ shrugged Setekh. ‘I’m astonished you ever assumed differently. But if it’s truth you want, so be it. Yes, I want Doahht’s treasure for myself. And yes, I’ve used you both to get hold of it. Zahndrekh might be a fool–’

‘I beg your pardon!’ interrupted Zahndrekh, but Setekh shushed him as if he were a child.

‘But he is a very clever fool, and I knew that if his mind was seeded with just the most tantalising hint of Doahht’s secrets, he’d eventually find a way to crack his way into this nut.’

‘In which case, why have you spent the whole campaign trying to convince me to kill him?’ growled Obyron, reaching a knee.

‘You bloody moron, Obyron. You don’t think I didn’t realise, after Zahndrekh’s little… collapse, that the best way to get you both back in fighting form was to try and drive you apart? A little jeopardy, a little intrigue, and there you both were… master and servant, back together at last, and ready to hand me Doahht on a plate.’

‘Hang on,’ interjected Zahndrekh, appearing rather lost in the whole exchange, ‘how did you get in here?’

In answer, Setekh just chuckled, and gestured at his staff. ‘Identical weapons, old boy. And not just in the decoration, either. They’re quantum-bonded. Where one goes, the other can always follow. Honestly, do you really think I would have been so gauche as to have them forged identically out of a sense of affection?’

‘Oh,’ said Zahndrekh, looking at the floor. But in the time it had taken Setekh to finish gloating, Obyron had regained his feet, and was advancing on the pale lord, braced in a low crouch.

‘All right then, Obyron,’ said Setekh, standing up straight. ‘I can see this will come to violence. You might even win. But before you engage, let me offer you one more truth.’ His eyes narrowed then, and Obyron paused mid-step. ‘That engine behind you? For all I understand, it really does exactly what I said it does. It sends whole worlds full of necron minds… elsewhere, and leaves behind empty bodies. That’s why I want it – as a weapon, to wipe out rival dynasties and puppet their legions. But for all I know – and there’s plenty of evidence in the cryptek’s workings to support the idea – the minds thus displaced might well end up somewhere… better. It’s your choice, Obyron. Join me, and you’ll be a traitor in the short term, but you might just save your people. Obey Zahndrekh, and you’ll be a good hound, but you’ll be throwing away what could be the answer to our damnation.’

Obyron thought carefully, slowing his chronosense to try to piece things together. But for all his attempts at analysis, all he could think of were his nemesor’s words, as he had sermonised on the barge above the battlefield during their previous campaign. Will without honour is nothing, I’m afraid. And infuriating though he surely was, Zahndrekh’s wisdom had never been proved wrong yet.

Without a further thought, Obyron cranked his perception suite up to near-maximum settings, and hurled his warscythe at Setekh. By the time the pale lord had time to cry out in shock, the blade was embedded in his chest, pinning him to the statue behind him through his central reactor. Although grave, the wound would heal – but it had never been intended as a killing blow. The action’s main purpose had been to buy Obyron time to counter the real threat. And so, as soon as the scythe’s shaft left his hand, he turned and sprinted for Zahndrekh, reaching the nemesor just in time to knock him out of the path of the pouncing skolopendra.

Of course, Setekh’s whole revelatory speech had just been a ploy to distract them both, as the canopteks had prowled up the sides of the ziggurat towards Zahndrekh. Obyron had acted with microseconds to spare. Even so, the odds were stacked against him. He’d fought these beasts before, and barely escaped with his life – and that had been without the prone form of Zahndrekh to keep from their snapping mandibles, or Setekh moments away from freeing himself and joining the fight. And as if that weren’t challenge enough, he’d just thrown away his only weapon besides his fists.

So, fists it was. Grabbing the antenna of the construct as it surged past, he wrenched with all his strength, steering the clattering abomination right into the path of its twin, as it leapt from the mist. Vaulting onto the back of the second creature – it was Sata, he saw now – he pounded away at its headcase with blows that would have shattered a tank’s armour, but left only dents in its shell. Still, it was enough – Sata was stunned long enough for him to move out of the way of Sepa’s next attack, so it only caught his forearm in its pincers, rather than his head.

His armour held, and so rather than try to shake Sepa loose, Obyron pulled the monster closer, gripping its bladed mouthparts even as they chewed at him. Reaching an arm round Sepa’s neck to take the beast into a crushing headlock, he let it bear down on him with all its weight, then pivoted suddenly, throwing the construct sideways. But Sata was already up, and striking. Once again, Obyron dodged, hoping to grab its antennae just as he had grabbed Sepa’s at the start of the fight. But his fists closed on nothing: the awful thing had phased out, just in time. No matter, thought Obyron, activating the ghostwalk mantle: he too had developed new tricks since Yama.

With the mantle online, Obyron could slip in and out of reality just as easily as either of the canopteks, and his training gave him the edge over their animal instincts. If they had been focusing on him alone, he would have been worn down quickly. But the skolopendra seemed intent on reaching Zahndrekh, and for all that he was no brawler, the nemesor was doing a decent job of evading them, ducking and weaving between the mechanical debris that littered the summit. Obyron himself flickered from spot to spot, blocking with his body every time one of the beasts had a clear run at Zahndrekh, and unleashing short flurries of blows whenever he could materialise behind one of them.

For all that, it was still a tenuous battle, and for every second the fight progressed, Obyron found himself having to increase the intensity of his perception suite in order to keep up with the skolopendra. He was already fighting on the ruinous metabolic plateau that had cost him so dearly during the battle of the first sepulchral hall, and if he pushed further, he would inflict catastrophic damage on what remained of his mind. But then, what else did he have to lose? Obyron pushed further.

As he tore a leg from Seta, he forgot the city of his birth. An armour plate torn from Sata’s back, as they wrestled in the shadows of the interstices, cost him the memory of how it felt to drink water. With every blow struck, another understanding deserted him, as if whatever remained of his mortal self was caving in beneath his fists. But still he fought on, to protect his lord.

Eventually, Obyron reached his limits. He found himself stood beside Zahndrekh, fists raised, as the skolopendra circled around them in the strange, dark glow of the cryptek’s engine. Both canopteks were heavily damaged by now, but they were by no means out of action, and it would take a monumental effort to keep them at bay. Obyron knew he could finish the monsters off, or at least cripple them for as long as it would take to deal with their master. But he also knew what that would cost, because it was the richest memory he had: Yama.

Could he really sacrifice that? Could he give up his most precious memories of his master – the very foundations their eternity together had been built upon – in order to save him? As the wounded constructs slithered forwards, Obyron glanced sideways at Zahndrekh, and Zahndrekh looked back with the strangest kindness, as if he understood. The vargard knew then that he had nothing to lose at all. He could forget every moment of Yama, but Zahndrekh would remember. And as sure as the void was cold, Zahndrekh would tell him those stories again. This time, they would be new.

Wishing he could smile, Obyron nodded to the old general, and pushed himself to a state so elevated he became lost in it.

A short forever later, Obyron woke, unsure of where he was, looking down a hill of broad black stairs at the smoking carcasses of two strange metal creatures. He was puzzled by that, and his body hurt very much. But he had the nagging feeling there was something he needed to deal with, and that it was possibly behind him.

Turning with the slowness of a sleepwalker, Obyron saw a sight he couldn’t piece together at all, until reality hit him like a hammer. That was Zahndrekh, his master, who he loved but couldn’t remember meeting. And he was fighting someone he didn’t know at all, but who he hated very much. They were fighting with staffs, in front of a horrible red light, and the person he hated was winning.

Running over, it felt as if the world were moving too slowly beneath his feet, but then he remembered what his chronosense was, and let it sink to its regular level. Things sped up considerably then, and in no time he was behind the person he hated. He found himself trying to calculate the optimum way of disarming his master’s assailant, but he was extremely tired, and so elected to take the most direct option. Obyron kicked the bone-coloured figure extremely hard in the leg, and he crumpled to the floor. Before he could get up, Obyron leapt on top of him.

Zahndrekh was saying something, and so was the person he hated, but Obyron couldn’t really hear them properly, over the sounds of his fists. They were making huge dents in the pale figure’s faceplate, and it felt very good, so he kept smashing them down. He paused after a while, to see if the person was dead, but he wasn’t. In fact, he was trying to speak again. But Obyron had had enough of that.

Hauling the battered body to its feet, Obyron grabbed it by the neck, and dragged it towards the horrible red light. It got hotter and hotter as he got closer, but Obyron didn’t care. There was another figure in the light – something with one eye – but Obyron did not really care about that either. The pale creature started shrieking then, but that just made Obyron more angry. He really, really wanted it to shut up. So he shoved its face in the light. The light burned his hands, and that was all right, because it was burning the person who he hated much worse.

The longer he held their head in the light, the brighter the light got, until it started to flicker and flare. Whatever was making the light, he was fairly sure he was breaking it, and that this was a risky thing to do. But he was even more sure it needed doing, so he carried on. At last, there was a very loud bang, and the light went out altogether. Something like a body fell from the place where the one-eyed thing had been, and turned to dust as it hit the floor. That was confusing. But the pale creature was still in his hands, and its face was black and melted now. It was still alive, somehow, but it wouldn’t be talking any more. So he walked back to where he had been standing when he woke up, and threw it down the stairs into the dark. As it hit the floor, he was fairly sure the things he had shattered earlier were crawling over to eat it. That was good.

Then, as messages he couldn’t understand blinked in and out at the edges of his vision, Obyron fell to his knees. He tried to get up again, but he only sank further down, and blackness rose to meet him.

When Obyron woke again, he tried to gasp, before remembering that he had no lungs. His vision was covered in glyph-pings: messages from his own systems, warning him of catastrophic damage, imminent shutdown and multiple failed attempts at reboot. Surveying the extent of the ruin he had inflicted on his own mind, he was astonished he had come back online at all. But there he was, sitting on the floor at the top of the ziggurat – and there was Zahndrekh, sitting beside him. He still had no idea how he knew Zahndrekh, but he was sure it would come in time.

Behind them, the engine at the planet’s heart – Doahht, wasn’t it? – had fallen into darkness, as had every light in the enormous chamber. The only illumination now came from his own running lights, and Zahndrekh’s, casting a pool of dim green across the darkness of the stone floor. Obyron felt peaceful. But as the structure beneath them trembled, and a deep rumble emanated from far below it, he suspected the situation was a little more precarious than it seemed.

‘Well fought, old friend,’ said Zahndrekh, with companionable warmth. ‘You really ought to have rested more, but we need to leave. I must commend your rather… straightforward method of dealing with the sorcerer’s engine, and it very much appears to have done the trick. Doahht has gone off like a light, and its legions with it. But without the engine, I fear the stability of the planet itself won’t last, so we’d be much better off in orbit. Are you ready for a short jaunt up to the Horaktys?’

Obyron nearly said yes, but then he remembered the engine’s true purpose. Or what it might have been – it was so hard to recall now.

‘But… our souls, Zahndrekh. The machine… it could give us our souls back. It could give us our bodies. Please, lord, let’s at least take part of it with us, so we can know for sure.’

‘Oh, dear vargard, why do you hold on to such things? You must let the thought of this awful contraption go.’

Zahndrekh put an arm round him in consolation, and continued.

‘Let me pose you this thought, Obyron, in the hope it will bring you ease. What do you think caused you to hold true to me for all this time – despite all the power you might have enjoyed through betrayal – if it were not a soul? What can love, but a being with a soul?

‘Even if we all ceased to be flesh and blood millions of years ago, which of course I don’t believe for a moment,’ – Zahndrekh actually winked – ‘wouldn’t it have suited us better to live in denial of that, as some fools might say I had done? Wouldn’t it be better, Obyron, just to accept our fate, and enjoy immortality for the everlasting life of merry campaigning it has proved to be?’

Obyron stared hard at Zahndrekh, unsure of what he was hearing. ‘You old bastard. You knew all along.’

‘I knew nothing of the sort, old friend. But since you seem to be labouring under some delusion that you’re a soulless machine, I thought I should at least make some attempt to set you straight.’ Zahndrekh stood up then, and patted his thigh for Obyron to join him. ‘Come now, soldier. Up on your feet, and let’s return to the flagship. If we’re quick about it, we can have this all cleared up in time for a truly astonishing feast.’

Obyron, ever loyal, obeyed his lord. He would have wept, but he had no tears.

About the Author

Nate Crowley is an SFF author and games journalist who lives in Walsall with his wife, daughter, and a cat he insists on calling Turkey Boy. He loves going to the zoo, playing needlessly complicated strategy games, and cooking incredible stews. Severed is his third story for Black Library, the others being ‘Empra’ and ‘The Enemy of My Enemy’.

An extract from ‘The Reaping Time’ by Robbie MacNiven
from the Warhammer 40,000 anthology Lords and Tyrants.

+ Sub-file 8762-443 +

+ Jurisdiction: Ethika Subsector +

+ Timestamp: 3551670.M41 +

+ Subject header: Tithe Non-Payment Response Protocol 33/8 +

+ Clerk Attendant: 4872-Amilia +

For the attention of the Adeptus Administratum, Sub-Division Theta 16, Ethika Subsector. Contact has been lost with Tithe-Ship 531, designate Praetorian. Last known astropathic message relay confirmed successful warp jump into the Zartak System [file ref. 228-16a]. Contact is now two weeks overdue, Terran Standard. Recommending dispatch of Imperial Navy Mars-class Cruiser Andromidax [see attachment DX1-9] to investigate.

+ Sub-file 8762-443 record-logged for review +

+ Added to review queue +

+ Estimated processing time: 6 years, Terran Standard +

+ Thought of the Day: The faithful suffer in silence +

The guildmasters were terrified. Their postures were stiff, their eyes darting, sweat slicking their pale, wrinkled flesh. One old man, stooped beneath the weight of his own sagging fat, was twitching uncontrollably. The motion juddered grotesquely through his heavy jowls, growing more pronounced the more he tried to hide it. Another balding, rheumy-eyed figure’s skeletal hands were clenching and unclenching on the grip of his silver pick-cane. A third was clutching her ermine ruff so hard her scrawny, velvet-draped limbs were shaking. 

The entire assembly, packed onto the walkway of an observation gantry, cringed at the presence of the giants towering over them. 

They were monsters, primordial terrors clad from head to foot in battleplate the colour of ash. They reeked of weapons unguents and a cloying, alien scent that turned the humans’ stomachs. None had moved since stepping onto the gantry. Their motionless state spoke of a razor-edged, predatory patience.

Eventually, one of the ashen giants spoke.

‘These are all of them? All the young?’

None of the guildmasters answered. For a moment, nothing happened. There was a click. Then, abruptly, one of the giants lunged.

For something so large, it moved with terrifying speed. Its bone staff shattered the skull of the fat, twitching guilder. Those around recoiled from the splattering of brains and blood. Without hesitation, the other giants lashed out.

The screaming started. It didn’t last long. 

The figure at the heart of the coral chamber woke with a start. He bit back a cry, fists clenched and shaking around his force staff.

It had been no dream. His kind were incapable of something so human, so innocent. No, this was the third time he had seen the exact same scene – the exact same slaughter – play out since the ship had broken in-system. It was a warning. It could be nothing else.

The figure shifted his cross-legged stance fractionally, the incisor-charms hanging from the leather bands around his wrists rattling. Without his etched blue battleplate and psychic hood, the true horror of his ancient form was revealed. The simple black shift did little to hide the ivory whiteness of his flesh, or the ugly grey denticle-scabs that blotched his elbow joints and neck. It was an affliction, the result of his unique and degraded genetic inheritance. Even more startling were the figure’s eyes. They were utterly black, without iris or sclera, as pitiless and unfathomable as the void that was his home.

The figure drew in a long, slow breath. Should he inform Company Master Akia? Not doing so would be a dereliction of duty. But telling him ran complex risks. They could not afford the dangers of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Nothing could be allowed to interfere with the Tithe.

After a while the vox bead in his ear clicked. The figure known to his brethren as Te Kahurangi – the Pale Nomad – listened for a moment, then uncrossed his legs and stood.

The time for contemplation was over. The reaping time had arrived.

The sub-guild quota hall was in an uproar. Every guildmaster and guildmistress present was speaking at once. It took Thornvyl slamming his augmetic left fist – the result of a mining accident almost a century before – against the flank of the hall’s lexmechanic podium to bring some semblance of order.

‘Panic achieves nothing,’ he snapped. ‘There may be another explanation.’

‘Another explanation for an Adeptus Astartes ship arriving unannounced in our system?’ Elinara of the Freehold Prospector Guild demanded. ‘A more probable explanation than the Imperium finally coming to investigate the disappearance of the Praetorian?’

The arched vault of the quota hall descended once more into wild chatter. The guildmasters, leaders of the mining colony of Zartak, had come together for an emergency session after the augur masts had detected an unidentified vessel breaking in-system. When the logisticators had identified it as a Space Marine warship, the meeting had descended into chaos.

‘They are the Emperor’s servants,’ Thornvyl, Guildmaster of Chronotech Inc., snapped. ‘As are we. And we shall greet them as such.’

‘Are you insane?’ demanded Maron of Broken Hill Industrials.

‘Unless you wish to call out the Guard, the local defence force and the mine-militia?’ Thornvyl responded. ‘Tell me, which course of action sounds more insane?’

The other guildmasters quietened, realising the truth of Thornvyl’s words. He pressed on.

‘There has been a misunderstanding. We will resolve it, quickly and quietly. Trust me, Guild Brethren, these god-warriors will be gone by tomorrow.’

It was raining hard when the Space Marines arrived. The downpour made the surrounding jungle canopy hiss, and seethed off the rockcrete surface of sink shaft 1’s primary landing plate, sited just beyond the edge of the great burrow-mine habitat.

A behemoth descended from the near-black skies, water cascading from its broad flanks, the white oceanic predator emblazoned on its grey hull glistening. The assembled guildmasters huddled closer together as the mighty gunship screamed overhead, shivering in their drenched finery. The flier’s afterburning turbofans whipped at the embroidered hems of their robes and sent one matriarch’s shawl twisting away through the rain. The engine’s painful howl finally dropped to an idling snarl as the transport settled itself atop the plate. The dark muzzles of its many weapons systems gleamed in the rain.

For a moment, nothing stirred. The guilders looked on, fretting. Eventually there was a thump, loud enough to make them jump. The gunship’s prow hatch began to lower, venting gouts of hydraulic steam. Through it, their armoured footfalls ringing rhythmically off the plasteel plates, came seven primeval giants.

Each one towered head and shoulders above the tallest guilder, and all were clad in grey battleplate of different shades. Their eye lenses were black, glittering in the harsh light of the landing zone’s jury-rigged lumen strips. Around their wrists and gorgets were bands hung with vicious fangs, claws and incisors, while many parts of their armour were inscribed with flowing line-markings that formed stylised maws or darting fins. They carried weapons in their gauntlets, mighty boltguns and chainaxes, their rotors thankfully inactive.

The seven stepped out onto the landing plate two abreast, forming a line in front of the guildmasters. With a crash of ceramite they came to a halt, the rain pattering from their armour.

For a moment they remained still and silent. Then one, his armour a whiter shade and embossed with numerous brass molecular bonding studs, took one step forward. The guilders cringed.

‘Who rules this world in the Void Father’s name?’ the white-plated giant demanded, his voice crackling up through the arched grille of his helm’s vocaliser as though from some great depth. The words were delivered in High Gothic, stilted and unnaturally formal. The guilders didn’t respond. The giant said nothing more. Eventually, unable to stand it any more, Fargo Tork of BorerCorp Mining summoned up the few words of High Gothic he recalled from his scholam days.

‘We rule as a collective council, sire. We have no one leader, bar Him on Earth.’

For a moment the giant did not respond. The guilders detected a series of low clicking noises. Some recognised it as the sound of an internal vox conversation, held in private over the Space Marines’ helm comms. Eventually, the giant spoke again.

‘Well met. I am Master Akia, of the Third Battle Company. We are the Carcharodons Astra, and we have come for you.’

The viewscreen monitor flickered and died. The sub-guild quota hall descended once more into furious recriminations, until Thornvyl snapped for quiet. After a moment’s pregnant silence the viewscreen blinked back into being again, the grainy image of Vasil Krane’s body double reappearing.

‘Repeat yourself,’ Thornvyl ordered. ‘We lost you.’

‘They are demanding to see our records,’ the Krane double said, pausing to glance back over his shoulder. He was muttering into a handheld vidcam, squeezed into the entrance tunnel of one of the tiny ratholes that wormed its way through the mineworks of Lower Six-Sixteen.

‘Records?’

‘Imperial data. Reports on psyker levels, Guard recruitment rates, xenos and heretic activity.’

‘And tithes?’

‘Yes, tithes. Their leader, Akia, claims to be here specifically for the tithe.’

‘It’s as we feared,’ Ghorst of New Western Mining hissed. ‘They know about the Praetorian!’

‘Silence,’ Thornvyl barked before the room descended once more into mayhem. He turned back to the viewscreen.

‘Where are they now?’

‘Waiting in upper ore hall west,’ Krane’s double said, again glancing back, as though he expected to see one of the giants loom suddenly from the half-darkness behind him. ‘Their latest request was to inspect the most junior Guard battalions.’

‘The most junior?’

‘The cadets, the new foundlings of the 10th Regiment.’

‘Why is that their first priority–’ began Elinara. Thornvyl cut her off.

‘It doesn’t matter why. It presents us with an opportunity.’

‘They’re here for the tithe, you heard it yourself,’ Tork said, jowls wobbling as he sought to contain his terror. ‘When they discover what happened they’ll kill us all!’

‘They won’t,’ Thornvyl said firmly. ‘Not if we keep our heads. Their ship is still in orbit, yes?’

‘So the augur beacon says,’ Maron said. ‘Holding anchor directly above sink shaft 1. Its ident-tag and keel scans are still coming up blank, but it’s definitely of ancient design.’

‘Their main strength will still be onboard,’ Thornvyl said. ‘But their leaders are down here, with us. That presents an opportunity.’

‘I do hope you have a plan, Thornvyl,’ Elinara said, her eyes narrowing. ‘Remember that not all of us supported the last one you had. This is where it has led us. We won’t all be held accountable should you fail.’

The rest of the guilders muttered their agreement.

‘But you’ll expect to reap the rewards once it’s successful,’ Thornvyl said, smiling despite the steel in his voice. ‘Trust me one more time, Guild Brethren. Tell the holding blocks to prepare to enact Order 19. And pass word for Inspector DeValin. I want the 10th paraded in full combat kit in drill cavern 11 within the hour.’

‘We should just slaughter them,’ Akia said over the inter-squad vox. Te Kahurangi didn’t deign to reply. The Company Master was speaking in jest, venting his frustration. The Pale Nomad couldn’t begrudge him that.

According to the chrono digits ticking over in the corner of the Chief Librarian’s visor display, First Squad had been standing at parade rest, waiting in what appeared to be called the drill-head chamber for upper ore hall west, for almost forty minutes. Akia had delivered the company’s demands to the gaggle of flunkies who claimed dominion over Zartak, and they’d been ushered into a quota collection analysis chamber, the cogitators and tithing boards currently abandoned. The flunkies had then fled. A wide-eyed attendant had offered them some sort of fungus-like local refreshment, the tray clattering in his shaking hands. The Carcharodons hadn’t so much as moved, and the human had left with haste. Since then they’d seen no one.

‘They dishonour us,’ said the Company Champion, Toa.

‘The concept of individual honour is a dead thing,’ Te Kahurangi replied, quoting from Beyond the Veil of Stars. ‘It is a lie invented by arrogant men to excuse their own foolhardiness.’

‘They dishonour the Chapter,’ Toa corrected. ‘And through it, Rangu.’

‘You think the Void Father cares if we wait an hour or two?’ Strike Veteran Dorthor rumbled. ‘We must follow protocol. The Edicts of Exile were not issued by the Forgotten One in vain.’

Throughout the exchange, Te Kahurangi could sense Akia brooding. The Company Master had lately reached his full maturity as leader of the Third through the august title of Reaper Prime, but with experience had come a bloodthirsty edge that left the Chief Librarian in no doubt as to his particular genetic heritage. The suggestion that they simply slaughter the Zartakian mine-leaders had not been spoken entirely in jest.

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This eBook edition published in 2019 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Rhys Pugh.

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