More Warhammer 40,000 from Black Library

DARKNESS IN THE BLOOD

A Blood Angels novel by Guy Haley

DANTE

A Blood Angels novel by Guy Haley

• MEPHISTON •

by Darius Hinks

Book 1 – BLOOD OF SANGUINIUS

Book 2 – REVENANT CRUSADE

Book 3 – CITY OF LIGHT

• DARK IMPERIUM •

by Guy Haley

Book 1 – DARK IMPERIUM

Book 2 – PLAGUE WAR

Book 3 – GODBLIGHT

BELISARIUS CAWL: THE GREAT WORK

A novel by Guy Haley

THE DEVASTATION OF BAAL

A Blood Angels novel by Guy Haley

ASHES OF PROSPERO

A Space Wolves novel by Gav Thorpe

WAR OF SECRETS

A Dark Angels novel by Phil Kelly

OF HONOUR AND IRON

An Ultramarines novel by Ian St. Martin

APOCALYPSE

An Imperial Fists, White Scars and Raven Guard novel by Josh Reynolds

FIST OF THE IMPERIUM

An Imperial Fists novel by Andy Clark

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

Part One

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Part Two

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Darkness in the Blood’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

For more than a hundred centuries the Emperor has sat immobile on the Golden Throne of Earth. He is the Master of Mankind. By the might of His inexhaustible armies a million worlds stand against the dark.

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

To be a man in such times is to be one amongst untold billions. It is to live in the cruellest and most bloody regime imaginable. It is to suffer an eternity of carnage and slaughter. It is to have cries of anguish and sorrow drowned by the thirsting laughter of dark gods.

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

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

PART ONE

INFESTATION

PROLOGUE

ON RED WINGS

Now

‘Death comes on red wings.’

The Chapter’s motto was emblazoned across the fronts of their tanks and their gunships. It decorated their banners. It adorned plates of exotic red metals tens of feet high, bolted to the hulls of their voidships. Their foes had learned to dread those words. To hear them shouted by a hundred vox-amplified voices was to know the end was nigh. Rebellious worlds had been pacified by that slogan alone. Broadcast to the sound of trumpets and the songs of victorious angels, it stilled wrath. It broke rebellion. It routed xenos.

The Red Wings were implacable in victory, imperturbable in defeat. They were Space Marines, born of the line of the Archangel of Baal, most perfect and sublime of all the Emperor’s sons. They were the Angels of Death and they knew no fear.

So the emotion they felt as the Eminence Sanguis came towards the Joyous Garde? Afterwards, Sanguinary Priest Lamorak drily referred to it as ‘consternation’.

Klaxons sang all over the orbital fortress. Not the harsh, electronic squawking of lesser forces, but the silver tones of trumpets, played by servitor constructs embedded in the walls. Perfect faces peered from apertures in the plasteel, where their hideous bodies lay hidden. Behind filigree panels, dirty white skin joined to oiled metal, veins to bubbling jars of preservative fluid. Within the walls their exposed spines twitched over the pumping of mechanical lungs. But on the outside there was only beauty, where shining faces pursed their lips and blew and blew upon their instruments, the same three notes over and over in a stepped rise. Alarm! Alarm! Alarm!

Ten of the Red Wings ran towards the Night Dock behind Sanguinary Priest Lamorak. Their boots boomed on the deck. They went fully armoured, their gear polished to a parade-ground shine, but at haste as if to meet an enemy. Their armour was the blue-white of arctic snow. Upon the right-hand shoulder guard, the Chapter badge – a wing tipped with a reaching talon – was rendered in blood red. Lacquered ruby coloured their left pauldrons, poleyns and coulters. Gold they bore in small amounts, the majority of their decoration and battle honours presented in black and silver. Braid, chains, parchment and all the adornments favoured by the Adeptus Astartes jingled and rang as they ran to the dock.

The Red Wings gleamed. They shone. An angelic host fit for the Emperor’s wars raced to meet their most feared friend.

Lamorak’s armour was all white and bore specialised equipment unique to his office. At that time, he was their leader, and he raised his fist in signal to his warriors as they reached the Gate of Night. The party slowed to a march, bolters held across their bodies.

The gate opened upon the stars, a void bridge linking the outer wall to the primary dock. Lamorak led them onto the way beneath the blue shine of an atmospheric field.

Though fantastically decorated, the Bridge of Night was made to be defensible. Its parapet consisted of armoured battlements. A word would collapse the atmospheric field. Heavy guns covered the three hundred-yard length, operated by vigilant machine-spirits and slaved human brains. They could sense the threat approaching and were currently locked on the void.

The bulk of the Joyous Garde blocked the view of Dulcis, but the planet’s soft green albedo shine bathed the bastion of the Night Dock, lighting up the great cannons jutting from the fortress’ sides. The Garde’s walls cast crenellated shadows on the dock. Out to the Garde’s left was a darker light. The Great Rift was near, and it rose high there to wall off half the sky. Ahead, to the galactic north, the Red Scar lay refulgent with energy stolen from the warp where it was closest to the rift, or so it seemed to Lamorak.

Lamorak and his guard passed along the bridge and headed towards the principal pier. Like the bridge, the dock was open to the void, screens of energy fields holding the air in and the void out. The principal pier was the central one of three, and led furthest out into the black. Its warding light blinked a mile away, far beyond the last of the atmospheric screens.

The Eminence Sanguis was closing. Liveried in red, black and gold, on one side these shades were turned a soft yellow by the light of the world the Garde orbited; on the other, the combined light of the rift and the scar bruised it.

Lamorak’s vox-bead peeped.

‘Eminence Sanguis, four minutes to dock,’ one of the mortal bridge crew informed him. ‘Identity verified. Voice prints, genetic printing and data signature are all matches for the High Chaplain.’

‘Give them the final permission codes. Stand down all weapons,’ said Lamorak. The ship was approaching fast. He struggled to keep the tremor from his voice. ‘Into position!’ he ordered his men. They moved quickly and smoothly, in perfect formation. They displayed no fault, but Lamorak was nervous one would make itself apparent, and was therefore harsh with them.

‘Now! Quickly!’

The squad lined up in two ranks of five. Lamorak stood in front of them. He clenched and unclenched his fists. He debated removing his helmet, decided against it, then changed his mind. He fumbled the neck seals and cursed to himself.

‘Steady, brother.’ Sergeant Bedevoir’s tone was softly mocking.

‘I could do without your commentary today, brother,’ said Lamorak. He placed the helm under his left arm, positioning it so the medicae helix of the Sanguinary Priest’s calling faced forward.

Bedevoir made a small noise that his voxmitter rendered as a click.

‘I’m as unhappy as you. They say he brings the Rage with him. We could have handled this ourselves. We should have done.’

‘I didn’t call him,’ said Lamorak. ‘He came. Does that not tell you that this is beyond us?’

The Eminence Sanguis didn’t slow until the last moment. Just when it seemed the ship would spear into the orbital, its braking thrusters activated. Jets opened up all around its blunt prow, washing off the atmospheric fields in frozen circles of gas before dissipating into the vacuum. The ship coasted down the length of the pier towards the dock, still too fast, until its main plasma drive vented forward through the engine block thrusters and the ship came to a determined halt, like a sword thrust into its scabbard.

The prow towered over the Red Wings, its huge fore-shields bright red, bearing the black blood-drip emblem of the Red Wings’ parent Chapter, the Blood Angels. The motif was repeated elsewhere on the hull in precious red stone.

‘Salute,’ Lamorak said through gritted teeth.

The Space Marines clashed their fists against their chests.

‘Now, follow me.’

In lockstep they marched down the pier. Waste gases burst periodically from the Eminence Sanguis as it rebalanced its inner workings. It wasn’t a large ship, but it was forbidding. Between the blood drips, black panels carried the skull badge of the Reclusiam of Baal.

‘Here,’ Lamorak said. They took up formation in front of an airlock bearing a painting of a skeletal angel. Its whole face, save for its bony jaw, was obscured by a hood. In its left hand it held an hourglass whose black sands were on the verge of running out. In its right it carried an immense axe.

Such skill had gone into a painting that few eyes would ever see, and those that did would wish they had not. The image had been eroded by years in the void – debris impacts, high energy particles and combat all having taken their toll – and yet it remained sinister, the angel so realistic it looked like it would step down from the metal and judge them all.

A light blinked over the door. It dropped with a loud clunk and extended outwards on a corridor of nested rectangles, pushed through the meniscus of the energy field, then lowered with a further heavy noise to the deck of the pier.

‘That’s it. He’s coming,’ said Bedevoir.

The skeletal angel split. The doors opened. Red light escaped from inside and air hissed as atmospheres equalised.

With the ratcheting of chains and a final, echoing boom, the airlock doors parted fully.

Two figures waited on the other side.

Lamorak was ready to kneel to greet their guest, but he stopped before he made a fool of himself, for on the other side of the door were Space Marines of lesser rank than the one he’d expected. On the left was a Sanguinary Priest, like Lamorak himself, wearing the same gear in subtly differing shades of white, and on the right was a sergeant. Both were helmed and armed.

‘Veteran-Sergeant Dolomen,’ said the sergeant by way of introduction. He stepped out of the ship, bringing with him the scent of the interior: oil, blood, wine and incense. ‘This is Sanguinary Priest Artemos.’ He waved casually at his companion.

The Priest followed the sergeant out. The pair saluted Lamorak by banging their fists against the aquilas on their chests.

‘I announce our lord to you,’ said Dolomen. He turned to face the door. ‘Astorath the Grim,’ he intoned, ‘High Chaplain of the Blood Angels Chapter, and Redeemer of the Lost, the Bringer of Mercy to all of the Blood.’

It could not have been so, but to Lamorak it seemed that the red light in the airlock deepened. The heavy, slow tread of a third power-
armoured warrior came towards them, turned a corner inside the ship and entered the open airlock.

Lord Astorath stepped onto the Joyous Garde, and the light of Dulcis grew colder.

Ceramite thudded as Lamorak and all his men got down on bended knees. They bowed their heads.

‘Rise, Keeper of the Blood,’ said Astorath. ‘Time is short. My tasks are many.’

Lamorak struggled to look up into Astorath’s stern face. His hair was raven black, his skin pale as a corpse. His armour was gorily styled to resemble flayed muscle. All those descended from the blood of Sanguinius knew who and what he was. All hoped never to meet him.

‘I am grateful you are here, my lord. I welcome you to the Joyous Garde, void-castle of the Red Wings, and sentinel of–’ Astorath cut Lamorak dead with a raised hand, leaving the Sanguinary Priest fearing he had misspoken in front of his guest.

‘I received this information when we left the warp. You do not need to repeat it. We have no time to waste on ceremony.’

‘I am sorry, my lord.’ Lamorak stood. He felt unsure. He had been immune to fear since his elevation to the Adeptus Astartes, a claim he could no longer make. ‘May I ask, how did you know to come here? We did not call you.’

‘Nobody calls Lord Astorath,’ said Dolomen. ‘He goes where he is needed.’

‘I am needed now, yes?’ said Astorath. His black eyes gleamed with a reptile’s cold mercy.

Bedevoir stiffened. Astorath glanced at him.

Lamorak’s throat was dry. He nodded.

‘Yes,’ he said simply.

‘Then show me. Tell me,’ said Astorath.

‘You will know from our records that there have been many problems here. Psychic phenomena, xenos incursions–’

‘The Black Rage,’ said Astorath. The words were cannon shots of misery. ‘Tell me about the Rage first. That is my concern. Take me to your dead. We begin there.’

Lamorak bowed his head. ‘This way, my lord,’ he said, and gestured back to the Garde.

‘Captain Ares rests in here,’ said Lamorak. He and his aide stood aside to allow Astorath’s party into the mortuary chapel.

The captain’s body lay upon a block of granite. Methalon pipes climbed the sides and went into the stone, cooling it so deeply it radiated a fearsome chill.

Ares’ face was half bashed in. Someone had tried to clean the blood from his hair, but clots of it clung to the roots and the white was stained pink. His armour was broken in several places.

‘By the red tears of the Angel,’ intoned Artemos. ‘I come to you so that you may serve in death.’ He went to the bier side and activated his instruments, playing his bioaugury over the ruined body.

‘I have all the data you might need, brother,’ said Lamorak.

‘Brother Artemos prefers to harvest his own,’ said Dolomen.

‘Massive tissue trauma, multiple broken bones. His skull has been crushed.’ Artemos looked up at Lamorak. He had removed his helm. One was a Primaris Space Marine and the other not, and from different gene-stock. Yet they were both of Sanguinius’ line. ‘These are no weapon marks.’

‘Lieutenant Jadriel killed him with his bare hands,’ said Lamorak.

‘Emperor,’ said Artemos. ‘He tore through ceramite?’

Lamorak nodded. ‘Nothing could stop him.’

‘This occurred on the surface?’ said Astorath.

‘Yes,’ said Lamorak. ‘When the Rage came on Jadriel we could not contain him. He fled before he could be brought down.’

‘What of the other departed?’ Astorath went to examine the body himself, leaning his knuckles on the stone bier, unaffected by the cold.

‘All of them but one.’

‘How many fell into the black?’

‘Six, in total. Five remain at large, including Jadriel. Brothers Bors, Dindran, Ulfius and Peilin. All are unaccounted for.’

‘And how many did they kill?’ asked Astorath. He moved aside to allow Artemos access to the lower part of the body.

‘We do not know,’ said Lamorak. ‘Two of our brothers, Safir and Fedor, Captain Ares, a number of the local populace, but we were fighting the Dulcites too. They turned on us as soon as the xenos emerged. It was chaos.’

Astorath leaned over Ares’ face and took a deep breath of the chill air. He closed his eyes. ‘Show us the one you killed.’

‘Brother Gawin. He’s in the next room.’

They left the chapel and went into a second, identical room. Another body lay on another bier, this one different in size and gear.

Astorath paused by the door for a long moment, staring at the body. He studied it with an impassive face. Lamorak observed him surreptitiously, wondering what thoughts troubled that noble, terrible mind.

‘Primaris,’ said Astorath. ‘It has happened, then, as I knew it would.’

The warrior’s face was still ruddy and distended with blood. The whites of his eyes had turned red. Sharp teeth showed behind drawn lips. He was the very image of a monster in Imperial plate, but he was dead. His breastplate was shattered, exposing the pulped ruin of the organs beneath.

Artemos commenced scanning this second corpse. ‘You have not harvested his gene-seed. Why?’

‘I was not sure if it would be safe,’ said Lamorak. ‘The Red Wings were nearly annihilated at Baal. We are mostly Primaris now. We of Cawl’s Gift have had no training or consultation with those wise in the Rage. Even I know very little, despite my office. How could I know whether or not the madness would be passed on to any aspirants blessed with Brother Gawin’s seed?’

Sergeant Dolomen gave a hard bark of laughter. ‘Oh, it’s passed on by the gene-seed all right, brother.’

‘Silence, Dolomen,’ said Astorath coldly. ‘This is the first time you have witnessed the curse?’

‘It is. I do not know what to make of it.’

‘I have seen it in Primaris Space Marines before,’ said the sergeant attending Lamorak. He stepped forward around his Priest.

‘Who speaks to the Lord Redeemer?’ asked Dolomen.

‘Sergeant Bedevoir, Third squad, Ninth Company,’ said the sergeant.

‘Explain what you mean to the Lord Astorath,’ said Dolomen.

Power tools whined. Artemos undid the bolts of Gawin’s breastplate. It came away with a squelch, trailing ropes of bloody matter.

‘I saw this once, on the crusade, before Baal,’ said Bedevoir. ‘We didn’t know what it was. We thought it was some trick of the enemy’s. Three brothers of our gene-line went mad, raving about the arch-traitor.’

‘Three of the Blood,’ corrected Dolomen.

‘Why did you not report this?’ said Artemos.

‘I did. Nobody else knew what to make of it either.’ Bedevoir took a further step into the room. ‘We were fighting daemons, sorcerers, foes that I could not comprehend. What happened to those others was nothing compared to some of the things I saw, some of the things I killed. They were…’ He struggled to find the words. ‘This knowledge of the flaw you have given us, it was a secret before, kept from us who share your heritage.’ It was an accusation. Astorath stared at him with hard eyes.

‘But why not report it now?’ pressed Artemos. ‘Now you know of our curse?’ He had taken off the warrior’s left arm plates, exposing skin covered by branching dark veins.

‘Because I did not know the signs,’ said Bedevoir. ‘I did not think it remarkable at the time. Only now, when I have seen the Rage with my own eyes, did I make the connection.’

‘A disappointing lack of vigilance,’ said Astorath. ‘You should have known.’

‘From imperfect descriptions? Even after we arrived at Baal, we were told so little – a few briefings, nothing in depth. Ares was a captain. We are warriors, not medicae.’ Bedevoir turned to Dolomen. ‘Brother, there are only handfuls of the original Red Wings left, and they are scattered. We continue their traditions as best we can, we have taken names according to their custom, but we are not them, not yet. You saw Ares. You saw his hair, the white hair of their Chapter. None of us have that. We are Primaris. We do not look like them. We do not carry their unique genetic markers.’

‘Be glad of that,’ said Artemos. He was shining his backpack light into the chest cavity of Gawin. ‘The distinctiveness of each strain of the Blood is often connected to a worsening of the flaw. The more extreme the divergence, the more violent the curse.’

‘That might be so,’ said Bedevoir, ‘but then what do we know of the flaw? We know little of the Thirst, how it manifests, how to manage it, how to channel it. We know nothing at all of the Rage. Ares was the only one of the original breed of Space Marine stationed here. Seven warriors from his company survived the tyranids. Only seven. They were split up and assigned to other groups of Primaris like ours who were attached to the Red Wings. They were supposed to help us become what they were.’

‘You have failed. You have ceded the planet to the enemy,’ said Astorath.

‘There is less than a demi-company of us here,’ said Lamorak, indignation overcoming some of his awe. ‘We are a scouting force, that is all. We did not expect this. We do not have the manpower to deal with the Rage or the xenos, and we have the population to consider.’

‘The capital is safe,’ said Bedevoir. ‘The majority of the population is located there. We have it under control.’

‘But you have lost the world,’ Dolomen said.

‘We will take it back.’

‘Listen to your sergeant, Brother Lamorak. He displays true mettle. Be calm. You are hard-pressed,’ said Astorath, ‘but remember what you are. Do not dishonour yourself by saying you cannot accomplish the tasks which have been entrusted to you.’

‘This manner of war is new to us,’ said Lamorak. Shame made his words leaden.

‘Then learn it,’ said Astorath.

‘We do not need your help,’ said Bedevoir.

Astorath inclined his head and stared at Bedevoir until he looked away. ‘I will be the judge of that,’ he said.

There was a clatter as Artemos dropped surgical tools into a silver bowl. Blood spattered onto his armour.

‘Harvest his gene-seed,’ said Artemos. ‘Honour his memory.’ He turned to Astorath. ‘It should be safe. This is a simple case of the Rage manifesting. There is nothing new here.’

‘Only the nature of the sufferer, that is sufficient cause for us to be cautious,’ said Astorath. ‘Test his gene-seed thoroughly before you use it for implantation. We will take a sample back to Corbulo.’ He addressed this last comment to Lamorak. It took a moment for the Red Wings Priest to realise Astorath was asking permission.

‘Yes, of course. If you so command it, Redeemer.’

‘It is good you agree. I would not wish to compel you.’ Astorath rested a fatherly hand on the dead warrior’s arm. ‘Gawin is the first confirmed Primaris Space Marine to fall to the Black Rage, Brother Lamorak. We in this room stand at the threshold of a new era. The hopes of all our bloodline are proven false, and we need to find out why. You will tell me everything – of the flares, the xenos, the psykers, and the coming of the Rage. Start from the beginning. Start now.’

CHAPTER ONE

FAR FROM THE HIGH TOWERS

The warp, three weeks ago [nominal]

They were things of the warp as much as they were things of the worlds of dust. In that, maybe they were unique. Maybe they were not. Once, perhaps, there had been more life forms that straddled the barrier. They survived where these others were gone, and even that did not matter to them. They lived. They were. They survived the great storms of the past and they would survive the storms of the present, for as much as the turmoil of the empyrean battered at them and winnowed their numbers, it granted opportunity. As storms clear the ocean bed of debris, as fires scorch the forest of dead wood, the rift opened new opportunities for the strong to prosper.

They drifted in the raging currents of the immaterium. Against all the odds, they remained whole in the vortexes of unmaking, bulbous air sacs crusted over and their tentacles wrapped tight against their bodies within the confines of their bio-fields. In the warp they were scavengers, siphoning shreds of soul energy from the recently devoured, darting away when threatened by the daemonic things they shared their feeding grounds with.

In the materium they preyed on flesh.

Solitary, alone, racing along currents from one part of nowhere to another, Third One lived a life no human mind could comprehend. It thought, but its thoughts were alien to any sentient being. It felt, but its emotions had no analogue. It had no name or age or identity as a being of the materium would recognise it. Third One was not its name. Third One was not what it was, but it knew, in its alien way, that Third One was what it must be, and soon.

It was time to breed.

Instinct drew Third One towards the great roar of the warp-materium interface. The Great Rift resembled an endlessly breaking wave seen from within. Souls and half-beings and things that never were rolled over and over in its curl. Light flashed and sounds howled. The pull towards it was irresistible. Worlds from the materium fell into the maelstrom and were torn apart. Vessels traversing the warp were dragged to their doom. Yet Third One knew where to stop. It knew where to wait. It drew to a halt at the edges of the interface, where the conflicting currents of reality and unreality were at their weakest, and a creature of its sort might best profit.

It waited eternities. No time at all passed. Seconds and centuries meant nothing there, and so they meant nothing to Third One.

Second One was already there. Second One arrived after Third One. There was one, there were two. They approached one another, colours racing over their gelatinous bodies. Tentacles rose up in elaborate threat displays. Their float sacs pulsed angry reds and blues. They poised on the edge of battle, there at the soul-falls at the end of the world, their bio-fields shimmering.

Third One reached out a pseudopod. Second One recoiled, then reached out in turn. Colours of aggression changed to appeasing pinks and yellows. Nests of eyes regarded one another, and shimmered assent.

Their tentacles twined, the hooks upon the underside piercing the other’s tendrils to drag them closer. Lesser tentacles waved forward. Their bio-fields merged, becoming stronger, shutting out the daemonic, making them an island of reality.

More of their kind gathered and formed their own binaries of Second Ones and Third Ones. Last to come were the First Ones, the largest sort, and they descended into the growing swarm. Violence broke out as First Ones vied with one another for the most promising binaries and binaries fought off First Ones they rejected.

Third-Second One repelled two First Ones’ attempts to join. One they killed, and ate its remains while they showed their colour songs to more suitable suitors, until, finally, one approached they did not reject, and with complex patternings of welcome they came close to each other.

The agreement was made quickly. Third-Second One further integrated with themselves and First One, until the three were an indivisible triad.

Other ones, twos and threes merged. The unsuccessful washed back and forth in the shallows of the warp. The last First Ones joined, or fled, or died, and then all were triads.

With many eyes directed by conjoined souls, First-Second-Third One peered through the rift and watched the shores of reality.

Lights shone on the far side. Prey light. Food.

The enslavers started to move.

Far from the high towers, Esmera felt a fight coming.

‘Give me that.’

Esmera followed the youth’s pointing finger to her bread. She gave him a mild look.

‘Why?’ she said.

They were walled in by crowds. By then the news had spread, and everyone was in the main square looking eagerly to the skies. Dulcis was a hard place to live. No one paid the street people any attention. The youths could knife her right there, and no one would care.

‘Because if you don’t I’ll smack you into the dirt, then I’ll let my friends have a go at you,’ said the youth.

The youth was like most bullies, supported by two smirking accomplices who were too cowardly and weak to survive on their own, but dangerous under the direction of their ringleader. One was fat and strong, the other small and wiry with a vicious face. He smelled bad, and had dead eyes. Esmera had seen this configuration before.

‘Come in from the villages, have you, swampies?’

‘How can you tell?’ said the fat one.

‘Because I’ve lived here all my life and I’ve never seen you before. You’d be hard to miss, you’re so fat.’

‘I’m going to take time cutting you,’ said the fat boy. He moved forward. The leader shot out his arm and caught him hard in the stomach.

‘You don’t get to say what’s what. I do.’

‘Right, yeah, sorry, Cen,’ said the fat boy. Boy was about right. He was younger than the others. His face flushed and he looked like he was going to cry.

The skinny one scowled. ‘Tougher than you for it.’

‘Now you’re catching on.’ Esmera smiled. ‘You don’t know me. How can you say that? I might be the most dangerous girl in this town.’ She used ‘girl’. It was lesser than woman, less threatening. She was a woman though, older than they, and better than they were in other ways too.

The fat boy and Cen laughed. The skinny one licked his lips. He had a fluffy moustache coming in. So young yet already a killer. The others were engaged in the malicious play of thugs that may or may not end in violence. The skinny one just wanted to hurt her. He had a knife. She could feel his need to use it, real as his bad breath in her face.

‘How old are you?’ said Cen.

‘Older than you.’

‘Then wise enough to know if you give me that bread you might walk away from this.’

‘No,’ she said. Giving no warning, she turned on her heels and fled, pushing her underfed body between two townspeople gawping up at the sky. There was a roaring coming from up there. Atmospheric engines. A ship was approaching from the void. That was remarkable, but she didn’t have time to look.

The youths were after her a fraction of a second later. She’d wrong-footed them, as she knew she would. She knew town; they didn’t.

She sprinted through the crowded main square of the upper fort, dodging past market-day stalls and piles of cages holding waterfowl from the marsh. Fat Boy blundered into them, breaking the wicker and bringing a retributory cudgel swinging at his arm. Esmera glanced over her shoulder to see him beaten while aviforms scattered and his friends tore past. Cen was angry. Skinny Boy looked ready to kill.

She flew down the main ramp, past the rusted teeth of the top gatehouse and the grim metal skulls housing the spirits that commanded the gates. The road was caked in dung and rushes, a good surface to run on. The ramp switched back on itself, but she knew the short cuts. She jumped, landing on the roof of the mechman’s tech shack. He only yelled at her. He knew her. He didn’t know the youths that tumbled after. She got shouts; they got shot at.

She led them into the Warren, the part of town where hundreds of small shops and businesses crammed the old roads and throttled alleys. It stank of breweries, chemicals, dyes, and worst of all, the eye-watering reek of the tannery district and the open-gut stench of the abattoirs. All of it was in there. It was no place to live, but this was her territory. She grinned as she panted. She’d lose them in the Warren, no problem.

She skidded sharply round a corner, wrong-footing them again, hurtled down an alleyway no wider than her outstretched arms, and dived under a curtain that divided the alley from a stall on the other side.

‘Esmera! Watch it!’ shouted the stallholder after her. They all knew her in the Warren. She was tolerated there – she’d made sure of that. She was useful to them, occasionally.

She slowed to a jog. There was no sign of pursuit. Low buildings of hardened mud hemmed her in, all squat, no more than three storeys tall. She was moving away to the edge of the Warren, nearer to the Clara Flumine river and the high towers of the Administratum district on the far side.

She’d barely broken a sweat. She was used to running away.

The smell of the river came up the alley. Most of the setts on that street had been prised up by the city folk to build their homes, and the road surface was little better than mud and rubbish compacted over the bedrock. The alley joined a lane. An open sewer ran down the middle, pouring chemical-tainted filth into the river. She could see the river now. The wide, muddy waters swallowed the sewer discharge, diluting it to nothing, but in the city the shit stink was heavy on her throat. Huts made of sodden fibreboard and cast-off metal scraps slumped together, drowning in the mud. On the far side of the water were cliffs of stonework, topped by crenellated walls, and behind those the grand buildings of the Imperial government. The district was a tiny part of sprawling Tywell City, but its offices and cathedrum lorded over all parts of the settlement save the citadel itself.

She was walking now. She crammed the bread into her mouth, eating it quickly before someone else tried to take it off her.

Meat-barge horns wailed from the docks further downstream. The ripe odour of marsh eel wafted over on the breeze. A baby cried in a hovel nearby. A stray canid nosed at a pile of rags and pulled out the scaled corpse of a dead marsh lizard. No one was about.

The sounds of the crowds carried over the Warren down to the river district. There was a boom in the air, and she turned to look back to where it had come from, up at the citadel, dry on its hill.

A small red-and-white ship was landing. The citadel was a stacked cake of fortifications, four rings of walls atop each other, and the ship came down towards the highest landing pad. The sound of the crowd’s excitement grew louder as it approached, only drowned out by the last, thundering roar of braking jets as it put down upon the pad. A wash of grey smoke bled off into Dulcis’ clouds.

She resented the boys for chasing her down here. She’d wanted to see the off-worlders land. Some fool had said they were the Emperor’s men, the Angels of Death, but she hadn’t believed that. But now, as she watched the ramp at the front of the ship open, she wasn’t so sure. The ship was a compact thing, covered in guns. She’d never seen the like before.

Tiny figures came out of the citadel and waited. Larger figures emerged from the ship. Her mouth hung open, the bread forgotten on her tongue. The Angels of Death had come! They were giants, towering over the welcoming party, clad in shining armour that winked in the weak sun. She took a few involuntary steps forward, their presence drawing her in.

She heard a noise behind her, and turned in time to see Skinny Boy launch himself off the top of a shack, so full of the need to hurt her he leapt with little consideration for his own safety. His chin connected with her head, his elbow drove the air from her lungs, and together they went down into the stinking mud. The remains of the bread bounced off and rolled to a halt at the edge of the sewer.

‘Got you,’ he breathed into her ear. His ripe breath choked her. She tried to escape, but he wrestled her to a halt, his thin fingers gripping her wrists painfully.

Cen and Fat Boy came out of a side alley.

‘Got her!’ Skinny called triumphantly.

Mud soaked through the back of Esmera’s smock and trousers. She bucked under him, but he wouldn’t budge.

‘Get off me!’ she said.

‘Shhhh,’ said Skinny Boy. He forced her wrists together so he could hold them in one hand, and pressed a filthy finger to her lips.

Cen came towards them. Beside him, Fat Boy was limping. He had a black eye, and he clutched his right arm with his left.

‘Get her up,’ said Cen.

‘Let’s make her pay,’ said Skinny Boy. ‘Let’s hurt her. Let’s make her sorry.’

‘Should have given us bread. Shouldn’t have run!’ Fat Boy shouted. ‘We’re going to gut you and chuck you in the river.’

‘Not for a little while,’ leered Skinny Boy. ‘We’ll bleed you first.’

‘Let me go,’ Esmera said. ‘I don’t want to hurt you.’

They all laughed at that.

‘Get her up!’ shouted Cen.

Skinny Boy dragged her to her feet.

‘Get her down there, by the river,’ Cen said. ‘Where no one can see.’

Esmera looked where he pointed; he meant an alley leading to the muddy riverside. If she went down there she’d never come out again.

‘Me first,’ said Fat Boy. ‘Pay her back for this!’ He pointed angrily at his face.

She closed her eyes. All it would take would be a little push. Skinny Boy was thirsty for blood. Fat Boy was angry.

Touching Skinny Boy’s mind made her sick. It was an oozing place full of hurt, a jagged landscape of abuse and pain he wanted to turn outwards against the world.

‘Who said you should cut her first?’ snarled Skinny Boy.

‘What?’ said Cen. ‘I get to decide. Get into the alley, before we’re seen!’

‘No,’ said Skinny Boy. ‘I want a word with fatty here about his manners.’

He shoved Esmera at Cen. She made no move to fight, playing the role of the pliant victim. She’d seen so many people freeze in times like this. Everyone thought they’d fight. So few did.

Cen grabbed her round the throat.

She pushed a little harder at Skinny Boy, stoking his anger and his lust to kill.

‘I’m sick of your whining, you pig-faced sack of crap,’ Skinny Boy said, getting right up into Fat Boy’s face. ‘I should gut you instead of her.’

Fat Boy’s mouth hung open. ‘I didn’t mean nothing. You cut her. I don’t mind.’

‘How about I cut you?’ said Skinny Boy. He slashed across Fat Boy’s stomach with a knife Esmera drew for him.

Fat Boy made a tiny choking click in his throat. Both he and Skinny Boy looked down at his gut. Blood spread out across his clothes.

‘You’ve killed me, Gris,’ said Fat Boy. ‘You’ve killed me.’

So Skinny had a name. That made it easier.

Esmera pushed harder at Gris. He was resisting unconsciously, but she had him, because he was a violent piece of work, and it didn’t take much to wipe the surprise off his face and make him see what a brilliant idea it would be to ram his knife into Fat Boy’s neck.

‘Gris!’ shouted Cen. Out-of-towners saw a lot of awful things in the marshes, but he looked genuinely appalled. ‘What are you doing?’

Esmera pushed again.

‘I’ve had it with you too,’ Gris snapped.

‘Wait!’

Cen pushed Esmera at Gris, but he shoved her down. Her head banged on the ground, making it ring. Gris might be scraps of flesh on bone, but he was full of rage at life and that made him strong. Cen got in a couple of blows but didn’t even get to draw his knife. Esmera’s mental influence dissolved what few inhibitions Gris had. They were mostly made of fossilised fears, and were easy to overcome.

Gris stabbed and stabbed at Cen, until his front was a mess of slits and blood. He went down into the filth, and Gris kept on stabbing. Cen had stopped fighting and lay there already dead, blood trickling from his mouth, his eyes wide.

Esmera got up onto her knees. She didn’t have much strength left to finish this, so she had to end it soon. Her hand closed on a rock. She always made sure to throw a stone when she pushed someone hard enough to kill them outright. She had to leave a physical mark, one that looked bad enough to kill. If he went down untouched on the outside, someone would notice, and she’d no desire to be burned as a witch.

Gris was slowing, tired by his frenzy, his knife skidding off Cen’s ruined chest rather than penetrating. The point made a sound like a shovel biting wet earth.

‘Hey,’ she said.

Gris looked up at her. He was dazed, but that’d wear off in a moment, and that was another reason to be quick. She threw hard. The rock hit his forehead with a thud – nowhere near hard enough to cause him to collapse, but hard enough to cover her tracks. Blood welled from the wound. He rocked with the impact, then blinked in confusion, a sleepwalker’s look she knew very well. His eyes cleared and he looked at his hands and the knife. So much blood covered both they were the same colour, indivisible, like the blade was a part of his body. He looked at the bodies of his friends, then at her. Now he knew what she’d done.

One last push, that’s what he needed. Nothing too much. Make it look like the rock did it. Blood ran from the wound on his head.

‘I’m going to make you pay for that, witch,’ he snarled.

‘No, you’re not,’ she said.

She pushed hard. Thoughts were easy, bodies trickier, but she could do it, and she did, imagining a pulsing bit of his brain pulsing a little too hard, and bursting.

Gris got to his feet. The blood of his friends dripped from his knife.

‘This–’ he began. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he fell limp as a wet rag into the muck.

Esmera stood. She was close to collapse herself. Blood leaked from her nose. That many pushes in one day was a lot. Too many. She needed to retreat and recover.

First, she looted their bodies, then she retrieved her bread from the dirt.

Her head spinning, the bread clutched tightly to her chest, she staggered back to her den.

CHAPTER TWO

ANGELS OF DEATH

Sergeant Bedevoir looked out from the balcony over the city of Tywell to where the slums crowded the walls of the citadel, so densely packed they completely obscured the layout of the older, more orderly settlement hiding beneath. A fat, sluggish river cut the place in two, its banks crumbling mud save where flood walls protected the Administratum district and the rockcrete wharfs of the docks neatened its edges. The far side of the river was neater, but not by much. The smell coming off the city was overpowering. Bells rang from every rickety tower. Crowds looked up at the citadel from full streets, waving red ribbons and banners bearing poor reproductions of the Chapter badge. Outside the walls, on the half-submerged landing fields of the planet’s only space port, marching bands played around squares of soldiers who performed parade drills for nobody’s benefit but their own.

Bedevoir looked down on their welcome and wrinkled his nose. ‘This place is a hole,’ he said.

Lieutenant Jadriel’s stony face flashed a brief frown. ‘Don’t let Captain Ares hear you say that – we’re here to protect these people.’

‘From themselves,’ said Bedevoir.

‘An angel’s first duty, brother, is to protect people from themselves.’ Jadriel put his hand on Bedevoir’s shoulder.

‘I’d prefer a proper enemy,’ said Bedevoir. ‘And I’d prefer to put my helmet back on. This place reeks of shit and despair.’

Jadriel went into the hall. Bedevoir tarried, now taking in the city walls and the endless wetlands beyond, his features openly displaying contempt.

‘Brother,’ said Jadriel softly.

‘Yes, yes, I am coming,’ said Bedevoir. ‘I have seen enough anyway.’

He followed Jadriel into the hall where the rest of their party were in quiet consultation. Captain Ares, Sanguinary Priest Lamorak, Lieutenant Jadriel and Sergeant Bedevoir were the most senior officers in the tiny detachment sent to Dulcis. There were so few of the Red Wings, they occupied the void-castle like rodents hiding in walls.

Ares shot Jadriel a questioning look. Bedevoir answered for the lieutenant.

‘It’s as bad as it looks from orbit. The defences are old, and they’ve not been properly maintained for generations. The wall’s got three major breaches in it. These have been closed up by timber. The charge nets across the river are working, so the local wildlife won’t give us a problem here. On the benefits side of the balance sheet, this citadel is strong, but it’s not a place I would want to defend against a proper enemy. We would be better going into the swamp and waging guerrilla war.’

‘We are not here to defend against attack,’ said Lamorak. ‘Only to scout, survey and report.’

‘We may have to fight,’ said Ares. ‘With the rift being this close, it’s only a matter of time before Dulcis comes under attack.’

‘That’s reassuring,’ said Bedevoir. ‘Because if we were going to fight, I’d say abandon Tywell. I’m going to say abandon it now.’

‘There is nowhere else to go, brother,’ said Ares. ‘Most of this part of the planet is marsh and swamp. Solid ground like this is rare.’

‘It’s barely solid,’ said Bedevoir. ‘I’ve been to places like this before. I’d say the people are as trustworthy as the ground. Where are our hosts?’

‘They’ll be watching us,’ said Jadriel, ‘to see how we behave when they are absent. They’ll have heard everything you said, sergeant.’

‘Good. I hate hiding behind smiles.’

‘There’s no danger of you hiding behind any kind of smile,’ said Lamorak.

Bedevoir curled his lip at him. ‘This whole mission is a waste of time. This planet is a ball of mud. Forty million people, is that it? What is Dante thinking? Why are we listening to him? There are a thousand systems more important than this within range of the Garde’s engines.’

‘That’s enough, Bedevoir,’ said Ares. ‘Dante is the Regent of Imperium Nihilus, the master of the Blood Angels and our lord.’

‘That’s interesting. I thought the Chapters were supposed to be independent. That’s what they told me in the Unnumbered Sons. Were they wrong?’

‘Peace, brother,’ said Ares. ‘Our new Chapter Master is a Primaris, like you. He agreed to Dante’s plan.’

‘That’s just fine then. I didn’t know Lord Guilliman gave us to you so we could be frittered away on pointless exercises like this. I’m glad that has been cleared up.’ Bedevoir’s resentment at the mission was clear. Jadriel shook his head warningly at him.

‘Communications have been nearly impossible since the rift,’ said Ares. ‘We are to scout every world on the Adeptus Astra maps and every other one that might bear a human presence and report back to Baal. How can we defend Imperium Nihilus if we do not know what we are defending?’

‘Lord Tyndall will return with his ministers and the local Adeptus representatives. We can deal with them, then be on our way,’ said Jadriel.

‘I hate flattering aristocrats, especially on a mud ball like this.’ Bedevoir picked up a goblet of wine, drank, and pulled a face. ‘Even their wine tastes like piss.’

‘You are an Angel of Death. You are a Red Wing. You will behave as such,’ Jadriel said. His patience was wearing thin.

‘Really? Until a few months ago we were liberating the galaxy, Jadriel, on glorious crusade. Now look at us, counting vermin in the mud.’

‘That’s enough, Bedevoir! Remember yourself.’ Ares moved suddenly, his armoured boots crashing on the moist flags. ‘Tyndall is the Imperial commander. He will be treated with respect. We have our mission. We will fulfil it, or did the primarch not teach you how to obey orders?’

Ares and Jadriel stared at the sergeant. Bedevoir looked between them both and shrugged. His armour whined as his pauldrons shifted around the movement.

‘My apologies, brother-captain, brother-lieutenant. There is no end to the problems of this new Imperium of ours. I never thought I’d find myself watching children rather than going to war, that’s all.’

‘Aye, children, human beings who you are sworn to defend. There are not only children here,’ said Ares, ‘but men and women too. They are loyal subjects of the Emperor, even if they do live in the mud. They did not choose their life. It is our duty to watch over them. Our duty is a serious one, Brother Bedevoir, if unglamorous. Sometimes one must wait for battle. I understand that after the glories you have won in the Indomitus Crusade that rankles, but believe me when I say that war will find us soon enough. Now I will hear no more of this, is that clear?’

Bedevoir shrugged again. He drank the rest of the wine. ‘Yes, brother-captain.’

Though the day had an unpleasant, muggy heat, night on Dulcis was cold. Mist rolled in off the marshes in smothering blankets, bringing a damp chill. In no time at all, iron-grey skies became a low black lid for the world, and condensation ran in oozing streams down the stonework of the citadel. Storms of intense violence preceded the fog, crashing louder than artillery in brief yet astonishing displays before grumbling away over the horizon, taking the heat with them and allowing the cold to seep in off the marsh.

While the Space Marines waited for their hosts, large fires were built up in every room, though they did little to warm the fortress. Damp wood hissed in the grates, putting out clouds of smoke that struggled to find the chimney. Thunderous showers of rain fell every so often, so hard the water bounced off the stones of the balcony and ran into the hall, then finished as soon as they began, as if activated by tap according to an unknown schedule. Despite the rain and the cold, the people stayed in the streets and continued to celebrate into the night.

Tywell was deep in the tropics. Evening passed rapidly. As night fell, from within the fog the rumbling cries of great beasts could be heard even over the city’s noise. Tywell’s diffracted light turned everything outside a murky orange.

An hour after nightfall, Tyndall arrived. His Guardsmen threw open the doors to the room with a crash and he strode in. For a man of such small stature, an attribute magnified by the pile of musty furs he wore against the cold, he had an imperious manner. He walked up to Captain Ares, holding the Space Marine’s eye all the way, while his courtiers flowed in behind him, as unctuous as Dulcis swamp water and barely less noisome of scent. The room filled up with the smell of warm, damp bodies that, though often wet, were rarely bathed.

Jadriel gave Bedevoir a meaningful look to behave, which the sergeant ignored. Ares inclined his head.

Tyndall self-importantly planted his cane on the floor and held out a hand, presenting his Imperial seal. Ares looked at it and raised his eyebrows.

Bedevoir sneered and took a step forward. Jadriel stopped him with an arm across his chest. Tyndall did not react, but his guards stepped up, unsure, fingering the triggers of their lasguns.

Jadriel shook his head at them, and they relented. The courtiers spoke to each other behind their hands, making a show of being secretive. Within the mass, though definitely separate, were a dozen representatives of the Imperial government. They did not whisper, nor did they smile.

‘You do not bow!’ the commander’s major-domo hissed his rebuke.

‘I need not bow,’ said Ares. ‘I am Adeptus Astartes. You have my respect, and my aid, but not my submission.’

Tyndall scowled, but forced it into a smile.

‘No need, no need!’ he said. ‘Captain Ares of the Red Wings!’ Tyndall gave a short bark of laughter afterwards, a triumphant, pleased-with-itself eructation that began with a lip-smacking sound close to a kiss. The Red Wings were to find he did so habitually. ‘My lords! Welcome to Dulcis. It is a long time since we were so blessed with visitors of so high a renown. The heroes of Baal!’ Again, the laugh. ‘My people celebrate your arrival. Ever since the Great Rift split the sky, they have lived in fear. Now they may look up, and, on a clear night, see the lights of your fortress watching over them from the heavens.’

‘We will not be staying, Lord Tyndall,’ said Ares. ‘We are tasked by Lord Regent Dante to make a survey of the worlds in this subsector. He is embarking on a great effort to secure these regions against all threats.’

‘Well! Well!’ said Tyndall. He turned to his sycophants. ‘Perhaps they could secure our city from the mud eels and the crustacea!’

His followers dutifully laughed.

‘They are dangerous, these local species?’ asked Bedevoir.

‘Dangerous, sir angel? Dangerous?’ Another look to the crowd prompted more fawning laughter. ‘I have it on good authority that were they slightly more dangerous, or this world of ours possessed of a small additional peril of some other sort, Dulcis would merit reclassification as a death world. Is that not so, Adept Kovas?’

Kovas, the leader of the Imperial delegation, dressed in Adeptus Administratum grey, bowed his head in acknowledgement. ‘It is so, my lord commander.’

‘Still, they might be dangerous, but they taste very fine!’ said Tyndall to more forced laughter. He clapped his hands. ‘Enough of jests! Everyone, everyone, to your places. Time for a little feast, I think.’

‘My lord, I thank you for your hospitality,’ said Ares, ‘but we must attend to our task. We should begin by speaking with your officials and the officials of the Imperium to ascertain what dangers your planet faces. You must understand that this is a time of unprecedented upheaval, and we–’

‘Yes, yes, all in good time. My people celebrate, so will I, and you will join me, captain. You and your officers here. Tomorrow we will have the talk of government. Tonight,’ he banged his cane on the floor, ‘we feast!’

A huge cheer went up from his courtiers. On cue, servants bustled in bearing tables and chairs, and musicians playing an assortment of braying instruments danced into the hall.

‘This is going to be a long night,’ said Bedevoir.

The Red Wings were given the seats of honour at the high table. Lord Tyndall plied his guests with Dulcis’ sour wine and huge plates of meat. It was surprisingly good, so good that even Bedevoir did not complain while Tyndall went on at length about his entirely modest achievements.

The Space Marines responded by eating. Ares encouraged them. They had eaten little but void rations for months, and the meat was welcome. The Red Wings amazed their hosts with the amount they consumed. Courtiers paid their respects and attempted conversation, to be met with curt dismissals from Ares that defending meat processing plants from the local wildlife was not within their remit. Only later in the night, when the music and crowd had become raucous, did the adepts of Terra approach. Only then did Ares set his plate aside, stand, and offer a salute, then his hand in friendship to Kovas.

There were half a dozen adepts in various official robes. Kovas was a thin, aesthetic man with a long skull and eyes that were too small for their sockets. They looked solemnly out from a surround of purpled skin, but there was steel in them. The Space Marines saw that immediately.

‘My lords,’ said Ares.

‘I am Administrator Kovas, plenipotentiary of the Adeptus Administratum.’ Kovas gripped Ares’ gauntlet. His hand barely encompassed two of the Space Marine’s fingers.

‘You are armoured, even to feast,’ Kovas said, holding out his hand to a flunky. Ares’ gauntlet was greasy. A handkerchief was duly presented for the plenipotentiary to wipe his fingers on.

‘We are at war, my lord,’ said Ares. ‘This may look like diplomacy, but we are on a combat footing at all times. The Great Rift is close. We might be called upon to fight at any moment.’

‘Yes. The rift.’ The plenipotentiary pulled an expression of distaste at Tyndall’s capering fools. ‘We must talk. In private.’

Tyndall had been discussing some local matter with one of his lords, but he had half an ear on all that the Space Marines said, and turned to them at that moment.

The Imperial commander’s laugh bubbled up, preparatory to him speaking.

‘I have Imperial business, my lord,’ said Kovas, interrupting Tyndall before the laugh had finished. ‘By your leave, I would like to speak with the captain.’

‘I must attend,’ said Tyndall. ‘I insist.’

Kovas bowed. ‘Very well, my lord,’ he said reluctantly.

‘Make a private room ready!’ Tyndall bellowed. ‘If the work of the Emperor cannot wait, so be it.’

‘Thank you, my lord, but first, I must take the captain to the roof.’

Ares raised a snow-white eyebrow.

‘You will see,’ said Kovas.

The Space Marines got up from the table, and the officials of the Imperium walked towards the door. The room quietened. Music faltered. Suddenly, all was hushed.

‘Yes, yes, drink, eat, be merry!’ Tyndall called. ‘The servants of the Emperor are among us!’

His courtiers looked at him.

‘Drink!’ Tyndall said with more force. ‘Music! Play, play!’ He laughed his peculiar laugh, but it sounded angry.

Falteringly, the festivities recommenced.

Kovas led the Red Wings from the hall. Bedevoir stopped before the Imperial commander and stared at him until Tyndall’s smile had quite frozen.

‘Good meat, my lord,’ Bedevoir said eventually, and followed his captain from the hall.

Kovas shivered as they ascended the stairs to the roof. Worn, damp stone wound round and round. It was a style of staircase the Space Marines had seen on a hundred worlds and in thousands of fortresses. But there, on Dulcis, it appeared particularly backward. Their giant boots rasped on the edges of the steps. There was not sufficient space for them, and they were forced to crouch and steady themselves with their hands.

A door of sodden wood opened onto a roof of ferrocrete pockmarked by corrosion where puddles gathered. One of Kovas’ servants threw a heavy fur around his shoulders. The plenipotentiary seemed badly affected by the chill, and his lips paled.

‘What have we come to see, my lord?’ asked Ares.

‘Yes, why are we up here, Kovas?’ said Tyndall. A select few of the Imperial commander’s courtiers spilled out onto the rooftop, giggling drunkenly and shivering.

‘The sky,’ said Kovas. ‘I would show you something that I do not believe the local authorities are taking with enough seriousness.’ He spoke as if Tyndall were not present. ‘If you would look towards the location of the Great Rift, please, captain.’

Ares went to stand beside the plenipotentiary at the parapet. Mist blanketed the ground so completely only the spires of the Administratum offices and the cathedrum were visible above it as stone islands in the wet. Lights moved about on the streets where people continued to celebrate, but the noise they made had lessened with the lateness of the hour, and the mist muted it further. The sky was equally covered, shrouded from horizon to horizon by thick cloud. ‘Is the rift visible often?’ asked Ares.

‘Thankfully, no. The sky is rarely clear here,’ said Kovas.

Tyndall began his laugh. ‘I beg to differ! Our world is renowned for–’

Ares silenced him with a glance.

‘You are lucky,’ said the captain. ‘On some worlds this close to the rift, its presence alone has made those who see it go mad, or worse. It is better that it is hidden.’

‘We fear similar incidents here,’ said Kovas. He followed the old protocol, now abandoned in many places, of being oblique when it came to matters of the warp.

‘What are we looking for?’ said Ares.

‘You will see,’ said Kovas. ‘Watch.’

A soft wind blew the mist along, but there was an endless supply of it, and though it curled and swelled with the slowed motion of a sea, it did not lift. The clouds were featureless. If they moved too, it was impossible to tell.

Tyndall’s courtiers grew bored and restive, and drifted back inside until only a handful remained on the roof with the Space Marines and bureaucrats.

‘Nothing is happening,’ said Tyndall. ‘Let us return.’

‘We will join you shortly, if you wish to return, my lord,’ said Ares. He kept his eyes on the clouds.

Tyndall grumbled, but remained.

‘I don’t see anything,’ said Bedevoir.

‘Anything on auspex?’ asked Ares.

Both Jadriel and Lamorak checked their instruments.

‘Nothing,’ replied Jadriel.

‘Wait, captain,’ said Kovas. ‘It happens every night. Only the timing is unpredictable.’

‘There!’ said one of Kovas’ party.

A bright light flickered in the sky, a single point at first, every flash accompanied by a low, pulsing noise like a puttering engine or a charging machine that was almost too quiet to be heard. Then more lights joined it, increasing in brilliance, blinking a dozen times until they filled the sky and flashed across the land.

Ares felt a pressure build in his mind. He tasted metal. The curse of the Blood of Baal reacted to psychic pressure. Behind hypnotically crafted locks and mental bars, the Red Thirst stirred. He thought of feasting on different fare to Dulcis’ meat. His mouth watered.

The puttering grew in volume with the frequency of the flashes. The last burst sheeted across the marsh with the brilliance of lightning, the final sound a loud pop. Strange noises echoed in the aftermath. In the swamp, the creatures roared and screamed, then finally they too quietened.

‘I felt that,’ said Ares. He shuddered as the sensations withdrew. The thirst for blood lingered. ‘What was it?’

‘Nothing, it was nothing. Lights in the sky,’ said Tyndall. ‘A pretty display! Harmless, harmless!’

‘Far from harmless. It was the warp,’ said Kovas. His lips had gone blue. ‘Let’s discuss this indoors. Lord Tyndall, if you are to join us, could I request your servants warm me some wine?’

Tyndall had a second room prepared for the Space Marines and adepts to speak with one another. It was so carefully appointed, at least by the standards of Dulcis, that he must have intended a private meeting all along. Ares decided that whatever it was Tyndall had to say would have to wait. Kovas’ disquiet was the greater concern.

Racel, the chief of the local branch of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica, explained Kovas’ worries to the Space Marines. Unlike some officials in that Adeptus, she was an astropath herself, her missing eyes hidden behind an augmetic steel visor wired into her temples. She was very young, thought Ares.

‘We have been experiencing similar pulses for the last five months,’ she said. ‘When viewed beyond the planet’s atmosphere, they appear as a major flare event emanating from the rift similar to a stellar coronal ejection, although on a larger scale. They are an admixture of warp energy and realspace emissions.’

‘By the local reckoning of time, when did the rift open?’ asked Ares.

‘Six months ago,’ said Tyndall, eager to be included.

‘Local or standard?’

‘Standard,’ Kovas said.

‘But none of these pulses until a month after that?’

‘My staff felt eddies in the warp before, but whether these are part of the greater turmoil unleashed by the Great Rift, or connected to this specific phenomenon, I cannot say,’ Racel said. ‘Our senses are blunted. One of my astropaths died the first time we tried to send a teleprayer after the rift – Adept Mina, a good sender, and a strong mind. So I ordered no further attempts at communication, either outgoing or incoming. Since then we have limited ourselves to short periods of scrying. Adept Selwyn is talented in astromancy besides astrotelepathy. His divinations help us choose the best moments.’

‘You made the right choice,’ said Ares. ‘The rift has taken a high toll on all psychic personnel on every world we have visited.’

‘We can feel it. It is a great pressure,’ said Racel. ‘Temptation that must not be given in to.’

‘How many of you are there?’ asked Lamorak.

‘There were five. A standard allowance for a system of this tithe grading,’ Racel said. ‘With Mina’s death, we are four.’

‘Our difficulties in communication are not why I wished to speak with you, my lord,’ said Kovas. ‘I am sure you have encountered the same wherever you have been.’

‘We have,’ said Bedevoir. ‘It hampers our efforts also.’

‘There is something else,’ said Kovas. ‘Something the lord commander of Dulcis will not address.’

‘It is nothing,’ insisted Tyndall.

‘Explain,’ said Ares.

‘For one, there is the effect of the flares on the local populace. We have had an increase in mental afflictions,’ said Kovas.

‘Entirely normal, given the circumstances,’ said Tyndall.

Kovas glanced at him irritably. ‘Of greater concern is the increased emergence of psychic individuals. This planet has a small population, my lords. Forty million.’

‘According to past tithings on this world, we would expect fewer than ten psykers to emerge yearly from this number,’ said Racel. ‘Given that some individuals evade detection for several years, the annualised, natural incidence of psyker births on Dulcis is somewhere in the order of one in eight million.’

‘That is not a high number.’

‘It is average for this world,’ said Racel. ‘Or it was. That number has increased fifty-fold in the last five months. In that time alone, Adeptus Astra Telepathica witch hunters have incarcerated five hundred psychic individuals. That number is growing. There is a spike in discoveries after every warp flare.’

‘The second problem we face is a complication of the first,’ said Kovas. ‘We are overdue a visit by the Black Ships. The last witch tithe was scheduled to take place three years ago. It never arrived. We expect it never will.’

‘It is nothing we cannot handle!’ protested Tyndall. ‘In the past, when we have had a surfeit of psykers, we have simply culled them. The periods between visits of the Black Fleet are long. They cannot take them all.’

‘We are not savages. These are Imperial citizens, cursed though they are,’ said Kovas. ‘And they are a valuable resource.’

‘If we enact a cull now, we may not have sufficient to fulfil the tithe quota, should the Black Fleet arrive,’ said Racel.

Kovas sighed. ‘If they do or do not, if we cull or do not, we are left with the problem of emergence. At this rate, it cannot be long until a psyker of dangerous talent appears.’

Ares looked around the room. ‘What do you wish us to do about this? We have no Librarians with us. Our own corps of astropaths is as small as yours. We can send word to Baal and notify the Regent of the problem. Perhaps Lord Dante will send psychic personnel here from another Chapter, to help you screen the dangerous from the merely benighted. There is not much more I can achieve for you. I recommend that you cull them. I can leave a letter of recommendation to that effect that you may present to the Black Ship captains, if they ever arrive.’

‘That would be helpful. But we also have specific requests.’ Kovas took a scroll from a servant. The parchment was bound with green ribbon and sealed with the mark of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica.

Ares broke the wax and unrolled the parchment. He scanned the petition. It was written in formal High Gothic, but the content was simple enough.

He looked up.

‘You do know what happens when the Adeptus Astartes are unleashed on a world? We are a finer tool than some military organisations, but this is not the sort of work we are made for.’

‘Who else is there?’ said Kovas.

Ares reread the scroll and rolled it up. ‘Very well then. We shall accede to your requests. You are correct, we do have the equipment to help you. I will commit my men to a detailed sweep, and if you insist then we shall perform the cull.’

Tyndall sat upright. The news shook some of the drunkenness from him.

‘These are my people!’ he said, though his outrage was more fear for his position should he fail to fulfil his tithe, that was certain, for he had advocated a cull himself only minutes before.

‘They are witches,’ Kovas said. He bowed his head. ‘Politically, it would help if you were the ones to eliminate our current overpopulation of psychic individuals. We cannot support the current numbers. We will maintain a small group. Should the Black Ships arrive, we will have a sufficient tithe, and detailed records to submit that show we are doing our duty and keeping the population of psykers down.’

‘We are doing your duty,’ said Bedevoir pointedly.

‘Your help is greatly needed. Off-world forces are a much more convenient conduit for hate. Some of the incarcerated are of noble birth. You can leave, but we must rule here.’

Ares’ face hardened. How blandly these bureaucrats committed others to death, witches or not.

‘Where are they?’ asked Jadriel.

‘The cells of our Telepathicum are full. We have established a witch-pen a hundred miles north of here,’ said Racel.

‘That’s far,’ said Lamorak.

‘Solid ground is in short supply,’ said Bedevoir, repeating Jadriel’s earlier words.

‘Do you have Mechanicus personnel on-world?’

‘A few enginseers,’ said Tyndall, trying to reassert some control. ‘They are yours to do with as you please.’

‘We will need them. Tomorrow, I shall survey the pen personally. Jadriel, you will lead a sweep of the city for psykers and eliminate any that run.’

‘This is dirty work,’ said Bedevoir.

‘And yet it is the task appointed to us.’ Ares looked at Kovas. ‘We will do as you ask, but once we are done, we shall be leaving.’

CHAPTER THREE

A LITTLE PUSH

The Joyous Garde was vast. The footsteps of Lamorak and Ares rang loudly on marble floors in deserted halls. It was one of the Red Wings’ five warp-capable void-castles, part of the Pentagarde that comprised their fortress-monastery. Each had the capacity to support three companies. In better times they were staffed by multitudes of mortals, but though the fortresses had been deliberately kept back and played no part in the battle to save Baal, the human servants of the Chapter were as reduced as their masters, lost to the teeth and claws of the tyranids on the voidships of the Chapter. Now few tended the Joyous Garde, hundreds where thousands should toil.

‘This place is empty,’ said Lamorak.

‘It was not always so,’ said Ares. ‘It will not remain this way for long. As soon as more Primaris Space Marines are raised we shall hear its halls ring with song and the sounds of work. Even with the reinforcements Dante was given, our Chapter is at less than half strength. This fortress once housed my company, the Ninth, and the Third and Seventh. We are fifty. Hundreds lived here with thousands of thralls.’

‘Bedevoir complains,’ said Lamorak. ‘He complains that other Chapters have been restored already and we must wait.’

‘Which Chapters does he speak of?’ said Ares. ‘I see Chapters worse affected than we, with fewer reinforcements, and fewer assets left. Or perhaps he refers to the Flesh Tearers? I’ve met their Chapter Master. If any Chapter needs diluting with new blood, it is they. Politics plays a part in who gets what, Brother Lamorak. We will receive our due.’

‘It is not my opinion.’

‘Then why tell it to me? I know what Bedevoir is like. Or does our brother mean the likes of the Golden Sons, who are only one of the Chapters virtually destroyed defending Baal, and whose order is now the same in name alone. We were blessed. Our numbers are diminished and our fleet no more, but none of our void forts were at Baal. I thought Master Pellinagror was ruthless not deploying them, but he was right.’

‘We are paying the price for our lack of commitment,’ said Lamorak. His words rang a little false; he, like Bedevoir, still did not see himself as one of the Red Wings.

‘We bled as much as any other in defence of the Blood Angels. Pellinagror foresaw what kind of battle we would be facing. He went to his death knowingly, but he saved our order. Where would we be without our void forts? We would be broken, and homeless. So let Dante punish us, if he really is, for leaving the Pentagarde out of the battle sphere. Consider, though, that we have the machinery aboard this fortress, and aboard the other five, to make our own Primaris brothers. Dante made sure we received this technology quickly. He did so because we are in a position to use it. Our fellow Chapters are not. Again, I say we came away better placed than others.’

‘I agree, brother-captain,’ said Lamorak reluctantly, ‘but the likes of Bedevoir will not be convinced. He is not alone, and nor is his grumbling limited to our Chapter. There is a sizeable faction among the Primaris of the Blood who think Dante too old to rule effectively. They chafe to be on crusade again. I know them, they are my brothers. This manner of service is strange to them.’

‘Let them chafe. They will cease biting their words, once they see what kind of man Dante is. I, too, thought his reputation too good to be true, until I fought by his side at the Arcus Elim. I was there when he led us out in a final charge into certain death. I saw him fall and rise again. If he chooses to give us a full set of reinforcements, I thank him. If he does not, I understand he has his reasons. I do not question him. I will not gainsay him. I will carry out his orders. The returned primarch himself gave him the right to give them. Go against Dante, and you go against the Emperor’s last living son. You served him. You know what that means.’

Lamorak was silenced awhile by Ares’ determination, then changed the subject.

‘Tomorrow I will begin testing the best of the local population for possible induction.’

‘Good. Continue your assessments at every world we visit. By the time this section of the tour is done, I want the sarcophagi full. This Chapter will rise again, and we shall play our part in that.’

They arrived at their destination, the Augury Psykanium, a facility between the empty Librarius and the Astropathic Temple.

Inside the psykanium there were more living souls than the pair of them had seen throughout all their walk: more than a dozen human servants of the forge, a similar number of mortal scriptors from the Librarius and three techpriests borrowed from Dulcis. Delgor, the Techmarine attached to the contingent, was present, directing all the rest. The machinery was idle but powered and ready for use. It emanated supernatural energies that made Ares’ eyes hurt.

‘Our honoured servants of the Librarius are to aid us with the operation of this machine,’ said Delgor when they arrived. ‘It’s all working as well as can be expected. Scriptor!’ Delgor called. ‘The captain is here.’

One of the mortals came forward and bowed before the captain. Like all the servants of the Red Wings, he was shaven-headed, with the Chapter insignia tattooed across his scalp.

‘You are Scriptor Everian,’ said Ares.

‘Yes, my lord, I am honoured you remember me.’

‘You can work this device without a Librarian to aid you?’

‘It would be easier with one of the battle-lords, but we can do it, my lord,’ said Everian. ‘Are the astropaths secure behind their baffles, my lord Priest?’ he asked Lamorak.

‘They are.’

‘Then we may proceed.’ Everian went to a command pulpit. His attendants began to work. ‘The discharging of this machine can be painful to those with psychic ability, if they are close by. Prepare for engagement.’

The device hummed, and the temperature of the room climbed steeply. Static electricity prickled Ares’ scalp. Everian looked to him and Ares nodded his assent to proceed. When he moved, a large spark leapt from his armour into the deck.

‘Engage scry-pulse.’

Fourteen thralls simultaneously threw large switches. The room shook once. The sensation of caged energy vanished, leaving Ares feeling peculiarly drained.

‘Begin power capture for second pulse,’ Everian commanded. ‘Readings will be available in a few moments.’

A mechanical cogitator rattled. The device took up several cubic yards of space and was attended by three forge thralls. Arrays of brass pistons pumped furiously. A thin line of punched parchment emerged inch by jerky inch from a slot in the side.

Patiently, the thralls gathered the parchment. A small blade chopped down with a metallic rasp, cutting it neatly. The paper was carried with all due reverence to a much sleeker machine and fed within. The device took the first inch slowly, then sucked it all in at once.

A screen came on, displaying an orbital image of Tywell of such realism it appeared as if the city had been captured and put inside the device. Soft glows lit up all over the image.

‘Signal count,’ said Everian.

A forge thrall went to the device and fiddled with several large knobs until a count appeared on the screen. ‘Planetary, one hundred and eighty-seven. Within the city of Tywell, thirteen.’

‘A hundred and eighty-seven?’ said Lamorak disbelievingly. ‘Exclude those incarcerated at the witch-pen.’

‘My lord,’ said the thrall. ‘That is excluding the camp.’

‘How accurate is the reading?’ asked Ares.

‘There is an error margin of forty per cent, give or take a few points,’ said Everian. ‘The chances of an underestimate are higher than that of an overestimate. The total number of returns in Tywell is high. They are close together. There is a high chance that some of the positive returns represent more than one individual. If we had a member of the Librarius here, then we would be able to tell. As it is…’ Everian shrugged apologetically.

‘Then we must cull them. Our ground forces are in position,’ said Ares. ‘Begin assigning them targets. Prioritise those in the richer districts.’

‘Shall we inform Lord Tyndall, my lord?’ asked Everian.

‘Only when the richer districts have been swept,’ said Ares. ‘The rich always run, and they are the only ones who have the resources to try. Give them as little warning as possible. Prepare for another scan mid-afternoon, by Tywell local time.’

‘We will be ready,’ said Everian.

‘Then begin at your discretion,’ commanded Ares. ‘I am needed on the surface.’

‘There were lights in the skies again last night,’ said Chalayus. ‘So pretty, so flickery! They danced and shone and it was ever so nice.’

‘Yeah,’ said Esmera. She wasn’t in the mood for Chalayus’ nonsense. Her head ached after the previous day’s pushing, and she was on edge, expecting the witch catchers to burst out of the reeking alleyways at any second. It wouldn’t happen, it never did, she was far too careful for that, but it didn’t stop her worrying about it. There were cages full of burned bones around the market square for girls like her. Either that, or the witch-pens.

‘Big ones and noises pop pop pop! All the sky.’ Chalayus waved her hand over the clouds. It was filthy, the lines in her palm seamed with dirt. ‘I felt it in my head and in my tummy. It made my head go funny. I liked it!’

They were walking alongside the crumbling bank of the Clara Flumine, seeing if anything edible had washed down the river in the night. Low cliffs of soft mud slipped under their feet, threatening to spill them into the brown flow. They were upriver, approaching the west wall, facing towards the citadel but away from the Administratum district. The smell wasn’t so bad up here, the city not having much chance to pollute the river yet, although every alley and hovel reeked of excrement.

Not that Chalayus noticed. She just kept up her babble as usual.

‘I would like a lovely fish for breakfast, or maybe some eel meat. That would be nice. I do like eel meat. I’ve not had it for such a long time.’

‘Shut up, Chalayus,’ said Esmera through gritted teeth.

The girl was younger than Esmera – not by much, she was probably seventeen or eighteen in standard terms, but she behaved like a child. Stool-wick had done that to her. There were plenty of fungiforms out in the swamps, and some of them had pleasant effects on the human mind if prepared right. Most of the pleasant effects came with less pleasant ones, and stool-wick had a bundle of each. Chalayus’ mind was a rainbow mess of nonsense thoughts. The girl couldn’t hold an idea in her head for longer than a second. She would never be able to, even if she stopped taking the drug. If she did she’d be left with a shattered mind crowded with fear, so she would never stop. It was probably for the best, considering the things Chalayus had been through. There were limited ways to make money in the city for people like them. A lot of them were damaging.

Esmera’s head ached. She had never had the knack of seeing thoughts, but today, somehow, she felt she could see right into Chalayus’ messed-up brain, and that made her headache worse.

‘And then I slept, and I had such lovely dreams, and I–’

‘Shut up, Chalayus!’

Just like that, Chalayus did shut up.

Esmera felt a familiar twinge deep in her brain, the one she got when she pushed. But she hadn’t pushed. At least, she had not meant to.

‘Chalayus?’

Chalayus looked at her dumbly. She frowned, puzzled.

‘Speak.’ Again, she pushed without pushing. She barely noticed she was doing it. Before, she’d had to concentrate. It was an act of focus only yesterday.

Noise burst out of Chalayus like water from a broken dam. ‘Wow, I didn’t want to talk for a minute. That’s not like me. Is that like me? I don’t know. But–’

Esmera had a thought. ‘Sit,’ she said.

Chalayus dropped to the ground. ‘Ow,’ she said in surprise.

Esmera reached out her hand. ‘Get up,’ she said.

Chalayus pulled on Esmera’s hand. Her arms were covered in self-inflicted scratches, bad tattoos and stool-wick scabs.

‘Why did I sit down? I didn’t want to sit down. But I did sit down.’

Esmera took great care in what she said next. She had to actively not push now. ‘Could you be quiet? Only for a moment.’

She ran a quick mental check. Usually after pushing she felt tired, wrung out, as if a little bit of her had been expended to get people to do what she wanted. It was like she was a gun, and her soul provided bullets, spending itself piece by piece. But not now. She felt fine.

She let out a delighted laugh.

‘Hey, hey, what’s up? What’s going on?’ said Chalayus. ‘Why are you laughing? Can I laugh too? What are you on? Can I have some? Please, please!’

‘You wanted some fish for breakfast, right?’

Chalayus nodded vigorously. The dirty dreadlocks piled on her head wobbled. ‘Yes! Fish. Or eel meat.’

Esmera grabbed her by the wrist.

‘Come on then, let’s get some eel meat.’

Bedevoir and two of his squad walked the streets at the base of the citadel. People stopped and stared at them, overawed at the angels in their midst. The braver of them attempted to approach, but it took only a glance to make them back off. Bedevoir was glad they were timid. Unbidden, his auto-senses kept switching to thermal sight, showing the warm glow of blood beneath their skin. The thought of drinking it tempted him: not badly, but enough, a nagging idea that would not leave him. He was glad he was Primaris at those times. It was much worse for the older Space Marines, or so he had been told.

It bothered him though, because the thirst seemed to be getting worse.

He reset his auto-senses to enhanced visible spectrum for the third time that day. A quick check told him there was nothing wrong with his equipment. A message signifier chimed in his vox-beads, with a line of script in his retinal display telling him it was from Everian. He ignored it while he adjusted the response sensitivity of his neural links. The order to change to the thermal view had to have been his, but it had not been consciously given. That was worrying.

He cut his external and his squad vox.

‘Cogitator, receive new sensorium settings,’ he said to his machine-spirit.

A line of text ran below the message alert.

<Confirmed. Awaiting.>

‘Set to vocal command only. Ignore neural input until further notice.’

<Confirmed. Settings adjusted.>

He reconnected his vox, then read the message.

‘Squad, I have a message from the Joyous Garde. We are active. Mission is in progress. Our first contact is moving up from the lower city to grid coordinate fourteen-nine-three, moving towards the citadel low gate.’ He datapulsed an updated cartograph into the helms of his comrades.

‘That’s the richest district,’ said Brother Bors.

‘Then Lord Tyndall will be pleased that all the world will be speaking of our actions, I’m sure,’ said Bedevoir. Already, he was sending further instructions to the other elements of his unit spread around the city. Three groups of three. To each he assigned a target.

‘There are only a few routes of escape off the Prince’s Row,’ he said to the men he accompanied. ‘We can apprehend our target there.’

There was eel meat and so much more besides. Esmera was careful how she got it; rather than forcing people to hand over their goods, she made them want to help those who had less than they had. Charity was an act they could justify to themselves, and one that wouldn’t have her dragged off by the witch hunters. All she and Chalayus had to do was turn up, smile, and get fed. Everyone won that way.

They stuck to the Warren for a while, but boldness took hold and they ventured onto the higher streets closer to the citadel’s base, then finally onto Prince’s Row. The streets there were not only paved but regularly cleaned. There was barely any mud on them at all. Tywell’s finest shops lined one side of the road, their windows facing the grubby cliffs of the rock the citadel occupied. Proximity to Lord Tyndall’s residence was a sure sign of royal approval.

Esmera and Chalayus walked along the street together, cramming steaming bread into their mouths and giggling.

The people of the upper city looked different. They were healthier, wore finer fabrics and carried more technology, and they had shoes with platform soles to keep their feet free of the filth. But women like Esmera and Chalayus were common enough, even there, and they walked along the road arm in arm, attracting little more than disapproving looks from bodyguards and shop minders.

They stopped and looked in at a window where glorious clothes were displayed under bright lumens. Chalayus was entranced by the sparkle of metal threads in the cloth. An assistant in the shop was taking shoes out from the shelves at the bottom of the display. She scowled at the women through the glass. Chalayus giggled and stuck out her tongue. A hard part of Esmera wanted to make the woman come out and throw herself into the mud at their feet, and lick their dirty boots clean. She stopped herself before the push could form.

She had to be careful.

A roaring banging made her jump. Chalayus shrieked. They turned in the direction of the noise to find a crowd running down the road, fleeing the source of the explosions.

‘All citizens, cease running. Stop,’ a grating machine voice shouted.

More banging. Esmera realised it was gunfire.

‘We are engaged in the apprehension of dangerous individuals in the name of your ruler, Lord Tyndall. Cease running.’

The crowds parted. Rich and poor alike huddled against the walls. One man did not stop, but ran towards them, his face contorted in terror. To Esmera’s surprise, he was a rich man, not poor. The rich never looked like that, not scared, not ever. They locked eyes. He was going to die, she felt that. There was a kinship between them. In that brief moment of contact, she knew they were the same.

He was a psyker.

Pounding footsteps came after him, and she understood why he was afraid.

The Angels of Death had come for him.

‘Halt! Halt or we shoot!’

There were three of them. They were immense, as tall as the eaves of the lower buildings. The man fled on, his fellow citizens parting before him, leaving him alone.

‘Stop!’

The Space Marine’s voice blared out of the brutal, downturned beak that covered his mouth. His tread shook the ground, each footstep pushing in the paving. His armour whined and growled. He was more like a machine than a man.

Chalayus began to cry.

‘For the love of the Emperor, stop!’ the warrior called.

Esmera couldn’t move. Being close to him filled her with a dread so all-encompassing it covered everything else over in blackness. He moved past Esmera. Faces pushed at the window of the shop. The crowd behind the Space Marines followed after them at a safe distance. Windows and doors all along the street cracked open, and curious heads peered out.

The warrior stopped running. He brought up his enormous gun. It was huge, large as an infant’s crib. He couldn’t get a clear shot, so fired up at the walls of the citadel. The gun barked. The crowd shrieked and ducked. The projectile hit the wall and exploded, blasting out a shower of rock. That did it. Everyone in the street got down except the fugitive witch.

Then the warrior aimed his gun at the man. The sight on the top glinted green. He tracked his target for a fraction of a second before firing, though to Esmera it seemed a lot longer.

The muzzle spat fire. The bolt streaked down the street, leaving a white trail behind it on the damp air. It hit the fleeing man and blew. Esmera felt a flash of terror as he was obliterated.

The Space Marine was very close. She could feel the heat from the reactor on his back, and the ground steamed around him. More gunfire sounded from elsewhere in Tywell.

They were hunting psykers. Suddenly, she was completely aware of that, with utmost certainty she knew she was right. She felt the Space Marine’s thoughts. They were cold, clinical. They seemed to lack something, a human quality.

They had to get out of there. Quietly, she tugged Chalayus’ hand and drew her after her, heading down a narrow set of steps leading back towards the lower city.

‘Go check the body,’ Bedevoir said to Brother Perkal.

His auto-senses picked out the body of the fleeing psyker as a cooling smear across the road. People were screaming. There was no aggressive movement against his warriors, however, only useless displays of fear on every human face.

‘Yes, brother-sergeant,’ Perkal said. He jogged down the road, scattering the people again.

Brother Bors went to follow.

‘Wait,’ said the sergeant. He stopped his comrade with a gesture.

The sergeant scanned the crowd, his green eye-lenses flashing as his internal systems judged them all. Threat indicators came back in the negative each time. He saw nothing but weakness.

‘What is it?’ asked Bors.

His gaze fell where he’d glimpsed two young humans standing.

‘Nothing,’ he said. His helm chimed. A dot appeared on the cartograph, marking up another psyker a few streets away. ‘I have notification of another target. Move out.’

On the other side of the veil, the triads watched. The area of interface flashed with a billion motes of light. Each might offer a way through, but the triads were experienced hunters. They would not chase every soul-blink, but lie still until the perfect opportunity presented itself.

On the shores of reality, in one particular place, a pattern was emerging. In a realm without time, timing meant nothing, but the pattern was evident nonetheless. A vortex formed around a bulge in realspace, spinning about and threatening to break, but never doing so, and when it reached a certain size so then did a light blaze, and as it faded, more tiny pinpricks shone their fragile candles.

The triads sensed sentient minds. Minds they could use. Minds they could own.

They drifted nearer.

Some of the pinpricks stuttered out, and the souls they marked sped into the roar of the rift where shoals of warp predators swam the currents to tear them apart. The triads stood apart from these daemonic beasts. They were not the same.

Among the birthing lights and their violent extinctions was one that shone more steadily and more brightly than the rest.

It was to this steady glow that the triad of First-Second-Third was drawn.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE CULL

The skiff carrying Esmera and Chalayus puttered past the wreck of a mudhulk rusted brown from top to bottom. Only metal remained. Every scrap of plastek or wood or whatever other softer material had comprised its fittings had been eaten away by the swamp.

Listing to the right and forward, the superstructure stared with empty windows down the length of the killing deck. Brown metal reflected from the oily water that had swallowed its double prow. The left-hand hull jutted skywards, the swampbottom tracks gone, the drive wheels exposed and welded immobile by rust. Above the clumped mess of the wheels, a water screw pointed at the clouds. Its triple brass propeller was bright green with verdigris, but otherwise its wholeness contrasted starkly with the disintegrating vessel.

The boatman scratched his chin and nodded. ‘You sure you want to go out to the rigs? That’s what happens when a hulk snags an eel that’s too big for it. I’ll bet you look on the underside of that you’ll find bite marks bigger than this boat. The biggest eels can snap their way right through plasteel, never mind that old iron, and not many of them hulks is made from plasteel, no missy.’

The man scratched his face again and spat over the side. He shifted his hand up the pole guiding the skiff. The motor was on the other end of the pole, the assemblage held to the boat with nothing but a bit of rope. The skiff wobbled, its disturbed wake sending ripples across the black water that made the reeds bob and jerk.

‘Don’t expect you’ll be eelers, anyhow, not you two. There’s plenty of safe work on the rig, away from the deep marsh and all the beasties there.’

He winked at her. Esmera knew what kind of work he meant.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I will hunt.’

‘Then what about your friend? She looks the sort. Off her head on stool-wick.’

Chalayus giggled and gave him a girlish wave.

‘Not her either. I’ll look after her.’

‘I’m sure I’ve seen her before, in the red quarter, by the docks. Hair like that is hard to forget.’

‘Shut up,’ said Esmera. She could have pushed to get him to obey, but she didn’t.

She eyed the water suspiciously. She had no idea how deep it was. She had a good idea of what might be down there though, and it made her afraid.

The boatman caught her scowling at it.

‘Don’t worry, missy, these parts are mostly safe. I’m messing with you. I wouldn’t ply them in this old tub if they weren’t. I didn’t get as old as I am by being a fool. This hulk ran aground twenty years ago. Engine trouble. The tracks dug up a gas pocket as they tried to haul out by bottoming, someone lit up a smoke stick, then boom, the end. No marsh eels out this close to Tywell. Never seen one. I’m just being funny, is all.’

The boat made its slow way past the ship. The space between the twin hulls made an artificial cave. A curtain of dead man’s moss hung from the broken railings over the mouth, all the way into the water. The sharp, frantic chatter of day bats gibbered out from behind.

From a stand of spiky mandrigroves, a water cat howled. Birds flew up from the black branches.

The boatman twisted the throttle. The boat’s acceleration tipped Chalayus up off her seat and she fell into the inch of filthy water in the boat’s shallow bilges, where she lay giggling.

‘We’ll be all right,’ said the boatman, more to himself than to his passengers. ‘So long as we stay clear of the swamps and the sea and stay on the marsh.’

Esmera watched until the hulk was lost behind them.

The gunship swept low over the water, its engines blasting up arcs of muddy spray behind it. Delgor was flying deliberately low to evade augury capture. There were a number of family members of the higher lords of Dulcis at the witch-pen. Better the relatives were informed of their deaths after the fact.

Ares stared at the dull metal plates of the transit bay. He did not like this duty. For all that the tithe-gathered were witch-born, and a danger to the Imperium, they were still people, and innocent of any crime other than birth. Imperial canticles of hatred placed the witch and the mutant on a level with the xenos in order of abomination, but he was a subtle man; he could see through the doctrine others espoused, and the Red Wings were like many of the sons of Sanguinius. They followed gentler beliefs when it came to common humanity.

‘Five minutes to the witch-pen, brother-captain,’ said Delgor.

Ares looked up from his brooding. ‘Bring us in carefully. I do not want the psykers incarcerated there gathered to panic.’

‘As you command,’ said Delgor.

‘Better we keep the situation as calm as possible. They’ll know why we are coming,’ added Lamorak.

‘If you were in their situation, you might,’ said Bedevoir. ‘These are civilians, and mortal. Some of them will guess, some of them will have sensed it, but a lot of them will convince themselves we’re there to save them.’

‘It makes me uneasy to break their hope,’ said Lamorak.

‘Hope makes men stupid, brother,’ said Bedevoir. ‘It is to our advantage. Some of these witches have more than a little talent.’

Glumly, Ares agreed, though he did not voice it. He looked over his men. Fully twenty of the fifty warriors under his command were present for this task.

The ship swept upward. Ares got up.

‘Prepare,’ he said. His men slapped their restraint releases. They took their guns from their racks. They checked each other’s armour. The ship banked around, and the Space Marines swayed with the movement, but they continued their tasks unperturbed.

Retro jets fired. The ship angled up, turned on the spot, and descended. Landing claws hit the ground and the ship sank into its hydraulics.

Ares pushed his way to the exit ramp.

‘We are facing away from the witch-pen?’ he asked Delgor.

‘Yes, captain.’

‘Open the front ramp only, by motor – this is not a combat deployment. Keep it calm. I will talk with the camp authorities. Delgor, make ready to come out. The rest of you remain here.’

Motors whined, dropping the ramp slowly. Thick, muggy air blew in.

Ares stepped out onto a prefabricated landing pad bolted to the side of a cliff. The view arrested him, and he paused once he had moved to the side of the ship. Marshland extended as far as he could see. Great meres of recaff-brown were broken up by runs of grey reeds. In the distance were darker places where tall trees grew. The water was black and brown, the vegetation adding greeny greys, and the sky was low and brooding, but the landscape had a gloomy beauty to it. Gusts of wind pushed patterns of silver into the reeds and raised up the water into tiny waves capped in white. There was little taint of pollution on the air. For all its wetness and rot, Dulcis was a world in balance, pure and full of potential to advance the cause of mankind.

‘Captain.’

Ares turned from the view. An official of the Adeptus Astra Telepathica approached the landing site down a flight of stairs carved into mud-brown rock. The witch-pen’s island was a few hundred feet tall at most, but stony as any mountain. Two armsmen in the green of the Adeptus accompanied the official.

The official gave a short bow. The hem of his robes was caked in mud, and he had the pale, tired look that all the people of Dulcis seemed to carry, but he was solemn, and dignified. He had a sacred duty to perform, wherever he was ordered to perform it.

‘Adept Rame,’ said Ares.

‘I greet you with regret on this day of such heavy duty,’ said Rame.

‘There is no other way,’ said Ares. ‘The number of psykers on this world is increasing with every flare from the rift.’

‘The Black Ships shall not leave us empty, when they come,’ said Rame. ‘It is alarming in all other respects. The rate of emergence here is running at hundreds of times the galactic mean. It caused me a sleepless night, but I have to concur that we have no choice. A shame, for this is a good tithing, with many fine specimens.’

‘There will be more,’ said Ares.

‘Emperor be praised,’ said Rame.

‘What did you tell them?’

‘That they are to be inspected by the Adeptus Astartes Red Wings. They have no concept of how the process works, but I must sound a note of caution. They are afraid.’

‘We are fear,’ said Ares. ‘The less they know the better. Fear of death is worse than death. We are not without mercy. We shall make this quick.’ He looked up the stair leading from the landing pad. ‘Is there no other way to the top?’

‘None,’ said Rame. ‘This site was chosen to be deliberately difficult to escape.’

‘That is a shame – they will see us coming up the stairs. Are your men ready?’

‘I have only twenty,’ said Rame. ‘But they are ready.’

‘Then let us be about it. I have little stomach for this slaughter and I wish it done.’

Ares called out Delgor and Lamorak before ascending from the pad. The steps came out between a pair of bunkers whose heavy weaponry pointed inwards. The island had a flat, stony top, broken by lumpen outcrops.

Hundreds of people waited for them. The witch-pen was laughably constructed: mounds of earth topped by a wall of wicker gabions. Scavenged razor wire fencing covered only part of it. There was little more to dissuade the population from escaping than the cliffs.

‘A child could break out of here,’ said Bedevoir.

Yet the witches made no attempt to escape. There were a number of gibbets placed around and within the pen, each holding a decayed corpse. A prayer station and flagellation posts huddled at one end, for the prisoners to use in their quest for redemption. A blackened stake in a circle of burned ground warned of what happened to those that did not cooperate. Ares thought Rame wouldn’t need to use it often. The expressions of many of his charges betrayed self-loathing, and they stood meekly in ragged lines, a sign of military discipline accepted haphazardly by civilians. Five men with lasguns watched them. A couple of badly cast rockcrete buildings served as barracks. Another, on the outside of the fence, housed the centre’s administration. The smell of a large number of people living in close proximity would have been overwhelming, were it not for the wind to disperse it.

Delgor flipped up a panel in the forearm of his armour. The machine inside emitted a soft repeated whooping. ‘This place is not fit for its purpose,’ said Delgor, moving his forearm slowly across the wind-blasted isle. ‘There’s no psy-warding here to speak of. You keep them behind these mounds of earth?’

‘We have no choice. We do not have the resources for any better,’ said Rame. ‘It serves its purpose. There is no other way down save the stairs. Any attempt to escape invariably results in death. There are some here who might develop the talent to remove themselves, given training. Needless to say, they do not get it. They are wild witches, my lords, they are scared. We have made examples of those too powerful to contain.’ He gestured at the gibbets squeaking gently in the wind. ‘Our buildings are warded against psychic influence, we all carry hexagrammatic charms, and our training makes us difficult subjects to subvert mentally. None of them are particularly gifted. They are card sharps, snoops, empaths, limited telepaths, minor pyrokines – nuisances rather than dangers. Even with the increase of psykers, the emergence of a primaris-psyker level threat is incredibly unlikely.’

‘It is a risk,’ said Delgor.

‘It is, however, necessary,’ said Rame firmly. ‘Telepathica law is clear. All individuals evidencing psychic ability are to be held until the arrival of a Black Fleet, even if no fleet arrives during the lifetime of a subject. Our Adeptus is bound by that duty.’

‘Such inflexibility will lead to disaster,’ said Ares. ‘You should have purged them already. This incarceration is cruel. What if we had not come?’

‘Flexibility often leads to disaster for the man who embraces it,’ said Rame. ‘I do agree, but I had no wish to be executed as a reward for my excellent judgement. Nor do I wish to find myself at the epicentre of a psychic event. The holding block at the Temple Telepathica is usually sufficient to contain the few individuals we find each year. The very strongest ones are currently held there. This number of minor talents is unheard of, and I assure you I know whereof I speak, my lords. I have spent my whole career finding witches for the Emperor’s use. But we have a solution.’

‘A solution you insist we enact,’ said Lamorak.

‘I have no wish to die,’ said Rame. ‘You can kill them all with ease. For us, there is a greater risk.’

‘Self-interest dooms us,’ said Lamorak.

‘Duty has only cold rewards,’ said Rame. ‘I do what I must to survive.’

‘Is this happening on other worlds near here?’ asked Ares. ‘What does your Adeptus’ sector command tell you?’

‘Nothing,’ said Rame. ‘Our communications are poor. From what you told Mistress Adept Racel, we are not alone, though I pray to the God-Emperor on Terra that we are an isolated case. Were psykers to begin to emerge in such numbers on other planets then I dread to think what would happen.’

‘What would happen?’ asked Lamorak.

‘What our Adeptus and others like it have being trying to prevent for millennia,’ he said humourlessly. ‘The extinction of humanity.’

Ares looked over the crowd. His helm counted four hundred and eighty-three individuals. Several of them were watching him. They knew what was coming.

‘Bedevoir, Jadriel, bring the others up. Quickly. We must act now. Rame, withdraw your men.’

Rame gave the signal. His soldiers retreated backwards, guns trained on the crowd of psykers.

The thunder of power-armoured boots rose over the moaning wind. Jadriel led the squads onto the island top. He peeled right, Bedevoir left. Half the warriors followed each of their leaders.

Concern passed from face to face in the crowd. The lines wavered. The Space Marines were running down either side of the dyke, and up onto the top of it.

‘Present arms,’ voxed Ares. ‘Full-auto. Leave none alive.’

A score of bolt rifles levelled at the crowd. That was enough. The captives began to scream.

‘Fire,’ Ares said.

He forced himself to watch.

Bolt fire left little of an unarmoured human target behind. Living people exploded into mists of red. Ares’ warriors aimed for the centre of the body’s mass, so if there was anything remaining, it was usually a scattering of limbs. Heads and legs thumped onto the muddy ground.

The psykers attempted to use their meagre powers. A fire caught on one of Ares’ Intercessors, but he ignored it and blew apart those he thought might be responsible. Another of the Red Wings shot wildly into the air, briefly disoriented by a telepath. A third staggered back under a weak telekinetic blow.

For ten seconds the island thudded to the report of bolters. The racket was immense, and suddenly over. Bolt rifles clicked dry around the perimeter. Space Marines reloaded, but did not open fire again. There was no need. Silence fell.

There was not a person alive in the witch-pen. Where nearly five hundred human beings had stood was a red mass of pulped flesh and vitae. The hot smell of blood and broken bowels blew over Ares. His teeth ached in his gums and his mouth watered. So much blood, all of it going to waste, sinking into the thin earth of the island camp…

Rame surveyed the carnage. His expression stayed firm, but a twitch around his eyes betrayed him. Ares was glad the massacre had affected him.

‘Thank you for your service, my lords,’ Rame said stiffly. He turned about and skirted the perimeter, heading for his headquarters.

Ares barely saw him go. His pulse roared in his ears. He could smell only blood. Scavengers were gathering in the sky already, drawn by the scent. Part of him yearned to join them, but he would not allow himself to descend to their animal level.

‘Back to the ship,’ Ares said. ‘Let them clean this up themselves.’

CHAPTER FIVE

MAINRIG

Esmera came awake with a jerk so hard it rocked the boat. The boatman gave her a dark look.

‘Careful, little missy, we don’t want to fall in there.’ He pointed down at the water.

‘They’re all dead,’ she said.

The man nodded. ‘Bad dream, is it?’

She shook her head. She couldn’t explain. The man would try to kill her if he knew what she was. Already she had to push constantly to stop him asking too many questions.

‘Just be careful,’ he said. ‘Don’t put your hands in the water. I had to tell your friend that five or six times.’

Chalayus grinned and lifted her hands up. They were tied together at the wrist, the binding looped over a cleat. ‘He did have to tell me a lot.’

Esmera wrinkled her nose. ‘What is that smell?’

‘We’re nearly there. See?’ Again, he pointed into the water.

This time Esmera looked, and was almost sick.

The marsh was slicked with blood. Chunks of offal bobbed past. The water churned with the feeding of small aquatic animals snatching mouthfuls of rotting flesh as the motor of the little skiff blended it into a disgusting soup.

‘Sorry, missy, we have to ride the currents, because it’s not safe to come in from the north. We’re leaving land behind. Deeper water out there – that means the big eels can get in. There’s a good reason why they wait for the in-tide before they splash the slops out this side of the station.’

The blare of a ship’s horn had her come fully awake. Esmera shook off her disorientation and looked to the horizon.

‘Mainrig, your path to a new life.’ The boatman grinned down at her. ‘I can always take you back, if you like.’

It was late afternoon. The day would retain the harshness of light filtered through flat clouds for a couple of hours yet. The sun was an aching smear nearing the west.

A towering, many-legged city squatted over the boundary of marsh and sea, voiding filth like a diseased old man. Around the boat the patches of reeds and muddy banks had dwindled to rare instances. Past the rig was open water.

The stacks of rendering plants belched black smoke. The awful smell of melting fat hit Esmera hard, coating her nose and throat with a greasy film. Ships and barges crowded the legs of the rig-city, adding the gritty pollution of badly maintained promethium engines to the smell. Corroded pipes dribbled stinking effluent from ten thousand privies and ablutorials, but the chief ingredient of the miasma was the by-product of Mainrig’s industry, the rank organs and blood of marsh eels thoughtlessly slopped over the side.

‘I thought Tywell smelled bad,’ said Chalayus brightly, ‘but this place really stinks!’

They followed a road of polluted water flattened out by the passage of little boats. There were dozens like the skiff crowding the rig, carrying all manner of passengers, nosing past the big ships to get under the city. Esmera’s boat joined them, and in jostling convoy they passed by one of the great legs holding the rig up over the border of marsh and sea. It was yards wide, blistered yellow paint flaking off ancient metal. The corrosion marked a definite line four feet above their boat. Below that the leg bore strange fruit: clusters of shellfish and lumpy coral that somehow survived in the effluent. Under them the leg ended in a large, rockcrete foundation.

‘It’s the tides,’ said the boatman when he caught her puzzled expression. ‘They leave the mark on the metal. Seawater goes up and down, not like in the marsh. Right now, it’s not so deep here. Ten feet, maybe. I wouldn’t go in it though.’

Esmera looked over the bobbing mat of filth and plastek. She’d rather have burned than jump into that.

The leg was the first of hundreds supporting the rig. The underside of the city was dark, and with the many pillars it resembled the cathedrum in Tywell, though far dirtier. Strange noises echoed under the metal sky: chains and other clinkings, shouts, cries, the slap of water and the splash of garbage. Engines filled out the lower registers, blurring the noises together. The shriek of day bats roosting beneath human feet were piercing enough to carry over everything.

The boatman made for one of dozens of floating piers fashioned from plastek boxes and netting that rose and fell with the filthy swell. The smell underneath the city redoubled, growing so strong Esmera started breathing through her mouth. Even then the noxiousness of the city made her want to sneeze. She resisted, thinking that if she breathed through her nose by accident she would vomit.

Another horn wailed. A metallic booming drew her attention to the outer edge of the rig. An eel hulk sat high on the water atop its twin hulls; it was huge, but still its railings only reached halfway up to the rig’s deck. An unseen crane swung down a rusty chain ending in a vicious hook. Men rushed to secure the end. Another horn blew. The men waved their hands. ‘Up up up!’ they gestured. The chain drew in, dragging up the tail of a marsh eel. Up and up the chain went. The eel uncoiled behind it, black against the flat, hard light of the cloudy sky. It went on and on, twenty feet, fifty, a hundred, its serpent body thick as the rig legs.

‘A big one, that,’ said the boatman. He hawked up a wad of phlegm and spat it into the scum on the water. ‘Not the biggest though.’

The boat bumped into the pier. Hands reached for the women, waving like leaves in a gale as their owners shouted to attract attention. Esmera pushed past the hands, careful not to take any to steady herself. The smallest help cost out here. She kept her single bag clutched tight.

The boatman lifted Chalayus out and onto the pier. She squirmed in his grip, frightened by the shouting mob.

‘Shhh,’ he said. ‘It’ll be all right.’

Esmera took her hand and pulled Chalayus close, using her back to shield her friend from the crowd.

‘Thank you,’ she said to the boatman. Another small boat bumped into the makeshift jetty, making it sway. Seeing no profit from the two women, the crowd moved away to offer their services to the newcomers.

‘You’ve been kind. I’m sorry I have to do this,’ Esmera told him.

The boatman started to speak. Esmera pushed, very gently, at his mind. A single word came out unformed. His jaw clicked shut. He stared at the women and frowned, then, blank-faced, he twisted his pole throttle and sailed off.

‘Come on,’ said Esmera.

Chalayus shrank into Esmera. There were too many people on the jetty, and it bounced under their weight, making water slop over the side that soaked their shoes. In the middle of the jetty, a single ladder led up the side of a leg. People were descending one side and ascending the other, carrying huge loads in nets attached to straps around their foreheads. People stopped to argue when they inadvertently stepped on each other’s fingers or jostled their cargo. The climb was high, the ladder rickety. Desperately, Esmera looked for another way up, but there wasn’t one to be found anywhere nearby, and those she could see were far away and, if anything, more crowded and more dangerous than the one in front of them.

‘Come on,’ she said again. Chalayus was so terrified Esmera had to prod at her broken mind to get her moving. She did this while her own head rang with the thoughts of the hundreds of people all around her. Need rattled against her soul like rain on a sheet metal roof. Only below, beneath the stinking water, was there calm in the slow, cold minds of fish. She looked around the arrivals in disbelief, seeing that so many of them were like her: witches. She recognised them by their fearful looks. Why had they all come here?

She was dizzy and close to passing out from the stench and the psychic noise by the time they reached the bottom of the ladder. A thickset bald man with skin as rough as glasspaper stood at the bottom, a bucket attached to his waist and a whip in his hand. He shoved at the people going up. He shouted at the people coming down. Everything he did was invested with enormous tension, awaiting the trigger to explode into violence.

‘An eagle each,’ he said to Esmera. She didn’t dare push him. She was too dazed and he was too single-minded.

‘We don’t have any money,’ said Chalayus.

‘Then you stay down here in the stink,’ he said. He grabbed Esmera to push her away.

‘Wait,’ she said. She couldn’t think straight. She certainly couldn’t push him. She pulled a small purse out of her bag. ‘Here,’ she said.

‘It’s extra, for lying. Three eagles,’ he said.

Esmera handed the money over meekly.

‘Where did you get that?’ Chalayus asked.

‘Never mind,’ said Esmera.

‘Up, up!’ shouted the man. ‘Get up or lose your place in the line.’

Esmera pushed Chalayus onto the ladder, lifting her hands into position and clasping her fingers for her around the metal.

‘Up! Up!’ shouted the man. He flicked his whip across Esmera’s legs.

‘Go on! Go up, Chalayus,’ she said.

‘I’m scared,’ said Chalayus.

‘Get up!’

She pushed Chalayus then, though the effort nearly caused her to black out, and they climbed. The ladder swayed with the motion of people. She tried not to think what would happen if the metal gave way. She could not look down.

Faces passed within inches of her own. Reeking bodies brushed her. It was cooler out there where the sea and the marsh met, but still the people sweated with their efforts, eyes bulging at the weights they carried on their backs. Their teeth were rotten and eyes bloodshot from stool-wick abuse.

Esmera was reduced to placing one hand above the other, plodding slowly upwards as her arms began to shake and her head spun.

All of a sudden, it was over. Another man, ugly enough to be the twin of the fellow at the bottom, dragged Chalayus then Esmera up through a hatch and onto the peeling deck. She was dazzled by the sudden light, and was roughly shoved aside when she failed to move herself.

Chalayus clamped hard to her arm. Aviforms and day bats screamed overhead. People were shouting. The smell of blood and melting fat was far more pronounced up top than it had been in the underside. The crowd pushed and bumped at them, until they came by sheer chance into a still place.

Chalayus gave a little squeak of fright. Esmera looked up.

A gibbet hung from a crane arm over a square. A badly burned body swung in the cage. The skin was black and had peeled away, revealing scarlet muscle tissue. Eyes cooked white in their sockets stared down at her. Lipless teeth were horribly white in the charred mess of the face. A day bat clung by its wing claws to the cage framework, long tongue rasping away at the half-cooked meat.

From the bottom of the cage a sign hung on chains. It caught the wind, acting as a sail and making the gibbet dance.

The sign bore a single word in red.

Witch.

Someone like her was in the cage, someone who had died in fiery agony.

Esmera grabbed Chalayus’ wrist and dragged her away, seeking somewhere, anywhere, where they could hide.

CHAPTER SIX

FLARE

‘Flare event imminent,’ said Everian. ‘Stand by for data collection.’

‘Put it onto the hololith. I want to see it,’ said Ares. He’d returned to the Garde specifically for the flare, and he wanted to study it as closely as he could.

Thralls moved to do his bidding. A large-scale visual of Dulcis appeared, its small moon peeping out over the day-night terminator. The rift was a wall of ugly light beyond.

Everian consulted a bank of twitching dials.

‘Psychic resonance building. Event occurrence in six, five, four, three, two, one.’

Everian’s countdown was accurate to the microsecond. The rift flashed. Its patterns bunched close, producing a flickering of increasing frequency that expanded, then exploded, sending a curled blast of white fire racing towards the planet. Alarms wailed as it neared.

‘Impact in ten seconds,’ Everian said.

‘It is yet distant,’ said Bedevoir.

‘The speed of the explosion exceeds that of light. Not surprising, seeing as we are dealing with the warp. Natural law is weak here. Prepare in three, two, one.’

The flare seemed to be hundreds of millions of miles away, but a palpable blow struck the station. It did not perturb steel or flesh, but the souls of all within were jounced hard in their seating. Men shrieked as unexpected fears filled their minds. Shadows took on sinister forms and scurried across the deck. Most of the thralls kept their wits about them and worked feverishly at their posts to prevent damage to their machines.

It was the Space Marines who were worst affected.

Ares felt the hit like a sword to the heart. For a second, he could not breathe. He found himself looking at a different place entirely: a voidship, its fabric polluted by the warp, that shook to weapons fire given and received. The guns echoed the call of the Rage in his skull. War drums pounded in his mind, urging him to do violence.

He looked down at his hands. They were huge, and strong, and clad in gold.

The vision passed. He gave out a great gasp. Klaxons rang from every quarter of the psykanium. The warp flare seemed to be hitting the planet then, but in truth it had already passed by, speeding into space and dissipating into nauseating colours as its unnatural energy fell afoul of physics. Beyond Dulcis the void boiled with purple and blue, trapping it between the ghost of the warp flare’s past and the moment of its dissolution.

The pulse beat at the sky and beat at his soul.

Ares steadied himself. He breathed like a drowning man surfacing, terrified he would be sucked back under the water.

Jadriel was leaning against a railing for support, shaking his head as if he could not believe what he saw.

‘Brother,’ said Ares. ‘Are you well?’

The thralls continued to work under Everian’s direction.

‘Brother?’ asked Ares.

Ares reached out a hand. Jadriel couldn’t breathe. He was shuddering. Amazed, Ares realised he was weeping.

‘Brother!’

‘I saw him – I saw Sanguinius,’ said Jadriel. ‘I saw him die. What is happening?’

‘They are the visions that plague our kind,’ said Ares.

‘The visions that presage the Black Rage?’ Jadriel recovered a little. A moment later, he seemed normal. ‘Will it take us?’

Ares stared at him. He should not have seen the visions. The Primaris were supposed to be immune, but Jadriel had seen them, and now he stood there as if nothing had happened. ‘Maybe. But it should not take you at all.’

‘Perhaps it was the result of the psychic wave,’ said Jadriel.

‘Perhaps,’ said Ares, unconvinced.

The psykanium discharged. Its sounding pulse shook the station.

‘All systems are operational for now,’ Everian reported. ‘That pulse was powerful. I do not think the instruments will withstand another one of that magnitude.’ He checked his displays again. ‘The pulses are getting stronger.’

‘My lord, we have readings.’

A thrall handed Everian a freshly scribed parchment.

‘We have a huge return. It’s a grade three witch sign, possibly grade four.’

‘In the city?’ asked Ares.

‘Further out, in the marsh. One of the processing rigs at the edge of the sea.’

‘Do you have more specific locational data?’

‘I can’t find it. This equipment is temperamental. But the size of the return suggests numerous psychic individuals.’

‘How many? Why are they gathering there?’

‘I have no idea, my lord,’ said Everian. ‘But if I might put forward a hypothesis…’ He frowned at the parchment. ‘Something is calling to them. There is a drop-off of witch sign elsewhere on Dulcis. There is definitely a concentration at this location.’

The hololith zoomed in to a section of the planet. Everian pointed at an industrial facility on the boundary between the sea and the marsh.

‘Here.’

Ares approached the display and examined it from several angles.

‘This does not bode well,’ he said. ‘An occurrence like this cannot be down to coincidence.’

‘Warp breach,’ said Jadriel. ‘Daemons. It’s the simplest conclusion.’

‘That is possible,’ said Everian. ‘Let us say that the psykers are growing in number here because of Dulcis’ proximity to the Great Rift. We are far enough away that immediate danger might be avoided, but near enough that subtler perils are likely. If these waves of psychic power are somehow affecting the planet’s population, causing these emergences of psykers, then we can expect to see more, and that will provide opportunity for warp entities to gain ingress to the material realm. Even if this is not the case, then the chances of a powerful rogue psyker emerging grow with every pulse. We should consider Exterminatus to prevent this world becoming yet another beachhead for daemonic forces.’

‘No,’ said Ares. ‘Not yet. We do not know if the pulses will continue.’

‘We do not,’ admitted Everian. ‘In support of your argument, it is possible they will cease. The workings of the warp are never predict-
able.’

‘We should inform Lord Dante. Can our astropaths get a message out?’

‘We can try,’ said Everian. ‘The risks to them are high. This is another occasion where a battle-brother of the Librarius would have been useful.’

‘I know,’ said Ares. ‘I would not ask if Baal did not need to be made aware of this. In the meantime, load cyclonic torpedoes and target weaknesses in the planetary crust.’

‘As you say,’ said Everian with a bow.

Everian and his thralls went back to their tasks.

‘Are you well now, my brother?’ Ares asked Jadriel.

Jadriel nodded. ‘I am. I feel perfectly normal.’

‘Go to Lamorak. Have him check you over. Find out if we alone were affected.’

‘Yes, brother-captain,’ said Jadriel.

‘And Jadriel?’

‘Yes?’ said the lieutenant.

‘Be discreet.’

The people were drawn out to see the flare. Esmera didn’t know why, she just felt herself drifting out of the converted oil tanks that housed their accommodation and up onto the flat roof. She was hardly aware she was going. There were others there, and on the roofs of other buildings. Mainrig’s uneven landscape dropped away in steps. Everything there was made from something else. Homes were shipping containers and old tanks, or lean-to shacks roofed with tarpaulin. The cranes that dragged the marsh eels up to the butchery plazas had been repaired with all manner of oddments. Part of the rig on the seaward side was shored up by a scuttled hulk, half-sunk into the waves. Everything was worn and old, broken and reused so many times the original functions of most of it were forgotten. Upon this shaky foundation the industry of an entire planet was based. But she didn’t see any of that. She looked up into the cosmos, and saw a far more beautiful world.

For once the sky was clear, only patches of cloud to break up the expanse of stars. The Great Rift was a river of light, huge as half the sky, full of spinning vortices and ribbon-like currents. The priests in Tywell warned the people not to look up into the night for fear of damnation, but if there were priests on Mainrig, they were silent. She had no idea how many people lived here, but it seemed a large proportion were up on the roofs, watching the sky.

She wondered if they had the same dreams as her. Since arriving a few nights before, she dreamed of a world of beautiful light inhabited by loving beings. They reached out for her with gentle limbs, and though they were xenos, and she had been taught since birth to loathe all things that did not wear a human shape, she did not fear or hate them, but delighted in their presence.

They seemed so far away, yet closer than her own heartbeat. They floated in a radiant ocean so much purer than the filthy seas washing the rig. She wished to go there, to where they were. Soon, they seemed to say to her, she could.

More psykers gathered at Mainrig. It seemed laughable that any of them could suffer the same fate as the unfortunate strung up in the square she had seen when she arrived. There was strength in numbers, and they were a multitude. She felt them all around her.

The pulse began, a wash of power in the sky that energised her mind. The others experienced it. She sensed their response, a mix of joy and fear, but mostly joy.

The sky shone with uncountable colours. She drew strength from them, feeling herself swell inside, and her ability grow. She felt unstoppable, as if she could change the minds of every person on the planet with the slightest of efforts. All her life she had been afraid and alone, but not in that moment. She was powerful, beyond the feeble beings that made up her race. She was above them, at one with something greater.

The promise of greater power, of the knowledge of all things, was tantalisingly out of reach, so she reached further for it. Clouds of sparkling lights surrounded her, and she found her wonder growing.

She was on the roof and she was somewhere else. She saw the rift from the other side, a place where a standing wave of energy as high as the galaxy curled endlessly over itself, filling space with dangerous beauty. Its energies remade and destroyed things beyond her comprehension, but as they did she felt a universe of emotions wash through her.

She laughed in delight.

Around the edges of this maelstrom, the kindly ones waited. Huge, placid creatures whose multiple eyes glimmered with gentle intelligence. They raised their tentacles in greeting, and she drifted towards them. There were others there, people from the roof, the gifted, like her, persecuted and hunted all their lives, but now free and at home.

Welcome, the luminescent beings said without saying. Welcome.

One of the biggest reached out to her. A flat pad tipped its tentacle. It laid it across her chest, and she thrilled at its touch.

Ours, it seemed to say.

A sharp pain made her gasp. The tentacle withdrew. A glowing barb was lodged in her… in her body, in her ghost? She didn’t know what she was. A thread of light led from the barb to the tentacle.

Ours. A tiny set of mandibles moved under multiple eyes. Ours.

It faded away into nothing.

‘Essie! Essie!’

Chalayus had her by the shoulders and was shaking her awake. Esmera thrashed and shouted, scrabbling at her stinging chest.

‘Essie! Essie! What is it?’

She came around slowly. She was in her cot in the crowded dormitory she and Chalayus had pleaded and bribed and pushed their way into.

‘Go to sleep, for the love of the Emperor!’ someone said.

Eel-oil lamps were lit. Voices murmured in the dark, foetid room. People roused by Esmera’s waking cursed and got up to toilet. Mothers tried to lull their children back to sleep.

Esmera heard shouting from other rooms, other buildings, disturbing the peace of the night.

‘What’s wrong?’ asked Chalayus, a vestige of the person she’d once been showing itself through her stool-wick fugue. ‘You are sweating. You’re hot! Are you sick?’

Esmera probed at her chest. Something felt lodged deep in her mind, a splinter of something else’s being. She felt hot and cold at the same time. Her eyes hurt, and so did her head, with the worst headache she’d ever had.

She looked out through the window. Just as in her dream, the sky was clear of clouds. The Great Rift roiled in the night. Looking at it made her feel sick, not like in her dream at all. She tasted bitterness in her mouth and was forced to swallow down her rising supper.

‘Nothing,’ Esmera said. ‘I’m fine. Go back to sleep.’

‘Really?’ asked Chalayus.

‘Really. Tomorrow we’ll find some work. Everything’s going to be fine.’

She didn’t believe what she said.

CHAPTER SEVEN

WARP GATE

Ares led the group himself. Bedevoir, his squad, Jadriel and Lamorak accompanied him. The arrival of thirteen members of the Adeptus Astartes on Mainrig caused the population to stop whatever they were doing.

Ares waved his men down the Thunderhawk’s front ramp. Mainrig’s structure was poorly maintained, and the whole landing tower shook with the power of its atmospheric jets. He advised Delgor against putting down, so the Techmarine kept the ship in a hover until the party had disembarked.

From the landing tower Ares could see all of Mainrig’s squalid corners displayed like a hololithic model. It was more a city in the sea than an industrial facility, a slum that stank of dead animal and fish oil. Hundreds of dirty faces stared in amazement up at the landing tower.

Ares upped the volume of his voxmitter to maximum. ‘In the Emperor’s name, I command that you clear the area or face lethal force.’

‘They’re not going to listen,’ said Bedevoir. ‘Look at them, they’re terrified.’

‘I’ll get them to move,’ said Jadriel.

‘Take the squad down,’ said Ares. ‘Lamorak, stay here on lookout and direct us. This place is a rat’s nest.’

‘Yes, brother-captain.’

‘Jadriel, Bedevoir, on me. Follow.’

Bolt pistol ready, Ares descended to the main deck. People had enough of staring when confronted by the Space Marines close to. The spell broke, and they quickly removed themselves.

Ares experienced a moment of indecision. The rig was a deathtrap of blind alleys and sudden pitfalls.

‘Jadriel, take half of Squad Bedevoir and try an alternate route. Speed is of the essence. Bedevoir, with me.’ Everian had found a better locus lock, and the psykanium’s trace pinged in his helm. He pointed through the crowded hovels. ‘The marker is west of the rig, in that cluster of rotten tanks that have been converted into dwellings. I don’t expect much resistance, but be on your guard. This one’s got a far higher reading than anything else we’ve experienced yet on Dulcis.’

There were others there, many of them, but the most powerful had to be dealt with first.

‘Yes, captain,’ said Jadriel. The lieutenant plotted his own route and forwarded it to Ares’ cogitator.

‘We’ll try this way,’ he said.

‘This place stinks,’ said Bedevoir. ‘This is one of the ugliest places I’ve ever been.’

‘It’s not their fault, Bedevoir,’ said Ares.

‘It is their fault,’ said the sergeant.

They ran as quickly as they could. But though power armour boosted their speed and allowed them to leap the clutter of the rig, the route was far from clear, and they were forced to a crawl in many places. The only cartolith Ares had was based on the STC template for that model of rig, but it was over a thousand years old, and Mainrig had been given many non-standard modifications to suit it to its purpose. Ares’ auto-senses did their best to sound out a way through the maze of huts and industrial units, but more than once he found himself coming up against a dead end of plasteel or an open pit that appeared without warning at their feet.

‘Double back. Try this way,’ he ordered, data-casting an updated route to his men.

Jadriel’s data marker moved more quickly.

‘I have the target location in sight,’ the lieutenant voxed.

‘We’re lost,’ said Bedevoir.

‘Move into position. Observe and await engagement until we are with you.’

‘Yes, captain.’

Jadriel’s feed cut.

‘Come on,’ said Ares, ‘let’s get out of this labyrinth.’

Jadriel’s group reached the tanks. Auspex scans gave an accurate representation of the layout. The psykanium marker blinked in the second cylinder, up on the fourth of five retrofitted floors.

He brought up his bolt rifle and advanced at a crouch, his gyro stabilisers giving him an unshakable aim. He ducked through a rough door cut into the side, and went into the first cylinder.

Jadriel could barely credit the number of people crammed into the tank. Each floor was thirty yards across, large areas given to open dormitories crowded with dirty bunks and the battered possessions of the destitute. Other parts were divided up with scavenged materials: cut-up plastek crates, planks from broken wooden boxes, sheets of cloth and metal. The smell of eel oil inside was intense.

It was impossible to approach the target silently. The Space Marines provoked reactions from surprise to terror. Some people froze in their tracks and had to be physically shoved aside; nearly all of them made noise, screams or shouts of excitement, calling their friends to come and see. Within seconds of the Red Wings’ arrival the place was in uproar.

‘Brother Gawin, clear this block now,’ said Jadriel.

Gawin split off and began directing people outside. There were a few in there, either crazed or intoxicated, who seemed to find the situation funny. Gawin broke a few bones explaining the gravity of the situation.

Jadriel moved on with the remaining four warriors of the demi-squad. Ceramite struck iron stairs, making the tank toll. Metal creaked under the Space Marines’ weight. His battleplate cogitator trilled alarms warning of failing structural integrity. Jadriel responded by increasing his pace. They ignored the second and third floor, heading directly for their target.

On the ground floor Gawin loosed off a few shots. Screams followed. People began pouring quickly past the Space Marines to get out. Jadriel ignored their babbling queries and pushed on, oblivious to their cries of pain when his armoured body clipped them. The laser dot of his bolt rifle flicked over flaking walls and ancient rivets.

‘Up there!’ a female civilian said, pointing behind herself. ‘She’s sick! Something bad!’ She was away before Jadriel could question her further.

The floor cleared. There was a draught coming from somewhere; curtains closing off ramshackle rooms blew out into the corridor. Auspex revealed a larger space beyond. The target was in a dormitory on the other side of the wall. Jadriel peered through, but saw no one. The door was open but too low and narrow to permit them entry.

Jadriel signalled Brother Ulfius to wait. Ulfius knelt and raised his bolt rifle.

‘We’ll go through the walls. Wait for us to break in, then cover,’ he told Ulfius.

He sent Brothers Safir and Bors into another room ten yards back on the right. He and Brother Fedor went into the room on the left.

A man lying on a cot in the cramped space scrambled up and ran out when he saw his visitors. Jadriel let him go.

‘Krak,’ he said, pointing to the wall. Fedor and he clamped a grenade each to the wall, one at head height, another level with their hips. They turned away.

‘Ready,’ his other fire-team voxed.

‘Now,’ Jadriel ordered.

The krak grenades went off to a datapulsed command. Their implosion shattered the wall. A couple of strikes from Jadriel’s boots opened it up enough for them to burst through to the other side.

Opposite Jadriel, the second fire-team advanced into the area and surveyed the room. Smoke from the explosion turned over in the breeze. The far side of the tank looked outside: rough windows cut into the metal showed an expanse of leaden water lined by twisted black swamps in one direction, a blank white horizon in the other.

A buzzing filled Jadriel’s mind. Once more he saw a flash of a voidship interior, and smelled corrupted flesh. He squeezed his eyes closed until it passed.

‘Brother-lieutenant?’ asked Fedor.

‘It’s nothing. The psyker. We’ve found it. Stay alert – the witch is clouding our minds.’

‘Where are they?’ voxed Brother Safir.

He advanced. The usual junk of miserable living crunched underfoot. Scores of people must have lived in there. The dormitory extended outwards, wrapping around the inner core of smaller rooms that made up the rest of the floor. Jadriel turned to the left, sweeping his gun over a disarray of belongings and beds. Fedor flipped a few over.

‘Nothing,’ he said.

‘Here,’ said Safir. He had gone the other way. There, a curtain divided the room. Bors ripped it down.

In the far corner a young woman sat with her knees drawn up under her chin. She looked up, startled by the intrusion. Jadriel judged her intoxicated, or she’d have run out with the rest before the grenades went off.

A second woman lay on a low cot, her head turned to face the Space Marines, her pupils dilated so widely her irises were compressed bands of colour around coins of black.

‘Life signs minimal,’ voxed Bors.

‘That’s our target. Get the other one out of here,’ ordered Jadriel. ‘There will be no more deaths than are necessary.’

Safir pulled the other woman to her feet as easily as if she’d been made of cobweb. She offered no resistance as he pushed her out of the room.

Bors and Fedor covered the girl as Jadriel approached.

Her filthy blankets were soaked with sweat. He estimated the girl to be in her late teens or early twenties – since his apotheosis it had become hard to tell the ages of common humanity apart, and her poor physical state made it harder. She was bone pale, her veins standing out against waxy skin. Strands of her hair lay around her head.

‘Something’s happening to her,’ said Bors.

‘It does not matter. Whatever witchery is at play here, we are in time. Back out,’ said Jadriel. ‘I shall execute.’

The woman stirred. Her eyes looked through the red-and-white giants into a place where she saw only wonder.

‘It’s so beautiful,’ she whispered. ‘So beautiful.’

Jadriel pulled the trigger of his bolt rifle. The weapon kicked in his hands three times as bolts were forced into the firing chamber and their initiators set off. They raced down the barrel of the rifle and into clear space, where their rocket motors ignited and they accelerated again, speeding towards the girl.

He saw all this clearly. Time slowed to a crawl. The woman floated up from the bed, light shining from her mouth and her eyes. Her arms raised jerkily, hands hanging like empty gloves from the ends of her arms. Jadriel’s bolts slowed further, until they were stopped in the air. Their rocket motors continued to burn for a few seconds, then gave out, and the bolts died where they were, floating in a psychic field that prevented them from reaching their target.

‘Too late!’ Bors cried.

All of them opened fire. They emptied their magazines until the space between them and the woman was full of burning bolts, but all were stopped, becoming like a wall of candles.

The girl began to jerk. Her face distorted. Her bones cracked. Blood poured down her legs and from her mouth. Her chest convulsed, flexing inwards, then outwards, and with a final heave it burst open, spraying viscera across the room.

Her arms spread. Her body divided and stretched, flesh running and reforming into an arch. A skin of rolling warp energy formed in the gap. Her head, still alive somehow, lolled on a broken neck.

Something pressed against the skin of energy. It bulged. The woman’s head flopped forward.

A tentacle emerged from the energy field, tapping tentatively at the floor, wrapped itself around a bed, and heaved.

A wall of force slammed into the four Space Marines, upending everything around them and sending it smashing into the walls. Something vast was coming through the broken woman into the world of living, thinking beings.

Jadriel crashed into the wall, denting it. He fell down, breaking the floor and crushing everything beneath him. Bors and Safir were firing again. Outside people were screaming.

‘Captain Ares, the lieutenant is down. We have warp hostiles making material breach,’ Bors voxed.

Jadriel did not hear any of it. He was sinking away from time, rising into another. Black corridors of a daemonic ship passed by as he hurried to meet his fate. The gunfire he heard sounded from another millennium.

He did not see Bors and Safir firing wildly at the xenos emerging from the psyker’s body, or their bolts pass harmlessly through it. He did not see the woman’s used-up corpse fall in a wet ruin upon the ground.

‘Horus!’ he screamed. ‘Horus!’

Bors turned at the noise. A diaphanous tentacle reached for him, wrapping around his helm. Immediately, he switched target, bringing his gun to bear on his brother.

‘What–’ said Safir.

Bors emptied his bolt rifle into his brother’s chest. Safir danced back under the impacts, until one finally broke his chestplate, punched into his body, and destroyed his internal organs.

‘Stop!’ shouted Fedor.

Jadriel saw this through the haze of madness reaching for him from the deep past. ‘Traitor,’ said Jadriel, and charged at Brother Fedor.

‘Sanguinius preserve us!’ said Ares.

They were forcing their way through the crowd pouring out of the converted tanks when the upper floors blew out with a loud metallic ring, leaving the walls petalled outwards.

‘What was that?’ said Bedevoir.

‘The psyker,’ said Ares. ‘This one is powerful. Far more powerful than we expected.’

Bolt fire rattled out of the ruined building. Secondary explosions went off as cooking cylinders caught.

‘Captain Ares, the lieutenant is down. We have warp hostiles making material breach,’ voxed Bors.

‘Confirm. What nature?’

‘Throne of Terra, daemons,’ said Bedevoir.

Bors did not answer. Safir’s life blinked out to the song of a mortis rune.

‘Jadriel, Jadriel, come in!’

‘Traitor! Traitor!’

‘Jadriel! Squad, fan out,’ ordered Ares. ‘Cover the entrance. We are not entering this building until we are sure of what we are facing.’

‘Captain, look!’

Bedevoir pointed skywards. A huge, semi-transparent creature was squeezing its way out of a hole in the tank wall. Its body shimmered with bioluminescence, which continued to blink even as its body lost its translucency and began to take on a pinkish brown hue.

‘That’s not a daemon. What is it?’ said Bedevoir.

‘Have you not faced them before? It is a psyren, an enslaver, a xenos that lives in the warp. Bring it down! Bring it down now, or they’ll infest the entire planet,’ Ares ordered.

The Space Marines raced to take up better firing positions. Bolts streaked across the sky. Many hit the rising xenos, punching holes in its flotation sac and blasting off tentacles, but most passed through and it continued to rise, wounded but not seriously harmed.

‘It’s not dense enough to trip the mass detonators,’ shouted Brother Peilin.

‘If we hit it enough times, it will die,’ said Bedevoir. ‘Hope there is only one.’

The creature rose up into the sky, pulsing colours. It underwent a complex unfolding. The upper part detached, and the creature became two. Another convulsion, and it became three. They drifted apart from one another, buoyancy sacs convulsing.

‘It’s multiplying,’ said Brother Dindran.

‘No, it’s dividing,’ said Ares.

Caught on the wind, the creatures blew away towards the land, rapidly receding from the range of their bolt rifles. They were soon lost against the sky. Ares switched through various visual feeds.

‘I can’t get a tracking lock on them. Delgor,’ he voxed.

‘I am monitoring the situation,’ the Techmarine responded. ‘I am in pursuit but cannot gain solid target locks.’

‘This is a disaster,’ Ares snarled. ‘Jadriel. Jadriel, come in.’

The squeal of tearing metal sounded from the other end of the platform.

‘Captain, I am seeing more of the xenos,’ voxed Lamorak.

They turned to see another of the psyrens rising up from a hovel, already splitting into three as it ascended.

‘Blood of Sanguinius! The other psykers. How many?’ Ares voxed. ‘Delgor!’

‘I have these,’ Delgor replied.

The sky shook to the roar of the approaching Thunderhawk. Bright laser beams sliced across the sky, cutting through one of the rising psyrens. It fell down in drifting sheets of matter. But the other two seemed to fade out of being as they too were picked up by the wind and carried off.

Another screech of metal, then another. Three more clusters of the xenos emerged. It was then that the population turned on the Space Marines.

They came at the Red Wings in an uncoordinated wave, faces twisted in terror at what they were doing, but unable to stop themselves.

‘Halt! In the name of the Emperor, halt!’ Peilin shouted.

‘It’s no use,’ said Ares. ‘The xenos have them. They’re slaves. Open fire, or they’ll overwhelm us.’

Mind-slaved humans ran at the line. Dozens were mown down by bolter fire, their blood gurgling down the drains set into the ancient deck, but there were too many to kill, and they hurled themselves at the small group. Red Wings grabbed at men who wrapped their arms around their necks, wrenching them off their backpacks and throwing them as living missiles back into the seething crowds. A rain of tools and belongings showered the Space Marines. In their armour, the Red Wings were impervious to such primitive missiles, but the assault spoiled their aim.

‘Delgor, the situation here is beyond salvation,’ Ares ordered. ‘Collect Lamorak and extract us. We’ll deal with this from orbit.’

He checked his command network. Bors’ life signs beat weakly. Jadriel’s ran hot.

Ares had a terrible misgiving.

‘Jadriel,’ he shouted over the chatter of bolters and the ineffectual commands of his men that the crowd get back. ‘Jadriel, respond.’

Fishing and industrial equipment rained down around him.

‘Jadriel!’

He took a step back into the shelter of the building, running through all data channels until he had a firm hold on Jadriel’s battleplate systems. An override command activated his lieutenant’s vox remotely.

Ares’ blood ran cold at what he heard.

‘Why? Why! Why, my brother? Why did you betray him?’

He silenced it, cutting it off from the others in case they heard.

Safir and Fedor were dead. Bors’ signum transponder showed him to be in the room the first psyren had come out of. Ulfius was close by. Gawin was missing. Peilin was running into the crowd. Dindran had vanished. Jadriel was moving away from the converted oil tanks, heading to the edge of the rig. He’d lost half a squad in a matter of moments.

‘Get up onto the roof,’ Ares said to Bedevoir. ‘Delgor is coming. Bors and Ulfius are still alive at the site of the emergence. Send someone to fetch them. I will find Jadriel. Track my signal, and take us out of here.’

‘I should come with–’ said Bedevoir.

‘I am going alone,’ Ares interrupted. ‘That is my command.’

Ares struck out through the building. His men fell back from the mind-enslaved crowd, firing as they went. The people were puppets, their morale was impossible to break under the influence of the xenos, and the going was hard. The squad was divided and scattered.

‘To the roof!’ he repeated. ‘Bedevoir, get them all up to the roof.’

He went deeper into the building, passing through the wrecked belongings of a hundred wretched existences. A door on the far side brought him out on the edge of the rig. There had been a barrier here, but many of the posts had rusted through and the railings were gone, leaving the three hundred-foot drop unprotected. The deck was corroded through with holes, and he tested the weight with his boot before proceeding.

On the far side of the converted tanks an unexpected calm reigned. Delgor continued to sweep overhead, strafing the psyrens with lascannon fire, but the engine roar was muted. The sound of the mind-slaved crowds was a soft rumble, barely louder than the slap of water on the rig’s legs. The boltguns of his men uttered sharp pops.

‘Jadriel,’ Ares spoke through his voxmitter. ‘Listen to me.’

Jadriel’s locator winked on the cartograph of the rig. He’d stopped heading forwards, instead moving erratically around a flat area crowded with ranks of water bowsers, their wheels removed and left up on iron stands for so long that repeated repainting and rust had welded blocks and axles together. Ares entered slowly, passing down an avenue between the tanks.

‘Jadriel, you are falling to the Rage. You must listen to me. Shake it off.’

He stopped. Jadriel was ahead. His shouting was muffled by his helm, his external voxmitter inactive.

There was a small square in the centre of the bowser range. Four large, square rainwater funnels covered it over, hiding the sky. Bundles of water pipes led from the undersides to feed the tanks. Jadriel was underneath, arguing with himself.

‘Jadriel,’ said Ares. He entered the space.

Jadriel stopped talking and turned to face his captain. He had lost his bolt rifle, but his power sword was out of its scabbard and in his hand.

His voxmitter popped and buzzed, and his voice came loudly.

‘Traitor,’ he said breathily. ‘You will not keep me from my appointed task.’

‘Listen to me. Think. Think who you are.’ Ares laid down his gun. His right hand itched to grip the hilt of his own sword.

‘It is over,’ said Jadriel. ‘Your treachery is done. I will end you.’

‘Jadriel, wait. Please. You are not Sanguinius. This is Dulcis.’

‘More lies from your mouth, Horus, but you will not stop me.’

Jadriel ignited his power sword and charged. Ares drew his own sword and activated it in time to meet the strike. Their power fields met with a boom that rolled out across the ocean. Their swords locked. Jadriel pushed hard, his face coming within inches of Ares’ own. Ares resisted with all his might, but Jadriel was Primaris, and had been stronger than him even before he gained the additional strength of the Black Rage.

‘Traitor,’ he said.

Bors and Ulfius fired from cover at Bedevoir and his squad when they went to fetch them.

‘Brothers! This is madness! Stop!’ Bedevoir voxed.

But they did not hear him, or they did not understand. They kept firing, spraying bolts down the corridor at their own brothers, roaring incoherently and driving them back.

‘We are going to have to leave them,’ Bedevoir told his remaining men. ‘Captain Ares, we are withdrawing.’

A fusillade of bolts burst through an iron wall. They slammed into Brother Mador and detonated, forcing him into the line of fire. Bolts blew all over his armour. Bedevoir dragged him back.

‘Blood of Baal. Delgor! Extraction, now.’

‘Ten seconds. I’ll have to hover – the roof won’t take the weight of the ship.’

‘Brother,’ Lamorak’s voice cut in. ‘The populace gathers outside the door and they are attempting to force their way in. I have Gawin closing on your position. He’s still alive, but he’s behaving erratically. Advise regarding him as hostile.’

‘Get out! Squad withdraw, move, move!’ Bedevoir shouted.

Bedevoir backed out, firing at his lost brothers one-handed as he helped the injured Mador with the other. Bors and Ulfius ducked back to avoid his bolts, and he took the opportunity of the break in fire to toss out his full load of grenades, blowing out the floor of the corridor and sending them plummeting into the building. The flash and bang tripped his auto-senses’ protection, and he was running blind a moment before they adjusted.

The gunship was coming in to land. Down below, industrial tools hammered against the barred door.

Bedevoir burst through the final door onto the roof. The harsh, flat daylight of Dulcis greeted him. Delgor had the gunship in a steady hover at the edge of the converted oil tanks. The front ramp descended, locking onto the rim of the roof with its blunt teeth.

Bedevoir waved two men aboard. Their weight shook the flimsy metal of the roof as they ran. He passed Mador on to them, and waited for the rest.

He watched the roof door, but no more came.

‘Peilin, Dindran, respond,’ he voxed. No response.

Xenos floated everywhere he looked. They were still emerging, pushing out through windows and doors before swelling to their full size. They were splitting apart, one large organism in each case seemingly becoming three. People were running all over the rig, fighting each other, or running away, until the creatures moved close to them or caressed them with their curtains of tentacles, whereupon they went rigid and joined the crowds of enslaved humans.

Had they somehow put his brothers under mind control, or was it something else he had just witnessed? Warnings of the Rage and the thirst surfaced in his mind.

‘Bedevoir!’ Lamorak stood on the ramp, gesturing to his brother. ‘Get aboard now!’

Bedevoir turned and ran into the belly of the Thunderhawk.

‘Where’s the captain?’ he shouted.

‘Down there,’ Lamorak said. ‘We’ll retrieve him, then we are going to have to resolve this problem from orbit.’

‘Jadriel… Where’s Jadriel?’

The Thunderhawk lurched back. The ramp began to rise. Engines burned hot.

Bedevoir didn’t hear Gawin approaching. Lamorak’s warning saved him.

Gawin sprinted across the roof and leapt, hitting the closing ramp and stumbling forward into the ship. He launched himself at Bedevoir, propelling them both to the floor where they grappled on the deck. The gunship banked around, sending them skidding into the transit benches. Gawin thrust his combat knife at Bedevoir. It slid off his battleplate.

‘I will not let you do it!’ Gawin ranted. ‘I will not let you destroy Father’s work!’

He was phenomenally strong. He gripped Bedevoir’s helm and struck again and again at the faceplate with the knife.

Lamorak dragged Gawin off. Together, he and Bedevoir were barely enough to restrain the warrior.

‘Brother, brother! Calm! It is the xenos! They have your mind. Be calm!’ Bedevoir shouted.

Gawin would not be stopped, continuing to fight them. Bedevoir was thrown off, and Gawin reached down to his belt.

Bedevoir pulled out his bolt pistol and fired point-blank into his brother’s torso.

Bolts exploded with bright flashes. Gawin jerked once, then again, then went limp, his stomach empty and smoking.

‘What have you done!’ Lamorak said.

‘He was gone. Lost to the Rage,’ said Bedevoir in disbelief. ‘He was about to set off his frag, look.’ He pointed to Gawin’s hand, wrapped about a grenade.

‘Bedevoir, Lamorak, I have Ares in sight,’ Delgor voxed.

‘Take us to him, now,’ Bedevoir said.

The gunship descended.

Bedevoir’s squad fanned out around the water store. The Thunderhawk hovered overhead, its wing-mounted heavy bolters barking as it drove back the enslaved masses on the rig.

Ares was down against a wall. His power sword lay broken to one side.

‘He’s dead,’ said Lamorak as soon as he saw him.

‘Where’s Jadriel?’ asked Bedevoir.

Lamorak looked at him. ‘Jadriel did this, brother. Can’t you see? It’s the Rage. It has come to us, the Primaris Space Marines.’

‘I have combat command,’ said Bedevoir numbly. He looked at the sky, where clouds of enslavers were floating off on the wind. ‘Get the captain’s body on the ship. Send a broadcast message warning of the xenos attack. If these things get into the cities, we’ll lose the whole planet.’

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE REDEEMER’S JUDGEMENT

Now

Astorath and the Space Marines had withdrawn to one of the Joyous Garde’s great halls to hear Lamorak’s tale. They drank wine fortified with blood as they listened, the five of them a lonely group at the centre of marbled opulence. Long trestle tables and benches were laid out for a feast, with places set for three hundred warriors. Every part of every setting was polished to perfection: crystal goblets, pewter forks, knives and platters, and glorious centrepieces of silver and gold celebrating human achievement. Though kept immaculate by the Chapter thralls and servitors, they had an air of disuse. Statues of Sanguinius and past Chapter Masters looked out over places that could never be filled.

‘We withdrew, and commenced bombardment of the meat rig,’ said Lamorak. ‘Unfortunately, the psyrens seem to have anticipated this. Somehow they managed to screen the city with a psychic field before the bombardment was complete. Everian says they use psykers for this purpose, sometimes. We have never fought them before, so I did not know. The rig is only partially destroyed. Four square miles of it remains intact – three more are partially submerged. The psyrens still have a strong presence there, if our bio-scans are accurate. The rest have scattered.’

‘There is a concentration of life present at the rig?’ said Astorath.

‘Yes.’

‘I assume you have managed to contain the infestation beyond this point,’ said Astorath.

‘Regrettably not,’ said Lamorak.

‘We have presided over a disaster,’ said Bedevoir bluntly.

‘What of your lost brothers?’ asked Dolomen.

‘We have lost track of them. Their locator signums are inactive or deactivated. We cannot tell.’

‘The city of Tywell is safe,’ said Lamorak. ‘We have been obliged to concentrate the civilian population there. Most are en route to similar places, out of the swamps, where we can keep them under surveillance. We have limited capability to scan them for the xenos parasites. As far as we are aware, we have kept them out of all the major settlements. We lack numbers, but the Joyous Garde is well stocked. Autonomous weapons systems we have deployed upon Tywell’s walls make up some of the shortfall we have in brothers and bolters. We have equipped our Tarantulas with las and melta weaponry. That seems to have the most effect on the xenos. From my observations and from consulting our Chapter records, it appears thermal expansion inflicts catastrophic injury on them. Better than solid projectiles or explosives. Adjusting our bolts’ mass reaction has also done some good, but the enslavers are numerous. More emerge with each pulse from the rift. They are virtually impossible to detect, and must be surprised.’

‘He means that we have failed,’ said Bedevoir. ‘Along with those lost to the Black Rage, and those killed by the lost, we are down to thirty-
two men, including Brother Lamorak here and Techmarine Delgor.’

‘We shall prevail,’ said Lamorak firmly.

‘It is not our place to try. We have had our chance, brother,’ said Bedevoir. ‘The coming of the Redeemer is fated. We cannot bring this situation back under control on our own.’

‘If it is so hopeless,’ said Lamorak, ‘then what good can three more do?’

‘They will do better than we have,’ said Bedevoir. He looked to Astorath. ‘My lord, though this task must now pass to you, I will not sit idly. Your reputation is as grim as it is glorious. It would be an honour to serve you, howsoever you see fit. I assume you will go to find Lieutenant Jadriel to bring him peace. I would go with you, if you will have me. Allow me to redeem my Chapter’s honour.’

‘There are other tasks for the Red Wings to attend to,’ said Dolomen. ‘This world’s fate, for one.’

‘That is not so important, I think. This world is finished. Do not leave me here to push buttons behind our castle walls, but take me into the thick of battle. Jadriel was a good man. I want to ease his pain, if I can.’

Astorath stared into his eyes. Bedevoir held his gaze far longer than most others could, and although he in the end looked away, unable to stand the burning regard of Astorath any longer, he must have impressed the High Chaplain, for Astorath did not dismiss his request, but said:

‘I must think a little on what you have told me. Provide my companions and I somewhere we may talk in private. I shall return my verdict within the hour.’

Lamorak led them to a small octagonal shrine off the side of the hall. Each side was occupied by a reliquary holding the gilded bones of dead heroes. Ribbed supports carried a ciborium that half-hid the painted ceiling with an intricate fretwork of domed marble. At the centre of the room was a tomb topped with a golden effigy.

Lamorak pulled the door closed, sealing the three Blood Angels inside.

‘Well then,’ said Dolomen, when he was sure Lamorak had gone. ‘What do we do?’

‘We must hunt down this Jadriel and his fellows and bring them the Angel’s mercy,’ said Astorath. ‘This is our duty, always. It will be hard. The psychosphere of Dulcis is awash with warp energies. I cannot hear the songs of pain of Jadriel and his brothers – the storms make it hard to find them. We must employ simpler methods to track them down. We shall go to the surface.’

‘I meant what do we do about the planet and its people, my lord?’ said Dolomen.

‘That is of secondary concern,’ said Astorath.

‘It needs addressing.’

‘Bedevoir is right. Dulcis is finished,’ said Artemos. ‘Clearing it of the xenos would be a waste of time. It will not be long before another warp-threat arises. We are lucky that it is a xenos scourge unleashed here, and not a plague of daemons.’

‘They are only xenos,’ said Dolomen. ‘Like those things we faced on Asque. They exist in the warp, but they are not of it. We could take it back.’

‘They are still dangerous,’ said Artemos. ‘Daemons may yet come. If the psyrens made the translation, daemons will. Often, one precedes the other. We must act now.’

‘Exterminatus is too extreme,’ said Dolomen. ‘The world is barely tainted. It is not subject to the full corruption of the warp. Would it be so wise to destroy it? The Imperium has lost many planets since the rift opened. We cannot use the last resort as the first solution to every problem.’

‘We should consider it,’ said Astorath, ‘not only as a matter of last resort. If the flares are changing the populace, and the number of psykers continues its dramatic increase, then a daemonic incursion becomes a certainty.’

‘That is a matter of when, not if,’ said Artemos. ‘The flares – do you think they had an effect on this incident of the Rage among the Primaris?’

‘We must consider what Lamorak told us. His account will be skewed by his perceptions and his beliefs, as the accounts of all men are,’ said Astorath. ‘He wants to believe the warp caused Jadriel’s fall. He wants to believe that the Primaris Space Marines are immune to the Rage, much as the brother-Priests in our Chapter desire to believe. He hopes that this is an isolated incident. If external factors are the cause, then other Primaris are safe.’

‘You do not believe this,’ said Artemos.

‘I never have,’ said Astorath. ‘I could sense the curse of our blood in the new Space Marines from the moment I first saw them. It is buried deeper, it is less volatile, but it is there and always has been. Cawl could not remove the curse from us any more than he could cut off a lame man’s leg and proclaim him cured of his limp. The curse is the Blood. Sanguinius’ virtues and his darkness are bound together within the helices of our gene code. They are inseparable. The roots of the Thirst and the Rage plunge deeply into our souls.’ Astorath paused. ‘Nevertheless, when determining any course of action, one must consider one’s own preconceptions and prejudices, also. Considering this, I deem Lamorak to be partially right. The two are linked. I judge it so – that the Rage lies dormant in the Primaris, and the wash of etheric energy from the rift awoke it. But I say also that Jadriel and his brothers will not be the last, and this problem will spread. The Red Wings are probably not even the first, as this Bedevoir suggests. As for Dulcis, it is clear that this world is dangerously close to the Cicatrix Maledictum, and should be abandoned. Sanguinius himself knows why the Red Wings chose to tarry here once the flare risk escalated. I met Ares before. I am surprised at his decision.’

‘A certain rigidity of mindset in the face of orders,’ said Dolomen. ‘The Red Wings try to prove themselves to Lord Dante.’

‘A man should not be castigated for his sense of duty,’ said Artemos.

‘Indeed not. They have my sympathies. Many of the Chapters seek to redeem themselves for the losses they took defending Baal, when they have nothing to prove,’ said Dolomen. ‘But I too expect more responsiveness from a captain of the Adeptus Astartes to changes in the tactical situation. Ares should have begun evacuating the population immediately.’

‘When you are a captain, Dolomen, then you may comment on the failings of other captains,’ said Astorath. ‘The problem remains – what to do with Dulcis? What effect would its loss have on neighbouring systems?’

Artemos brought up information on the display mounted in his wrist. ‘The planet’s primary purpose is the export of meat from its fisheries,’ he said. ‘These marsh eels Lamorak mentioned provide their main source of income. Clearly there is more potential here. Were Dulcis more developed, it might serve as a major agri-world for the sector.’

‘It does not?’ said Dolomen.

‘Its exports are luxuries for the rich, no more,’ said Artemos. ‘The oils the eels provide are a useful but non-essential component in the manufacture of medical supplies in four systems nearby, if they are still there themselves.’

‘In these times we have more to worry about than simple inter-system trade,’ said Astorath. ‘We must take into account that these other worlds might also have found themselves close to the rift, and could be suffering the same problems, or have fallen. Furthermore, enslavers could spread from here to other places. Once they are in the material realm, they become a plague upon the living.’

‘That is something else the Red Wings have failed to deal with,’ said Artemos.

‘They have,’ said Astorath. ‘It is decided. Dulcis’ removal from the Imperium will have minimal impact on the sector.’

‘Does it have to die?’ said Artemos. ‘We should consider depopulation instead of outright extermination.’

‘We do not have the resources to evacuate the inhabitants,’ said Dolomen. ‘With communications as they are, we will not be able to find sufficient ships to take them away. Organising places of refuge will take time. Do we have it, even with Lord Dante’s writ to support our demands?’

Astorath closed his eyes and spoke quietly. ‘Artemos is not considering evacuation.’

‘Indeed, my lord.’ Artemos nodded.

‘Then it is settled,’ said Dolomen. ‘Depopulation.’

‘I shall remain here upon the station and begin work on the solution,’ said Artemos.

‘I have to discuss matters with the Imperial governor,’ said Astorath. ‘The local Adeptus must also be informed. Dolomen and I will pay this Tyndall a visit before we set out to find Jadriel. We shall take Bedevoir with us. His attitude is little better than yours, Dolomen, but I admire his forthrightness.’

‘You rarely admire mine,’ said Dolomen.

‘Forthrightness is a sibling to insolence. It should not be encouraged. But it can be useful, my brother,’ said Astorath. ‘Come, let us prepare ourselves. We depart immediately.’

PART TWO

THE MARSHES OF DULCIS

CHAPTER NINE

DESCENT OF ANGELS

Astorath, Dolomen and Bedevoir rode down from the Joyous Garde in a Red Wings gunship. Astorath ordered a true-pict hololith projected into the transport cabin while they flew. A round, muddy ball filled the aisle between the seats, so wet a planet its image wept rain at them.

Marsh covered most of Dulcis, grey tracts of grass broken by murky meres that attained beauty only at each day’s end, silver bright in the evening, flame red in the morning. The hours between were uniformly brown. The reed beds were mottled with black thickets of swamp, dominated by big trees with spiny, leafless branches so dark they looked rotted on the bough. Shallow seas blended darker shades into the waters of the land, deep greens and blacks, but throughout they were swirled with silt and sand.

It was an old world, a low world. Tired with the shudderings of the earth, it had left activity behind, and shook rarely with remembered vigour. Its sluggish tectonics would upheave no more mountains. The peaks it had in ages gone were long ground to fine dust, and the dust wetted down to mud. A sodden equilibrium was struck between land and sea, no one part very much higher than the other, so that water intruded everywhere, and no ocean bottom was far from the surface. Only at the very heart of its main continent did drier conditions exert themselves, but these were never less than moist. The poles wore caplets of grubby white comprised of more slush than ice.

Dulcis teemed with life, for old worlds are rich from epochs of decay, and the multiplicity of life forms that spring from rot. But as the world’s pulse had slowed, evolution was arrested. The creatures of Dulcis had existed for millions of years in their current forms. Any competent biologian would argue that they would change little more.

Astorath and the others gleaned these insights solely from the true-colour image. No technology greater than a tri-d pict was required to reveal the nature of Dulcis. The least acute of human eyes could see it for what it was: a dismal, drear place of reeking brakes and filthy water. It was an old man comfortable in his skin, nesting in the detritus of his life, best left alone to his odd habits by right-thinking beings.

Humanity rarely thought ahead clearly. The species expanded willy-nilly in all directions. There were far worse places than Dulcis to call home, but other races had passed it by.

‘Dulcis,’ said Dolomen. ‘Sweet.’ He translated the High Gothic name into the common vernacular. ‘Is that some kind of joke?’

Bedevoir grunted in amusement. ‘I thought so too,’ he said. ‘The punchline is all the more obvious when you get to the surface. Rarely have I seen such a profusion of browns. Dulcis truly is a jewel among the Emperor’s possessions.’

‘Sarcasm is the least honourable of weapons,’ said Astorath. He went helmetless, as was his habit unless it was absolutely necessary to don it. His black eyes were fixed on the approaching world. The mottled patterns of the surface gave fractally to the same pattern, again and again. Meres were broken up by reed beds. Islands were broken up by ponds. Thickets were broken up by creeks broken up by mudbanks broken up by puddles.

‘My lord is grim of mood, as his name suggests,’ said Dolomen. ‘I would not disrespect him by telling you to ignore him, but…’ He let his sentence hang.

‘I understand,’ said Bedevoir. ‘Do not push it.’ He looked sidelong at the Redeemer.

‘He probably likes you,’ said Dolomen. ‘You seem to be of similar temperament to me. He pretends not to like me, but he does. Most people spend their time grovelling at his feet, or hating him, or feeling fear in their fearless Adeptus Astartes hearts. Usually all of the above. I don’t. He likes me.’

‘You are a necessary adjunct to my office,’ said Astorath. A feral grin flashed at Bedevoir. It vanished so fast it might not have happened, unnerving the Red Wings Space Marine.

‘Ignore that too,’ said Dolomen. ‘He pretends not to, but he does have a sense of humour.’

‘You are a veteran-sergeant,’ said Bedevoir, ‘yet you have no squad.’

‘I am, and I do, but I am on permanent secondment to the Reclusiam,’ said Dolomen. ‘Lord Astorath has many titles and offices, and attendants to go with them. Artemos and I are his Court Extraordinary. Artemos attends to any medical peculiarities of the lost we may encounter, and retrieves their gene-seed. Ordinarily, we have a Librarian among our number, but the post is unoccupied of late, since the war for Diamor.’

‘None have been worthy to succeed Brother Azirael,’ said Astorath. ‘He fell in battle against the sorcerers of the Warmaster.’

‘Then there’s Astorath’s Erelim,’ Dolomen continued, ‘who guard his sanctum on Baal. They are unamusing fellows, so it is best they remain where they are. Besides them, and us, are the sundry mortals we encumber ourselves with, supposedly to aid us in our tasks, when they are not getting under our feet.’

‘You are accompanied by no other brothers?’ said Bedevoir.

Astorath answered. ‘The role of the Blood Angels is to protect and expand the domains of the Emperor of Mankind. It is not to endlessly deal with issues of the curse. That is my lot. The three brothers that ordinarily accompany me are three brothers who cannot help us perform our primary function as a Chapter of the Adeptus Astartes. I deem that too many, but the custom was set three thousand years ago, during the tenure of the High Chaplain Barachiel, and so I must abide by it.’

The ship bounced as it passed into the atmosphere of Dulcis. It was a feeble shake. The atmosphere was as enervated as the rest of the planet.

‘Cheery, isn’t he?’ said Dolomen.

Bedevoir looked at Astorath. ‘I am surprised a hero as venerated as the Lord Astorath would tolerate such levels of insolence. What is your role?’

‘Ah, you see, that is my role,’ said Dolomen, wagging his finger. ‘I am his naysayer, if you will. I am here to whisper in his ear and remind him he is mortal, and that the worlds he visits are the home of people, not obstacles to his duty.’ He gestured expansively in the air. ‘To puncture the darkness of his role with barbs of light. To be the balance to his grimness. The ineffable spirit of hope against the certainty of the curse. That sort of thing.’

‘So, you’re a kind of… court jester?’ said Bedevoir.

‘What? Ouch,’ said Dolomen. He let his hand drop. ‘What form of manners did they teach you in Guilliman’s pseudo-Legions? I don’t think you’ve had much experience with the actual Chapters of the Blood yet, my friend. But yes, if you wish. I make light. And I provide a little extra muscle, where required.’

‘Artemos and Dolomen both are good warriors, and insightful counsellors,’ said Astorath with surprising warmth. ‘I overlook Dolomen’s irritating tendencies because of that.’

‘A shame Lord Dante did not overlook the same, or I would not have been assigned this role within our blessed Chapter.’

Bedevoir stared at him in disbelief.

‘What?’ said Dolomen. ‘Our creed is to attain beauty in all things. We have great singers, playwrights, writers and artists of all kinds. Is insolent wit also not a talent to be honed? There is an art in mockery. Are we not the heroes of mankind? We are hope, and there is no hope without laughter.’

Bedevoir shook his head. ‘I am amazed. Lamorak says that I do not take my duties seriously. I bait him for it, but I see I have been outmatched.’

‘You mistake Sergeant Dolomen,’ said Astorath. ‘He is unduly light, but it is a valuable trait.’

‘Yes,’ Dolomen said. ‘Because when I become serious, you know the situation is dire indeed.’

Lord Tyndall awaited Astorath’s party on the same landing pad Captain Ares had used some weeks before. A band struck up a martial air of throbbing brass to welcome him. The notes went awry as the Redeemer strode out ahead of his escort and the music came to a blundering stop.

To mortal eyes, Astorath was immense and terrible, clad in armour cast and painted to resemble flayed muscle. Nestling in this gory panoply was a face of grey and blue flesh, pallid as a corpse, framed by raven-black hair. His eyes appeared black but otherwise normal, until they caught the light a certain way, and then they flashed a retinal red, as a predator’s eyes will when reflecting bright light at night. He seemed too big to be real, too wicked to belong to so beloved a brotherhood as the Blood Angels. The smell of blood hung around him. His backpack bore wings of black metal feathers that clattered in the backwash of the engines like the death rattles of dying men. Moulded skulls adorned his right pauldron. Skulls of gold decorated the joints of his armour. Bones suspended by twines of hair clicked on his ceramite. Parchment proclaiming his grim duties rustled around him.

What held the eyes of the mortals most was his axe. A huge powered head was mounted on a curved shaft as tall as a standard human. Inactive, its blade was black, the edge so sharp it glinted like frost in the morning. The haft had been made to look like a spinal column. For all the mortals knew, it might have been one. It looked to weigh as much as a refrigeration unit, but Astorath carried it in one hand, a quarter way down the haft at its balance point, as easily as if it were one of Dulcis’ reeds.

Tyndall’s haughty little heart shrivelled in his chest. Despite the heat of the morning, Astorath radiated an intense chill that prickled the skin.

The governor blanched. ‘M-my lord,’ he managed to stutter. ‘I welcome you to–’

With a motion of his free hand, Astorath swept aside his attempts at formality. Tyndall’s guts clenched. The adepts of the Imperium arrayed behind him became fearful in anticipation of Astorath’s words.

‘Lords of Dulcis,’ Astorath pronounced. ‘Heed me well. Your planet is infested and must be abandoned. I, Astorath the Grim, make this judgement.’

‘But, my lord…’ spluttered Tyndall. His fleshy lips flapped wetly, but he could find no words to feed out of them.

‘I make this decree by the authority of Commander Dante, Regent and Warden of Imperium Nihilus. You, Tyndall, lord of this world, will gather your population to the cities of your domains, and await evacuation to places of refuge, where you shall remain until it is decided that you should return.’

‘I must protest!’ Tyndall said. He looked to his advisors. They stared at the deck of the landing pad, shivering under the regard of the High Chaplain. Finding no support among his countrymen, he instead searched the faces of the adepts. Lord Kovas lifted his crystal-headed rod of office to his chest and gave a barely perceptible shake of his head. He then addressed Astorath.

‘I will ready our officials and archives for departure. The Adeptus Terra is at your disposal to ensure the evacuation proceeds to plan, my lord.’

Astorath stared into Tyndall’s terrified face.

‘You have seven days. Ensure compliance, or suffer the fate of all who defy the will of the Emperor.’

Astorath turned about. Bedevoir and Dolomen parted to allow him to pass between them.

‘Any queries may be directed to Sanguinary Priest Artemos aboard the void-castle Joyous Garde,’ said Dolomen.

‘But, where are you going?’ said Tyndall helplessly. ‘We have food, entertainments… We would welcome the High Chaplain.’

‘No welcome required,’ said Dolomen. ‘Thank you. Just do as he says. I’d get back off the platform. We’re leaving.’

The three Space Marines followed Astorath back into the Thunderhawk. Idling engines cycled up, sending the ceremonial capes of the band fluttering and blasting sheets of music out over the drop surrounding the landing pad. The band leaned into the wash of air as the Thunderhawk took off, tumbling one of the band members off his feet and leaving the rest of them dishevelled.

Aboard the ship, Bedevoir watched the mortals dwindle through the still-open access ramp.

‘Our lord knows how to make an entrance,’ said Dolomen. ‘He finds fear and awe can accomplish a great deal. Now, to our real business.’ Dolomen grinned at Bedevoir. ‘We’re going to the docks.’

‘Then allow me to help,’ said Bedevoir.

Dolomen wrinkled his nose at the smell coming off the meat barges.

‘Why do you think I left my helmet on?’ said Bedevoir.

‘You could have warned me.’

‘I did warn you.’

A rusty crane lowered a rectangular clamp over a barge’s load of containers. Chain rattled out too quickly, and the rig connected with a clumsy bang. Mechanical fingers crawled it into the correct position, locking in place. The chain went taut, and the crane hoisted the container up. Reeking fluids poured from its joins, spattering the dockside as the crane swung the container around and deposited it on a flatbed rail truck.

‘People eat this?’ said Dolomen.

‘Apparently so,’ said Bedevoir. ‘If you think this place smells awful, then avoid the processing plants. Having said that, the fresh meat is palatable.’

There were a great number of people at work on the docks watched over by local defence forces, most of whom were wearing sealed air supplies. The area was under the command of Gaheris, one of Bedevoir’s battle-brothers, but though the locals had grown used to the sight of the Red Wings, the Lord Astorath was another matter, and they all, no matter how lowly or whatever their role, watched in open-mouthed fear as he strode along the quaysides.

Dolomen picked his way around piles of offal and rubbish with obvious distaste. Astorath appeared impassive. Bedevoir walked quicker than the Blood Angels, searching the crowd for his Chapter brother. The dockside was crowded with machinery, barrels, suspended nets and all manner of other nautical paraphernalia, most of it in poor repair, and finding someone even as striking as a Space Marine amid the clutter was not easy.

Bedevoir tracked him down by vox first, and the group was directed to a crane with a broken arm. Halfway up, a ramshackle steel room served as a command point.

They went up one at a time, so as not to stress the corroded metal stairs. Wisely so, for when they entered the box office at the top it creaked and shifted under their weight.

Gaheris was waiting for them by a desk sized for a human. He bowed his head respectfully when Astorath entered, then saluted them all, fist to chest. There were two mortals behind him. The first was a grubby-looking fellow in a patched uniform, cradling a lasgun in his arms and pushing a length of reed around his mouth with his tongue. The second was a female trooper with the wiry build of someone who’d spent all her life performing hard physical labour. She was as terrified as the man was insouciant.

‘You’re looking for guides, I hear,’ said Gaheris. ‘I recommend these two.’

The man stepped forward without being asked. Astorath turned his predatory gaze upon him. The man stared back unflinchingly. He gave a shrug that suggested regret at a declined bar fight.

‘My, he’s a bold one,’ said Dolomen.

‘I’m Idrin. I’m a patrol boat captain, though if you want to get technical about it, I rank as sergeant.’

‘Then we have an embarrassment of sergeants,’ said Dolomen. ‘You are brave, my friend, to behave this way before Lord Astorath.’

‘Am I?’ Idrin switched his open, appraising gaze to Dolomen. ‘My rank is only nominal, in case I need to boss any grunts about. I don’t have a squad or anything – apparently I don’t play nice with others. Doesn’t matter. What does matter is that I know the terrain around Mainrig better than anyone alive – marsh, swamp, islet and creek. I’m a half-decent sailor too. I’m your man. I’m volunteering.’

‘He didn’t volunteer,’ said Gaheris. ‘I chose him. There are certain… anomalies in his mentality. His record is a bad one – violence, insolence and dishonesty – but he has one large advantage over the other patrol boat leaders.’

‘That is?’ asked Dolomen.

‘He is unafraid.’

Idrin smiled. ‘It’s true. Not much scares me.’

‘I have provided the appropriate papers to your commanding officer,’ said Gaheris. ‘This secondment is now official.’

‘Doesn’t make any difference to me. What’s he going to do? Shoot me?’ said Idrin. He sat down on the desk. It creaked. Undaunted, he pulled one grubby boot up under himself and rested his chin on his knee. ‘I don’t care to work for that bastard Tyndall any more, anyway.’

‘He is your rightful ruler,’ said Dolomen.

‘Word is you’re evacuating the planet. So, if he is, he’s not for much longer.’ The reed bobbed up and down in his mouth. He grinned. ‘Word travels fast round here.’

‘Who is this other one?’ asked Dolomen. In marked contrast to Idrin’s total lack of concern, the woman was completely cowed by the Space Marines. Her eyes kept moving towards the door as if she were considering making a break for it.

Idrin scratched the back of his neck before he answered. ‘Cellew. She’s not quite so good as me at finding her way about, but she’s the best shallow-water woman in port. I’m going to guess that you need that. She’s my pilot.’

‘You have served with him long?’ Dolomen asked her.

She nodded mutely.

‘Speak,’ said Dolomen.

‘Yes,’ she said in a small voice. ‘Three years. He’s all right,’ she added, unprompted, making Dolomen think Idrin was not all right at all.

Idrin gave them all a cocky look. ‘The thing is, this request, it’s got me wondering. Why do a lot of high lords like yourselves need my little boat? A clever man might say you were hiding something.’

‘A sensible man would not say he had thought so,’ said Dolomen. ‘Our business is our own.’

‘We are looking for missing brethren,’ said Astorath. ‘We must make sure they have not been taken under the control of the xenos. To find them, we must perform a surface search. A gunship will attract the xenos’ attention. Storms and old wrecks cheat our auspexes. We shall search quietly, and by necessity thoroughly. Eyes and ears are our best methods of detection.’

‘Missing warriors?’

‘Yes,’ said Astorath. He put plenty of menace into that one syllable. Idrin pretended not to notice.

‘Oh well, so long as you’re not trying to hide anything from Lord Tyndall,’ Idrin said sarcastically. ‘I’m your man. I’m a good tracker too. Of course, I’ll expect hazard pay for this.’ He let his boot thump down to the floor.

‘Guardsmen do not receive hazard pay,’ said Dolomen.

‘They do if they are in the position to ask for it,’ said Idrin. ‘I think I might be, if there are any secrets involved. Besides, it’s the end of this world. I’ll not get another opportunity.’

‘You will get what you deserve,’ said Astorath. He stared at Idrin for a long time. Astorath’s face was so inexpressive it was hard to gauge what he was thinking, but Dolomen knew him well, and recognised the expression as fascination.

Idrin held Astorath’s gaze without blinking. There was something dead in his eyes, Dolomen thought. He’d seen that look before. Men like that felt no fear, but not in the pure way of a Space Marine. They felt precious else either, no mercy, no kindness, only self-regard.

‘Sure,’ said Idrin.

‘We shouldn’t do this,’ blurted the woman to Idrin. ‘We got back in yesterday. We’re due leave for a day. I don’t want to go out again right now.’

‘My, what strong-willed people they breed here,’ Dolomen said.

‘Your Emperor commands it,’ said Bedevoir.

‘They’ll pay you too, Cellew. I’ll ask nicely for you, I promise,’ said Idrin.

‘Don’t care about money!’ she said. ‘Out there’s bad enough normal times, especially this season when the blood bugs are out and the eels start a-breeding, but now? With those things in the air, coming down on everything unawares. At night it is, mostly, they drop out of the dusk, you don’t see them, then you’re theirs. Everywhere but the city, they are. They’ll get you. They’ll get all of us.’

‘What about the barges?’ asked Dolomen. ‘Work is going on outside. This should stop, all of it.’

‘The lord commander’s reasoning is that the psyrens have restricted themselves largely to Mainrig,’ said Gaheris. ‘When they do attempt to take one of the barges, they’re easy targets, slow moving, vulnerable to las-fire and promethium flame, provided you see them soon enough. Every ship that leaves this place is guarded. Every ship that comes back is carefully checked. We’ve no psychic screening, but there are other ways to tell. We have psy-augurs, even a basic bioscan will reveal them, if skilfully executed.’

‘Those are not your words,’ said Dolomen.

‘No, they are not,’ said Gaheris. ‘I would have closed it all down. Tyndall is fond of money, however. He doesn’t like to upset his populace.’

‘It’s almost like he’s worried they don’t like him,’ said Dolomen.

‘He is the lord commander here,’ said Gaheris. ‘There is only so much we can do.’

‘How many ships are being lost?’ asked Dolomen.

‘Six per cent so far,’ said Gaheris. ‘Three of the rigs are gone. Rest assured, brother Blood Angel, these will be the last barges. The latest harvest is in. Tyndall’s greed has been curtailed by Lord Astorath’s command. The next time these vessels leave this port will be tomorrow, in the morning, and they will be going to aid the evacuation.’

‘Good,’ said Dolomen.

‘Tyndall’s right about one thing,’ Gaheris ventured. ‘I believe we’ll beat them. They lost their element of surprise coming out in such numbers. Whenever we discover a knot of xenos, the Joyous Garde speaks the language of guns, and they are eradicated.’

‘Except at Mainrig.’

‘Except at Mainrig,’ Gaheris conceded. ‘Your help would be most welcome, if you can spare yourselves.’

‘Our duties lie elsewhere, but be wary, brother. I have faced the psyrens before,’ said Astorath. ‘This is not their normal behaviour.’

‘I am no biologian, my lord,’ Gaheris said apologetically. ‘But we shall keep them out of the city until you are done and the world is evacuated.’

‘Good,’ said Astorath. ‘Very soon, Tywell will become the last safe place on this planet.’

‘It’s always been that way,’ said Idrin. ‘Nowhere’s safe on Dulcis.’

‘You don’t understand, it’s getting worse,’ said Cellew. ‘Much worse.’

‘That is not of concern to us,’ said Astorath. ‘We depart now. Take us to your ship, Cellew.’

Cellew frowned. ‘We’ve assigned duties. There are permits to be filed, and supplies, and…’

‘None of that is important,’ said Dolomen.

Cellew’s shoulders sagged. She peeped at them with frightened eyes. ‘Where are we headed?’

‘Where this started,’ said Dolomen. ‘You will take us to Mainrig.’

CHAPTER TEN

THE NIGHT PARADE

The patrol boat more resembled a fishing scow; it was large enough, but it was flat, shallow of draught with only the hint of a point at the squared-off prow. Indeed, Idrin and Cellew used it for fishing as much as patrolling. Its bow gun was crowded by crustacean pots to the point of uselessness. Its paint was bleached to a nondescript khaki. They were not, as Dolomen remarked quietly to Bedevoir, a crack military unit.

Otherwise, Dolomen and Bedevoir both held their tongues at what they saw, though their attitude made it clear what they thought of Idrin’s discipline when they ripped most of the equipment from the deck. Off went the pots and net winches, life raft and harpoons. On went a couple of large boxes holding the Space Marines’ supplies. When they were done with the scow, the heavy stubber could be traversed and elevated properly again, and it looked more like the military vessel it was supposed to be. There was enough room for the three Space Marines to stand, even sit, on the deck, and despite initial appearances it was stable enough that even their great weight did not disturb its equilibrium in the water. Cellew took position in the tiny wheelhouse, finding refuge in a small space no Space Marine could enter.

‘We’re going upriver first,’ Idrin said. ‘It’s quicker to cut across the meres directly to the coast proper. Going downriver takes the long way around. Cellew doesn’t agree, but time is of the essence, right? And I’m in charge of how we get to where you want to go.’

After that, Idrin curled up under his cloak tight against the gun-wales and promptly went to sleep. The Space Marines took him at his word. Cellew sank into a sullen quiet after he made his pronouncement, and said nothing more for several hours.

The boat’s electric motor whined with the effort of pushing its passengers against the river’s current. The dockworkers looked upon this strangest of excursions with expressions of such incredulity Dolomen chuckled all the way to the northern river gate.

From time to time, the discharge of multi-lasers crackled over the city’s noise. Less often they heard the short-period thunder of a lascannon. In both cases, the weapons fire was becoming more frequent as small swarms of psyrens drifted over the city.

At half a mile across, the river was too broad for the walls of Tywell to bridge. There the circuit of fortifications broke, with the walls on either bank finished by a pair of twinned bastions. A line of buoys was strung between them. Below the water line, just far enough to avoid the hulls and propellers of Dulcis’ flat-bottomed merchant navy, a web of chains barred the river to the local wildlife. Poles topped with warning lights projected a mild energy field across the gap to further dissuade the planet’s creatures. It crackled on the Space Marines’ armour in miniature displays of lightning as the boat passed through.

Bedevoir spent time on the vox with his comrades. A few of the Red Wings were visible in the crenels of the tower parapets as bright splashes of crimson and white. Guns mounted in the walls tracked their progress out of the city.

When they were clear, Bedevoir spoke to the others.

‘My brothers report that there is a large swarm of psyrens coming in on the wind,’ he said. ‘They expect them to be here by nightfall.’

‘They come at night,’ said Cellew again, to herself.

‘Then we shall have some pyrotechnics to light our way in the marsh,’ said Dolomen.

Cellew turned the boat into the wide moat that ran around the outer face of the walls. The giant footings of rockcrete that supported the fortifications had been partly exposed by repeated flooding. Beds of oily shale bled rainbows into the water, the scum of man’s rubbish and pollution adding further colour to the surface.

The walls ended and the space port drifted by, ancient and dilapidated, its landing fields giant plates of ferrocrete slowly sinking into a sea of peat. Ships lumbered skywards, bearing their cargoes of eel flesh, as if nothing untoward were happening on Dulcis – no flares, no xenos.

‘A last summer,’ said Dolomen. He turned around to look in the opposite direction. His movement sent the boat rocking. The engine whined unevenly and dark waves slapped at banks of black peat.

Unlike most cities, Tywell had not spread beyond its walls. There was only mud outside, and nowhere to drain the water to. Instead, mankind made ever more ingenious use of the space inside. Away from Tywell, marshland stretched to the horizon. Mud and grasses were dotted with rusting installations abandoned to the caprices of shifting creeks, and boats left high, though not entirely dry, by the same waters.

‘It is remarkable how clear-cut mankind’s influence on this world is,’ said Dolomen. ‘There, the wall marks the end of it.’ He held one hand out to the space port and city, whose outermost precincts were petering into bog. ‘There, the trackless marsh, too unstable to build on.’

‘Nothing but mud and more mud on this planet,’ said Idrin. ‘That and the eels. The little ones live in the reeds. They eat people, you know.’

‘I thought you were asleep,’ said Dolomen.

‘I was half-asleep. There’s plenty of time for sleep when you’re dead.’ Idrin sat up. ‘Which you will be if you fall asleep in the wrong place on this world.’

‘Are you not a native of this place?’ asked Astorath. It was unusual of him to show interest in the lives of mortals. Dolomen looked at him askance.

‘I am, born and raised.’ Idrin stood. His dirty greatcoat puddled on the deck and he dashed dust off his trousers with his hands. ‘Been off-world though, part of the Munitorum draft. Dulcis 889th light foot. Somehow, I got to come home, gift of land, monies, a shiny medal, the full works. No one was more surprised than me. I could have taken it easy, but like the idiot I am, I decided to sign up again. My friends thought I was insane, but once you’ve been a soldier, what else is there?’ He looked at the Space Marines. ‘I think you might understand that.’

‘There is nothing for us but war,’ said Dolomen. ‘So maybe we do.’

Idrin scratched hard at his head again. ‘Throne-cursed lice,’ he said. ‘You’re not free of them longer than a day.’

‘Shave,’ said Bedevoir.

‘I like my hair. I’ll dust myself later.’ Idrin fished out his length of reed from behind his ear and stuck it between his teeth. ‘Anybody got anything to eat? I’m starving.’

Dolomen opened a box on the deck, pulled out a ration bar and tossed it at Idrin. He caught it.

‘Eat only half. That will sustain a mortal man for four days,’ said Dolomen.

Idrin peeled off the top half of the wrapper. The bar was of a soft white substance, pliant as soap. He gave it an experimental sniff, then nibbled at it.

‘It does not have much flavour,’ he said. ‘Is this all you eat?’ He took a bigger bite.

‘No,’ said Dolomen. ‘But it’s better than the alternative.’ Dolomen showed pointed white teeth. ‘Better for you.’

‘No more questions,’ said Astorath. ‘Be thankful.’

The boat whirred past lumens on slender steel poles that marked the outermost limits of the space port. There they left the moat, turned into a maze of interconnected pools, then caught a weak current and headed towards the sea.

There was a pop and crackle in the sky like plastek packing being crinkled up. Cellew was crammed at the bottom of the wheelhouse, it being her turn to rest, but the noise woke her and she stirred and looked up. She didn’t know what she was looking at, not at first.

‘What’s that?’ she said thickly.

‘Be quiet,’ Idrin said. The green glow of the boat’s instruments was turned down to minimum. Tiny numbers on dials and the tips of indicators showed as disembodied sigils. They lit nothing but themselves.

Cellew uncurled from her damp bed. Both the mortals were in the small wheelhouse at the centre of the boat. The Adeptus Astartes stood still on the deck. The lights on their helms were out. A few minor activity lumens glowed on monitoring panels on their battleplate, but they were tiny, and the light they gave bled away into the deep night of the marshes.

The crackling continued, back towards the city. A sea breeze blew onshore from the ocean, sending the reed beds they sailed through into a clamour of hissed whispers.

Cellew went out onto the deck. The sky over the city flashed repeatedly. Thread lines of laser light flickered out into the sky, connecting with their targets in blinks of dispersing energies.

The sound of the fighting was so faint the wind in the reeds was louder. It seemed so far away as to be irrelevant. Marsh life continued its noisy habits around them.

‘They are attacking the city,’ she said.

One of the Adeptus Astartes warriors looked down at her. He was so still, she hadn’t expected him to notice she was there. Having his eyes on her was unnerving, and she wished she hadn’t spoken aloud.

‘They will keep coming,’ said the warrior. She had spent as little time as possible with them and didn’t know which of the Space Marines it was, only that it wasn’t their leader. She was grateful for that. ‘They will come on the wind when it blows in the most favourable direction, or they will pull themselves along the water and creep up over the fortifications. They will drift and scheme and find a way. It may take them time, but they will get in, and when they do the city is lost.’

‘Tonight?’ she asked.

A last grand fusillade of las-shots stuttered skywards. The noise crackle-popped across the flatness moments later.

‘Not tonight.’ The Space Marine looked back to the city. Without the gunfire, only the glow of Tywell’s lumens on the underside of the clouds marked its position. ‘Be at ease. This duty is dangerous, but with the Lord Astorath, you are safer than anywhere else on the planet.’

She stood nervously by his side for some time, too afraid to speak again, too afraid to turn her back on her passengers. The breeze chilled her. Biting insects buzzed around her.

Time passed. Far out to the east, the sky flickered where the Great Rift filled the void behind the clouds, and the strange lights that had lit the night every night since the Great Rift opened pulsed. The warrior watched them.

‘Earlier and more powerful than before,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said the other Space Marine. Parts of his armour might have been paler. The night was so dark out there she might have been imagining it. If that were so, she thought he might be Bedevoir, the Red Wing. Their voices were the same to her, as was the fear they raised. In the dark, she saw how far from human they were.

‘I felt that,’ said the first. ‘It is calling to us. Do you feel it?’

‘Yes,’ said the other. ‘The need. The madness.’

The warrior looked back at her.

‘Best go back into your wheelhouse, pilot. Stay there until dawn.’ He looked meaningfully across to the third of them, their leader, the one they called lord. To her utter terror, he had moved and she had not seen; now his horrific pallid face was turned to look right at her. Two red dots marked out his eyes where his retinas caught the feeble light. He did not blink.

‘Yes,’ she said. Tears welled up, threatening to drown her. ‘I will.’

‘Now,’ said the warrior.

She retreated to the fragile box of wood and glass. She locked the door behind her, knowing it would be no protection at all.

The Space Marines remained still on the deck all through the night. She grew to fear their movement more than she feared the creatures who floated through the skies. She feared that if they did move, it would be to come for her.

Dawn on Dulcis was no spectacular affair, but a gradual infiltration of light that sneaked across the marshes until the whole world was bathed in a leaden sheen. Mist started rising during the smaller hours. A few more hours into morning, Cellew would not be able to see further than a couple of feet in front of the boat. Already the fog obscured much of the landscape, leaving tantalising passages of clear space. Cellew steered clear of them. The mist rose first over the deeper water; the clear patches were over the shallows where even the flat scow might ground itself.

Wisps of fog reached for the lightening sky, but had yet to conquer it. It remained clear, and to the west still very dark. As she was looking upwards, she saw something moving across the sky. At first she took it for a skein of waterfowl, but instinctively knew that was not so. She scrubbed moisture off the window with the back of her hand, and gasped.

Xenos things drifted on the currents of air, and though they moved with the prevailing breeze, they seemed to do so with purpose. Bodies pulsed red, blue and green. Tentacles moved sluggishly beneath tick-like bodies. Lines of light ran from tip to root and back again, pulsing in changing but clear patterns, and together they made a colourful parade across the sky. Cellew had the notion she was looking at something private, a display not meant for human eyes.

The xenos proceeded overhead by the hundreds. They were reminiscent of the sea jellies that swarmed the thermoclines at the edge of the deeper seas. But their faces, if that was the right word for the tight group of eyes and mandibles pinched in to the front of their bodies, had a more insectile look, reminding her of the fleas that infested every stand of reeds on the planet.

She hunched down instinctively, the animal parts of her brain fearing she would be seen, and peered up at them through the spokes of her ship’s wheel. The mist was rising thicker and closing over the boat, hiding them. She welcomed it as a prey animal welcomes the cover of long grasses.

She was so engrossed in the display she didn’t register the boat rocking. A rapping on the glass nearly stilled her heart. She swallowed a shriek. A huge, square, inhuman head stared through the window. The Blood Angel, Dolomen, was bending down to peer at her, his helmet off and breath steaming in the morning.

‘Don’t look at them,’ he said, his bass voice muffled by the glass. ‘They see badly, but they will feel your attention on them, then they will come for you. Turn off the engine until they have passed.’

She nodded mutely. Her hand fumbled on the activation rune, the engine cutting out on the second try. The boat turned in the fog.

‘How long to Mainrig?’

Her tongue and lips refused to obey her at first. ‘Th-three hours,’ she said. ‘Maybe less, if the wind picks up. If it doesn’t the fog will slow us down. We have to turn the engine back on, it goes without saying.’

‘Only when I say,’ the Space Marine said, and moved away.

Idrin woke and smacked his lips loudly. It was warm down in the base of the wheelhouse, and he was pungent.

‘Daytime already?’ he asked. He yawned noisily. ‘What’s for breakfast?’ he said.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE MIST

The mist grew thicker as the day advanced, plunging them into a world of half-shapes and sinister noises whose location could not be judged, and Cellew was forced to turn to her instruments to navigate.

‘Throne,’ Cellew said, more than once, as she checked over the tiny screens. Twice they grounded the boat on mudbanks, though the strength of the Space Marines made pushing themselves off a simple matter.

Reeds rasped over the boat’s hull. The mist trapped the sound around the boat, making it oppressively loud. The three Space Marines faced different directions, staring out over the water.

‘They could help us a bit,’ Cellew whispered to Idrin. Her resentment overcame her fear, but only just. ‘Emperor alone knows what technomancy they have in those armoured suits. I bet they can see right through this fog.’

‘It’ll rise soon – it always does,’ said Idrin.

‘What do you know about it?’ she said. ‘Who’s the pilot here?’

He raised an eyebrow.

‘You’re in a fine mood today.’

She glared at him as she spun the wheel to avoid a floating log.

‘I didn’t want to come on this trip,’ she said.

‘It is a mission, Cellew, not a jaunt. We have to make the best of what the Emperor sees fit to give us.’

‘You don’t believe that,’ she said. ‘You never believe that. You’re always looking out for yourself, and I’m always getting dragged into it.’

‘Yeah, well,’ said Idrin. ‘You’re still alive.’ He frowned. ‘What are they doing now?’

Bedevoir had raised his left hand and clenched it into a fist. He was waving two fingers on the other hand out off the port side, turning the gesture into a point.

‘Battlesign,’ Idrin said, dropping his voice to a whisper.

‘What?’

‘Battlesign. Non-verbal communication. Cut the engine and shut up.’

‘Don’t speak to me like that.’

‘You know I’m supposed to be your commanding officer, right?’ Idrin murmured. He fetched his lasrifle. ‘Look, if they think it’s a good idea to be totally silent, then we should probably do the same thing too, don’t you think? Now, shush.’ He grasped the wheelhouse doorknob very carefully, and eased the door open. Cold air blew in, misting up the windows immediately. Cellew mouthed a silent curse and scrubbed at the glass with her sleeve, then shut off the engine.

The boat coasted forward a few yards before snagging on the reeds and drifting to a halt. Idrin pushed the door shut as quietly as he could, then padded over the deck to the side of Dolomen. Of the three, he found the Blood Angels sergeant the most engaging.

Dolomen heard him coming though Idrin could have sworn he moved totally silently. The Space Marine spared him a brief glance and made a chopping motion with the blade of his hand. Idrin nodded. Silence. He understood.

Very carefully, Dolomen pointed off to the port side. His armour made tiny whines and whirrings with every movement.

Idrin followed Dolomen’s blood-red finger. He flattered himself that he had good eyesight, but at first he could see nothing in the mist except eddies in the fat droplets that made up the cloud.

Dolomen pointed again, more emphatically this time, then Idrin saw. Something was floating through the fog. The main part of it was a massive, brownish sac, somewhat like a part-deflated game ball. Tentacles hung down from the underside like weed roots. Most just trailed along the water surface, but two were larger and more muscular looking, and it was by grasping at the vegetation and pulling itself along with these that it traversed the marsh. A comparatively small head of vaguely insectile appearance was set to the lower front part of its buoyancy sac. Several black eyes swivelled this way and that independently of one another. A number of delicate, arm-like mandibles fronted its mouth.

Astorath spread his fingers and moved his hand over the swamp. He opened and clenched his fist twice, then shook his head, and held up a single finger, which he then pointed at the enslaver. Only one.

The xenos had still not seen them, but it was coming closer. Perhaps its eyes are weak, thought Idrin.

Bedevoir noiselessly tapped his bolt pistol and shook his head.

Astorath looked to Dolomen. He made a series of signs with his right hand that Idrin could not follow. Dolomen reacted by kneeling beside the larger crate of supplies the Space Marines had brought with them. He opened it quietly and from inside he took out a pistol so large Idrin would have struggled to lift it with both hands.

Idrin recognised it as a sun gun, a plasma-projecting weapon of some rarity. There’d been sun gunners in his regiment when he’d fought off-world, and some of the officers had carried smaller versions of the pistol, but he’d not fired one, ever, and had no desire to. In his experience they were as deadly to the wielder as the foe.

Dolomen raised the gun. The glassite charging coils on the top flickered and turned an electric blue. The gun whined with building power. It gave off a great and sudden heat, and Idrin took a step back.

The noise of the gun grew louder as its charge built, the glow becoming painful to look upon. The psyren heard, or saw, or in some other way sensed it, and turned towards the patrol boat.

Its black eyes locked with Idrin’s, and he felt his will drain away. There was no compulsion to act, no struggle, but the awful sense that his self was gurgling down a hole in the ground, and that he was no longer welcome in his own body.

He was trapped in his skull, but the worst of it was that he felt no urge to fight. He was a ghost to himself, an irrelevance, possessed of a will and an importance equal to that of a clod of earth. He barely even realised that his arms were rising, his fingers thumbing off the safety catch on the lasrifle. The psyren was going to shoot Sergeant Dolomen, using him as its agent. Idrin did not care that was happening.

It was worse than being dead. It was fascinating.

The sun gun discharged. A searing beam of energy cut through the mist, boiling it away for yards either side. It struck the enslaver a little above the head cluster. The buoyancy sac shrivelled away to nothing. The beam passed through it and continued on for forty yards beyond the target before it lost coherency and dispersed in a cloud of ionised air.

The psyren fell into the water without making a sound.

Idrin blinked. He was suddenly aware of himself again, and awake to the need to live. He was pointing his rifle at Dolomen’s head. Bedevoir had hold of the end, and gently pushed it down.

‘You’d be lucky to break ceramite with this,’ he said.

‘I… I am sorry,’ said Idrin. ‘I didn’t mean–’

‘The psyren had you,’ said Astorath. ‘You are innocent. Do not fear.’

‘I wasn’t afraid,’ said Idrin, which was true. He didn’t feel much of anything.

‘It would have been better going for one of us,’ said Bedevoir.

‘I felt it try,’ said Dolomen. ‘It tried to stop me. It failed. Then it took him. He was the easier target.’

The enslaver floated on the surface like a discarded sack. The water was beginning to move around it.

‘Our minds are hardened against such attacks,’ said Astorath, coming alive. ‘It was bound to fail.’

‘It wasn’t,’ said Bedevoir. ‘They took some of my brothers. We need to be careful of these things.’

Cellew waited for a command from Astorath before restarting the engine. Its electric mosquito whine started up again, and they pushed off.

The enslaver was moving once more as larval eels tugged at it and tore it to pieces.

‘There’s plenty of life on this planet,’ said Dolomen. ‘What kind of brain do the eels have?’

Idrin found it hard to think. He struggled to retrieve the information, then again to form it into words.

‘None,’ he said. ‘They’ve a complex spinal column, I think. I don’t know. But what I’ve been told is they have no brain.’

‘That is a small blessing,’ said Dolomen.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE BLACK WATER

They emerged from the fog a few hours later as they crossed onto the sea, though the demarcation on Dulcis was debatable at best. The divide was better described by the fog, which formed a heaped pile behind them, solid as a fortress guarding the land, but vanished over the open sea.

Idrin stood and pointed at a mark on the black water, some miles past where the last of the reed beds petered away.

‘That’s Mainrig,’ he said.

‘Distance, three point three miles,’ said Bedevoir.

‘Stop your craft, shipmistress,’ ordered Astorath.

Cellew, who had become more sullen as the day wore on, obeyed without a word.

‘Why are we stopping here?’ said Idrin. ‘My lords,’ he added as an afterthought.

‘You are not coming with us,’ said Dolomen. ‘You saw the effect the enslaver had on you. This place is crawling with them. You won’t last longer than a few moments, and then you’ll be dead. That’s why.’

‘That’s fine by me,’ said Idrin. ‘But what about you? One couldn’t latch onto your mind, but there’s a lot out there.’

The Space Marines were reaching into their weapons crate and pulling out spare magazines from racks. Dolomen took out the plasma pistol and hooked it to his belt. Bedevoir supplemented his bolt pistol and chainsword with a compact flamer. Astorath watched them, totally still. He took nothing, but placed his helmet over his head when Dolomen handed it to him.

‘We have with us Lord Astorath. His will is powerful. It will guard us from their influence.’

‘How? Is he a witch?’ Idrin looked at the Redeemer with renewed interest.

‘Be respectful,’ growled Bedevoir.

‘No, he is not. It is more complicated than that,’ said Dolomen. ‘Through great heroes of our Blood such as the Lord Redeemer of the Lost, the spirit of our primarch Sanguinius, the Great Angel, may work and protect us.’

Dolomen checked his weapons as he talked, as did Bedevoir. They then checked over each other’s armour, calling off a checklist. Astorath remained motionless.

‘I have datapulsed the location of nearby solid ground to Cellew’s navicogitator. You will meet us there.’

‘That’ll be Ollin’s Isle. I know it,’ said Idrin.

‘Do not arrive before the designated rendezvous, in case the enemy are present,’ said Dolomen. ‘Stay quiet. Do not attract attention to yourselves. Keep your vox on in case we need to contact you, but do not signal us. The enslavers have many unusual senses.’

‘Prepare battleplate for void sealing,’ Astorath commanded.

Ports and vents on the warriors’ backpacks hissed shut. The louvres in the grilled vents in their masks turned and sealed themselves closed. Lights on panels blinked on.

Then Bedevoir and Dolomen drew their weapons, planted the tips on the deck and knelt with their hands clasped over the pommels, Dolomen’s over his sword-long combat blade, Bedevoir on the ornate guard of his chainsword. Astorath stood over them in benediction.

‘By the will of the Archangel of Baal, Lord Sanguinius, the saviour, the sacrifice, do we pledge ourselves anew to the Emperor’s purpose,’ the kneeling warriors said. The quality of their voxmissions was changed by their armour’s reconfiguration, rendering them robotic, yet it could not hide their reverence.

‘He’s a priest?’ said Idrin to himself. ‘Huh.’ He found that mildly interesting.

‘Blessed be the Blood,’ said Astorath.

‘Blessed be the Blood,’ the others replied.

Their short ritual done, they stood as if nothing had happened, and walked to the edge of the boat. The whole vessel tipped in the water, the side opposite lifting a foot above the surface. The gunwale dipped almost level with the sea.

That shook Cellew out of her sulk. She burst out of the wheelhouse. ‘Hey!’ she shouted. ‘Hey! You’ll sink us!’

‘Fear not, fair maiden,’ said Bedevoir sardonically. He stepped off the edge of the boat. He made a small splash, and sank. Astorath looked into the sea for a few seconds, then followed. Before Dolomen jumped in he turned back to Idrin and Cellew.

‘We will see you in five hours,’ he said. ‘Emperor watch over you.’

He plunged into the water. Idrin rushed to the edge. A few silvery bubbles rocked their way to the surface and popped, but he could see nothing through the peaty water.

‘Well,’ he said. He looked out to Mainrig, half-expecting a cloud of xenos to rise into the sky and come flying over to attack them. Nothing did. That stretch of the sea was usually crammed with boats and barges going to and from the rig, laden with meat and workers, but it was eerily empty.

A bird shrilled somewhere deep in the marshes behind them. Cellew shivered.

Idrin had an idea.

‘You know, I have a way we can keep each other warm.’

The look of disgust Cellew gave him was almost comical. ‘Not on your life, sir.’ She patted the autopistol holstered on her right hip meaningfully, then went into the wheelhouse. She locked the door behind her.

Idrin shrugged. Out over the water, nothing moved.

Putting one step in front of the other was hard work, even with power armour. There was no facility in the armour’s design to drive them through the water more quickly, and so their progress was a slow plod.

The sea was less than thirty feet deep, but so heavily tinted by the dark soils of the marsh that visibility was down to a couple of yards. The surface was an indistinct play of yellow light that fuzzed away to nothing. Beneath that the water was a murky brown, but where the Space Marines walked it was black as the void. Junk from thousands of years of human habitation dotted the seabed everywhere, in some places covering it completely. Drifting plastek twined round weeds. Rusted metal jutted from the silt. The seabed looked to be in a constant process of coverage and renewal. Though the currents then were weak, they must have been strong enough some of the time to sweep the seabed free of rubbish, or the refuse from the rig would have piled up high enough to make islands, in time leaving it high and dry. Dolomen had seen that happen on other worlds. Perhaps the population of Dulcis recycled more than they threw away. Perhaps there just weren’t enough people on Dulcis to choke its biomes to death. As a Blood Angel, Dolomen spent a great deal of his time trying to maintain balance in his mind and soul. He was not the only one among his brotherhood who turned his need for equilibrium outwards, and had developed a fascination for the good functioning of human societies. This was not unusual. The Chapter had as many scholars as it did artists among its ranks.

For all the befoulment, life thrived in the water. Evolution drew parallels on most worlds, but the piscids of Dulcis seemed to favour anguilliformes over more conventional shapes. From shoals of hair-thin, glassy fish that nibbled on discarded plastek, to arm-breadth predators whose mouths were many times too big for their bodies, Dolomen saw a profusion of differing sorts of all sizes, though none of the larger kinds. Waving fronds of aquatic plants trailed most of the way to the surface, the broken human artefacts serving as root anchors as well as lairs for animals.

As they trudged nearer the rig, his sensorium registered a higher concentration of chemical pollutants in the water, along with a greater amount of organic spill. The amount of plant life decreased, with a concomitant drop in the level of oxygen. There were jumbles of large bones in untidy subaquatic middens amid the piles of old metal and plastek. Broken fishing gear abounded: nets and lines and harpoons. Much of it was organically derived, and so was breaking apart while the metal rusted away, yet there was enough to accumulate to dangerous levels and snare unwary creatures.

After some time, Dolomen’s armour cogitator detected regular shapes ahead in the water. They were nearing the rig. His power armour would keep him alive for days down there, but Dolomen disliked fighting in liquid of any kind. He hated the slowing effect on his limbs, and the way it sapped power from his blows. Bolt weapons worked almost as well in water as they did in atmosphere or void – their rocket-powered ammunition pushed through whatever they had to – but Dolomen was relieved to know their underwater march was nearly done.

The first of the bodies appeared soon after – a man in utility coveralls stained with oil. Wounds to his chest had killed him, but from what weapon it was hard to tell. Crowds of tiny eels wriggled around his open flesh, tearing at sea-bloated meat washed white in the water.

After that, the sea was thick with the dead. They floated face down on the surface, arms reaching for the Space Marines. Severed legs bobbed past under the water, kept buoyant by the soles of their shoes. Swarms of scavengers were at work, ripping at the corpses, cleaning bones. Fragments of muscle and skin clouded the water. A litter of fresh bones and half-stripped skulls appeared on the seabed.

Dolomen crushed them underfoot.

Huge, bell-shaped plugs of rockcrete resolved in the murk. The great plasteel legs they supported were shadows over the water. The rubbish was at its absolute worst between the supports, and Dolomen had to cut his way through old lines and shrouds of sacking every few yards.

They found a footing that had a staple ladder sunk into it. The rungs were crusted in shellfish and badly corroded, but looked strong enough.

‘I’ll go first,’ voxed Dolomen, and began to climb.

The ladder led to a rockcrete foot several times larger than the rest. The Space Marines climbed out and found themselves on a dirty landing for a metal staircase that ran up beside the leg, switching back and forth in neat turns so that it occupied the smallest amount of space. Wire caged the world out. They moved to the gate, thick effluent slipping underfoot. On the wire fences, signs warned of death for trespassers, suggesting the stairway was reserved for the rig’s higher castes, yet it was as rickety and filthy as everything else.

They prepared their weapons, clearing mechanisms of sludge and water. Nothing moved under the rig, no people, no wildlife. Holes in the corroded deck overhead let in harsh daylight and gave the illusion of stars in a night sky. Greasy waves slopped listlessly against rockcrete and steel. Away from their position was the area hit by the Red Wings from orbit. The legs were buckled and the upper parts had fallen into the water. A few buildings retained their shape as they’d fallen through, but most had been reduced to a tangle of broken girders and twisted plating. The sea washed over the remains with each surge of the swell. Elsewhere, the deck had been vaporised. Several round holes, each twenty feet across, were grouped towards the north-eastern end, the result of lance fire. Dolomen watched these most closely as Bedevoir inspected the stairway entrance. Wounded metal moaned in pain as it shifted under the tide and wind. Nothing descended through the holes.

‘Locked,’ Bedevoir said.

‘Force it,’ said Astorath.

Bedevoir wrenched the door open. The lock gave with a loud snap. The three warriors waited, guns ready, Astorath with his axe prepared to strike. Everything remained calm.

‘Move on,’ Astorath said. ‘Quickly.’

They ran up the steps. Thick rubberised plastek treads muffled their footsteps, and they made little sound. The whine of their armour was covered by the slap, slap, slap of oily water, and the groan of the stairs mingled with the soft squeals and creaks of the damaged rig. As they ran, they reconfigured their armour for normal operations. Coolant hushed from vents. Water and filth ran off their plates The breathing grilles in Dolomen’s face mask swivelled into their open position, letting in the ripe stench of the rig: dead flesh, human waste, untreated industrial effluent and spilled chemicals. Dolomen had smelled that scent a thousand times on dozens of worlds. It was the smell of slow extinctions. It was the smell of humanity.

They emerged onto the main deck cautiously, weapons ready. Devastation only hinted at by the state of the rig below greeted them openly. Cranes leaned drunkenly onto one another. Toppled buildings lay dead, their skeletons blackened lattices exposed by fire. The rig creaked in the wind blowing off the ocean.

‘Nothing. No contacts,’ said Dolomen. He lowered his plasma pistol.

‘Auspex,’ commanded Astorath.

Bedevoir unclamped the scanning device from its place on his thigh and activated it. A gridded pattern showed on the screen.

‘There’s a large collection of biosignals that way,’ he said, pointing. ‘There’s nothing else here – they’re all in one place, xenos and human.’

‘Do you have any sign of your missing brothers?’

‘None, my lord. No return on location beacons, or ceramite. It’s hard to get any kind of clear signal in all this mess.’

‘The location of the incident is there,’ said Astorath. He pointed to the converted oil tanks. ‘According to Brother Lamorak’s information, it is the site of initial xenos incursion. We shall go there first.’

‘Then what are they doing over there?’ Dolomen asked. Bedevoir had datapulsed the auspex readings into his helm display, and he looked towards the place highlighted by biosigns. A pile of wreckage blocked his view.

‘There has been activity here,’ said Bedevoir, pointing out various places close by. ‘Paths through the wreckage. The xenos have been doing something.’

‘But nothing now.’

‘Elimination of the xenos is a secondary objective,’ said Astorath. ‘We have a greater purpose. We must find the lost.’

They crossed the rig at a loping run. Bedevoir kept his auspex active, alert for any sign that they had been detected. They crouched low, hugging the paths cut through the debris by the xenos’ slaves. Dolomen kept a ready eye out for any clue as to what the enslavers’ intentions were, but there was none. The psyrens were a species of extreme mystery, their nature and motivations still subject to speculation thousands of years after mankind’s first encounter with them.

Only a little time elapsed before they encountered the first of the dead rig workers. Bedevoir flipped the corpse over with his foot. A woman’s pinched face stared up at them. Her clothes were rank with filth.

‘Just over a week since the attack,’ he said. ‘The psyrens have been working their slaves hard. This one is dead from dehydration.’

‘The enslaved cease to care for themselves. Indeed, they cannot,’ said Astorath. ‘The mind-slaving is total. If the governing xenos does not look after the slave, then they die soon enough.’

‘I have not faced this foe,’ said Bedevoir. ‘Is this normal?’

‘When we are dealing with a handful of these xenos it can take them weeks to overrun a planet,’ said Astorath. ‘Sometimes, it is a single example that is encountered, and they will puppet their slave and keep them alive for as long as they need to. But who can judge what is normal for them? How can one understand so alien a mind? Nothing good can come of trying, for to understand the mind of the xenos is to invite its influence, and that is dangerous in the extreme in the case of the psyrens. Best kill them, brother, before they spread, and leave the understanding of such things to scholiasts safely locked away with their scrolls.’

Bedevoir moved on, keeping his eyes on the corpse for several steps. Her clouded eyes stared emptily skywards. Her lips were beginning to shrivel.

The three of them continued to their target. They passed several more of the corpses, then a sweet, cloying smell filled the gulley they travelled, warning them of many dead, and they came to a small courtyard piled high with bodies, neatly stacked, ten deep.

‘There must be hundreds in there,’ said Dolomen.

‘No scavengers,’ said Bedevoir.

‘Enslavers do not restrict themselves to higher minds. They will take animals as well,’ said Astorath. ‘If you see beasts, be wary – the xenos will be looking out through their eyes. Come, there is no way through here. We will double back.’

‘This place was a maze the first time I was here,’ said Bedevoir. ‘It is worse now.’

‘Be silent,’ Astorath ordered. ‘Focus on the mission.’

Although the outer shell of the oil towers remained more or less intact, fire had gutted the interior, leaving most of the floors collapsed and all within consumed. The Space Marines picked their way through ankle-deep ash and charred detritus. Dolomen pointed upwards, past the partial remains of rooms and floors, to where the shell had taken some damage.

‘This is where it happened,’ said Bedevoir. ‘This is where they were lost.’

Bedevoir played his auspex around the ruin while Dolomen visually scanned the ground. Astorath kept watch.

‘Nothing,’ Bedevoir said. ‘If Jadriel or the others are still here, there is no sign of them or their wargear.’

‘Unlikely,’ said Dolomen. ‘I do not think they are here.’

‘Unless they are with the enslaved,’ said Bedevoir. ‘Is it possible for a warrior gripped by the Rage to be taken over in such a way?’

‘No,’ said Astorath. ‘The Rage is too strong. A warrior under its influence is playing host to our gene-father’s soul. No xenos could override that. If they were here, they would be fighting. We must assume they are not.’

‘Then how did they leave?’ said Bedevoir. ‘We tracked no vessels leaving this place after the incursion.’

‘They will have departed the same way that we arrived,’ said Dolomen. ‘What is the maximum operating time underwater for Mark X armour in its Tacticus configuration?’

‘Optimally? Days,’ said Bedevoir.

‘Then they could be anywhere,’ said Dolomen.

‘Not anywhere,’ said Astorath. ‘The Rage follows a path. It is an ancient tragedy playing itself out, surely as any dramaturge’s creation. It forces the patterns of the present upon the past. If your brothers did not die here fighting the enslavers, then they will have been compelled to search out another foe. Something else they could place the label of Horus upon.’

‘There is nothing on this world like that,’ said Bedevoir.

‘Then they will have searched. The Rage follows a pattern. Part of that pattern is the journey, the road trodden to the final confrontation. The stage for this will impose itself on an area of prominence, whether that is an area of conflict, of grandeur, or here, a simple island rising over the mud.’

‘If they had gone into the reed beds, they would have been detected by now. The Joyous Garde has been constantly scanning the planet.’

‘How many islands are there within a week’s travel, on foot, in power armour, through this terrain?’ said Astorath. ‘Let us narrow our search to those places.’

‘The mortals will know,’ said Dolomen.

‘We should investigate this concentration of bioforms,’ said Bedevoir.

‘This planet is doomed,’ said Dolomen. ‘Why waste our time?’

‘Because it is my duty to put right our mistakes,’ said Bedevoir.

‘We shall,’ said Astorath, after a moment’s consideration, ‘but quickly.’

Astorath, Bedevoir and Dolomen crept closer to the concentration of biosignals. As they neared they saw that the edges of the area had been built up with sheets of scavenged metal, creating a wall around part of the rig. They skirted round it. Finding no openings, they headed for a block of prefabricated habitats less damaged than the rest and went up to the flat roof, where they looked down into what they suspected was a ramshackle fort. It was anything but.

Inside the walls a series of pools had been constructed around one of the lance holes punched through the rig. All manner of materials had gone into their making, from sagging canvas and plastek sheets held up by ropes to crudely welded metal units. Each was full of murky liquid in which bobbed large, oblate spheroids strung together by fibrous strands. Human slaves stood motionlessly around them.

The enslavers floated over the pools, anchored in place, their tentacles dipping in and out of the liquid and turning the spheres over, pushing some down and raising others up to the surface.

‘Eggs?’ said Dolomen. He looked at Astorath.

‘It is likely,’ said Astorath. ‘These things must reproduce somehow, though I have never heard of anything like this.’

‘There were many more than this,’ said Bedevoir. ‘The rest must have spread across the planet.’

‘There are few of their slaves left,’ said Dolomen. ‘What has happened to them?’

‘Food for their young,’ said Astorath. ‘Observe.’

One of the rig workers came to sudden, jittery life. He marched to the edge of one of the tanks, took up a knife from the side, cut his own throat with it and while vitae sprayed from his neck in a broad fan, replaced the knife, before clambering calmly into the water. The alien’s influence seemed to leave him for a second before he died. He thrashed madly amid the bulbous eggs as the last of his life drained away, then lay still.

The enslaver tending the pond pulled itself over the body, and serenely rearranged the eggs. The filthy liquid shivered at the introduction of blood. The eggs palpitated.

‘They’re hatching,’ said Bedevoir.

Small white things the size of a human hand slipped free of gelatinous casings. If they were the young of the enslavers, they looked nothing like them, seeming more like leeches than the vaguely cephalopodic adults. Despite the hatchlings’ smallness, from their vantage the Space Marines saw them clearly with their enhanced eyesight. Mouths snapped mechanically at one end. Fringes of hair-like cilia surrounded them. Besides a single, dull black eye above the mouth, they had no other features.

‘Abominations,’ growled Dolomen. ‘Give me a psy-scan. Locate the ones responsible for the aegis over this place.’

‘There,’ said Bedevoir presently. He pointed out a woman stood alone. It appeared some attempt had been made to keep her alive, for her front was stained with foodstuffs.

‘There,’ he said, again pointing out a worker who had also been fed, though like the woman he stood in a posture of slack-jawed idiocy, his eyes permanently open and drool running down from his mouth.

‘There’s the last,’ Bedevoir said, indicating a third, similar individual.

Dolomen quietly prepared his bolter. ‘My lord, we should take the psykers down, at least, and vox the Joyous Garde. They can finish this nest from orbit. If all these eggs hatch…’ He paused, as he did not know for sure what would happen. ‘If they mature here and get off-world somehow, or head into the warp and to another system close by, then Lord Dante will have an unlooked-for threat to account for. We cannot contain an enslaver plague while finishing Leviathan.’

‘I concur,’ said Astorath. ‘We must not rely on our actions to come, but act now.’ His thumb rested on the activation switch of his axe. He drew his bolt pistol with his left hand. ‘They will come for us. They will try to bend us to their will. When you feel the vile touch of their minds upon yours, think hard upon the glory of Sanguinius. Let him be your shield. Remember the Litanies of Hate.’

‘Permit not the xenos to live,’ Bedevoir and Dolomen said together.

‘Slay them all.’

‘You take the nearest two, I shall bring down the furthest,’ said Dolomen, sighting down the barrel.

‘Grenades into the tanks, then we run,’ said Astorath. He tuned his vox to the Red Wings’ carrier signals. ‘Joyous Garde, prepare to fire upon Mainrig at my signal.’

The response was swift, for the Red Wings had been waiting for contact.

‘Affirmed, Lord Astorath.’

A flutter of wings passed overhead. Dolomen saw one of the flying mammalians the locals called day bats flapping by. A commotion broke out immediately by the tanks. The enslaved workers came alive all at once, their heads turning towards the Space Marines. The enslavers began to move agitatedly. Colours pulsed dully in the sunlight over their dull flesh.

‘We’ve been seen,’ said Dolomen.

The three Space Marines opened fire as the enslaved erupted into activity and ran from the pit.

Boltguns banged. Dolomen’s target vanished in a red mist. Astorath’s dropped, missing its head and most of its shoulder. Bedevoir’s shot also flew true, but hit a worker running in front of the target. He fired again quickly, slaying the psyker.

‘It’s done,’ said Dolomen. ‘The psykers are down. Grenades, to be sure.’

Together they rained death down onto the tanks. The grenades plopped into the bloody fluids before exploding, shredding the eggs and the young. Shrapnel scythed up, puncturing the buoyancy sacs of the psyrens. Three fell. The tanks burst, and a slurry of decaying body parts, dead larvae and ruptured eggs poured from them, running over the deck and dropping into the sea. Bedevoir riddled another enslaver with bolt fire. Its sac collapsed, and it dropped out of the air, limbs shaking in distress. Dolomen took out his plasma pistol and incinerated a fifth.

Some among the crowd of onrushing workers stumbled to a confused stop and looked around themselves uncomprehendingly, the xenos that controlled them now dead, but more threw themselves forward, clambering madly over the piles of wreckage to reach the Space Marines’ position.

‘If they reach us, we will be trapped, and easy prey for their masters,’ said Astorath.

Dolomen’s pistol thrummed loudly again as it unleashed a stream of plasma. The enslaver it hit exploded, showering burning meat everywhere.

‘We go now,’ said the Redeemer.

Firing behind themselves, the three leapt down from the top of the hab-block. It was three storeys tall, but their armour absorbed the impact, and they were away, shoving through the frenzied crowds who rushed around the building’s base to swamp them.

Dolomen thrust his plasma pistol back into its holster as he ran. He kicked down a man who tried to tackle him, breaking all his ribs with the weight of his boot and crushing his organs. He slammed the muzzle of his boltgun across the face of another, smashing the jaw clean off the skull, then opened up with the weapon, setting his fire mode to full-automatic. The bolt rifle shook in his arms as he used it to scythe down the enslaved workers that tried to bar his way.

Astorath ran to his left, jumping from roofs to the pinnacles of debris piles, each landing accompanied by a thunderous swipe of his axe that obliterated his targets. Bedevoir fired and fired. The Space Marines were far faster than unenhanced humans, and they outpaced the larger number of them, their pounding feet shaking the broken rig. Debris tumbled down the sides of wrecked facilities. Deck plates bounced loose, revealing the sea below. More of the enslaved burst out of the wreck. Dolomen smashed them down with his fists and his gun.

They were nearing the edge of the rig when a psyren lurched skywards from its hiding place, buoyancy sac shedding charred debris and pieces of metal.

Astorath ignited his jump pack. Jets roaring, he flew off the edge of the rig, arced high and plummeted down, disappearing into the waters with a mighty splash. Bedevoir followed, hurling himself by bodily force alone, then finally Dolomen.

The enslaver hauled itself rapidly over the rig’s surface and whipped out a tentacle, wrapping it around the stabiliser jet of Dolomen’s backpack as he leapt. Dolomen jerked back a little, but his impetus was barely arrested, and he fell, trailing the xenos like a parachute behind him.

He sealed his vents as he plunged into the water. The alien jerked as it hit the surface, but it did not let go, and it was seemingly more at home in the water than Dolomen was. It acted as a flotation device, holding him up as more and more tentacles reached out and slipped around his arms and head.

He felt the xenos in his mind. A heavy pressure smothered his will to act, removing his need to survive, to breathe even. He met the attack calmly, centring himself through his training, reciting the five virtues and graces to steel his soul, but it was not enough. He was sinking into oblivion, and to his horror gladly so. His hands went limp, dropping his boltgun. He tried to move his arms, but they barely twitched. His armour ticked and spasmed under conflicting mental impulses. The psyren had him in its embrace, drawing him nearer, and nearer, up to the surface, the bag of gas that made up most of its body more than sufficient to keep Dolomen afloat.

His head broke the surface. The enslaver’s tentacles had him thoroughly ensnared and its vile insectile head thrust against his faceplate, its arm-like mandibles pattering on his armour in semblance of a kiss.

Dolomen fought the thing’s influence. Though it had him, the xenos could not quite overpower his will. It was trying to make him draw his plasma pistol, and he resisted with all his mental strength. Even so, his hand shifted unsurely in the water. Degree by degree, his hand was forced towards the weapon. He groaned as he grasped it. The mandibles chattered against his helm. The pistol rose, charging coils glowing, and he pointed it at his own head.

His vox clicked. ‘Remember the suffering of our Lord Sanguinius, who gave of his life freely that mankind might live still in the light of the Emperor. It is a pact we, his sons, have renewed time and again since the birth of the Imperium. Do not break it now.’

At the sound of Astorath’s voice, Dolomen’s head filled with visions of long ago, when brother slaughtered brother and the galaxy burned. Wonderingly, he beheld the face of a radiant angel, and knew he remembered the face of Sanguinius, whose blood flowed in his veins. Such beauty he saw. Such sadness.

The plasma gun turned away from his head.

The tentacles gripped harder. The mandibles rattled faster. Sanguinius’ face wavered, replaced by a silent offer of mindless peace.

The plasma gun shifted closer to his head again, fully charged. Water hissed off its coils.

There was an immense roar to his left. The sea burst open, and Astorath rocketed skywards, his black wings spread, his jets burning with hot orange fires. He had his axe ready to strike, and as he swooped towards the enslaver, he let it fall.

‘Remember what you are, son of Sanguinius,’ he roared.

The axe cleaved into the enslaver’s buoyancy sac, and the wound let out a geyser of yellow gas. The creature squealed as it deflated, cracking its mandibles on Dolomen’s helm. Astorath disappeared back under the water, and Dolomen followed. Still the psyren tried to control Dolomen’s mind, pushing him to fire and end his own life even as they sank together.

‘I am of the Blood. I am Adeptus Astartes,’ he said.

He turned the pistol on the xenos. The sea exploded into violent steam. When it blew away, and the water rushed back, only scraps of flesh remained.

The Space Marines approached the island cautiously, in case it was there that Jadriel and his fellow members of the lost had fetched up, but scans carried out from the seabed revealed it to be empty. Their feet sank into thick mud at first, but soon bit into rock, and the three of them emerged with water pouring from their battleplate. The island was small, unusually composed of stone, and at fifteen feet over the water it stood higher than anything for scores of miles in every direction.

Astorath ascended the modest summit to call down the wrath of the Red Wings. A few minutes after they had arrived, a furious bombardment crashed down, lance fire followed by smaller cannon shells to save the Space Marines being caught in their explosion. The bombs struck hard, and the world lit up, adding a more glorious sun to the sky than Dulcis had ever seen. When the glow subsided, the rig was gone. A column of steam rose from the water that did not dissipate for several hours.

‘It is done,’ said Astorath.

‘It will slow them, not stop them,’ said Dolomen.

‘We have the time we need to complete our mission,’ said Astorath.

‘And I have my honour restored,’ said Bedevoir.

Their vengeance wrought, they waited in silence for Cellew and Idrin. A brief wind blew violently from the site of destruction. Some ten minutes later, the first of the waves came, high enough to overtop the rocky knob of the island, and briefly submerge the Space Marines again. The patrol boat arrived as the last of the bombardment swell was dying. Clouds were gathering thickly in the heavens, taking the column of steam into themselves as if greeting a lost brother.

‘You did it then?’ said Idrin nonchalantly, as they drew near. Cellew eyed their smirched livery. The three of them were covered in oily filth so thoroughly the waves could not wash it away. It was clear she didn’t want to get her boat dirty, but she, unlike Idrin, dared not say anything.

‘Of course,’ said Dolomen. ‘Though it was in some regards a close-run affair.’

‘Did you find anything that could tell us where your missing brothers are?’ asked Idrin.

‘Not that these matters are yours to ponder, but we found some enlightenment,’ said Dolomen. ‘You are to take us to the nearest significant islands within a twenty mile radius. Bedevoir’s brothers will be there.’

‘If they are not?’

‘Then the next set. You will do this without question,’ said Astorath.

The boat rocked heavily as he and Bedevoir climbed aboard.

‘That means going into the swamps. They are not nice places. Are you sure you want to go?’

‘We are Space Marines,’ said Dolomen. ‘I have seen things that would freeze your heart and drive you insane. We are not perturbed by the idea of mud or aggressive fish.’

Idrin shrugged. ‘Just saying.’

‘How fast does this vessel go?’ said Astorath.

‘Twenty miles an hour or so,’ said Cellew quietly.

‘Then make it do so,’ said the Redeemer.

Cellew turned the boat around and set off towards a line of black on the horizon.

It began to rain – lightly at first, and then so hard it was difficult to tell sea and air apart. Lightning followed.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

THE BARGE OF THE DEAD

The rain grew progressively worse as they headed further north-west and their sailing took them further into the sea proper.

Lightning came and went. Storms blinked into life and died in every direction. The rains persisted. The sky flattened out, until it was an unbroken, oppressive grey that poured on them relentlessly.

A hump appeared in the distance, its edges softened by rain.

‘There’s something ahead,’ Dolomen said.

The rain fell with monotonous rhythm. It drummed the water into a landscape of circular ripples that expanded and died, expanded and died. Secondary splashes made further ripples, so the water for miles around was in ever-changing motion.

Raindrops rattled on the Space Marines’ armour, collecting into rivulets that poured down the gullies between their armour plates. They gathered plant matter and mud still stuck to the warriors from their sojourn underwater at Mainrig, but it would take more than the rain to wash them clean, and they remained filthy.

Idrin held his hand over his eyes to keep the rain from them. He was forced to blink frequently nevertheless. ‘There’re no islands around here. No swamp. Only the sea.’

‘Nothing new?’ said Dolomen.

‘The mud shifts all the time, but not so quickly, and it never gets that high. The currents are wrong here.’ He outlined the edge of the object with his finger. ‘It’s too far clear of the water. For an island to get that amount of elevation, it’d have to be there for long enough to accumulate vegetation. Several seasons, at least, and then there’d be trees beginning to grow on it. No, it’s too regular. It’s a barge,’ he said. ‘A big one, holed pretty thoroughly to sink so regularly. They usually tip up. That’s flat on the bottom, and the cabin’s gone. Can’t see any of the other deck furniture that should be there.’

Dolomen’s helm whirred as his auto-senses zoomed into the wreck for him.

‘You are correct. It is a barge.’

‘Take us to it,’ said Astorath.

‘Do you think my brothers have been here?’ said Bedevoir.

‘It is possible,’ said Dolomen.

Bedevoir looked to the wheelhouse and shouted over the rain. His voice barked out of his vox-grille.

‘Heed the Lord Astorath! Take us to the wreck.’

Rain drummed on hollow metal. Water poured from the drains cut into the barge’s gunwales.

‘There,’ said Dolomen. He pointed to a rusty ladder bolted near the stern.

Cellew watched the sea and the barge nervously as she drew alongside. The boat clanged into the barge. The sound of the contact was very loud, and Idrin looked to the water.

‘Careful,’ he said.

Cellew darted from the wheelhouse, a coil of rope in her hands that had a grapnel tied to one end. She tossed it expertly upwards, hooking the barge with her first attempt. The rattle of iron on iron was once again loud, and Idrin scowled.

‘Do we have to make so much noise?’ he said.

Cellew made the boat fast, her hands doing the work automatically. Her gaze went to the heavens repeatedly, then to the water, then back again.

‘This time, I will go first,’ said Bedevoir.

Dolomen stepped aside. The Red Wings Space Marine ascended, bending the staple rungs with every step. His armour whined as he hauled himself up over the edge. He stood there a moment while he drew his pistol, then he took a few steps forward and vanished.

His footsteps sounded on the deck as sonorous thuds, so heavy that the water rippled around the hull with the shaking of the metal.

Astorath followed.

‘Stay here,’ Dolomen commanded Idrin and Cellew as he climbed up.

‘I’m coming too,’ said Idrin.

‘You are not,’ said Dolomen. ‘Stay here and wait. Do not follow us. That is a command, in case there is any ambiguity in what I say.’

Cellew and Idrin could only listen as the Space Marines walked the length of the barge and back again. Their feet boomed loudly through the metal. The water shook. Grating speech emanated from their voxmitters in harsh bursts.

‘They’re making too much noise,’ said Idrin. He pressed the vox-band on his wrist and spoke into it. ‘You’re making too much noise, my lords. You must be quieter. It is breeding season.’

‘We will return in a moment. Be silent,’ said Astorath.

As Idrin did his best to convince them to return there and then, Cellew found herself drawn along the edge of the boat to where a fall of water ran from a gunwale drain. She stared at it, coming closer, peering into the silvery rush.

She stopped, realising what had drawn her attention. A rusty hue tainted the water. As she looked closer, threads of red came and went as the rain hosed down the deck.

‘The water,’ she said. ‘There’s blood running into the water.’ She looked over the edge of the boat, at the ripples shaken out by the hull. ‘Idrin!’ she called. ‘Blood in the water!’

Something heavy knocked the patrol boat, ringing it hard off the barge’s hull. She teetered on the brink of falling. The boat moved, and she pitched forward.

Idrin’s hand grabbed her and yanked her backwards.

‘Too late,’ said Idrin. He nodded at the surface. ‘Marsh eels.’

A wake cut the water as the eel swam away from them towards the prow. More wakes were cutting in towards them. Some were very big.

‘Get up onto the barge,’ he said. ‘Now.’

Dolomen cut his vox connection with Idrin.

Astorath handed his axe to Dolomen and knelt so he could inspect the most complete of the corpses. Dolomen had held the axe many times, but the honour of doing so never lessened. It was one of the Chapter’s greatest artefacts, feared as much as revered, a symbol of their might and of the curse they all carried inside them.

‘Dolomen.’ Astorath pointed at the corpse. A rictus of horror stared out from skin bled white. The corpse’s eyes were missing, and large portions of its exposed flesh had been pecked away. The rain and scavenging aviforms had broken the shapes of the wounds that killed the man, widening them, making them huge and ragged, but they were unmistakable nonetheless. Two closely set punctures in the neck, much deeper and cleaner than the stab marks of beaks alone.

‘Jadriel and his men did this,’ said Astorath. ‘They are beginning to feed.’

‘We have to resolve this quickly, before word gets out,’ said Bedevoir.

Dolomen surveyed the scattered corpses. Most had been torn apart. Limbs and entrails lay all over the deck and floated in the water filling up the three open cargo holds. The boat’s wheelhouse had been ripped free and lay upturned in the water on the far side of the boat. The damage to the barge in general was great, but there was no sign of explosives or bolt fire.

‘I do not think there were any survivors,’ said Dolomen. ‘The escape craft are still in their boxes. Our brothers were thorough.’

‘Such savagery,’ said Bedevoir. ‘I did not know.’

Astorath stood and took back his axe. ‘You will come to learn the signs. You will come to understand. When the Rage comes upon those of our blood, if it is not quickly bound by prayer and will, and the fallen warrior not set to a final, noble purpose, this is the result. Some may resist, for a while, and seek out a good death on their own, but the consequences of the unguided lost is always this. They see all as enemies. In their madness they kill and kill. Unbridled slaughter is the lot of our kind who succumb. To take those who hear Sanguinius’ call in hand and grant them one last righteous war is my purpose – but if that cannot be done, then it is mercy, and the saving of those the lost would kill, that I must provide.’ He looked about the massacre. ‘In this case, I suspect the Rage was primed by the empyrical pulse, and then initiated by the ingress of the psyrens to the material plane. When it happened, it was swift and savage. There would have been no time for them to prepare or contain it, however it occurred. No wonder the song of pain was so loud.’

‘This is unusual then?’ said Bedevoir. He sounded uneasy. ‘Those who succumbed during the crusade were not nearly so violent.’

‘Such manifestations of the Rage are not unheard of,’ said Astorath. ‘If they were, then there would be no need for the duties of my office. It is less rare than I would like. Whole Chapters can succumb to their baser instincts. One must think only of the Knights of Blood. They will not be the last to fall wholesale into madness. Still,’ he looked to the sky, to where the Great Rift skulked in the heavens. He sensed it, even while hidden. They all could. Sanguinius’ sons possessed a measure of his visionary powers, no matter how lightly they were touched. ‘Something is happening with the Black Rage,’ Astorath said, ‘something connected to the Great Rift.’

The vox sounded again.

‘Those mortals will not leave us be,’ said Dolomen. Something banged on the hull. ‘What was that?’

A long body rasped along the barge. A shrill call clicked and whistled through the water.

‘The local wildlife,’ said Astorath.

Dolomen looked at the blood washing from the corpses and gurgling through the gunwale drains into the sea.

‘Maybe we were being too loud.’

‘The mortals are coming aboard,’ said Bedevoir.

Dolomen turned about and faced the edge of the barge where Idrin’s head was emerging.

‘I told you to stay on the boat,’ Dolomen shouted angrily.

‘Marsh eels!’ shouted Idrin. He skirted round the bodies. The woman was obviously disturbed by them, and stared, forcing Idrin to drag her after him. He had one hand clamped around her wrist; in the other he held his lasgun. Its charge lights shone.

‘We are aboard an iron barge,’ said Bedevoir. ‘We are safe.’

‘We’re not,’ said Idrin. ‘Look!’

The sea boiled with grey-green bodies. Silver undersides flashed. Suddenly, all the water around the barge was packed with serpentine forms. The smallest were no thicker than a man’s finger, and these made huge bait balls on their own, but there were eels of much greater sizes also. Arm-thick fish rolled over more with bodies as broad as a Space Marine’s chest.

‘Right, get ready,’ said Idrin. He flicked his lasgun to active.

‘You shouldn’t have come aboard,’ said Dolomen.

‘What? This?’ Idrin glanced back at the slaughter. ‘I’ve seen worse.’ The look on his face suggested he knew who had killed the men.

‘I gave you a command,’ said Dolomen. ‘I warned you.’

‘Not now,’ said Astorath. ‘We have more pressing matters at hand.’

‘The eels cannot get up here,’ said Bedevoir.

‘These can’t, but that can.’ Idrin pointed with the muzzle of his gun to a massive wake surging through the water towards them. The creature that made it was so huge that it was wriggling along the bottom rather than swimming, throwing up clouds of mud. Translucent bone spines fringed its head, cutting neat furrows through the sea.

‘Heed the mortal,’ said Astorath.

‘Thank you,’ said Idrin. He opened fire.

Steam burst from the water where his lasgun hit. The sea absorbed most of the shot, and the eel was unharmed until Dolomen unslung his boltgun and opened up, Bedevoir adding to the fire with his bolt pistol. A line of gory craters appeared all along the eel. Puffs of atomised blood floated on the air. The eel’s writhing became frantic, and it turned over dead in the water, its bright belly rolling skywards.

‘A full magazine,’ said Dolomen. He ejected the clip and slapped in another. He looked at Idrin. ‘I take it we have not slain the beast and won the day, but instead more of those things will be here shortly.’

‘Damn right,’ said Idrin. ‘If we leave now, we may be able to escape while they eat the big one.’

The eels were moving away from the barge. Their movements became a frenzy as they set to work on the corpse.

‘Follow him,’ said Astorath.

Cellew shrieked as an eel as long as five men rose up from the flooded hold and slapped hard against the deck. Pale teeth flashed. Idrin tracked its swerves through the offal and put it down with a shot through its head. It limply slithered back whence it had come.

‘They’re coming through the holes in the hull,’ Idrin said, peering into the waterlogged hold. That too boiled with the eels. More leapt up from the water and threw themselves against the edge of the open hatch, trying to gain purchase on the deck and get at the bounty of carrion there.

‘They pose no danger to us,’ said Dolomen, crushing one under his boot.

‘With all due reverence, my lord, it’s not you I’m worried about.’ Idrin shot two more dead. ‘Cellew, get on the bow gun!’

Cellew ran ahead to the ladder. ‘I’m on it.’

The barge rocked. Cellew fell onto the boat with a shriek. Idrin stumbled.

‘Emperor’s life,’ he said.

A gargantuan eel breached the water ahead of where the patrol boat was moored. Spray rushed over the barge, and the eel landed hard, crushing the gunwales and what little was left of the barge’s fittings. A head the size of a Rhino armoured personnel carrier turned towards them and hissed breath that smelled of mud and fish up the deck.

‘By the Blood,’ growled Dolomen. ‘Is that the biggest, or are they going to keep getting bigger?’

‘That’s pretty much the biggest one I’ve ever seen,’ said Idrin.

Bedevoir, Idrin and Dolomen opened fire at once. Bolts and las slashed through the pouring rain into the creature, but it was so immense that the shots did little harm to it. The feared bolt weaponry of the Adeptus Astartes was little more than a nuisance. Wounds that would blast a human to undifferentiated pieces of meat were spots and nicks upon its slimy body.

It heaved itself further onto the barge, its immense weight depressing the front deeper into the mud. Corpses rolled down the deck and into the sea. Blood and water rushed from stern to prow. The creature was a living cable of muscle, as capable of squirming its way across the mud and marsh as it was of swimming, but the barge was simply too narrow for it to move effectively. From the patrol boat the sound of the heavy stubber set up as Cellew riddled its tail with shot, but these wounds troubled it not at all.

‘I shall deal with this personally,’ said Astorath. His armour purred, and the black wings set around his jump pack unfurled. Holding his axe crosswise across his body, he activated it with a sharp jerk. The head cracked with awakening power. Rain fizzled into the disruption lightning playing over the black metal.

‘Cease fire,’ said Dolomen. ‘Let our lord do his work. We’ll take care of these smaller ones.’

A forest of eels danced over the edges of the hold and round the fringes of the boat. Idrin switched targets, clearing a way to the ladder.

‘Save your ammunition, Bedevoir,’ said Dolomen. He slung his boltgun across his back and drew his combat blade.

‘Aren’t you going to stop Lord Astorath? He is putting himself in danger.’

Dolomen glanced at the High Chaplain, who was advancing towards the giant eel.

‘You stop him, if you like.’

Astorath ignited his jump pack as he broke into a heavy run. His feet slammed into the deck so hard it dented. When the jet of his pack reached a screaming whine he leapt, neurally setting the pack to full burn as he did. He arced up, his mechanical wings spreading, adding range to the leap. He swung his axe up over his head and prepared to bring it down as he came spearing from the air.

Wind shrieked through the metal feathers. His axe roared through the rain. He shouted out the first line of the Litanies of Hate.

‘Trust only in your enemy. His desire to slay you shall never waver.’

He landed on the side of the eel. His weight was such that his boots plunged through the side of the beast, dealing it a grievous wound. As he hit, he brought his axe down, adding the impetus of his short flight to the blow. The head buried itself deep. The disruption field banged mightily when it met so much matter, and blasted a hole three feet across into the eel’s body.

The creature hissed and thrashed. Astorath was flipped from its side and fell to the deck in a torrent of thin blood. The eel was far from dead, and it bent double to deal with this new threat, thrusting down with its blunt snout. Astorath burned his jet to get clear, sending himself skidding along the metal in a spray of sparks. He hacked at the side of the beast as he slid, opening a series of ugly injuries far along its anterior half. Its mouth chased after him, snapping at his feet even as the exhaust from his jump pack seared its snout. Teeth like glass swords closed around his ankle.

Astorath sported a harder shell than most prey, and the fangs shattered on his ceramite, but the eel held him fast, whipping its head around, hurling Astorath high into the air and bringing him down hard on the deck. The Executioner’s Axe was jarred from his right hand, leaving him holding it with the left only, far towards the bottom of the haft. Icons flashed warning reds in his helm display. He swung the axe awkwardly as the creature coiled to deliver another punishing flick. The blade buried itself in a quarter of the way down the body, not far from where Astorath had inflicted the first gash, but as the beast wrenched him away to again dash him upon the metal, the axe was torn entirely from his grip. It fell from the smoking wound into the central flooded hold, where it was swallowed up in churning knots of
eels.

The eel brought Astorath down hard, denting his left wing. His vambrace cracked. Alarms wailed in his helm. The eel worked him around in its mouth, attempting to bring the full pressure of its enormous jaws to bear. Astorath ripped at its teeth with his hands, wrenching them out and throwing them down. Blood poured from the beast’s mangled gums, adding to that flowing from the axe wounds, but still the eel showed no sign of tiring.

On the deck, Dolomen and Bedevoir saw their lord in trouble and turned their attention to the giant eel once more, riddling its slimy body with bolt-rounds. The side of it went from sleek to ruined in a second of furious gunfire. The pain sent it wild, and it whipped its head back and forth, biting down harder all the while.

Astorath punched at the thing, his armoured fists skidding from its mucus covering. He grunted with pain as one of the razor teeth found its way through the softseal at the back of his knee. His battleplate responded, dosing him with pain nullifiers, but the tooth remained lodged in his flesh, moving back and forth with every toss and turn of the beast’s head, penetrating deeper into the knee joint.

Bolt fire roared from the Space Marines on the deck. Idrin shot methodically with his lasgun, scoring the hide with burns. Their shooting abated as the beast turned upon its coils, forcing them to flee as it rolled further up the deck, crushing the dead to smears and buckling the barge’s frame under its immense bulk.

Astorath clawed at the beast. It flicked back its head, opening its jaws as it did so, and catapulted the Redeemer of the Lost high into the air. He fired his jump pack, but it stuttered and coughed, alarms in his helm warning him of its non-functionality even as he plummeted into the thing’s gullet and was swallowed whole.

The eel’s throat convulsed, pushing Astorath down into its belly. His armour sealed itself, switching on its internal life support systems, shutting out the world.

The Redeemer took stock of the damage. His armour was malfunctioning in multiple places. The outer shell was cracked in three different spots. The thrashing of the beast’s head had broken some of the fibre bundles that gave extra strength to his legs and severed several connections between the components. His bodysuit was torn wide open around his knee. His own wounds were hardly less severe: torn ligaments, ruptured membranes, internal bleeds and the savaging of his leg.

Already his body and his battleplate’s systems raced to alleviate the worst of the pain and maintain his combat functionality. Within hours, he would begin to heal.

If he escaped.

The eel’s body was a cold place. More of the slime-coating that protected its skin slicked its gullet. Internally, it was a spongy thing that appeared to be comprised mostly of mucus.

The digestive tract spasmed again, pushing him lower into the beast. Multiple hearts arrayed in strings thrummed at high speed near the gut wall. Vital fluids gurgled. The gullet opened up, dumping him into a bath of digestive acids. His alarm chimed out the warning clarion for toxic environments. Where his bodysuit had imperfectly sealed, the acid leaked in and burned flesh.

‘Enough,’ said Astorath. He braced his feet against the beast’s stomach wall. Elastic tissues stretched under his boots, then tore. ‘Stand by, Brother Dolomen,’ he voxed. ‘I am coming out.’

Hooking his fingers into the gut wall, Astorath began to dig.

Idrin continued to fire at the gargantuan eel. The deck was awash with so much blood that it collected in the open holds faster than it could drain away, lifting up the thrashing knots of lesser eels and granting them easier access to the men fighting on the deck.

‘We’ve got to get out of here!’ he yelled. ‘Nothing can bring a marsh eel this size down.’

Heavy stubber fire banged from Cellew’s boat. The sea was alive with the motion of serpentine bodies. The dry hissing of the eels overcame the patter of the rain, so that it seemed the weather was screaming.

‘Stand your ground,’ Dolomen said. He moved his attention from the giant eel to its lesser kin, blasting a path with boltgun and grenades to the edge of the central hold.

A number of events occurred in such quick succession that Idrin struggled to keep track. Dolomen jumped feet first into the central hold, where he disappeared under the filthy water. Bedevoir continued to fire at the giant eel with his bolt pistol, while sweeping his chainsword at the creatures writhing all over the deck. The eels bit at Bedevoir’s feet and shins, but did nothing more than break their own teeth. Idrin’s boots provided no such protection, and he was forced up onto the gunwales, where he balanced precariously over Cellew’s boat. She was having an even worse time of it, abandoning the main gun and retreating to the wheelhouse, where she fired through a broken window at the eels as they tried to get in.

The giant eel reared up with an awful screech. Idrin saw movement in its side, then Astorath burst through its stomach wall covered in gore. Bedevoir charged to his aid, hacking his chainsword into the eel’s side and tearing the wound wider. Still it would not die. Its thrashing was weakening, but it had strength to spare to kill them all.

‘Now, Dolomen!’ Idrin heard the Redeemer cry.

Dolomen pulled himself up from the central hold, Astorath’s axe held in one fist. He lofted it at the High Chaplain. It was an awkward throw from a disadvantageous angle, but such was his strength that the weapon flew true. Astorath caught it in both hands, the blade burned once more with lightning, and the Redeemer swung it down, catching the eel below the jaw and opening its throat for a run of five yards.

The eel shook, and flopped. Astorath struck again, then again, until its neck was a mess of axe cuts and its glassy spine was exposed to the air.

Astorath waded through the flood of guts pouring from the beast. He raised his axe a final time, slid his hands to the end of the haft, then with the extra reach gained he swung the blade, cutting neatly through the spinal column some twelve feet above his head.

The beast fell to the deck, its jaw continuing to snap as its life drained away.

‘Are we going now?’ Idrin said.

Astorath limped from the ruin of his foe, crushing lesser eels underfoot, his axe held across his body. His jump pack wings were shattered, his armour breached, yet he seemed even more terrible than before, dripping as he did from helm crest to soles in watery eel blood, and roped about with sheets of slimy guts.

‘We are going,’ he said.

Dolomen heaved himself fully out of the pit. Bedevoir covered him as they retreated. The Space Marines jumped one at a time onto the patrol boat, eels shaken free from the boat’s sides by their impacts. The rest they butchered with inhuman efficiency.

The eel shoal went into a feeding frenzy and fell on their monarch. They leapt out of the water, latching onto the giant corpse draped over the grounded barge. Others fought with each other in the sea in their fever to get at the flesh. Those on the deck moved like a living tide, swimming into the giant eel’s wounds to consume it from within.

‘Jump, mortal man,’ shouted Dolomen.

The boat was a long way down. Still, leaping was preferable to becoming eel food.

‘I came back here for a quieter life,’ Idrin said to himself, and jumped.

Dolomen caught him, an act that amused the Space Marine but left Idrin unaccountably annoyed.

‘Go!’ Bedevoir shouted.

Cellew opened the throttle. As they pulled away from the vessel the propeller chopped the sea bloody, mincing the eels crowding the boat.

When Dolomen set Idrin down, he felt even more of a fool.

‘Thanks,’ he said. ‘You didn’t need to catch me.’

Dolomen shrugged. ‘You might have injured yourself. You could have slipped on one of these ugly beasts.’ He pushed a dead eel around with his foot.

Astorath sat down awkwardly while Bedevoir unscrewed parts of his armour. The grounded barge and its swarm of eels receded behind the scow. It was still raining, and blood was washing surely out of the deck drains. Dolomen stooped low, picked up a dead eel as thick as his arm and made to throw it overboard, but stopped.

‘You say these things are edible?’

Idrin shouldered his gun.

‘More than that. They’re quite good, as it happens.’

Dolomen chuckled. His voxmitter made it sound like a failing engine.

‘Then tonight we eat well!’

Dolomen went about collecting the eels. Idrin felt eyes on him, and looked back to find Astorath, now half-unclad, staring at him.

Idrin looked away again. Astorath had a gaze that was difficult to bear.

Uneasily, he looked out over the water to the grounded barge, knowing he had seen something aboard that he was not meant to.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

BRINGER OF MERCY

As they moved away from the barge, Bedevoir and Dolomen helped Astorath remove the rest of his armour, and their diagnosis of its condition was not favourable.

‘It is in no fit state for combat, my lord,’ said Dolomen. He spread the plate out on the deck and surveyed the pieces critically, taking Astorath through the damage to its doleful conclusion. ‘This cannot be repaired here. A Techmarine would struggle under these conditions. It needs to be returned to the forge.’

‘I can see,’ said Astorath.

‘How is your leg, my lord?’ asked Bedevoir.

Astorath flexed his knee. ‘It will heal.’

‘We should call in support, bring down spares from the Eminence Sanguis. Maybe Artemos as well to see to your injuries,’ said Dolomen.

They were drawing near to an archipelago, all its isles crowded with black trees. Astorath looked deep into the swamps.

‘I hear the music of the lost’s pain,’ said Astorath. ‘We are getting close. This quest for mercy is almost done. We will proceed as planned.’

‘This is a poor course to follow,’ said Dolomen. He stepped closer to the Redeemer and lowered his voice. ‘We have no information on how strong Jadriel and the others are. They are Primaris. They may be able to best you. If you do not have your armour, I cannot guarantee your safety, and you are injured.’

‘None of us can guarantee our safety, Dolomen,’ said Astorath. ‘We all fall eventually. If we leave now, then we will lose our chance to do our duty. They are our blood-kin, and must have mercy.’

Bedevoir hung around the prow of the boat, politely waiting for them to finish. The two mortals watched the Space Marines, Cellew nervously, Idrin with his blank-eyed curiosity.

‘My lord, it is my duty to advise you. We may have to consider leaving the Red Wings to their fates here. They will die anyway. You should not risk yourself in this way.’

‘They will die, but they will do so alone and unshriven. Mercy is my role, brother,’ said Astorath, so low even Dolomen could barely hear. ‘I will not leave these brothers to madness and slow deaths, nor to the sorry end that awaits this world. They must be delivered from their suffering cleanly, with honour. I have always expected to die doing this duty – if that time is now, so be it.’ He rested a hand on Dolomen’s shoulder plate. ‘But I do not think it is, not yet.’ He removed his hand, and stared into the approaching swamps. ‘The lost are in there.’

The boat left behind the open water for narrow river channels overhung by slimy, black-wooded trees. Beneath their boughs the humid day became closer still. Clouds of insects gathered between the mosses hanging from the branches. They irritated Idrin and Cellew, but though they gathered around the unclad Astorath in huge swarms, his thick, modified skin seemed impenetrable to their bites and he ignored them.

Once he was sure the two Space Marines had finished their private debate, Idrin approached.

‘These swamps cover hundreds of square miles,’ he said. ‘If your warriors are not here, they may be further to the north, in the swamps on the coast there. But if they’ve gone deeper into the forests here, we’ll never find them. Not without proper augur sweeps.’

The boat puttered along a narrow channel. Cellew kept it slow, for the water was choked with tree roots and rotting boughs. The sharp prow nosed through tree limbs whose twigs were so closely entwined that the gun mounted on the front broke through them with a constant, wet crackling. Cellew’s face was immobile with concentration.

‘We will find them,’ said Dolomen. Astorath stared out into the woods, ignoring Idrin. ‘Lord Astorath senses them.’

‘How?’ said Idrin.

‘Blood ties,’ said Dolomen, and would say no more.

The trees grew directly from the water on arched roots. They were a leafless variety, possessing pores for respiration on their spreading fingers, so though alive they appeared dead. Despite this and the sodden wood, and the sap-weeping gashes that split the bark of many, there was a symmetry between the roots and the spreading branches that gave them a certain beauty. As they went in further, the trees grew taller, the roots higher, until the boat was sailing directly under the trunks.

There was a great deal of life there. Chitinous crustaceans stalked along the roots. Shoals of eels exploded away from the approaching boat, disappearing into the inky water in a blizzard of metallic flakes. Birds cawed from the high branches. Day bats defecated on the boat from their roosts. Of the xenos there was no sign, save one sole example caught in the upper limbs of a tree, its inflation sac torn and tentacles limp, already rotting in the heat.

Night came. Luminous fungi lit up on every tree, so that cold fires consumed the forest. Astorath ordered them to continue. Idrin turned on the searchlight upon the bow. Several times they reached open leads of water between the trees, and then Cellew would tiredly ask which way the Redeemer wished to go. He remained silent a moment, intent on the night, looking ahead, until he indicated wordlessly which direction they should take. This was always towards the darkest place.

Day returned, grey and sickly. The swamps carried on in all directions, yet their character was changing, so there were scattered patches of solid ground upon which grew different trees. The islands became more numerous, raised higher out of the water, until the boat was sailing down a broad river fringed by the swamp trees, behind which jungles rose.

Astorath closed his eyes and moved no more from his spot. He held the Executioner’s Axe loosely in his left hand, the corner of the axe blade resting on the deck. Dolomen bade everyone be quiet, for Astorath was searching for signs of their quarry in his uncanny way. The boat slid through the water, its electric motor purring, the racket of Dulcis’ life loud in every quarter.

Not long before noon, Astorath opened his eyes and spoke a single word.

‘Here.’

Cellew pointed the prow into the shore. She cut the engine, and the boat coasted to a stop with a gentle bump.

Bedevoir and Dolomen prepared themselves. Idrin pre-empted Dolomen’s command when the Space Marine turned to face him and Cellew.

‘Wait?’ he said. Dolomen nodded. The Space Marines jumped into the water. Oil black, it came only to their chests, yet it was with difficulty that they waded through the tangle of roots towards what counted for solid ground.

Astorath reached the muddy shore first, pushing his way through wet branches and vanishing into the trees. He still limped, but he pushed on ahead. Dolomen and Bedevoir struggled more, their armoured weight pushing them into the sucking mud. They emerged covered in a fresh layer of filth.

‘Where did he go?’ said Bedevoir.

‘That way. Footprints.’

‘Is he always this way?’

‘Yes,’ said Dolomen. ‘His duty drives him on. He rarely waits, though truthfully he rarely needs to.’

The ground rose. Water collected in hollows among the trees, and the two Space Marines found that the soil between them was firmer. They trampled the brush underfoot as they went deeper into the jungle. The trees there were different, thicker of trunk, and rooted directly into the ground, while their branches bore heavy cargoes of sharp needles. Small animals ran squealing into the undergrowth without showing themselves. An oppressive feeling affected both of them. Dolomen stopped Bedevoir with a hand on the elbow.

‘Can you feel it?’

‘The sense of weight on me, and…’ Bedevoir searched for a word long unused, ‘dread?’

‘It is the Rage that calls to us. When one falls, others may fall. It is a contagion. Their blood calls to our blood.’

‘This is still strange to me. I did not know I would feel it so deeply in myself.’

‘You must prepare yourself.’

‘How?’ said Bedevoir.

‘How can you not know?’ said Dolomen.

‘We have not been told,’ said Bedevoir. ‘Our Reclusiam has but one member remaining. We Mars-born were not a priority for him.’

‘All is in disarray,’ said Dolomen sadly. ‘Then heed me, and learn now. Focus upon the present. You have experienced the Thirst?’

‘Yes,’ said Bedevoir.

‘When it comes, do not draw on it. The red road leads to the black. The Thirst gives us strength, but it brings out the beast in us. Remember that you are an angel of the Emperor of Mankind. Remember who you are, and where you are. Do you follow the five graces and the five virtues?’

‘Our Chapter has different traditions,’ said Bedevoir.

‘Then remember them. Recite them to yourself. They will ground you in the now. You are a Red Wing. You are not a Blood Angel of the Ninth Legion.’

‘I understand.’

‘Let the spirit of Sanguinius guide you, do not let it overwhelm you.’

‘You are being serious,’ said Bedevoir.

‘Then you know we are in trouble,’ said Dolomen.

They went further slowly, until the ringing of weapons caught their attention.

‘Astorath,’ said Dolomen.

They broke into a run.

Bedevoir and Dolomen came into a clearing in the trees to find a Red Wings Space Marine in mud-caked armour already bleeding his last into the dirt. Astorath had another kneeling on the ground, his neck exposed. The Executioner’s Axe was ready to strike.

‘Brother Bors! Brother Ulfius!’ said Bedevoir.

‘See to the other,’ said Astorath. ‘I have this one. He remembers who he is. I shall deliver him.’

‘Cover us – there are yet three at large,’ said Dolomen to Bedevoir. He put down his boltgun on the ground. With his combat knife drawn, he approached the dying warrior. Ulfius, his name scroll read. His guts hung out of his broken war-plate, and yet still the Space Marine would have posed a danger to Dolomen had both his legs not been broken and his chest cut deeply.

The warrior raised his hand feebly.

‘Father,’ he said. ‘Father, do not forsake me.’

Dolomen knelt by his side and gripped his hand in his own.

‘Quiet now, you have served your lord well. You have saved us. Be at peace.’

‘What are you doing?’ hissed Bedevoir.

‘Silence,’ said Dolomen with a glance behind. ‘Let him die well.’

‘He killed me,’ said the dying warrior. His eyes were completely red. His eye teeth were fully extended, raking his lower lip open.

‘He did, but not in vain,’ said Dolomen. ‘Know that you are worthy, for you have seen through the eyes of most blessed Sanguinius. For all that there are no true gods, of all men, our father came the closest to the divine.’

‘Help me,’ said the warrior.

‘Dolomen!’ hissed Bedevoir.

From the other side of the clearing came Astorath’s voice, urging calm and control upon the other Red Wings warrior.

‘Be at peace,’ said Dolomen. He angled the knife so it was parallel with the warrior’s face and pushed. The blade cut down into the warrior’s neck, severing arteries and penetrating the primary heart. Dolomen withdrew the blade, and executed the warrior with a similar cut to the other side that killed his secondary heart.

‘Be at peace,’ said Astorath. The Executioner’s Axe took Brother Bors’ head off with an upward cut to the front that avoided the backpack.

The warrior toppled forward. His neck pumped vitae weakly onto the ground. The soil was too saturated to take it, and the blood nosed off over the damp earth, collecting dead needles on its front.

At the sight of that, Bedevoir felt the red calling to him, war drums beating to the rhythm of a human heart, and something worse behind them, banners of black, and the ending of sanity.

He swallowed unwanted saliva. Astorath and Dolomen knelt and bowed their heads in silent prayer. Bedevoir felt an unaccustomed dizziness. Black licked at the edges of his vision.

‘I am Bedevoir, brother of the Red Wings,’ he whispered to himself. ‘This is Dulcis, this is now.’

Astorath and Dolomen stood simultaneously.

‘That was dangerous,’ said Bedevoir. His reaction to the bloodletting left him feeling jittery.

‘We are bringers of mercy,’ said Astorath. He lifted his axe. ‘They call it the Executioner’s Axe, but I am no executioner. These brothers suffered. We gave them peace.’

Dolomen’s knife rasped back into its scabbard. He retrieved his boltgun.

‘Stay aware,’ he said. ‘The others are near.’

Jungle pressed hard on them. Twigs scraped across battleplate. Fungal smears and green streaks of algae joined the muck caking the Space Marines. The atmosphere grew more and more oppressive, the sky more distant, and the heat under the trees climbed. They pushed on to dark places where few had ever been. Civilisation, the Imperium, even the notion of them, seemed far away there. All of them heard the clamour of ancient battles on the edge of their hearing. All three of them felt the tug of the Rage. For Bedevoir the experience was deeply unsettling. Dolomen muttered his own prayers, accustomed to walking the edge of insanity. Only Astorath greeted the black and the red, accepted them, taking them to him as one would friends gone from the path of righteousness.

They climbed upwards, following paths trodden into the earth by generations of animals. There were the occasional imprints of heavy ceramite boots, but they did not need these to find the lost. The Rage drew them on.

They mounted the summit of a low, miserable ridge where soft mudstones barely harder than the earth made weeping outcrops. It was there that Lieutenant Jadriel and his last two comrades launched their attack.

All three of them felt the first of the lost coming before they heard his wordless war cry. A bow wave of torment washed over them all, threatening to drag them down into the same dark place the warrior inhabited, then his shout came amplified by malfunctioning equipment, raw and dark with despair.

‘Brother Peilin!’ Bedevoir called.

Peilin was too far into the night of the soul to hear Bedevoir and no longer knew who he was. In his blood madness he had discarded his weapons, and so now he leapt from the top of the crumbling rock and fell upon them like a boulder. Dolomen was fast, loosing a shot from his boltgun as the warrior hurtled at him, but it missed, and Peilin’s armoured body crashed against him, the pair falling into the mud, where they wrestled.

Bedevoir’s head reeled with the call to battle. Flashes of ancient warriors whose names he inexplicably knew came to him, their armour unfamiliar, their colours not his own, and yet these were more than his brothers.

They were his sons.

‘I am Bedevoir, sergeant of the Red Wings,’ he said to himself. ‘I am Bedevoir. This is Dulcis.’

He came back to himself to find events had moved on. Astorath fought with a second warrior, who had approached while Bedevoir was lost in his fugue. Dolomen rolled around in the mud, sliding down the shallow slope. Peilin smashed at him, cracking the older Space Marine’s ceramite with his armoured fists. Dolomen punched back, the armour clashing, but Peilin slapped his blows aside and gripped Dolomen about the neck. Dolomen struggled to throw off the stranglehold. The sinew coil enhancement Cawl had added to the Space Marines’ suite of gifts amplified Peilin’s abilities beyond what Dolomen could deal with. The Primaris gripped Dolomen harder, forcing his helm back, pushing in the banded seal of his neck while Dolomen slapped helplessly at his hands.

Astorath fared better. Even lame he was formidable, and nimble out of his armour. Bare toes dug into the hillside where his opponent slipped. He waited for the right moment to deliver blows from his axe, each hit damaging the lost brother’s wargear, and bleeding him by degrees.

Bedevoir moved to help, but stopped, lost again. Bemused, he saw the inside of a starship and tasted atmospheric mix spoiled with rotten meat and the hard metallic bite of warp power. He strode ahead, knowing he was going to die, but going anyway.

‘Bedevoir,’ choked Dolomen. ‘Bedevoir!’

Metal walls flickered back to sodden trees. He saw the wood again. He shook off the vision and raised his gun. Dolomen and Peilin rolled around on the ground. Mud filled every crack of their armour. Rain was falling again, beginning as a few fat drops that turned into a downpour.

‘Bedevoir!’

Bedevoir sighted the bolt pistol, waiting for a clear shot. The jungle flickered away. Voidship corridors, enemies dying to blasts from his spear, his great sword in the other hand. A difficult march with death at the end.

‘Bedevoir…’ Dolomen’s voice was a croak, but it penetrated the shouts and imprecations of the twisted Sons of Horus. Bedevoir blinked. Rain. Forest. Lightning.

A spear of light slammed down into a tree, blasted it in two. The glare of its discharge shocked back the dark. Bedevoir fired.

The bolt penetrated Peilin’s reactor pack with a soft plunk. Fire flashed within. Peilin lost his armour’s support and Dolomen struck back immediately.

His own battleplate grinding with the effort, he forced apart the Primaris’ hands, slammed his knee up until he braced it against Peilin’s chest, then flipped him over. Peilin’s backpack caught on the ground, stopping him from being thrown onto his back, but Dolomen scrambled up, shifted his grip and with a grunt dislocated Peilin’s left wrist. He fell forward, catching the warrior on the side of the head with his shin, pinning him in place and stunning him long enough to draw his blade.

‘For the love of Sanguinius, I bring you mercy,’ he said, and rammed the blade sideways through Peilin’s throat and out of his neck, cutting his spine. Dolomen fell back wheezing. Astorath continued his deadly dance up the side of the knoll, drawing away from Dolomen and Bedevoir.

Bedevoir moaned. He leaned forward, bracing himself on his knees.

‘Bedevoir,’ Dolomen said. ‘Bedevoir, you are feeling the Rage. Fight it, my friend. Stay with me.’ He attempted to rise, but slumped back. He grasped at his leg. Blood leaked from his waist joint.

Bedevoir half-slid, half-stumbled down the slope. He stopped by Dolomen.

‘Rest, my son,’ he said. ‘You have fought well. I will continue without you.’ He looked away and waved his arm, summoning Apothecaries dead for millennia.

‘Bedevoir!’ Dolomen called. ‘Stop! Remember who you are! Fight it!’

Bedevoir climbed up the hill towards the ridge.

‘Destiny waits for no one,’ Bedevoir said. ‘I must go on.’ Lightning flashed around them.

Cursing, Dolomen hobbled after.

Astorath fought the lost Space Marine up the hill, cutting at him carefully, each blow of his axe carving away pieces of his armour. It would take time to drain his strength, but the Redeemer was cautious. He was without armour and the Primaris were stronger. Their Mars-born might, amplified by the Rage, posed a danger to him.

The storm raged. The ridgetop was bare of trees, so prominent above the landscape it attracted more than its share of lightning. Anything that grew there would be hit, and die. He looked up at it. The cliff was only forty feet high. They were halfway up, winding round the slope at its side. Another factor to be careful of.

A flash of lightning on the Red Wings warrior’s nameplate revealed his identity as Dindran, though Astorath had guessed it already from the list Lamorak had provided. So many names had been entrusted to him. So many lives that needed ending. These warriors of the Red Wings were all beyond help, too deep into the memories of Sanguinius’ death to serve in one final battle as members of the Death Company. They must instead be killed. That was Astorath’s role and his burden, the Bringer of Mercy, the ending of pain.

Dindran had lost his helm and his face was contorted with rage, the awful changes the curse wrought upon those of the Blood already twisting his features into something inhuman. While his soul underwent the most sacred end one of the Blood could hope for, his body took on the aspect of a beast.

Dindran was wordless, as the lost often were, but Astorath spoke softly to him.

‘Duty is our burden, but it is our nature to serve, and should be accepted gladly,’ he said. ‘Sanguinius wrote that of all things, duty is the most sweet. Yours is at an end. Rejoice, for you are with our father.’

His words did nothing to soothe the warrior’s savage temper, but were not said to calm; they were said to prepare his soul for the end.

Astorath readied his axe for the final blow, seeing that the time approached, when a voice called out through the rumble of thunder and the crack of lightning striking trees.

‘I see you, brother! I see you! Come to my sword and give answer for your treachery.’

The sky sheeted white. Jadriel stood upon the edge of the low cliff, silhouetted against the storm’s fury.

Dindran lunged for Astorath in his moment of distraction. Astorath sidestepped, brought his axe around in a horizontal sweep and shattered Dindran’s backpack. The blade continued into his spine, breaking it. Dindran fell face down into the mud.

‘I bring you mercy,’ said Astorath. ‘Be at peace, son of the Blood.’

‘No!’ Jadriel’s cry was full of pain. ‘You have slain your last Blood Angel, Horus! Face someone who might best you, or name yourself coward and fall upon the Emperor’s mercy.’

‘I am not your enemy, Brother Jadriel,’ said Astorath softly. ‘Look into your heart and remember who you are. I shall return you to your brothers so you may serve one final time.’

‘You shall not turn me to your cause!’ shouted Jadriel. ‘It has been tried, and it failed. Face me now, and receive the prize for your treachery.’

Rain bounced off Dindran’s armour. Astorath looked up to Jadriel on the rock. Another that was too far gone, he judged, but this would be dangerous. Jadriel was armoured, still in possession of a measure of his faculties, and was a renowned fighter.

Astorath hefted his axe in both hands. It was heavy with the lives it had harvested, and yet it was not sated, and hungered for more.

‘Then await me, and I shall bring you mercy.’

Jadriel stood back from the brink. Astorath walked up to the top of the ridge. At the summit the hill was broad and rounded, making a space some fifty yards across. They were exposed to the storm there. Lightning cracked down dangerously close, earthing itself in the upper branches of the trees poking over the summit’s edge. The stone was soft, blending itself into clays, and the ground was consequently treacherous. Jadriel waited for Astorath at the centre of this natural arena.

‘So it comes to this, Horus, you against I,’ said Jadriel. ‘Why did you do it? Why did you turn against our father?’

Astorath had heard similar questions many times before, and never answered them. Dante and others might have felt the touch of Sanguinius, but not he. All he saw was the madness their father’s curse brought to them. There was no response that could find favour with those in the grip of the Rage, no matter how cogent they might seem. They were not there, in that time. They were not themselves.

‘Those days are long done, my brother. Set down your weapons. Your wars are over. I come to bring you mercy.’

Jadriel tore off his helm and threw it down, showing a face ravaged by sorrow. ‘Like you brought mercy to Isstvan, and Beta-Garmon, and to Terra? To Ferrus? To the people of the Imperium?’ Jadriel carried no ranged weapon, but he pulled free his power sword from its sheath and touched its activation stud. It burst into a display of lightning to match that raging across the sky. ‘You have no mercy in you. Only pride, and arrogance. For your self-regard you have ruined us all.’

‘Brother, wait. You are not Sanguinius.’

‘The time for waiting is done,’ said Jadriel. ‘The time of vengeance is at hand.’

He flew at Astorath, feet kicking up clods of crumbling mudstone. Lightning roared earthwards and blasted a steaming hole into the other side of the hilltop. Flickering tongues of electricity crackled all over the sky, and the rain pounded down, dragging Astorath’s long black hair into weeping strands.

Astorath stood his ground, axe ready. He ignited his own power field at the last moment, intercepting Jadriel’s swing with a short block. The blades met, and boomed with technology’s thunder, far sharper and more aggressive than that of the storm.

‘In the name of Sanguinius, father to us all, I come to heal your pain,’ said Astorath.

Jadriel shouted, his face colouring a deeper red. His fangs flashed in the lightning. ‘Liar! You are the bringer of pain!’

Again Jadriel charged, bearing down on Astorath like a feral world knight jousting at the lists. They met again. Jadriel’s sword sped up and then down as he passed, seeking Astorath’s primary heart. The Redeemer blocked both blows in short, precise movements that called more thunder from the weapons. The storm crashed in answer. Jadriel cut short his run past, and pivoted, sword spinning, cutting high then low in a weave of blue sparks. Astorath bided his time, catching the blows with his axe haft and the head, deflecting them away, but Jadriel pushed him, advancing all the time, his boots carving deep prints into the hilltop that filled instantly with rain. Another lightning bolt slammed down, then another. The ground steamed under the storm’s attack. Jadriel pressed on, driving Astorath towards the clifftop. He was ranting now, losing coherency, mixing elements of his own life into the memories of Sanguinius.

‘I have come to ease your suffering,’ said Astorath, parrying another blow.

‘There has been nothing but blood and death – I have been an instrument of destruction. I have been a blade rarely sheathed. Why? Why?’ screamed Jadriel.

‘I have come to end your pain,’ said Astorath.

Astorath pivoted back as Jadriel raised his blade to strike, hooking the beard of his axe over the sword and twisting it hard. Caught between haft and axe head, the sword broke with a great emission of power that staggered them both. Astorath’s bare skin steamed.

Jadriel leapt forward, grabbing the axe in his hands and wrestling the Redeemer for it. Jadriel’s greater strength came into its own, and Astorath had to fight with all his might to retain his weapon. Jadriel aimed blows with his feet and knees at Astorath’s lower half, forcing the Redeemer to step carefully to avoid them. Together they wrestled on the brink of the cliff, the storm blazing with growing intensity. The sole of Jadriel’s sabaton raked down Astorath’s shin, scraping the skin off and exposing bone. Astorath gritted his teeth against the pain, and replied with a headbutt directly into the centre of Jadriel’s face. His nose exploded under the impact, and the rain ran with spiced blood.

Jadriel staggered. Astorath pushed his advantage, releasing the axe with his right hand and driving his fist into Jadriel’s broken nose. The bone cracked wetly again. Astorath gripped the collar of Jadriel’s armour and dragged him, attempting to use the Primaris Space Marine’s weight against himself and bring him to the ground.

Jadriel wriggled out of the throw, grabbed Astorath’s hand and turned the limb, forcing the Redeemer back. Jadriel shoved hard and wrenched the Executioner’s Axe from his grasp. Astorath stumbled, falling to one knee. His blood washed into the earth.

‘You betrayed us. You betrayed us all,’ said Jadriel. He raised the axe high.

Lightning slashed across the sky, connecting with the axe. Electricity raced through Jadriel’s armour, burning out its systems. Energy surged through Astorath as the power raced away into the ground, threatening to render him unconscious, but he staggered up from the smoking ground as Jadriel fell forward. The lieutenant rose onto all fours, then fell down, managing to roll onto his back. His face was badly burned by the lightning strike.

‘I come…’ grunted Astorath, ‘to bring you mercy.’ He fetched his axe, and stood over the fallen lieutenant.

‘You betrayed us. Now, at the last, you use the power of your false gods against me,’ said Jadriel. His lips were scorched, and his words poorly formed, but there was no denying the hatred in them.

‘No false gods, brother, only angels,’ said Astorath. ‘Sanguinius watches over all his sons. He waits for you now.’

He brought the axe down. The power field was burned out, but the blade sharp, and it split Jadriel’s skull perfectly down the centre.

Astorath let the axe drop and bowed his head. His duty was discharged. Another loyal son of the Blood was slain at his hand, and another song of suffering silenced. Soon, another would come, and then another, but for that moment there was peace to be found in the storm’s fury.

‘I commend your soul to the Great Angel,’ he said. ‘May you find reward at his side.’

In answer the sky flashed and crashed one more time, before the storm moved away to other places.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

THE DEATH OF A WORLD

Astorath limped down the hill towards Dolomen. The sky was lightening to a painful whiteness now the storm had gone, and the heat rose rapidly. Animals chattered in the forest, invigorated by Dulcis’ display of power.

Dolomen watched over Bedevoir, who sat upon a fallen tree at the edge of the clearing, facing into the forest. His head was bowed, and he was muttering repetitively to himself.

Astorath joined him.

‘I hear the song of his pain,’ said Astorath. ‘He is lost. The Rage comes to him.’

‘Not yet,’ said Dolomen. ‘He has some time.’

‘Then he shall serve,’ said Astorath. ‘Is your vox functional?’

‘Yes, my lord,’ said Dolomen.

‘Call down our transport. Our task is done, and the need for secrecy over.’

‘What of the mortals?’

Astorath sighed. ‘They have seen too much. The male has a mind like a knife – he knew who had slaughtered the barge crew. He saw the marks in their necks. There is no lie we can tell them that will convince him.’

‘They will die soon anyway,’ said Dolomen. ‘We could let them be.’

‘We can never take that chance,’ said Astorath. ‘Our curse must remain our secret. You know what must be done.’

Idrin paced the deck of the patrol boat, chewing at his fingernails.

‘They should have been back by now,’ said Cellew.

‘Thank you, trooper, for your insight,’ he said.

‘I only meant…’

‘Of course they should have been back by now!’ he snapped.

‘You’ve tried the vox?’

He gave her a look.

‘Then maybe we should go,’ she said.

Idrin peered into the trees where the Space Marines had gone. Steam rose off the water’s surface. He considered a moment, then nodded.

‘Whatever they were fighting, I’ve no wish to see it. Something about this isn’t right.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘The barge. Those men weren’t killed by eels.’

‘How could you tell? They were in pieces.’

‘I saw enough, and even if I hadn’t, they were angry when we came aboard. They were hiding something. Let’s just get out of here,’ he said, running to the bow and unlooping the boat’s painter. ‘I’ll come up with a story, if we are asked any awkward questions.’

‘Will they believe?’ said Cellew.

‘If we’re lucky, we might not be killed by the xenos, then we’ll be able to tell if they do or they don’t.’

Cellew opened the throttle. The propeller turned the black water white. The boat reversed away from the bank rapidly.

Idrin looked skywards, his eyes squinting against the glare of the flat white clouds.

‘Do you hear that?’

Cellew frowned. ‘Engines!’

‘Get us moving, Cellew,’ he said.

‘They’re just coming down to investigate, surely?’

‘Why do you think they needed us to do this? Why all the secrecy?’ he said.

Cellew’s face crumpled with fear.

‘Go faster! Get us under the trees!’

A black gunship was coming in fast towards their position. The patrol boat was pathetically slow by comparison. Cellew was shouting something at him, but he didn’t hear.

‘Funny,’ he said. ‘I never thought it’d end like this.’

A missile detached from under the gunship’s stubby wings. Light reflected from its engine as it boosted towards them, rapidly attaining a speed he could barely follow.

‘Emperor’s ba–’

The missile slammed into the patrol boat. The gunship flew over the burning hull, swooped back around, and came in to land.

The Space Marines were in the control centre at the heart of the Joyous Garde’s command keep. Many stations were empty, but new thralls taken from Dulcis would soon occupy them. But not yet; they were not ready. In any case, the Red Wings were not cruel enough to make a person watch their world die.

Astorath and Dolomen had been loaned black robes while their armour was cleaned and repaired in the Joyous Garde’s forge. They stood with Lamorak and Artemos, watching the procession of surface-to-orbit craft lift the few that would be saved from Dulcis.

‘Governor Tyndall is still ignorant of what we intend?’ said Astorath.

‘A man like that is devious enough to have worked it out,’ said Artemos. ‘I doubt he cares.’

‘Politics offends me,’ said Dolomen.

‘He must be allowed to live in exile. One day, this world may again play host to the human race,’ said Astorath. ‘It will be easier to reclaim if there is a legitimate claim to its rulership. You have placed Bedevoir into stasis?’

‘As you commanded, Lord Redeemer,’ said Lamorak.

‘Use him well, next time your Chapter is at battle. He will serve the Emperor one more time.’

‘We have much to learn of the nature of the curse, my lord. Why did you not return the others?’ said Lamorak.

‘The curse pushed them too far,’ said Astorath. ‘They had gone into the far black of the Rage. Only mercy can be given to warriors in that state.’ He continued to stare out of the window at the planet. ‘You will learn to recognise all its signs in time. You will learn how to harness the rage of the dying. I will speak with Dante. I will ensure Chaplains well versed in the lore come to you to teach you. For all that it cuts short a warrior’s service, and overturns his mind, the Rage is a blessing, for those that suffer it are with our lord, the Great Angel, at the end. They are witness to the events of the first days of the Imperium, and the measure of strength they borrow from our father makes them mighty, and fearless.’

One of the Red Wings called up from the lower levels of the command deck. ‘I have been informed that the refugee ships are at capacity. Ninety per cent of the population is gathered at the evacuation points.’

‘The missiles are ready,’ said Lamorak. He looked to the Redeemer before giving the order.

‘This is your command, brother,’ said Astorath. ‘Your Chapter. You need not seek my approval.’

Lamorak nodded. ‘Proceed,’ he said.

Commands were passed along the deck. The station trembled with the release of missiles. They passed before the wide viewing ports of the deck, falling down the gravity well until they were specks of silver, like the eels of Dulcis’ marshes feeling for the depths. Engines burned, and they sped towards the planet and vanished. Moments later, small explosions flashed bright under Dulcis’ blanket of cloud.

‘The virus will wipe out every human being upon the planet,’ said Artemos. ‘I made sure to tune it to the local populace for maximum lethality. It will burn itself out in a few years. By then, every human being upon the world will be dead. The enslavers will have nothing to do their work for them, and will depart. There will be no more psychic emergences, nothing for daemons or warp xenos to find their way through. Dulcis should then be left undisturbed, and may be resettled, when the time is right.’

Astorath turned away while the bombardment was still underway.

‘Then we are done here. Have our wargear sent to our ship immediately.’

‘Brother Lamorak,’ said another Space Marine. ‘I have an incoming communique from Lord Tyndall. He wishes to know what we are doing.’

‘He can wait. My Lord Astorath…’ said Lamorak.

‘Yes?’ said Astorath.

‘I thank you for the mercy you delivered to our brothers.’

‘Do not thank me. I do my duty, as we all must. There will be more. Artemos, Dolomen, we depart now. The Tower of Amareo stands empty. Soon it will no longer be so. Lord Commander Dante must be informed that the Primaris Space Marines are not immune.

‘We return to Baal.’

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Guy Haley is the author of the Siege of Terra novel The Lost and the Damned, as well as the Horus Heresy novels Titandeath, Wolfsbane and Pharos, and the Primarchs novels Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter, Corax: Lord of Shadows and Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia. He has also written many Warhammer 40,000 novels, including the first book in the Dawn of Fire series, Avenging Son, as well as Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work, Dark Imperium, Dark Imperium: Plague War, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Darkness in the Blood and Astorath: Angel of Mercy. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

An extract from Darkness in the Blood.

Bloodcaller was an ancient ship. Its keel was laid down in ages so distant there were none alive who remembered them, at least none with noble hearts. A battle-barge of the Adeptus Astartes, masterfully built and furnished with technologies now forgotten, it stood the test of voyage and battle with indomitable strength. It had fought the length and breadth of the galaxy. It had caused the end of worlds. It had witnessed the death of suns. It had defied warp storms that saw lesser ships founder. It had pierced psychic tempests to bring the deliverance of angels to planets thought doomed. It had sailed true through daemonic attack and the dread shadow of the hive mind. Such glory it had won, such renown for its Chapter, there was little its vigilant machine-spirit had not witnessed.

But this storm was something new. Bloodcaller had never seen the warp so disturbed.

Hurricanes of souls roared through the empyrean. Where one died away, fury spent, another was already rising. Vortices of raw emotion drew to themselves coalescences of energy so intense they verged on attaining consciousness, before melting to nothing, stillborn gods.

Only a ship so indomitable as Bloodcaller could pass unharmed through the warp. Currents raced between storm fronts, tearing ships from their courses. Daemonic beasts assailed everything that dared their realm, breaking Geller fields open to feast on the souls inside where before they had been confounded.

To brave the warp in those times was to leap knowingly into insanity. So many vessels were lost without trace, or emerged light years and centuries away from their destination, or they came out void of the living, their halls crowded with ghosts and their machine-spirits supplanted by diabolical beings.

Many did not come out at all.

This was the legacy of the Warmaster Abaddon; the Cicatrix Maledictum, the Great Rift that tore across the galaxy’s middle and gutted the stars and threw the Sea of Souls into bedlam.

Few dared to travel in the aftermath of the Great Rift’s opening.

Bloodcaller dared. The Blood Angels dared. War was everywhere. The Adeptus Astartes would not shirk from their calling.

Through towering waves of raw pain and eddies of loss, Bloodcaller forged a path for other ships, leading an armada of vessels gathered from far-flung stars. Alone, the ships were lost, isolated, impotent. Together, they would be strong, the basis of a fleet to save an empire.

In Bloodcaller’s wake the flotilla plunged and rolled. The ships yawed hard in countercurrents. Whirlpools of screaming faces threatened to pull them into the depths of agony. Bloodcaller’s metal moaned in pain. Its reactors howled. Its Geller generators spat smoke and sparks, but on it went, on for the sake of mortal men, its steely soul undaunted.

Each moment in the warp risked disaster, but the Imperium was beset on all sides. The ships had to get through. At a time when every gun in every pair of hands counted, a warship was a precious thing indeed.

In the time of the Cicatrix Maledictum, ancient traitors strode the cosmos. Planets burned across the realm of man.

Commander Dante, lord of the Blood Angels, had sworn to put an end to that.

High up on Bloodcaller’s command spires there was a chamber as richly decorated as any king’s. In that chamber, there was a sarcophagus.

The chamber was black in all aspects. The floors, walls and ceilings were clad in black marble veined with darker blacks. All its numerous carvings and statues were worked from the same black stone. The artworks depicted noble heroes bearing the arms and armour of the Blood Angels Chapter. They were protectors of humanity, but in the light of the firebowls the sculptures appeared entirely sinister. Flickering flames lent their features a semblance of movement that would have disquieted the sturdiest of hearts. There was but one occupant in the room, and he was deep in slumber within the sarcophagus. He was Dante, the greatest-hearted of all mankind’s heroes, and in that moment he saw nothing.

His sarcophagus stood upright. A sculpted face covered the upper portion. Through its eyes of red crystal murkier red could be perceived. Though made principally of ivory, the sarcophagus was covered in ornamentation and inlaid gemstones that made it glitter. All were hues of red: rubies, carnelian, red sapphires, blood diamonds, topaz, garnet and jasper. About the flat, broad head was a coronet of the rarest of all: bloodstone from Baal. It was an idol garlanded in crystallised blood.

Blood was everything to Dante. The blood of his gene-father shaped him. The blood of humanity called to him for defence. The blood of the alien, heretic and traitor demanded to be spilled.

The pounding of twin hearts filled his hearing with a river’s torrent, torrents of red, torrents of black, twined forever inseparably. Hot and sweet, the darkness in the blood spreading through his veins was enough to poison, but never enough to kill. Blood brought him torment and joy. It damned him. It renewed him. Blood was his saviour and his damnation.

Dante floated in vitae. The stolen life of innocents filled his mouth, his nose, his stomach and his lungs. It bathed his unseeing eyes, it stoppered up his ears. The temperature of the liquid and his body were precisely matched, so he could not tell where his body ended and the blood began. He was deep in the renewal phase of the Long Sleep, but all was not as it should be. The machines embedded in the sarcophagus exterior blinked uncertainly. There was an admixture of Dante’s own blood in the suspension mix, and most dilute, a touch of the divine: Sanguinius’ own essence mixed into Dante’s.

Dante’s body was covered in cuts, many deep, some not healed. Huge, crescent wounds overlaid the scars of ancient wars. He was a Space Marine. The wounds were inflicted months before. They too should be pale marks now, healed shut by his enhanced physiology and become only memories of pain. It was not so.

Dante bled.

Shifts in the voidship as it ploughed on through the storm pushed his slumbering body about. The feeds plugged into his brachial and femoral arteries tugged. He did not feel their sting. Dante was absent from his body, lost in the healing coma, and his soul wandered the halls of recollection, remembering a battle fought long ago.

Another time, another war, and Bloodcaller suffered. Atmosphere bled from a thousand cuts. Its armour was shattered. Its weapons broken. Systems wept power from ruptured conduits. Yet it persisted, and its great reactor heart laboured to keep the few who remained living alive.

The battle was over, but a new struggle had begun.

‘He is not worthy!’ Chaplain Keshiel rose from his seat in the Great Basilica and slammed the head of his crozius onto the ground. The power field was active, and the crack of it contacting the paving reverberated around the hall in electric thunders. The four-sided head buried itself in the deck.

Dante stood silently as the rump of the council deliberated. There were twenty-five thrones; all but four were empty, sixteen were draped in funeral black. The rubble of the chamber’s facings lay piled in the coign of floor and wall, exposing the naked plasteel beneath. Generations’ worth of art was so much powder and grit. The fine dust of destruction filled the ship. It contaminated the seals of the Space Marines’ power armour. Motors ground unpleasantly. Machine-spirits complained into their wearers’ helms.

The last members of the council looked down on Dante. The High Chaplain Bephael survived, as did two Sanguinary Priests of middling rank, and Keshiel. Upon them rested the future of the Chapter.

‘He is the last of our captains,’ said Sanguinary Priest Gallion. ‘There is no other. He must take this office. There is no other choice.’

‘He is not worthy!’ Keshiel roared again. He released the haft of his weapon, leaving it embedded; the energies cloaking its head arced into the floor and frittered it away atom by atom. ‘That he is the last is no reason to choose him.’

‘It is the precise reason we should,’ said Estius, the second priest. His white armour had been battered back to the gunmetal grey of bare ceramite. One salvaged arm was the vibrant red of a battleline brother.

‘And what of his deeds?’

‘There have been greater men elevated to the office, I admit,’ said Gallion. ‘But although his story is yet short, he has the capacity for glory.’

‘There have never been lesser than he,’ Keshiel said. The bones sculpted into his armour shone white against their black background. ‘One day, he may be a worthy candidate, but now?’ Keshiel spoke as if Dante were not there. ‘The Eighth Captain? It is not his moment.’

‘Then what do you propose?’ Estius said.

‘The Council of Blood and Bone should rule the Chapter, as is our custom. We should return to Baal, and rebuild our numbers. Let the centuries run and time present us with a new candidate. It may even be that Dante will rise to the role. But I say again that he is not worthy, not now, not like this.’

Bephael remained silent throughout. Helmed, both hands gripping the armrests of his throne, and with the great axe of his office propped against his seat, he resembled a statue. It was not right that the Executioner’s Axe should be so placed, but the blood thralls were all dead, and the stand it occupied broken. Dante felt the axe’s presence keenly. It was the instrument of judgement, and he was being judged.

‘He could refuse,’ said Bephael eventually. His voice was deep and dark, a growl from a cave.

‘My lord?’ said Estius.

‘He could refuse. If he does or does not, the problem remains the same. A Chapter must have a Chapter Master.’ Bephael leaned forward in his throne. The black wings that framed it seemed to flex and spread. ‘What do you say, Dante – if this burden is placed upon you, will you bear it? Will you lead us?’

Dante stood in silence. He was drained by battle. His limbs were weak from hewing the foe. Without his armour to support him, he felt he might not be able to stand. The Emperor had made him strong, but no warrior in existence could have undergone what he had without effect.

‘He does not answer,’ said Keshiel with satisfaction. ‘See, my lords? What aspirant to this highest of roles would remain silent when questioned about his suitability to lead?’

‘Why do you not answer, Captain Dante?’ asked Bephael. He spoke quietly in all circumstances, yet his words carried far more power than the hectoring of Keshiel.

‘I do not speak, for what can I say?’ said Dante. ‘So many heroes are dead. So many better than I. I stand before you not by merit but by happenstance. Chaplain Keshiel is right.’

‘You are a hero yourself, as all Blood Angels must be,’ said Bephael. ‘You are a captain of the Adeptus Astartes. You are a lord of men. You, who have witnessed the Sanguinor more than any other. Surely it is a sign you have been chosen.’

‘That is so,’ said Dante. ‘Still, I am not ready.’

In the present, in his sarcophagus, Dante let out a silent moan. Machines chimed alarms as the level of Dante’s own blood in the fluid rose. They went unheard.

Bloodcaller shook hard in the storm.

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
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