More tales from the Sabbat Worlds

BROTHERS OF THE SNAKE
A novel by Dan Abnett

TITANICUS
A novel by Dan Abnett

DOUBLE EAGLE
A novel by Dan Abnett

SABBAT WAR
An anthology by various authors

SABBAT WORLDS
An anthology by various authors

SABBAT CRUSADE
An anthology by various authors

• GAUNT’S GHOSTS •
Dan Abnett

THE FOUNDING
Book 1: FIRST AND ONLY
Book 2: GHOSTMAKER
Book 3: NECROPOLIS

Also available as an omnibus

THE FOUNDING

THE SAINT
Book 4: HONOUR GUARD
Book 5: THE GUNS OF TANITH
Book 6: STRAIGHT SILVER
Book 7: SABBAT MARTYR

Also available as an omnibus

THE SAINT

THE LOST
Book 8: TRAITOR GENERAL
Book 9: HIS LAST COMMAND
Book 10: THE ARMOUR OF CONTEMPT
Book 11: ONLY IN DEATH

Also available as an omnibus

THE LOST

THE VICTORY
Book 12: BLOOD PACT
Book 13: SALVATION’S REACH
Book 14: THE WARMASTER
Book 15: ANARCH

Also available as an omnibus

THE VICTORY – (Part One)

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

Dramatis Personae

I

II

III

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Avenging Son’

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.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

Iron Snakes Adeptus Astartes

Brother-Captain Priad

Techmarine Pyrakmon

Epistolary Hamiskora

Damocles Squad

Brother-Sergeant Xander

Apothecary Khiron

Brother Holofurnace

Brother Aekon

Brother Andromak

Brother Dyognes

Brother Kules

Brother Natus

Brother Pindor

Brother Scyllon

Thunderhawk Pilot Crethon

Erasmos Squad

Brother-Sergeant Symeon

Apothecary Spiridon

Brother Anysios

Brother Demetios

Brother Laukas

Brother Iacchos

Brother Serapion

Brother Agenor

Brother Menoetios

Platonos Squad

Brother-Sergeant Iapetos

Apothecary Kryakos

Brother Adrastes

Brother Panagis

Brother Alekon

Brother Idas

Brother Dardanos

Brother Atymnes

Brother Herodion

Brother Kapis

Thunderhawk Pilot Cepheas

Kalliopi Squad

Brother-Sergeant Kreios

Apothecary Hapexion

Brother Hemaeros

Brother Phaethon

Brother Mathos

Brother Skopelion

Brother Kandax

Brother Coenus

Brother Perdix

Brother Xenagoras

The Legio Invicta

Invictus Antagonistes – Warlord Titan

Princeps Maximus Pietor Gearhart

Moderatus Bernal

Steersman Zophal

Tech-Priest Dajien

Sensori Rakolo

Morbius Sire – Warhound Titan

Princeps Maximilian Filias Orfuls

Moderatus Strakhov

Steersman Paavo

Tech-Priest Zemplin

Lupus Lux – Warhound Titan

Princeps Leyden Krugmal

Moderatus Klyte Beyran

Steerswoman Sola Encantor

Tech-Priest Papagha

Lupus Noctem – Warhound Titan

Princeps Entascha Mereschel

Moderatus Amion

Steersman Bodinel

Tech-Priest Enoq

Raptus Solemnus – Warhound Titan

Princeps Arkaly Creel

Moderatus Torsch

Steersman Maharach

Tech-Priest Inand

The Saint

Saint Sabbat, also called the Beati

Colonel Iovin Mazho, Urdeshi Fourth Light, her military attache

Captain Brey Auerben, Tenth Jovani Vanguard, her tactical advisor

Trooper Brin Milo, Tanith First and Only, her counsel

Sister Yulla Kassine, Adepta Sororitas, her counsel

Astra Militarum

Command

Macaroth, Warmaster of the Sabbat Worlds Crusade

General Illin Grawe-Ash, commander, Ghereppan theatre

Lieutenants Erzien and Oshner, members of her staff

Private Dmorz, an armoured personnel carrier driver

Adept Tschemherr, a wyrdvane psyker

Logistics Echelon, Third Urdeshi Regulars, Ghereppan Army Group

Sergeant Bekt Kellare, a convoy leader

Corporal Verzt, her next in command

Trooper Geizner, her driver

Trooper Kolsh, her gunner

Old Ourezhad expeditionary crew

Zhiery, a submarine pilot

Lyass, a submarine engineer

Forward Observation Point, Encoma Unitae Clade-Tower, Ghereppan Scarp

First Scoper Ottoli

Scoper Dzyne

Scoper Deenagh

Scoper Uzhman

Scoper Stooks

Citizens of the Imperium

Ghelon, a preacher and scratch company leader

Bairet Henztrom, a scratch company lieutenant

Dree, a scratch company watchwoman

Shuura, a scratch company vox-operator

Roboute Frazer, a war refugee

Mikk, a war refugee

Gerreg, a war refugee

Belphos, a war refugee

Tiro, a war refugee

Along with various followers of the Throne, including soldiers, pilgrims, machine-brothers, refugees, et cetera.

The Archenemy

Anakwanar Sek, the Anarch, He Whose Voice Drowns Out All Others

Nautakah, an arnogaur of the Blood Pact

Haliuk, a high sirdar and commander of artillery of the Blood Pact

Verleg Chae, a damogaur of the cult of the Anarch

Mohgun Osh, a sirdar of the Sons of Sek

Engavol the Hunter, a sirdar of the cult of the Anarch

Along with various of the Lost and Damned, including packsons, gore mages, ingeniants, lekts, and sundry beasts, fiends, minions, et cetera.

Of the four Adeptus Astartes Chapters to pledge their forces to the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, the Iron Snakes of Ithaka made up the largest contingent. Twelve squads had answered Warmaster Slaydo’s muster, and earned battle honours in a string of engagements from Ambold to Balhaut.

After Balhaut, the new Warmaster Macaroth found the Snakes’ culture of highly autonomous individual squads well suited to his preferred strategy of overstretching the enemy along multiple fronts. Where Slaydo had preferred to concentrate their strength, Macaroth divided the Snakes among carefully selected actions throughout the Erinyes Group and along the Morlond approaches. The first conflict to reunite them in any numbers was the reconquest of the crucial forge world of Urdesh, which Macaroth initiated in 791.M41 and personally commanded.

Urdesh was crucial to the crusade’s entire coreward advance. Its industrial base, built on the plentiful rare elements and abundant geothermal energy provided by its restless geology and numerous volcanoes, was unmatched for its power and sophistication. Unusually for a forge world, it could also support a robust population on the rich harvests of its warm and shallow seas and had contributed many regimental foundings to the crusade.

These attributes also made it a hard world on which to fight. The weapons of decisive planetary-scale warfare – orbital and air strikes, macro-scale artillery and war engines – would devastate the very forges that made the planet so vital. After several emphatic early victories, the Imperial invasion fragmented into a grinding, ground-level struggle spread across the planet. Every city and forge-complex was its own warzone, with few clear battlefronts and even fewer regions clearly under either side’s control.

In such a diffuse and fluid conflict, each side struggled for a decisive advantage. Imperial intelligence had suggested that the infamous Anakwanar Sek, one of the Archenemy’s most powerful magisters, was personally commanding the defence of Urdesh from the heavily fortified city of Oureppan. However, although the elite ‘Sons of Sek’ were fighting in considerable strength across the planet, years passed without a confirmed sighting of their master and Sek’s signature strategic brilliance was notably absent from the enemy’s actions. For his part, Macaroth had located his command (and by extension that of the entire crusade) onto Urdesh at the space port city of Eltath, apparently hoping for a direct confrontation with Sek. As the campaign wore on, however, Macaroth had become increasingly erratic and reclusive, leaving the campaign to generals who no longer entirely trusted him and who were increasingly certain that Sek was no longer on Urdesh at all.

Five squads of Iron Snakes had worked closely with Macaroth’s command in the early Imperial counter-invasion, spearheading the initial orbital landings along the Ghentethi archipelagos in the face of brutal resistance. As Macaroth became more withdrawn from his command, however, the Snakes’ relations with his generals cooled, and as the campaign ground towards the ten-year mark their squads increasingly began to work directly with field commanders and bypass the nominal high command. And in one case, they were removed from the fighting altogether.

Damocles Squad, under Brother-Captain Priad, found themselves tasked as the personal guard of the Beati, the charismatic figure who had emerged from among the Imperial forces during the defence of Herodor and whom many in the crusade believed to be the literal reincarnation of the original Saint Sabbat. The Beati had played an active part in the early invasion, fighting in several major Guard engagements and personally raising and leading the months-long Peshelid Sea-Crossing in the invasion’s third year. Macaroth had been happy to put her inspirational presence to use on the front line, but his subordinates did not appear to have shared his faith in her and were unwilling to risk such a unique asset in battle. Over time they relegated her to more and more ceremonial duties in rear echelons and safe enclaves, where she and her Adeptus Astartes escorts could maximise their propaganda value.

Detailed accounts of her movements during this time are sparse, but a study of available records suggests that her shift from warrior to religious figurehead was reluctant at best. What is not in doubt, of course, is that her decision to defy the military command and carry the fight to the Archenemy once again precipitated one of the defining incidents of the Urdesh campaign, and indeed of the entire Sabbat Worlds Crusade…

– From A History of the Later Imperial Crusades

I

HUNTING SNAKES

Damocles
Rhole Cliffs

‘LISTEN!’

His voice slammed against the tiled walls, rolled through the passageways, broke and rolled back, interleaving itself into echoes all around him.

‘I speak of Ithaka, the warriors of Ithaka, the Iron Snakes of Ithaka. The Adeptus Astartes of the Reef Worlds, who proved their valour upon the waters!’

His eyes were closed as he concentrated on sounds and echoes. His great shoulders bunched and released, his arms opened to embrace the air. His fists unknotted and his hands spread wide.

‘Armoured in devotion, armed in purpose, united in service, side by side on the road from the Throne to the stars, march the brothers of Ithaka!’

He opened his eyes. Over these gloomy subterranean chambers his imagination painted the storm-tossed sea of his home world, the deep and endless sky, the rough rock of the ocean cliffs, the watching faces of his brothers. His Chapter. The tunnels were full of the soft lap and chuckle of water in the town cisterns, but in his mind he could almost hear the sigh and boom of the surf against the cliffs below the Phratry’s fortress, taste the clean, sharp sea-scent in the air.

‘Listen and I shall tell you. There came a day when word arrived of war, of desperate need. Word came that the Archenemy walked among the stars again, tales of worlds burning and then worlds extinguished. The sorrows and prayers of the Sabbat Worlds were poured out like the waters of the oceans.

‘And as the call sounded, the blood of the Phratry stirred to answer it, as its brothers emerged from their stern counsels to declaim over the ocean’s roar the names that would muster to carry the weight of the undertaking.

‘Brother-Captain Cules, who commanded his brothers to glory in the halls of the traitors of the Yandine Drift, undertook this. Brother-Captain Priad, whose lightning-wrapped blades had known the blood of the daemon, the ork and the primul, stood by his side. And to their banner came twelve names, a dozen banners, full sixscore warriors of the Phratry, sworn now to take ship from the Reef Stars, and with the might of their arms lift from the Sabbat Worlds the despair and the oppression of war!’

He had half-consciously taken a step forward and found the modulation of the echoes had changed ever so slightly as he had moved. He began to move in slow half-steps, listening to the way his voice rang through the stone and tile of the tunnels, seeking out the best position.

‘And so soon the Archenemy was to feel the coils of the snake, the iron of its armour, the speed of its strike! At Ambold the Snakes of Ithaka fell upon the foe as they laid siege to brave soldiers of the Throne, to break their grip and their back, so that Ambold might again call itself free. Upon Fornax Aleph the foe birthed the warp-dreamed form of the daemon, the enemy beyond, but the jaws of the snake closed upon it and its malevolent breath was dissipated like the foam on the swell of the wave.’

His voice had sped up, the echoes piling into each other and mashing together, blurring his words. He compensated, shifted position again, changed his cadence.

‘And then to Presarius, poor forsaken Presarius, whose darkened forges teemed with the misshapen enemy, spite-ridden, machine-merged, moving beneath their cities like the turbid tide. Like a spear of lightning before the storm, Brother-Captain Cules led the Snakes of Ithaka among the hives of Presarius, and in the darkness beneath the cities the hordes of the enemy closed about them.’

Then, in among the echoes, directly behind him, there was a gap.

‘And so began the Nine Days of Presarius, spent in the deep shadows of the forges and labyrinths, every brother of the Phratry with bolter-breech ringing empty, flamer and plasma all thirsting in vain for fuel, missile and grenade long since dispatched into darkness. And in the darkness before the breaking of the last doors to the Tetradine Stairs the Iron Snakes slew with fist and cleaving blade, chainsword and sea-lance, with their hearts never veering from the fight and the victory, as steadfast as the mariner’s compass.’

Something was directly behind him, out of his field of vision, motionless. Soaking up just enough of the sound that his exquisitely fine-honed hearing could spot the change in the echo layers. Someone was in here with him, silently watching.

‘It came about that while the brothers of Ithaka paid honour to their dead among the stones of wretched and ill-starred Presarius, a new banner was brought among their assembly. In amongst the heart of the foe’s ruin the steely snake and the golden aquila stood together, as Captain Cules and Macaroth the Warmaster bowed their heads together in sober conference.

‘“I bring you the Warmaster’s salute,” Cules’ words went, when the talk among the commanders was done and he had come back to his brothers, “for he has seen our prowess and resolve, and the ruin that we make of any enemy who stands against us, united in our undertaking. But the tides of war ebb and rise, and so we must chart a new course among its changing currents. The Warmaster is spreading his armies, to drive at the divided Archenemy and find the foe’s weaknesses as a storm surge will race through all the low places of the rocky coast.” And so, the undertaking to the Sabbat Worlds became many undertakings, and the voyage became many voyages, and the Iron Snakes strode onward through the war amid the smoke and the ruin of the Archenemy’s retreat.’

He still had not turned around, but his picture of his observer was rapidly building. Human proportioned, on the small side, unarmoured. His scent was clean: harsh laundry soap and ablutory scrub. Imperial Guard. Trooper level. His nostrils twitched. A quick under-scent of oiled wood and boot leather. A whiff of islumbine.

‘And so now I must speak of Urdesh, great Urdesh draped this way and that in her necklaces of volcanoes among her surging and teeming seas, honoured Urdesh whose bright Mechanicus spires raised their golden peaks above the ashen plains, Urdesh the mighty forge around which the tide of fortune had ceaselessly churned. Urdesh who would witness the reunion of brothers long separated by the twisting currents of war.

‘Five banners the Phratry planted on Urdesh’s ashen soil, five hands poured out the water so that Urdesh’s seas and Ithaka’s might be forever joined. Five names were spoken to its smoke-laden winds.

‘Priad of Damocles Squad we shall account first into the fray, for it was noble Damocles who broke the teeth of the fortresses upon the Peshelid Sea. Shoulder to shoulder with them in the fury of the landings came the venerated Sergeant Symeon, bearer of bright Akanthe, leading the brothers of Erasmos Squad who had torn open the Styger Gate at Presarius. Hard behind in their steps, across the basalt-black teeth of the Ghentethi islands, came Platonos Squad, merciless as the rieve-shark, guided by the far-piercing visions of Hamiskora the seer and the hunter’s cunning of their Sergeant Iapetos. Kalliopi Squad, the tip of the Phratry’s lance behind their Sergeant Kreios, blood burning as hot as the flames of their jump packs. Andreos Squad, the hammer-handed, the breakers of armour, who marched beneath the banner of Sergeant Londas and left the corpses of enemy tanks burning behind them on the Eotine Walk.’

His feet were firmly planted now: he had found the acoustic sweet spot, and just the right pitch and projection of his voice. He was almost smiling.

‘Five names, and five banners carried to the soil of Urdesh when the Iron Snakes fell upon the enemy among the white light of their starship’s wrath, breaking open the crowns of the atoll citadels and crumbling their walls into the waters.’ His voice rose from declamation to a triumphant shout. ‘The Iron Snake is swift of strike and keen of guile. It coils around the staff of the Saint and its hide shines with the light of the Throne, the light that the Archenemy has learned to fear! And so you must listen, listen as the deeds unfold, the deeds of the liberation of Urdesh!’

He let the echoes die away and looked down, lowered his arms, relaxed his fingers. He was not out of breath. Three lungs and inhumanly high blood oxygenation would not permit it.

No sound from behind him. There was a certain cheek to that. Brother Xander, sergeant of Damocles Squad and warrior of the Phratry of the Iron Snakes, turned around.

‘Well?’

‘Sir?’ the boy asked. He was leaning back against the grey-tiled cistern wall by the same entrance Xander had come in by, slender white hands folded.

‘We’re not under attack. You’re too calm.’

The boy considered that, and nodded. ‘You are correct, sir.’

‘We’re not launching an attack. I’d have been told.’

‘I am not aware of any such, sir.’

‘Well then?’ He walked forward, covering the distance in four unhurried steps, watching his visitor carefully. Not tall and burly like the Volpone troops, not compact and blocky like the Pragar. He was wiry, lean and pale, dressed in black fatigues almost devoid of markings. A cameleoline cape was draped at his shoulder and fastened back with a regimental pin Xander didn’t recognise.

But he did recognise its owner, now that he was bothering to make connections. One of the Beati’s retinue, one of her closest, so constant and quiet he might as well have been her shadow. The one you forgot was there until you almost stepped on him. Xander must have been told his name at some point, but as far as he knew every Space Marine in Damocles Squad just thought of him as ‘the boy’.

They’d been wrong to, though. Xander’s initial impression had been of a youth barely older than he could dimly remember being when the Iron Snakes recruiters had taken him away, but he realised he had been way off. The trooper was nearly middle-aged, his face lined and a little brush of grey starting to show at his temples. Still, Xander towered over him.

‘Enough with the wasting of both our time. What’s the message?’

The trooper shook his head. Despite his annoyance Xander was rather taken with his calm. Most people began shifting and stammering with a warrior of the Adeptus Astartes looming right over them. It was a useful thing.

‘No message. I apologise if I misled you.’

‘If there’s no emergency, and no message,’ Xander said, bending forward to stare into the human’s eyes, ‘then why did you seek me out?’

‘I see the misunderstanding now, sir. It was this place I sought out, not you. I was waiting for you to finish.’

To the Space Marine’s annoyed surprise, the trooper pushed off from the wall and walked around him, still with that same odd calm. He took position – in exactly the spot Xander had stood in, he noticed – and brought something out from where it had hung beneath his cape. A set of musical pipes, made from soft hide and elegant dark wood, much worn but kept in beautiful repair. Looking around him as his arm began to work the bellows, the man caught Xander’s stare.

‘I like the acoustics in here too,’ he said, and turned away, tucking the pipes under his arm.

As Xander walked out of the cistern chamber towards the stairs, he could hear the man from Tanith begin to play.

Priad
Rhole Cliffs

There hadn’t been much of a fight for the Rhole Cliffs the last time this stretch of coast had changed hands. The place had never been fought over very hard at all. It had no strategic role on the transport lines from the ocean farms, and it was not part of the web of Adeptus Mechanicus forge-shrines or vast manufactory hubs that stippled Urdesh’s seamed and smoky surface. It was just there, one of those odd corners in the interstices of the landscape’s greater workings where people and homes gradually accreted, and a village grew into a town without anyone really intending it, coasting onward on peaceful inertia.

There was no particular reason to fight over it, and so thus far nobody had. If one side or the other ever managed to conquer this world for long enough then Rhole Cliffs would be somewhere down the list for places to march through and pacify. But Urdesh had changed hands three times during the Sabbat Worlds Crusade, five times in living memory, seven times in a millennium of history. In all that time this had been the little coast-city’s remarkably effective defence: that it was an afterthought.

This did Brother-Captain Priad’s humour no good at all.

He prowled along the cobbled promenade that edged the clifftop, looking out over the rampart. The spacious streets and dignified buildings of the uptown were at his back; before and below him the dense jumble of the lowdown buildings packed the bay between the cliffs and the waterfront. His ceramite boots crunched and grated on the stone, covering two metres at a stride. He was dressed in the armour of his Chapter, a gunmetal grey that matched the overcast sky. On his left shoulder pad, a steel-blue snake coiled across a white field. His head was bare, his thick black hair bound back with selachid skin and pinned with sea-snake bone. Despite his resolve to master his resentment and concentrate on the task at hand, he was glowering like a storm front over open ocean.

He was tracking the little grey speck that had come swinging in from the bay, looping in over the eastern tip of Rhole Cliffs and then arcing back past him, following the line of the water’s edge. It was hard to pick out from the grey sky behind it, even though he knew its trajectory. The wind whipped in from among the islands, breaking up sounds, but as the speck made another pass, close enough for Priad to see its outline, he could just start to hear its engines.

The sound was a welcome one, a touch of familiarity, with associations built up over decades of campaigning. The keening of turbofans meant extraction, reinforcement, bombardment. It meant support and comrades, the sign that his battle-brothers were nearby.

The previous morning it had been a less comforting sign. There had been a burr in the running of the port fan, barely audible even to Adeptus Astartes hearing but clear once Pyrakmon had pointed the sound out to them, and even fed it from his Techmarine’s instrumentation into their audio pickups so they could hear it more clearly. Pyrakmon had spent ten hours working on the engine, and then another one in rituals designed to make peace with the machine for the insult of dismantling it. He was up there in the craft now as Crethon put it through the most punishing manoeuvres their enhanced physiologies would take, making sure nothing might induce the fan to begin misbehaving again.

Abruptly the engines cut out. All of them. Priad’s expression didn’t change, not when the Thunderhawk tumbled in the air and not when the engines blasted back into life and shot the blocky craft up in a parabolic curve over the lowtown rooftops. The shout of the turbofans was clear now, echoing up and down off the angular black cliffs. Priad felt a prickle of uncharitable amusement as he pictured people below flinching from the noise. There should have been few people left at the Cliffs who were unprepared for the noise of war machines by now. As far as Priad understood, any townsfolk the war hadn’t driven away were long since evacuated. With as little obvious fuss as possible the place had been turned into a guardhouse, just in case anyone remembered it was here.

The thought brought the scowl back to Priad’s face again. That was exactly why this was the wrong place. Wrong for him, wrong for his Iron Snakes, wrong for… her. That was as plain to him as his own hand in front of his face, but not to the people he had spent days arguing with, around in circles, trying to push his case through the endless briarpatch of their objections.

He growled and shook his head. He had come up to watch the Thunderhawk’s air tests precisely to give him something practical to think about, get his head clear of all that for a while, and here he was dragging it with him. He looked up again.

Crethon was hanging the craft in the air, letting it tilt this way and that, keeping position by feel in the choppy air coming up off the water. Priad focused his long-vision and watched it, reassured by the steady note of the engines, proud of the skill his pilot was showing. The Iron Snakes required every member of their Phratry to train on every weapon and machine they fielded. Every member of Damocles Squad could fly the gunship if they had to, but none with Crethon’s artistry.

The Thunderhawk skated sideways through the air and pushed through the headwinds until it was over the seawall. Priad walked to the promenade’s rampart and leaned over to watch what it would do next.

It arrowed down towards the central wharves, combat wings unlocked, still twisting in the air to orient itself as it vanished behind the stately domes of the seafront buildings. Priad heard the echoing crunch as it crashed down.

A moment after that, he was over the rampart and dropping like a stone through the air.

Priad
Rhole Cliffs

They could have simply gunned the enemy convoy to pieces as it rolled down the ferry ramp onto the dock, but the Iron Snakes had been on campaign away from Ithaka for a long time now, and supply lines had never been sure. Finding ways to spare power and ammunition were second nature by now.

So Crethon had brought the gunship down in a barely powered drop onto the convoy’s lead vehicle for an impact that would have stunned any normal human crew, and wrecked any lesser craft than an Adeptus Astartes Thunderhawk. After the gunship’s hull bounced off its roof the Salamander command tank juddered on for a few more metres, its top bowed in and its sides bowed out like a stomped-on ration-can, before it simply stalled. It had barely made it off the wharf and into the feeder road that would have taken it towards the uptown. The rest of the motley little convoy, four more pieces of military armour and two civilian haulage trucks, were left jammed nose to tail all the way back to the ferry ramp. Easy prey.

Crethon pulsed the engines and took the gunship aloft again. As the Thunderhawk accelerated towards the cliffs, the hot shockwave of its exhausts swamped the SteG-4 light tank second in line, leaving the burning hulk sinking onto the melted remains of its tyres. The rest of the convoy became dim shapes in a cloud of smoke, grit and dust. A couple of dull red snaps of las-fire came from somewhere inside it. Emperor alone knew what they thought they were shooting at.

The Thunderhawk wrenched itself out of its collision course with the cliff by sheer brute force of its vectored engines, screaming up into a half-loop and flipping to come back down at the convoy. It passed over Priad’s head as he picked himself out of the rooftop he had landed on. The drop had not hurt him at all, but had driven him up to his ankles into the brickwork. He sprinted around the roof’s central dome to the far side, took a second to look over the lip of the roof and then stepped up, turned and dropped, arms out, the wall blurring upward less than half a metre from the tip of his nose. He had one short moment to pray that no one came out of the building’s front entrance, and then he was kneeling in a crater of chipped cobbles in front of the tall double doors. As he looked up they parted and half a wide-eyed face looked out at him.

‘Stay where you are,’ Priad told it. ‘Put out word to lock down all the buildings and checkpoints.’ And then he was sprinting over the pedestrian footbridge and along the zigzagging paths towards the wharf. The lowtown substreets were narrow and Priad was sacrificing care for speed, leaving a trail of gouged walls and knocked-out corners in his wake.

Another echoing slam of ceramite on metal punctuated the engine-howl as he came out onto the rockcrete apron above the wharves. Crethon had swooped on the convoy again through the smoke of his first run. He had landed more gently this time, hard enough to jolt the second SteG-4 that had brought up the convoy’s rear but not enough to cripple it. That part came next. An armoured figure stepped through the Thunderhawk’s side hatch and dropped onto the SteG, and the gunship rose up over them and pulled away.

The waterfront was deserted. Either his order to get indoors had been passed on much faster, and obeyed better, than he expected, or the Rhole Cliffs docks had fallen into disuse. Either way, there was no other noise to obscure the renewed crackle of las-fire and the banging of the SteG’s little turret-gun as it tried to fend off his brothers’ attack, until the firing was cut off by a grating shriek of parting metal. By the sound of it, Pyrakmon’s servo-claw had just torn the gun bodily from the turret.

The crunched Salamander’s engine tried to start, and sputtered out again. Priad lengthened his stride, jinking left around its weapons’ firing arcs although he doubted they would function. And then he was swarming up the front of the machine, bolt pistol in his hand and covering the autocannon pintle on its back. The Thunderhawk impact had taken care of the gunner: his remains painted the pushed-in wreckage of the gun mount. Priad caught a glimpse of grey puzzle-pattern camo in among the red: Urdeshi Storm Troop uniform. Not that that necessarily meant anything.

The top hatch was deformed by the impact and took a powerful kick to dislodge. Once it was loose Priad yanked it off its hinges, held it over the opening for a split second as two las-shots burned into its underside, then whipped it away and swung his pistol into place like a conjurer making a fast switch. His gun spoke twice and then he was walking across the top of the lifeless tank and leaping onto the next one.

Another fusillade of las-shots went off somewhere in the smoke as Priad strode the length of the burning SteG. One of the haulage drays was pulled up behind it and Priad simply lengthened his stride into a half-leap and propelled himself straight through the front of the cab. As he grabbed the thrashing driver by the throat he was also listening to the almost supersonic hum of a powerblade igniting and then the fizzing screech of it parting metal. It sounded like Pyrakmon was cutting into the Chimera transport that had been second-from-last in line.

Priad pulled the driver close to his face. He was wearing the same puzzle-pattern grey camo, but it was impossible to tell at a glance if it were stolen or his own. Priad squeezed his hand tight around the driver’s neck, drove his skull against the side of the cab for good measure, and then punched and tore the thin metal of the cab’s rear until he could clamber through it and walk down the empty flatbed.

‘For Ithaka,’ came Pyrakmon’s voice up ahead. It was a simple declaration rather than a roaring battle cry. It was followed by the blast of a grenade, then a hoarse human scream that ended in a bolt-pistol shot.

The second dray’s doors were hanging open, and the cab empty. Priad took two long strides and swung up onto its roof, tearing a fistful of chassis half loose and deforming the top of the cab under his armoured weight. The two crew of this one had already swung out and around onto the flatbed and were hurrying back towards the heavy grey shape of the AT-70 battle tank that anchored the convoy’s middle. They were both shouting. Priad couldn’t quite make out what through the tangle of panic and unfamiliar accents.

The AT-70’s hypervelocity main gun moved slightly. It was centring on the two dray drivers. They were waving at it, shouting, until they realised why it was moving and looked over their shoulders to see Priad behind them.

The man’s eyes widened and he tried to break into a run, but just stumbled to his knees, gesticulating to the tank behind them. The woman spun around and started firing wildly from the bullpup lasgun she had slung at her hip. They were both still in the way when the tank fired.

The range was so short that the two humans were slammed by the blast of the shot almost simultaneously with the detonation of the shell. The round ploughed a trench down the flatbed and detonated almost in the back of the cab. It was a good shot. If Priad had stayed where he was, the shell would have burst almost straight under him.

As it was, he was hurtling off the dray and skidding along the roadway when the shell annihilated the truck behind him. The explosion caught him in mid-stride and tumbled him over in an ungainly clattering of armour on rockcrete. His ears were ringing from the blast but his balance and reflexes were still sharp. A moment later he had pushed himself into a fighting crouch, and a moment after that he was racing at the side of the tank.

Its engine roared as he closed with it. Priad saw a flare of light come from its front, then heard the pop of vaporising metal and smelled the scorching ozone stink. The tank’s hull-mounted lascannon was finishing what the main gun had started, carving a way out of the deathtrap the little convoy had turned into. The engine roared again, almost triumphantly, and the AT-70 shouldered the cargo-hauler’s ruins aside and accelerated away.

Priad glanced back along the line, and so was just in time to twist on his feet and hunch his head down as a dozen hard stubber rounds beat against the great curved pauldron of his power armour. The next tank in line, some light carrier model he didn’t recognise, was trying to follow the AT out of the trap, and when its heavier cousin had bolted it had left a clear line of sight to the Space Marine.

Priad spun out of its line of fire and leapt to one side, slightly faster than the turret could follow him. Rounds chewed and whined against the rockcrete at his heels, and then Priad put a bolt-round dead centre into the turret between the two guns. The shell did not penetrate the armour, but its detonation dented in the front of the little cupola and the guns fell silent. When they fired another burst it was a wild zigzag well over Priad’s head. In the time that that took, he had closed with it and half-leapt up its flank. The pintle gunner tried to get his weapon around to point into Priad’s face, but the Space Marine reached out and grabbed the muzzle of the nearest gun in one gauntleted fist, holding it effortlessly still. There was a clack as his boots mag-locked to the tank hull for traction, and then he tore the gun bodily from its mount, swung it back over his shoulder and crushed the gunner’s skull with one blurringly fast stroke.

‘Brother-captain!’ Pyrakmon stepped into view around the cupola. His armour was scorched and spattered. He held a dripping combat knife in his left fist and above his head the many-jointed cybernetic servo-arm mounted between his shoulders was weaving in the air. Its powerblade talons were still sparking and buzzing. ‘All dead from here on back. Crethon is coming back for us. He says the AT-70 has made it to the road.’

Then all other sounds were lost in that familiar scream of jets, and the Thunderhawk lowered itself onto the road beside them.

Priad
Rhole Cliffs

‘I gave an order for everyone indoors to seal in and be prepared,’ Priad said as they stood at the open ramp. Underneath them the rooftops of Rhole Cliffs swung back and forth as the gunship came around to swoop on the fleeing tank. ‘They seem to be doing what they’re told.’

‘That elevates them in my regard, then,’ Pyrakmon answered, peering over the ramp. His armour was steel-grey like Priad’s, but the collar and the trim of his pauldrons were painted with the rust-red yoke of the Hephaestium and the brow of his helm held a stylised eye of beaten brass, the badge of the Phratry’s Techmarines. ‘Certainly more than this rabble who think they’re invading us. Even if they don’t suspect that this place is anything more than it appears, who would go thinking they could take a town this size with a handful of light armour and a couple of empty trucks?’

‘I don’t think they’re here to try and take the town,’ Priad said. ‘There are other reasons for this that I can think of.’

‘Understood. Prisoners, then?’

‘If we can, but we probably can’t. But evidence, yes, as much as we can safely preserve.’

‘Understood, brother-captain.’

‘Stand ready!’ came Crethon’s voice, right on cue, through the gunship’s internal clarions. The dark green block of the AT-70 was veering back and forth beneath them, Crethon keeping the ramp over it with smooth, intuitive adjustments. They could hear its lascannon firing wildly, randomly, at whatever was in front of it. The sound was sucked in and swallowed by the clamour of the tank’s engine, the rattle of treads and the racket of the gunship’s engines bouncing back off the high grey building facades. Priad leaned over and shouted through the din.

‘I would count it something of an embarrassment, brother, if they were to get as far as the road up to the clifftop.’

‘Well, then,’ Pyrakmon replied, and together the two of them stepped off the ramp and into the Thunderhawk’s roaring slipstream.

Priad
Rhole Cliffs harbour

She wanted to see the scene of the attack in person. Of course she did. Priad had stayed down on the waterfront to wait for her, topping up his pistol load from Pyrakmon’s magazine and then sending the Thunderhawk back to the improvised aerodrome at the other end of the bay. He had spent the rest of the hour until her arrival aboard the ferry that had brought in the botched little invasion while a team of Urdeshi specialists worked to secure it, all of them itchily aware that Rhole Cliffs’ cover had been broken. The next attack could come from any quarter, at any moment, in any form.

She didn’t seem to be troubled by that. She seemed to shrug off so many of the ingrained cautions and habits of a warzone as though they were beneath her, didn’t apply to her. Priad had sometimes wondered if that was part of why the soldiers were in awe of her. He didn’t really understand it himself.

But here she was, standing in the ferry’s forward hatch and peering into the gloom.

The Saint’s hair was cropped to almost nothing, and the stubble made a halo in the ferry’s deck-lights behind her. The same halo effect illuminated the rough, woollen herder-girl’s cloak around her shoulders, but from there the image of the simple mountain-trail pilgrim ended. She wore Urdeshi-made flakcloth armour over grey trooper’s fatigues. A thick, curved combat knife, a gift from the Pragar tunnel-fighters, hung from her belt, back behind the hip the way the Pragar liked to wear them. Seeing Priad, she stepped through the hatch and down into the forward carriage bay.

‘Thank you for your work today,’ she told Priad, who accepted it with a tilt of his head. ‘They brought me word that troops had landed along the wharf, but that was all. From their words I expected some sort of full invasion, not’ – she turned to look behind her, out in the direction the tanks had driven hours ago – ‘this. Whatever it was.’

‘We are fairly sure we know what it was,’ Priad said. ‘What and who.’ He held out a hand. A couple of the printed cloth squares he was holding fell to the floor before she stepped forward and took one of the remaining ones from his fingers. It was blackened in one corner and there was a large bloodstain just off its centre, but the design on it was clear. A blocky, stylised arm reached in from each edge of the square, printed ochre on the grubby white cloth. The hands were open, crossed against one another in the centre. Until Priad had pulled it off the gunner of the torn-open AT-70 it had been tied around the man’s lower face so that the two hands crossed over his mouth. As though they were silencing him.

‘Anakwanar Sek,’ she murmured. Her voice betrayed no detectable emotion.

‘Pyrakmon has made pict-recordings of what we found in the main enemy tank,’ said Priad. ‘We will make them available when we return to your strategium. It seems to have been their command vehicle. The inside panels were covered in illustrations of this town – an aerial map and illustrations of the streets. They were covered in handwritten instructions about where to turn and what the next landmark would be.’

There was a pause. Saint Sabbat, or at least the girl in which her spirit now resided, let the cloth float to the deck.

‘I think we can guess what their objective was,’ she said.

‘Of course we can, madam. It was you.’

Priad
Rhole Cliffs

The Saint’s retinue kept trying to get her off the boat and back to the clifftown compound, but she wouldn’t leave until she had seen the ferry’s crew.

The bodies had been piled gracelessly at the far end of the lower cargo hold, behind a partition and a jumble of broken containers. With the lights on that deck all shot out they wouldn’t have been spotted by anyone doing a routine, cursory inspection with a torch. It had worked, too. The boat had made it through two shipping checkpoints. It had only been the tank crews’ panicky overreaction to the sight of the Thunderhawk that had given them away on the wharf.

She had given a brief glance to two of her retainers when they had rounded the partition and seen the heaped corpses, and two of them had immediately gone to work removing each one and laying them out with a little more dignity on the floor. After the first couple had been placed, the Saint had walked over to them and knelt by each one in turn, softly touching their faces and speaking with them. Out of respect, Priad did not try to pick up her words, but it didn’t have the sound of a blessing or a farewell. It sounded conversational, as though she could hear them replying. He gave an inner shrug and then let it go. It was far from the oddest thing he had seen humans do. When she had had her soft words with the last of them, she stood and walked over to him without looking back.

‘Did you have anything to say to them, brother-captain?’

‘No, madam.’ He looked past her at the dead. ‘I don’t know the local customs so I can’t wish them farewell in the way they would want. And by my own customs, I’ve paid my respects by avenging them.’

She nodded at that, and then looked around as yellow torchlight fell on them from the direction of the ferry’s little inner stairwell.

‘Right,’ came a voice over the top of it. ‘Here they all are. Are the lights in here working? No? More torches, then. You, yes, you, at the top of the steps there. More lamps. Find some.’ The yellow light advanced on them over the stomp of hard-soled Urdeshi military boots.

‘I asked your trooper to tell you, ma’am,’ came the voice from behind it, ‘that you really do need to get yourself off this stripcogged death trap and back up the cliffs. Anyone who’s watching us can take a pretty good guess that you’re down here looking the place over. One good fast suicide dive later and I’m the scum-bastard in the history books who lost the Saint. You know, the one the whole damn Sabbat Worlds Crusade is named after.’ The light briefly flashed on Colonel Mazho’s glasses as he fanned the torch over towards Priad for a moment. ‘And her Adeptus Astartes, of course, respect t’you.’

‘I wanted to see where it started, colonel,’ she told him calmly. ‘It’s important. These people died for the war, it’s true, and the Emperor. But they very specifically died because of me. Because the Anarch’s soldiers wanted to get to me. I wanted to see them.’

‘Have you seen what you needed to see, then, ma’am? Yes? Because in which case I’ll ask you to step upstairs with me and we’ll be on our way.’

‘If your suicide pilot is out there,’ Priad put in, ‘then they’ll be equally able to take out her compound. They know the building.’

‘They may know she’s here, but they don’t know the build–’

‘They do.’ Priad didn’t need to raise his voice. ‘They do know the building. I’ve described what we found in the tank to my lady already. That little convoy was headed directly to the cliff road and the compound gates. They had directions. They most certainly know where she has made her headquarters.’

Mazho sighed.

‘Alright. Alright then. We’re having the damned debriefing on the boat, so it seems, so let’s have the damned debriefing on the boat. You and you, set some of those containers out. Not the broken ones, ones that’ll take your colonel’s weight without dumping him on the deck. And you’re seating your Saint, too, so be quick about it. What am I looking at here, exactly?’ He had spotted the rags that Priad had brought from the tank crew, now hanging from the hand of the quiet black-uniformed Militarum trooper from the Saint’s personal staff.

‘Show him, please, Brin.’

The scarves were held out, passed around, inspected. They were made of a sheer cloth that could be crushed up small and hidden away easily in a pocket or a boot. Most were tattered, all were battle-stained. All bore the same crude drawn-on design of overlapping hands.

‘Getting clever, then, the Anarch,’ said Mazho. ‘We all understand the significance, do we?’

‘Mark of the enemy, it seems,’ said Priad.

‘And in need of burning,’ snapped Kassine, the dour little Sister whom Priad had never seen out of the Saint’s company. ‘This minute.’

‘When we’ve finished speaking, Kassine,’ the Saint said softly. ‘Thank you.’ Colonel Mazho caught Priad’s eye and gave a cynical, surreptitious twist of his mouth. The Adepta Sororitas were famous for their love of burning. Priad pretended he hadn’t seen the look.

‘Their voices,’ the Saint went on. ‘Their mouths. When they tie these around their heads the hands meet over their mouths.’ She looked around. ‘This is how they venerate their leader. He Whose Voice Drowns Out All Others.’

‘The Sons,’ Priad said. ‘The Sons of Sek. This particular warlord’s most precious, elite troopers. We killed some of them around the Ash Coast.’

‘Hah,’ said Mazho. ‘I’m sure you did. And you’re right, the design is similar, you see it all through the cult. Their line troops’ helmet straps come across their faces to hold in respirator masks and they’re worked into a pattern of hands blocking their mouths. I’ve read intelligence reports which say they use the gesture all the time, too. Put their hand over their mouths. It’s like their sign of the aquila.’

‘Colonel!’ barked Kassine, sharp enough that Priad saw Mazho actually jump.

‘Rather say, it’s like their salute,’ the Saint said evenly. ‘Let’s not soil the Eagle of Earth by setting it alongside these people’s wretched little mockery of a faith.’ Mazho looked like he was going to retort to that, but he swallowed the words.

‘These weren’t Sons, though,’ he said instead. ‘Apologies, brother-captain, but cast your mind back to the wargear on the Sons you killed. Captain Auerben, did you notice it too?’ He pointed. ‘The Sons of Sek aren’t a mass mobilisation like the Blood Pact. They’re something special. Their selection seems to be very picky, and very brutal. Their training must be intense – look at any after-action report about how they perform under fire. And they’re huge bastards, all of them. Monsters. They must recruit for it.’ He glowered at a new thought. ‘Unless they farm them in some gut-twisting way we haven’t heard about yet.’ He scowled at the scarves again. ‘Point is, the Sons don’t just settle for the hand design on their wargear. They use the real thing. Every Son wears the skin of a human hand over his mouth. I didn’t see any human leather on the ones who came ashore today.’ He shook his head. ‘Sek has a broader military base. He hasn’t just got his Sons. He’s got spies, and infiltrators.’ He patted his hand over his mouth in imitation of the pattern on the scarves. ‘Specialists.’

‘I understand your point, colonel,’ the Beati said. ‘Thank you. We must be sure and pass on everything we have learned here to Warmaster Macaroth’s staff at Eltath. I am sure we will be speaking to them soon.’ There was a trace of bitterness in her gentle voice at that. ‘Brey, do you think you will have anything to add to what we have discussed?’

‘The colonel has a point,’ said Brey Auerben, stepping towards Mazho’s torch to make herself a little more visible. She was a poised little woman with raked-back, glossy black hair and an angular face, the brown skin gnarled from collar to cheekbone by a pyrochemical blast that had nearly killed her on Morlond. A captain in Warmaster Macaroth’s Collegia Tactica, she had been seconded to the Saint’s retinue when both commands had converged on Urdesh to begin the reclamation assault. Like the others on staff, she was dressed down in an attempt to be nondescript, wearing a shapeless grey duster and tunic that merged with the gloom.

‘We are continuing to model the structures of Sek’s army groups,’ she went on, in the tired-sounding croak that was all the flames had left of her voice. ‘We had inferred that the man’s loyalists would still be mobilised en masse, as support, or for line operations working around the actions of the Sons. Our working position is that Sek does not have enough Sons to be able to use them for tasks that are not critical, or for suicide missions such as this one.’ She paused to take a puff from an inhaler bulb. ‘This attack used up a great deal of simple luck to get as far as it did. I do not think they were expecting to get a second team in to extract them.’

‘Luck?’ Mazho asked with distaste. ‘A strike team decided to slip through our lines and attack a town, which happens to hold the Saint and her command, and they got lucky?’

‘I have people working back along their trail,’ Auerben said. ‘But there’ll be a hard limit on how much we’re going to be able to get. Our worst case is trained and motivated behind-the-lines specialists working to prepared strategies.’

‘Specialist infiltrators carrying out suicidal surgical strikes,’ Mazho growled. ‘Here’s where I remind you all that we are sitting out in the harbour on a bloody unarmoured ferryboat.’

‘Worst case,’ Auerben repeated. ‘But there’s plenty about this attack that falls well short of worst case. We’re surrounded by evidence to suggest that the fight for the boat was desperate and messy. Not the work of highly skilled commandos. They took enough casualties to leave them under-crewed when they tried to drive their vehicles ashore, in a convoy that was badly thought out and easily trapped. They seem not to have made any attempt at getting papers off the people they killed, nor to try to find the ferry’s codes to make use of them. They panicked when they saw the Thunderhawk, but their response was utterly incoherent and they ended up an almost stationary target.’

‘I see what you’re saying,’ Mazho conceded. ‘Doesn’t exactly point to a deep insurgent capability. Maybe just a bunch of desperate, cut-off regulars who saw a chance and ran at it.’

‘Then again, they knew the Beati’s location,’ said Auerben.

Mazho glowered at her.

‘Make up your damn mind,’ he snapped. The captain just shrugged, and took another puff from her vapour bulb.

‘Who doesn’t know the Living Saint is on Urdesh?’ asked Milo, from his place at the Beati’s side. ‘The enemy learned that fact the first day she landed. They’ve had the lesson again how many times now?’

‘Not enough,’ Sister Kassine snapped. ‘Never enough.’

Even Mazho joined in the general murmur of agreement.

‘But it’s been two months and three relocations since she was last seen to be here,’ Auerben said. ‘And the last location that we allowed to be known was the shrine at Xhuten.’ She coughed a little as her damaged throat tried to mimic the throaty Urdeshi pronunciation.

‘And because it was known that she was there, she was well protected,’ Mazho said. ‘Please, Captain Priad, I’m the last man to cheap-talk your warriors and their work today, but, but this is… this is she. Herself. This is the Beati. It’s unthinkable that an attack could get close enough to need what you did out there.’

‘I wasn’t needed at Xhuten,’ the Saint said.

‘Ma’am.’ Mazho cleared his throat and looked around for support, but saw only polite blankness on the faces about him. ‘You’ll remember the soldiers you saw, ma’am. Do you remember the way they responded to you when you walked through them? Do you remember the way they sang to you when you stood in the aisle of the temple there? They told me that when they found out you were on your way there, those troops skipped meals and starved themselves of sleep clearing away battle damage and making those pennants that you walked under the whole length of the commercia. You remember them.’ He looked around again and his voice carried a hint of accusation. ‘You were all there. Don’t tell me you don’t remember.’ He looked at Sabbat again, directly now.

‘Nobody told them to,’ he said. ‘They’d been through eight weeks of street-to-street fighting driving the Blood Pact out of the city and still this is what they put themselves through. They did that for you, ma’am. I saw their faces. They needed you like they needed food and sleep and lasgun cells. That badly. And even so they’d have leapt right up and straight back out into battle without any of those things, if you had so much as pointed–’

He caught himself.

‘My lady,’ he said, calm again, ‘I dispute the idea that you were not needed in Xhuten.’

‘There was work I could do there,’ she said. ‘And I did it. Of course I did. I did it gladly, the same as at Oershin and on the Echeppan Road and all the places before that.’ She shook her head. ‘But I’m sorry, colonel. Xhuten is not where He needs me.’

Mazho lowered his head and looked away. Priad couldn’t read his expression.

‘I dreamed of Ghereppan again last night,’ Saint Sabbat said softly, as if to herself. ‘Or, I think I did.’ Her hands were moving as though she were holding prayer beads, although Priad could see nothing in her fingers.

‘Madam,’ said Mazho, ‘with respect, we are already as close to Ghereppan as the instructions from command let us get.’

‘I know what the instructions from command are.’ Her emphasis on the word command was barely there, but its meaning wasn’t lost on any of her listeners.

‘Just so, my lady,’ Mazho said. ‘If you’ll permit my pointing it out, you know what command has instructed, but you think you dreamed about Ghereppan.’

She had to smile at that.

‘You’re tenacious, colonel,’ she said. ‘I know it isn’t easy for you to speak against me but you don’t flinch from what you need to say. I admire you very much.’

‘Well.’ Mazho shifted from side to side, working on his next words. Finally, he pushed off the crate he’d been sitting on and made the sign of the aquila. It seemed to help him find his voice again.

‘Right,’ he said. ‘We’ll be getting you moved to the contingency quarters tonight, ma’am, with a town lockdown and second-order perimeter. I’ll clear a relocation with command and we’ll move you out southward–’

‘No.’ The Saint’s voice was as gentle as it had been since she had first walked aboard, but it silenced the deck. She inclined her head to where the crew’s corpses had been laid out. ‘They are dead, whichever way. And more will die in Rhole Cliffs, whichever way. For me.’

‘With respect, ma’am,’ Mazho said, ‘we are at war, here. We have been at war for these stars for longer than two of my children have been alive. We’re at war now for a fiercely contested world. We are close to one of the biggest, fiercest theatres of that war. So I think we all understand that people will die. I am from Urdesh. Ma’am. With respect.’

‘Thank you, colonel,’ she said, and looked up. Somehow, the quality of light in the gloomy sealed deck seemed to change. ‘You are right, of course. It’s beyond denial. Urdesh has suffered so much since this crusade began. It has bled for the worlds around it, and there are many brave men and women who will bleed in turn to see it come back into the light. I will shoulder the weight of seeing it free. As much of it as the Emperor wills to me and allows me. Every gram of it that my strength will take. And still, people will die. Some of them will die for me.’

She stood up, and there was a shuffle through the dark as the soldiers around her came to attention.

‘I won’t have that wasted,’ she said. ‘If people are to die for my name, it will not happen while I sit in state inside rings of fortifications and secrets and send sweetly worded blessings out to a timetable drawn up by some staff officer in Eltath. No. I will not have it. Anakwanar Sek is on Urdesh.’

Those around her kept their composure well, but Priad’s senses picked up the intakes of breath, the sudden sharp tang of sweat.

‘We have no–’ Auerben began, then stopped herself. ‘Ma’am, if that is true, if he is still here, it only underscores how important it is to see the Warmaster’s strategy played out. He understands how important you are to the crusade. If Rhole Cliffs is too compromised we will establish a safer location, but that safety is vital.’

‘You are one of the greatest weapons this crusade has,’ Mazho agreed. ‘Knowing your feet tread Urdeshi soil is one of the things that has given the whole world heart for this war. You have to know this, ma’am, you’ve seen and heard it for yourself along with everyone here. The Astra Militarum is our sword and our shield. You’re our heart and our banner. We have to keep you safe. How can Sek pass up a chance to strike at you, if you are exposed?’

‘I killed one magister. I can kill another.’ There was no bravado or theatre in the words. They were a statement of truth as simple as the herding-girl’s cloak about her shoulders.

There was silence in the dimness for a few moments.

‘What do you think, Brother-Captain Priad?’ asked Milo, and everyone turned about to look up at him.

Damocles
Rhole Cliffs

‘And what did you tell them?’ Xander asked. He and Priad were alone in one of the compound’s outer courtyards, standing side by side, each holding a weighted Ithakan sea-lance in their right hand. Their postures were identical, the lances raised over their shoulders, their eyes on the far courtyard wall. High above them dim points of light came and went in the high atmospheric haze, as fleet elements hanging in low orbit went about business of their own.

‘I told them that I had accepted a charge from the crusade’s highest command to keep the Saint safe. I said where the Saint went, Damocles Squad would go, and we would fulfil our charge to the last breath in our bodies.’

‘And?’ Xander asked as they stepped forward, lances driving forward ahead of them. For the briefest instant they held position at the end of the thrust, then in perfect unison drew their weapons back and dropped, turning the lunge into a low crouch.

‘And then,’ Priad answered, ‘I said that I had given my word to guard her, not control her. Damocles would guard her in Rhole Cliffs if she stayed here, and if she chose to go to the front Damocles would guard her there. And if she chose to walk off the wharf and out to the bottom of the ocean, Damocles would follow as best we could and keep her alive as long as we were able.’

They had come up out of the lunge, pivoting on their rear foot. The lances swung up to a high ready position over their heads and came arcing down again as they finished the turn.

Xander’s laughter drowned out the lethal whoop of the lance-heads carving the air, and Priad found himself grinning too. They fell into position in perfect sync, lance hafts resting against their hips, bladed heads once again extended.

‘How did they take that?’

‘Quite well. The Beati was far too polite to gloat, of course, and most of her people took their cues from her. Sister Kassine said a little blessing, which was kind of her. I think Mazho misheard it and thought she was insulting him.’ As one, they shifted the position of their left hand and lunged again, this time using the right hand to pivot the lance-head as well as driving it forward, turning the feint at the throat into a brutal impaling thrust to the belly. Each lance had gone far enough forward to skewer through three or four humans, and the two Snakes had moved with such speed that those humans would barely have seen the strike coming.

‘And the colonel, then?’ Xander asked as they twisted the lance hafts, half-withdrew from the lunge and whirled the weapons about their heads. The move turned Xander’s back to his captain as they both spun to their next facing, and Priad waited until they had finished the full turn and were side by side again before he answered.

‘He made a face, and then made a great show of polishing his glasses, and then dropped the subject and shepherded us all back up here. I have a feeling he still thinks he’s going to get his way on the subject once Warmaster Macaroth finds out about it.’

‘Macaroth.’ Xander let the name hang. They went through the final half-dozen steps, strikes and repositions without speaking, their footsteps scraping on the courtyard paving. If he listened carefully, Priad could hear the tiny hums and clicks of the machinery that encased them, in such perfect sync he could barely separate them. That pleased him.

‘You’re smiling,’ Xander said as they came up from the final position and to attention, raised their lances in salute, then broke the moment and stepped away.

‘Was I? I was concentrating.’

‘Nothing from the Warmaster to bring a smile on, then?’ Xander said, idly shifting his lance from hand to hand, tilting and spinning it, feeling the point of balance.

‘No. Nothing from the Warmaster at all.’

‘That’s not normal. I mean, pardon my bluntness, brother-captain, but it’s not. We did a lot of fighting with this Macaroth as just a name and vague sense of a grand command being out there somewhere along the front, but this? We’re on the same world, Priad. We’ve been sharing a planet with the Warmaster of the entire crusade for years now. He came among us and spoke with us before first planetfall.’ Xander’s brow furrowed. ‘Didn’t he? Was that him? Black hair, shorter than most of them. Heraldry was a cannon shell and a starfield, I remember that.’

‘That was him.’ Priad was still smiling.

‘And since then, what? Nothing.’

‘Not nothing,’ Priad said. ‘I spoke with the Warmaster on a few occasions between Ghentethi and the end of the Eotine Walk. Our missions around the Krethir Sea came from one of his commanders or another, but the communiques carried Macaroth’s seal to show his endorsement. Now, though, you’re right. Nothing. The orders appointing Damocles to guard the Saint came from one of the generals in the command fortress at Eltath. There was no sign of the Warmaster’s hand in it at all. And…’

‘And?’ Xander asked after a moment. It was not like Priad to leave a thought unfinished.

‘They were orders,’ Priad said slowly, as though he were thinking it through for the first time. ‘Macaroth himself would make requests of us. Or he’d describe a situation, or at least have it described to us, and then point out where our intervention would be the most beneficial to his plans. At the Tourmal Drift, and twice during Morlond, he simply let Cules and I select where we would take our squads, then he adjusted his plans around what we told him we would do. When we dealt with his subordinates that was always how it worked. I believe he gave orders that that was how they were to treat with us.’

‘You’ve never told me about any of this before. The plans we were part of, of course, but not how we arrived at them.’

Priad waved the observation away.

‘It never seemed much worth noting before now,’ he said. ‘And perhaps it’s taken me longer to notice than it would have taken one of their own. But I find myself wondering, now. We’re on the same world as the Warmaster of the entire Sabbat Worlds Crusade. Elect of Terra, commander of armies the size of planetary populations. And yet it feels like you described to me earlier. That he’s vanished. He’s just some distant, notional presence whose proxies attempt to give us orders he has no idea about. What’s happened over there at Eltath, do you think? Has he fallen ill? Has there been some ruction among his command? Has an Archenemy assassin got to him?’

Xander was shaking his head.

‘I don’t envy you,’ he said. ‘All the talk, and conferences, and the–’ He left off with words and just swept a hand through the air. ‘Can you not just tell them to thrash all their stupidity out with each other – or of each other – and just let us know when there’s an enemy to kill?’

‘There are times I want to do just that,’ Priad admitted. ‘But let’s not get too pleased with ourselves for our pure and simple purpose. We can usually ignore all of that stupidity because these men and women do the work for us. How can we trace the routes these infiltrators use to steal their equipment and carry out attacks like these? How do we sift out the fifth columnists from folk who are coming to our lines just grateful to be able to rally around an aquila again? How do we plan a conquest so that each successful action gives the crusade one more piece of territory, one more industrial base or transit route, on which to build the next action, until we have a planet that is productive again instead of a ball of dead rubble? How do we catch their spies while we send out our own? For us, most of those questions are intractable. We come from a world that’s nothing like this, from a Chapter House with not much more than a thousand other faces in it, to join an army of billions fighting for a world of tens of billions, that has to be taken intact for the sake of the fate of trillions. We’re fortunate. We get to ignore the complexities.’

‘Except for you. You and Cules.’

Priad tilted his head from one side to the other, a gesture that made do for a shrug in the heavy-shouldered power armour.

‘That’s part of it, though. Part of captaincy. It’s what Cules was teaching me, before our undertaking got divided up. We must move in harmony with the rest of the crusade, just like each of us moves in harmony within a squad. So he and I are having to at least dip a hand over the side and make sure we keep that harmony. And what can I say? They asked.’

Xander snorted.

‘Did you really tell them you’d follow the Beati to the bottom of the ocean if that was where she went? I’d have liked to have been there for that.’

‘Remember what Khiron told us on Iorgu?’ Priad asked. Khiron was Damocles Squad’s dour old Apothecary, currently sequestered away in the aerodrome auditing and re-auditing his supplies. ‘He has a way with expressions that I remember deciding was worth emulating. We were there to show our banners at that coronation. We wondered at being in the midst of it, a little like tonight, and I remember him saying we had to remember what we were made to do. We were made to fight, but over and above that we were made to serve. If we could serve the Emperor best by fighting and killing, then that we would do. If it were by standing at attention while this king was crowned, then we would stand. If a day came when we could serve Him best by supporting a toppling temple, then we’d square our shoulders and take the weight. And if it turned out the day after that that we could best serve the Emperor by stripping naked and standing on our heads, why, then we would do that too.’

‘I remember it,’ Xander said. ‘But I like your version better,’ he added after a pause. ‘It has a little more gravitas.’

‘Thank you.’

They stood looking up at the starless, ashen night sky.

‘Some of us do it, though, don’t we?’ Xander said.

‘Some of us do…?’

‘That. The…’

‘The stupidity,’ Priad said with a smile.

‘Yes, well. You have instructed me on that score, brother-captain, so I shall call it something else from now on. But yes. Some of us seem to manage it.’

‘Are you talking about Cules?’

‘No, some of us outside Ithaka,’ said Xander. ‘The Ultramarines command a realm, not just a Chapter. The White Consuls too. I know there are others. For those of us who hold ourselves to ourselves, it’s a choice we’ve made. Not the way it must be.’

‘Is it a choice you think we might make differently, one day?’ Priad asked. ‘Speak freely. I find myself more intrigued by questions like these the more I discuss them.’

Xander thought about that for a time.

‘I can’t get to grips with it,’ he said at last. ‘If I’m going to take your example, and be humble about our good fortune in our simplicity, then perhaps I’m too well adapted to that simplicity to turn to questions like that one. Or perhaps I just need to take a boat out on a good soothing swell when the winds are gentle, and think about it in the sun for an afternoon.’

Priad laughed at that, and clapped his battle-brother on the shoulder. The clang of ceramite bounced off the courtyard walls.

‘I give you leave,’ he said, ‘if you’re still in that mood when we’re on Ithaka again. And provided you don’t disgrace us when you deliver our declaration of deeds for this campaign.’

‘I don’t plan to. I was down practising it in the cistern chambers under the compound this afternoon.’ He gave a little smile. ‘I just need to find out how it ends.’

Priad nodded in approval.

‘Alright then. I’m mandating an hour of full-sleep for us tonight. One at a time. The Beati will be moving in the morning, and so will we.’

Damocles
Rhole Cliffs

The next morning, quietly, unceremoniously, Saint Sabbat moved on from Rhole Cliffs.

Soon it would be impossible to conceal that she was moving towards the front, or that she had reached it – indeed, that was the point. Soon she would raise her banner at the battle lines, and let everyone on Urdesh, friend and foe, know that the Beati was taking the field. But for now, with enemy flyers not yet completely suppressed, with the chance of Sek partisans abroad with knowledge of her location, with the sea channels not yet completely secure, she bowed her head and went in secret.

Priad was the only Iron Snake to ride with her. He had had a little trouble convincing Damocles Squad about that. They all knew about their brother-captain’s speech to Colonel Mazho the previous night, and the unanimous feeling was that leaving Damocles shuffling about the now abandoned sanctuary-compound cut that pretty rhetoric off at the knees. Priad had stood firm. They couldn’t be sure that it wasn’t the presence of their Thunderhawk that had already given the game away at Rhole Cliffs. That had been an error. Instead of compounding the slip of judgement by having the gunship shadow a tiny, nondescript supply column, they would use their visibility to their advantage.

So as the upcoming dawn was sending up a fringe of pale light over the ocean, Mazho’s garrison created a fuss around the wharfers’ barracks below the cliffs at the southern end of the town. It was not the largest building on the docks, nor the most obviously commanding of the town, nor the most obviously defensible. In fact, if an observer were studying the town and dismissing all the obvious targets for a new sanctuary, the barracks was the obvious choice for a non-obvious building.

They drove about it in the morning dimness in haulage vehicles with hooded lamps, and shrouded the big cargo doors with tarps so no one could see what was being moved. They made merry with rivet-hammers and power saws close to the windows so the sounds could drift out, and rousted the handful of remaining personnel out of the surrounding buildings without bothering to explain what was going on. Pyrakmon and Crethon remained with the Thunderhawk, but the rest of Damocles Squad made sure they could be glimpsed stomping about the barracks’ forecourt or appearing briefly at its windows.

And meanwhile, Priad took a full ammunition load, two vials of precious Ithakan seawater, his guns and lance and lightning claw, and fitted himself carefully into the eight-wheeled SC-3 carrier. His bulk filled the rear of the transit compartment, eclipsing the camo-wrapped form of the Saint as the rear hatch swung closed. Such was his weight, in full armour and pack, that the carrier’s rattling and jouncing barely budged him while the others jolted to and fro in their places. Nobody made a sound but for the Beati herself, humming the lilting melody to an old Hagian walking-song that was mostly lost beneath the rumble of the engine and the rattle of the chassis.

Pyrakmon stood in the modified pulpit inside the Thunderhawk’s angular shoulder, his eyes closed, his senses latched on to the larger machine’s through the couplings in his armour. He had personally muted the code signature in Priad’s armour the night before, in case the enemy was listening with better ears than they expected, and so now he traced the convoy by the readings from the aerodrome’s auspex and stolen sense feeds from the checkpoint gates. He watched through borrowed mechanical eyes as the carrier disappeared from view, gave it fifteen watchful minutes, then opened his eyes and addressed his machines.

‘In my hand do I hold the water of Ithaka. In my hand do I hold the sands of Mars. In my grip do I conjoin flesh and steel. Blood and code, pulse as one.’ He brought his hands together in the sign of the cog, and his voice spoke numbers and cipher-phrases that the Mars-crafted vocoder in his faceplate translated into shrilling bursts of binharic. The sacred machine-tongue of old Mars awoke the encryptor cortex in the Thunderhawk’s transceiver array, enjoined the transmitter to its duty, and sent a sharp and powerful blast of code into the sky along a tight, surgically precise beam.

The Phratry had no ship of their own overhead to receive the message, but Pyrakmon had exchanged oaths and understandings with the machine-magi of the Imperial fleet before they had broken warp for Urdesh. His code-burst was aimed at the Banner of Slaydo, a Jovian-class battle cruiser whose watchful high orbit had it passing over Rhole Cliffs that night. The transmission was snagged in the Banner’s keen auspex arrays and passed through her cloistered calculae logi in a nervous bustle of voices and machine-cant. Their apex transmechanic studied the Astartes data-seal on the transmission carefully, added a benediction of her own, and then sent it arrowing back down through Urdesh’s ash-hazed atmosphere, now multiplied into three.

Erasmos
North-east docks, Barenzho City

Word came to Erasmos Squad as they walked to the waterfront. They were eight hundred kilometres north of the Rhole Coast and just over a thousand kilometres west, and the dawn that was lighting the road ahead of the Beati’s convoy was barely a ghost in their sky. Erasmos hefted bolters, meltas and cutters, their Ithakan sea-lances traded for stubby, heavy close-quarters blades. They passed through the little knot of officers and sailors to a series of salutes and respectful murmurs, and halted at the jetty where the battered old harvester sub waited for them.

Brother-Sergeant Symeon plucked a little vial from the holder at his waist. The top was designed to be easily opened by thick power-armoured fingers and he unfastened it with ease. Spiridon, Erasmos Squad’s Apothecary and the first in line, stepped forward and opened his hand.

Symeon poured a little dash of water into the armoured palm, cupped expertly to let as little as possible spill. Spiridon turned and dropped the water into Anysios’ open palm with a quick, practised turn of his hand. Anysios turned to Laukas and poured the water out again.

Down the line the gesture was repeated. By the time it reached Menoetios at the rear there was barely more than a drop of water left to fall into his glove, but it was enough. Each Iron Snake had had the waters of the Ithakan oceans pass through his hand. Their physical preparation was done; now they were in spiritual readiness too. Finally, Symeon looked down to where the power sword Akanthe, heirloom of Erasmos Squad and badge of office of its sergeant, sat at his hip. He touched his hand to the sword’s pommel. There was the barest gleam of water, but it was enough. This far away from home for this long, they made do.

The submersible lowered noticeably in the water as the Iron Snakes climbed aboard, bending and hunching to fit through human-proportioned spaces. Symeon paused briefly at the hatch as though he were listening to something, then gave a soft hmm before he stepped through and took his place just behind the control cabin.

‘Something we should know about?’ Anysios asked him as he wedged himself into the position opposite.

‘News from our brother-captain,’ Symeon answered, speaking aloud through his helmet grille rather than through the squad’s close-vox channel. He waited for the hatch to clang shut behind them before he told them the rest.

‘The Saint is on the move.’

Platonos
Low Urdesh orbit

‘The Saint is on the move,’ Brother-Sergeant Iapetos told Platonos Squad across the vox-link. The howl of the air past the hull and the roar of the Thunderhawk’s engines made it useless to try and speak out loud.

‘New orders?’ asked Panagis. Iapetos shook his head.

‘Not yet. Nor exact details, but Priad mentions the Troadine tide in passing.’

‘The what?’ put in Adrastes, looking up from the plasma gun he cradled in front of him. A moment later he worked it out, nodded, and dropped his gaze again.

Urdesh was a world of islands and straits, seas and channels, tides and currents, but none of them was the Troadine tide. That was a name from Ithaka, the tide that had carried the very first Iron Snakes to their first victorious battle with the Old Enemy of that world, back when they were still making Ithaka their own, before they had even taken their name. It was not a reference any outside the Phratry would understand, but Iapetos had understood it straight away. Priad was warning them that the Saint was on her way to war.

Iapetos considered that. Their altitude and trajectory meant they were passing through the airspace of several battle zones. They were hammering down through the turbulence left by orbital lance strikes into the desperate naval battle around the Kortethi Islands. The savage fighting around the Imperial push into Ghereppan would be to their west-south-west. But their destination, if Hamiskora was right, was an abandoned personnel hub in an almost deserted stretch of drylands, nominally under enemy control, nowhere near an active battle zone. All in all, Iapetos did not see the need to change their immediate mission because of the Saint’s proximity.

It would be interesting to set eyes on her, he thought, this one that they said was the manifestation of the adored Beati herself. Saint Sabbat, the girl whose charisma and zeal had inspired the first conquest of these worlds. Who had, he was told, reincarnated herself on Herodor and struck down the daemonic general Enok Innokenti in single combat.

‘An example for all of us, then,’ he murmured aloud, tilting his helm back up to look at the sea-lances racked overhead. Once he had their latest quarry skewered and headless on his lance, perhaps they might be reassigned and he could see the legend for himself.

Wind shear slammed the Thunderhawk across the sky, and Iapetos looked around.

‘Are we close?’ he voxed.

‘Five-minute warning coming up!’ Cepheas answered cheerfully. He had been complaining about losing his edge shuttling the squad up and down through Imperial-controlled airspace, and graceless about the reminders that he could have been stuck on the ground like Crethon at the Rhole Cliffs aerodrome. It was good to hear him enjoying a challenge like this.

Five minutes then, more or less. Iapetos relaxed, closed his eyes, paid attention to his breathing. Almost time to hunt again.

Kalliopi
Klenn South Island, Ghereppan

Ghereppan was still waiting for dawn. The city’s mighty skyline was a mass of black blocks and spires against the early-morning sky. The streets were dark ravines in which the occasional light might dance for an instant: hooded signal lamps, briefly opening doors, muzzle flashes. The island ahead of Kalliopi Squad was a looming, indistinct mass, seemingly devoid of movement. The bridges that linked it to its siblings spread away into the dimness like curving wings, pinioned in rockcrete and feathered in steel cables.

And then Invictus Antagonistes’ banked lumens turned the night back into day.

Sergeant Kreios stood on the shoulder of the grand old Warlord Titan as it waded chest-deep through the turbid sea, mind calm and body at rest, staring ahead. The gold-white glare illuminated the waterfront, dazzling back from the scattering of intact windows and picking out in merciless relief the pockmarks and shell-holes, the empty windows and the stumps of severed footbridges. Sharp black shadows leapt from the light and shifted back and forth with the Titan’s every ponderous step. The brilliance of the light and the restless shadows gave the whole city-island a surreal look, like a painted backdrop rippling in a breeze.

Kreios paid the strangeness of the sight no mind. His attention was fixed on the layer of warning runes weaving a stately pattern over the island, circling, grouping and scattering like restless birds as each new ping from the Legio Invicta’s auspex updated the targeting data. Klenn South had been considered contested until earlier that day, when an armoured column of Urdeshi Militarum had tried to push through to the plaza at its centre and been stopped. Stopped hard. Footholds on the islands were hard to make, and this one was too valuable to lose. General Grawe-Ash had called on the Iron Snakes and the Legio Invicta to make sure that didn’t happen.

In his heat vision, Kreios could see a pall of warmer air ballooning up over the centre of the island before the sea breezes broke it up. The jagged, spinning symbol for a power source was dancing among the buildings, close to the heat source, big enough to register in the passive auspex of the two Warhound Titans currently prowling the far edge of the island trying to triangulate it. Kreios had no doubt they were coming from the same place. The signals weren’t clear enough to show what it was, but he had no doubt it would turn out to be their objective. And that it would be something worth killing.

‘Kalliopi Squad, standing ready?’ It was the voice of Moderatus Bernal, the Titan’s second-in-command, locked away in the armoured head that jutted into the gloom below and before Kalliopi Squad’s perch, like a mountain-crag of forged armour instead of weathered stone. Kreios felt his footing tilt as Invictus Antagonistes took another step, a bow-wave around its torso as it planted its foot in the seabed somewhere below them. Antagonistes’ princeps was Pietor Gearhart, Invicta’s commander and most famous living warrior, but Kreios had never once, in all the time the Phratry and the Legio had been fighting side by side, heard the princeps maximus’ voice. Nobody had. Apparently there were stories going around about the old man. Kreios didn’t much care what they said.

‘Standing ready,’ he sent. With a thrumming tingle the thrusters of his jump pack ignited, and the rest of Kalliopi’s jets came to life around him like beacons answering a signal. There was a moment’s swimming sensation as his suspensors came on. Now he was only anchored to the Titan’s shoulder by the mag-locks of his boots, the thrusters straining against their grip. Confirmation signs strung themselves along the bottom of his vision as the rest of Kalliopi Squad followed his lead.

‘Jets hot.’

‘We’ll put our shoulder forward and face the south bridge tower,’ came Bernal’s voice. ‘Line you up for a landing on that colonnade around the near tower.’

‘We see it. Mark us.’

‘We’re starting to get vox-traffic from the surviving Guard from the assault column,’ Bernal added. ‘Shall I feed it through to you, sergeant?’

‘Are you analysing it for yourself?’

‘We are.’

‘Then I trust your analysis.’

‘Understood, sergeant. Survivors are from the rear of the column after the front got hit. Roughly two platoons’ worth and a handful of tank crew. They’ve fallen back along the South-western Axial and scattered into some of the Administratum clerking-houses towards the bridge. Feeding you the markers now. Room-to-room fighting all along the Axial. Multiple confirmations that the opposition contains Sons of Sek in significant numbers. No hint of the nature of whatever it was that the column ran into.’

Kreios turned the report over in his mind as Invictus Antagonistes made a ponderous step-turn to swing them closer to shore. He had no doubt at all that Kalliopi Squad could kill every single Son of Sek infesting the island if they chose to. But he also had no illusions how long that would take, how many wasted hours, days, scrambling about in who knew how many maze-like floors of who knew how many buildings.

No. Let the Militarum take care of the sweepings. The Iron Snakes were here to kill whatever was waiting under that pall of heated air.

Time to move.

Legio Invicta
Klenn South Island, Ghereppan

In the warm dimness of the command bridge behind Invictus Antagonistes’ brow, Moderatus Bernal watched as the Iron Snakes simultaneously disengaged their mag-locks and shot away, arcing high over the narrowing strip of water between the wading Warlord and the rockcrete shore.

‘Sensori,’ he said, both aloud and into the Titan’s manifold. ‘Show me what’s waiting for them.’

The canted confirmation came back from Sensori Rakolo and the displays in front of him swam and readjusted as their full bank of auspexes homed in on the tower and colonnade at the end of Kalliopi’s trajectory. Rakolo was sifting and marking the data as it came in: temperature traces consistent with moving humans, pinprick power flashes as lasweapons discharged. And then a visual: a glimpse of an ochre uniform at a high window, two more lower down. Las-fire lighting off in the open air. Bernal almost laughed to see it: they were shooting at Antagonistes. Ludicrous to fire small-arms at a Titan, even as a gesture of defiance, but useful to demonstrate one thing: the Sons of Sek were too blinded by the lumens to have seen the nine Iron Snakes about to drop on them.

‘Nominal power to point defences,’ he announced, his voice low. That should have been the instruction that came not from but to him, from the one whose very mind and senses were bound into the Titan’s own. But Princeps Gearhart was curled still and silent in his amniotic tank, and Invictus Antagonistes had to pick its way through the battlefields of Urdesh under whatever crude analogue guidance the rest of her crew could give.

The rest of the Legio’s Battle Titans, the Reavers and Warlords, were spread out down the coast, anchoring the Militarum cordon on the Xavec Strait or duelling enemy engines around the caldera foundries outside Hyelock Bay. Every princeps held to the story: that Invictus Antagonistes remained in Ghereppan to supervise the Warhound Scout Titans as they roamed the widest avenues, to keep Invicta’s focal point at this most crucial of battlefields.

But the truth that hung between them all like dead grey static in the manifold was that it was for Gearhart and Antagonistes, not for them. The years and decades had weighed hard on Gearhart’s mind and spirit even at the start of the crusade, but they had all told themselves that he was still strong. He had been like a father to nearly every other princeps, a fixed star in the heavens. The thought of dethroning him had been unbearable, and then they had been on the move and out into the war. The crusade would reinvigorate him, they had all thought. Surely his days were not over yet.

But the old man had been ever stranger and more withdrawn since they had first joined battle on Orestes, and for too long now his silence had been total. His back had begun to hunch and his limbs to pull into a foetal curl. They only knew there was still life in him because of the vitals faithfully lighting up the hololith in front of his tank, and because Invictus Antagonistes still moved with enough of its old regal grace to show that at some level its machine-spirit was still entwined with a human one.

How could they walk into the fury of an engine war with their beloved commander lost in the dark of his own mind, their grandest and most venerated war engine barely more than sleepwalking? And so they were here in Ghereppan, haunting the warzone like a ghost. They prowled the edges of city blocks they dared not fire the Warlord’s mighty weapons into. They watched the Warhounds’ auspex feeds and listened to their jubilant hunting chatter on the manifold. And they all pretended not to feel shame.

Bernal fought the urge to look over his shoulder, and lost the fight as he always did. Gearhart was still a motionless shape in a dark tank. He looked so still, so small. The patriarch of Invicta shouldn’t look as though he could be cradled like a child. Grimacing, wishing he had never looked, Bernal turned back to his controls, forced himself to focus. Most of the point-defence bolter emplacements were around the Titan’s hips and waist, but the uppermost arrays were clear of the water and showing green across the board.

‘Let’s open the way for them,’ he said.

Antagonistes’ main guns were exhilarating to fire, powerful enough to shudder the whole Titan, but the crew did not dare try to use them. The god-machine they rode in had been built to be guided by the living mind of its princeps. With that mind all but gone the four orphaned crew were pushed to their limits just to guide the Titan’s cold, numb husk through the slowest, simplest manoeuvres. The risk of bringing it crashing down, like a doddering old man finally unable to keep his legs under him, was intolerable. Even the thought of it filled Bernal with acrid humiliation.

The point-defence bolters were safe; indeed, they were too small to feel when they fired. Bernal watched the whirl of firing solutions and ammunition counts on his displays, and the traceries of propellant sparks on his screen as the shells swarmed forward. The clean lines of the tower were blurred by detonations of dust and smoke as the barrage drove the enemy from their positions. A moment later Kalliopi Squad swooped down into the pall and were lost to view. Bernal stretched and exhaled.

‘Straighten us up, please, Zophal, and get ready for a ninety-degree counter-clock turn. The Militarum will be coming over the bridge once the Snakes have opened the way again. Let’s at least light their way.’

Steersman Zophal acknowledged the instruction, but Bernal only half-heard it. The urge to look over his shoulder at the amnio-tank was back. He managed over a minute before he gave in to it.

Kalliopi
Klenn South Island, Ghereppan

The whine of an incoming krak missile registered in Sergeant Kreios’ ears and kicked straight through to his reflexes, and he swerved hard to his right. A split second later there was an exhaust trail barely an arm’s length from his head and a jolting shock as the implosive warhead detonated in the road behind him. Cracks rippled along the grey rockcrete under his feet.

‘Missile team in the skyway, three-forty, sixty,’ he heard Mathos call into the vox-channel, and a flashing amber rune zipped across Kreios’ field of vision like a mayfly and fixed on a spot above the street ahead.

‘And three-twenty, seventy,’ Kandax added, as another exhaust trail stabbed down and the squad parted to let the round blast a chunk out of the kerb. ‘And I’m seeing heat traces on both skyways now. Hot like plasma flasks.’ Kreios glanced up and saw the hotspots like tiny aurorae in his infrared, and opened his thruster jets for another burst of speed.

Kalliopi Squad scattered, spread, reformed and crossed over one another, weaving in and out of a line of statues that marked the boulevard’s dead centre. Stone pedestals holding up steel dignitaries. They were mercifully tall enough to break the sight lines up to the gun nests in the skyways that arched over their heads. One local worthy had already had his likeness decapitated by a missile aimed at Hapexion, and another had had the gleaming metal sweep of her skirts melted into an undignified crater by a plasma shot.

Xenagoras hurtled past that glowing wound now, pivoting, running a few paces up the lady’s side, launching himself upward and punching outward to send himself ricocheting off her upraised arm. The next few moments in the open air were the most dangerous ones, if the gun crew were alert, but by the time they had compensated for his movement he was halfway up to them, both his bolt pistols raised above his head. His shells burst all around the gun nest, tearing apart the ironwork around it and cracking the floor under the crew. One of the gunners toppled through the broken railings and fell screaming past Xenagoras as he straightened his flight path and went blasting up through the weakened floor. Adeptus Astartes bolt pistols were solidly built, more than up to bludgeoning a human body to pieces in the hands of an armoured Iron Snake. Xenagoras finished off the rest of the gun crew without firing another round. A quick burst of las-fire peppered his side and hip and he spun, pistols out in front of him, and demolished the second gun nest in a flurry of shots.

Hemaeros had already reached the next skyway. Xenagoras watched as his brother’s grenade went off inside the ironwork cage, and heard the squeal of a chainsword as it tore through armour and flesh. The ironwork facing that side was undamaged, and it took him whole infuriating seconds to rip a hole in it large enough to step out through. By the time he was in the air, the missile crew in the next skyway were all dead and Xenagoras simply let himself crash into the side of it, clambered up and over, and launched himself at the final one, a larger bridge with a graceful arch to it and the heat traces of at least a dozen human gun crew shining out through its ironwork.

Down below them the rest of Kalliopi had passed the end of the statue parade and into the tail end of the destroyed Imperial column they had come to reinforce. Or avenge. The rearmost vehicles seemed almost intact, mostly Chimera squad-carriers and a handful of mortar trucks, some pocked by enemy fire and some apparently just abandoned. The damage grew worse as they advanced towards the road junction, tanks seamed and sliced by high-intensity las-beams, or blackened and smoking. Several tanks were still burning so fiercely that the front of the column in the junction wasn’t visible at all.

Kreios led the way forward through a cluster of AT-79s made for the Urdeshi reclamation from seized local forges, most deformed from blasts of intense heat and wrecked by internal explosions of ammo or fuel. Finally, in the choking smoke at the front of the formation, the ruins of half a dozen Astra Militarum Leman Russes, all with their fronts caved in by some colossal incineration that had killed the tanks and pitted and calcified the rockcrete beneath their feet. The front of the formation had slewed in close to the buildings on the right of the avenue, and when he looked up through the smoke Kreios saw that the windows all along here were just empty sockets. The blast had not shattered their glass; it had evaporated it.

There were no more rushing antigravity leaps now. Kalliopi advanced slowly, watchfully, falling automatically into a zigzag pattern where every scrap of cover they passed was swept by the senses of at least two Snakes before the forward members of the squad passed by. Against something that could do this to tanks, their best defence was not to be seen. The hot smoke was their ally, and so for now their feet stayed on the ground.

It was Hemaeros, perching on the arched skyway above and behind them, who had the best vantage down into the road intersection and who saw the movement first.

‘Armour! Multiple armour, tracks, stalks, something big behind them, can’t identify, heat spike, power spike!’

‘Double maw spread, high-low, Kandax up to second,’ Kreios said, unflappable. He swung himself up on his suspensors, kicked the pavement and ghosted away to the left around the collapsed and smoking corpse of a Leman Russ. Skopelion was mirroring his motion the other way as Kandax darted forward into the cover of the tank Kreios had just hurdled. The heat and smoke still fouled their vision but they could hear the enemy now. The rev and miss of overworked and under-maintained promethium engines, the squeal of balloon-tyres on pavement, the clatter of metal treads and stalk-tank legs.

All familiar noises but there was something else, both above and below what he was hearing. Kreios was trying to identify it when the tight yellow-white beam from a lascannon sliced the air by his head. Two krak missiles followed it, one punching through the flank of the dead Russ and the other vanishing into the smoke to crater a wall somewhere in the middle distance.

‘Las is from a four-pack of light tanks in the middle of the avenue,’ Hemaeros said over the vox. He had leapt off the last skyway, crashed through the window of a rotunda looking down over the boulevard, and now crouched in the empty frame like a las-scorched gargoyle, studying the scene below. ‘Looks like HET-7s, I saw stubber mounts on the side sponsons.’ As if on cue, there was the rapid slam of a 60-calibre rapid-fire and a line of rockcrete chips flew up from the road between Kreios and Kandax. ‘Three stalk-tanks visible so far, one of them fired those missiles. AT-79 beyond them. There’s at least seventy metres of space on them.’ The lascannon beam licked out again, angled low. Hapexion barely jetted himself up and out of its way before the beam could shear through his legs, and then sideways as it flashed past him, aiming where the blue of his thruster-wash had glowed through the smoke. Stablights from the advancing tanks started to probe at the smoke.

Kreios gritted his teeth. Krak missiles were bad: a solid hit from a lascannon could easily cost a Space Marine a limb and probably a life. Their own armour-killers, krak grenades and Kandax’s melta, were far shorter ranged. The tank gunners were capable. A rush would work, but Kalliopi would lose brothers. Kreios had no intention of losing brothers. He looked around.

‘With me,’ he began, ‘back a length, flank and coiling high port. Xenagoras–’

His voice was lost in a shattering blast of static that drowned out Hemaeros’ warning shout. And then the sun came down and touched the street behind them.

Kalliopi
Klenn South Island, Ghereppan

It took a second for Kreios to come to his senses and roar in anger. The whole squad had been bowled over by the detonation and lay sprawled like discarded toys, scattered among the tanks. Looking back to the corner, Kreios could barely make anything out in the dissipating haze of red-white light and the ferocious blaze of heat. His warplate seemed creaky and off-balance when he struggled to his feet, and warning runes jostled and scrolled at the edge of his vision as it tried to shrug off the damage.

‘UP!’ he bellowed. Sudden hot winds were dragging the smoke this way and that, their visual cover disappearing. Kreios toppled to his right, triggered his thrusters and punched himself sideways. Another krak missile missed him by a hair. It was only a moment before he was back in cover, but through the break in the smoke he had seen everything he needed.

Beyond the ugly, swaying shapes of the stalk-tanks and the boxy, six-wheeled HET-7 lascarriers, a great block of ochre-painted metal squatted across the avenue on four sets of broad tracks. The front of its control cabin was a sloped sheet of armour, windowless but for tiny, shielded slits, with a battery of auspex and sensor barrels jutting out from it. Behind the cab, rising up from a pyramidal generator stack wreathed in a noxious haze of leaked coolant, sat the gibbet-like barrel of a magnetic mass driver.

Kreios’ helmet sensors started to react and he thought he could feel his physical senses tingle. The magnetic field that the scaffold projected was strengthening. It was cycling up for another shot.

‘Barrel’s tilting back,’ came Hemaeros’ voice through a growing sizzle of static. ‘Higher arc, shorter shot.’ A maddening whine filled the air, growing into a scream, as the reactor in the giant tank’s pyramid vented plasma into the magnetic cage that was about to lob it high and drop it onto Kalliopi Squad.

Kalliopi was already moving – every one of them knew exactly what Hemaeros’ report meant. They scattered in both directions, sprinting hard through the mess of dead tanks and into running leaps on thrusters pushed hard into the red.

A lascannon beam seared Mathos’ pauldron and scorched the side of his reactor pack before he could spin away and let the beam cut the air behind him. He hissed in pain and frustration as the shoulder joint of his armour fused and locked. His left-hand thruster guttered, and his evasive spin turned into a crash just short of the doorway he had been aiming for. Glanded pain suppressants flooded his left side as he turned and snapped a string of shots at the HET-7 lascarrier that had tagged him. His feet dragged and skidded on the rockcrete steps as he made for the door. He could see the lascannon correcting its aim, tracking him for a centre-of-mass shot. A kill-shot.

On the other side of the boulevard Skopelion’s boots had barely left the road when he was knocked tumbling by converging streams of high-density stub-rounds. He landed on all fours, the two sponson gunners riding him, hammering at him, following his motions. Two rounds smashed through his bolt pistol, another punched the side of his head hard enough that the vision in his right eye pixelated and then started to flicker as the auto-senses tried to compensate for the damage. He felt a hard yank and his vision tilted as Coenus grabbed the edge of his pauldron and dragged him forward. Every Snake was bracing to hear the drilling shriek of energy erupt into another incinerating explosion. Not even Astartes could survive a direct hit from that.

Kreios smashed into a pair of barricaded-shut double doors, forced them halfway open and left himself wedged there while he turned and emptied his magazine at the two HET-7s advancing on his squad. A bolt pistol was useless for duelling with tank guns but if he could burst a shell or two against their armour he might be able to throw the gunners’ aim for a crucial second. A dozen foot soldiers had spread out around the two tanks and were starting to fire back at him.

He heard his brothers’ voices start to distort in the vox as the plasmapult’s magnetic field flexed and focused. Hemaeros was shouting something. He sounded jubilant, but Kreios couldn’t make out the words. He saw the launch scaffold on the plasmapult’s back start to move again, but now it was rotating away from them. That didn’t make sense.

Then he heard the footsteps.

Kalliopi
Klenn South Island, Ghereppan

The two Warhound Titans came bounding on their great columnar legs, each footfall sending shocks down the road, their combined tread blending into a continuous earth-shaking rumble as they picked up speed. Their bright carapaces glimmered in the dusk and flashed crimson and gold in the stablights the tanks were turning upon them, the livery of Legio Invicta. Metres-long pennants fluttered from their shoulders and upper arms: Lupus Noctem, in the lead, flew the Legio’s crest in white upon black; Lupus Lux followed with black on white. They ran with their vulpine heads down, the moulded steel wolf-masks over their cockpits frozen in snarls, their arms spread wide, filling the broad street.

It was a sight to freeze the blood of any common enemy, and indeed the Warhounds’ booming tread was met with the screech of metal as the tank crews began to panic and collide with each other. But the plasmapult gunners did not miss a beat. The driver scaffold was already rotating to bear on the Warhounds, the flared snout starting to drop and the little hell-star still screaming inside its magnetised cage. It still wasn’t more than a third of the way to launch position when Lupus Noctem fired.

The twin turbolaser beams had had their power level throttled back, and their burn time cut down to a fraction of a second. The shot was not a beam, simply a strobing flicker that barely spilled into the visible spectrum. But it shook the avenue.

The Iron Snakes’ auto-senses dissolved into boiling nonsense as the superheated air pushed out in an overpressure wave that blasted them with heat and flying grit until it collapsed in on itself with a boom that sent the enemy foot soldiers sprawling, eardrums broken, and brought down jigsaw rains of window fragments from the building frontages.

Kreios tore and kicked his way free of the shattered doors, almost blind and deafened to any sound but the keening of his armour’s joint motors and his own voice, murmuring an oath to his battle-gear. By the time he’d freed himself his hearing was back: ceramite boots on pavement, armoured bodies brushing against metal hulls. Sight a moment later.

‘That was wrong,’ Kandax growled over the vox, and all the squad knew what he meant. That hadn’t just been a heat-blast. That had been an interference wave strong enough to overwhelm even their power armour’s dampers and shielding. And that meant…

Legio Invicta
Klenn South Island, Ghereppan

‘Voids!’ snarled Princeps Entascha Mereschel, flinging her body backwards as if recoiling from the shot. Her throne folded and tilted with her, flexing along with every motion, keeping her snug in its grip against the jolt and buck of the bridge. She could feel as much as hear the groans of metal and ceramics under unthinkable stresses as Lupus Noctem fought to arrest its charge. ‘Leyden, that thing has void shields!’

The plasmapult tank still squatted in the centre of the avenue, behind its line of now motionless lighter escorts. One of the HET-7s that had been directly beneath the path of her beam had exploded; another was burning. One stalk-tank had toppled over. Behind it all, the coruscating curtains of energy around the plasmapult faded back into near invisibility.

She had no illusions but that they were still there. They had been hidden from a casual scan by the interference from the plasma cage itself, the cage that had now turned the great shape of the catapult into a silhouette as it primed for firing. Her fists tightened, her teeth bared.

‘Shot coming down, my love. Break!’ She swung her weight to her left, phantom sensations juddering up her legs as Lupus Noctem redirected its monstrous forward momentum. The Titan skidded down to a walk, splayed its legs and hunched to the left. Behind her, Leyden Krugmal, fellow princeps in arms and her betrothed, mirrored the movement, slowing Lupus Lux and leaning it to the right. The air between the two Warhounds broke and sparked where their own voids clashed against each other, and then the plasma hit them.

Now the shriek of energy came from around her own machine, and once again the avenue was washed in feedback as the shields shunted the energy away into nothingness. Tendrils of plasma made strange red-white fractals as they were caught between the two voids, and then what was left of the superheated payload splashed down to eat into the rockcrete below. A wave of hot pressure swamped Lupus Lux’s sensors, and a single dribble of plasma left a smoking track down Lupus Noctem’s right flank.

‘Battle scar!’ Mereschel howled as the feedback reached her, like a hot needle-tip touching her shoulder. ‘Battle scar! Remember it, all of you, we’ll have the enginseers gild it!’

‘Invicta!’ her moderati shouted in unison, and Lupus Noctem stepped back into the middle of the avenue, its sculpted snarl seeming almost to move as the light shifted across it. Its turbolasers whined in eagerness to fire again. Mereschel’s right fist felt as though she were gripping a hot metal hilt, as power went to the generators in the Titan’s forearm.

‘Well done, my heart!’ came Krugmal’s voice. ‘Auspex forward, energy leakage, a huge one. You lanced it, Entascha, it’s bleeding out!’

‘No,’ Mereschel snarled. ‘Thick-hided scrap-strip bastard machine still has its voids. That’s not a damage leak. It’s bleeding plasma into the mag cage for another shot. Form up beside me, blood of mine. Lasers hot. A double cannonade–’

‘Will melt the avenue around us, my love,’ Krugmal said. ‘Even if turbo lasers at full strength don’t, if we lance that cage and furnace then we’ll burn half the island to ash.’

Mereschel growled again. Her jaw tightened and muscles stood out from her neck as she reined her Titan in. Lupus Noctem’s machine-spirit was bonded tightly to her own, her brain and its animal-pattern cortex meshed together through the mind impulse unit, and its desire to bound forward for the kill was as hard to brake with her mind as its charging body had been with her physical controls.

‘Too ugly to live, too hot to kill,’ she growled at the ochre-painted beast ahead of her. The charging of the cage was accelerating. Her auspex feeds showed her a repeat of the enormous energy bloom that had first brought her in from her hunting-grounds on the island’s far side. ‘Alright. We’ll strip its voids and shell it into a daze.’

‘And the Snakes will make the kill,’ Krugmal finished. ‘Over to the shared vox-band… mark. Kalliopi Squad. Sergeant Kreios, are you with us?’

‘Hear that?’ Mereschel asked her moderati. ‘We have new packmates. Let’s kick this thing unconscious so they can open its veins.’

Kalliopi
Klenn South Island, Ghereppan

‘Invicta!’ came the shout over the vox-band, a man and woman’s voices in unison, and then the Titans’ Vulcan megabolters cut loose. The shells, bigger and more powerful cousins of the self-propelled rounds in Kalliopi’s weapons, came down the avenue like two streams of howling fireflies. Each had enough punch to cave in the side of a light tank, or reduce a Space Marine to a random tangle of scattered limbs, offal and ceramite splinters. Each Titan had fired its weapon for mere seconds; in that time each had loosed three hundred shells.

The telltale storm of interference blurred Kalliopi Squad’s vision and wailed in their ears as they advanced again, weaving through the litter of wrecks as much on their memories as senses, mental maps made by brains augmented and optimised for spatial awareness and retention. The scream of the shield hits grew almost unbearable, climbing to a final burst that hit them like a physical impact and actually brought warning runes to their helmet displays. As his vision cleared and their advance sped up, Kreios could see green-white corposant arcing from surface to surface, dancing in the air and crawling across the building fronts. The plasmapult’s void shields had blown out.

The enemy engine’s prow was no longer a domineering armoured bastion. Now it was caved in along almost all its length, vision slits indistinguishable among dozens of armour breaches, auspex vanes hanging brokenly in those rare spots where they were still attached at all. Smoke was starting to leak out of the cracks and tears across its face. As Kalliopi ran at it, a loud grinding began in one of the tread housings, rising to a metallic shriek and cutting off in a heavy explosive thud. Thicker smoke began to pour from the housing and that corner of the giant chassis settled visibly lower.

Nothing moved in the street as the Iron Snakes closed the distance. The enemy armour that had formed up in front of the plasmapult was as scorched and lifeless as the Imperial column they had passed on the inroad. Hemaeros and Xenagoras swooped down from their vantage point directly onto the plasmapult’s generator stack.

‘Kandax, join them,’ Kreios said as he leapt and landed halfway up the plasmapult’s sloping front. ‘They’re your guards. Kill the cage. Without detonating it.’ He turned to look at Mathos. The injured Space Marine had been the last to land on the wreck, his arm drooping and his chainsword motor barely idling. He had kept pace with the rush on the plasmapult but Kreios’ helmet feeds showed him how his brother was struggling, the quantity of pain-suppressant he was glanding and the neural reinforcement he was having to draw on from his armour systems. The trench the lascannon had cut through his pauldron had clearly gone deep into the Space Marine’s own shoulder joint.

‘I can fight, sergeant,’ Mathos said. ‘My precision aim is off by about fifteen marks so I’ll keep the gun in my other hand. I can move the sword enough to defend, and I can suppress and use grenades. I can keep pace and keep watch.’

‘And you will,’ Kreios told him. ‘Third in. In you go.’ Coenus and Skopelion had already torn open the front of the cab above them and clambered in. ‘We’re going to work our way through this thing and clean the vermin out. You’re going to back me up as we go down into the guts of it and work our way back. Hapexion will work on your shoulder while you do it.’

The Apothecary already had his narthecium unit unfolded from its housing and enclosing his left gauntlet, its biotic needles and tiny surgical heads ready to go to work. Hapexion’s right hand held a hand flamer, the little ring of blue igniter lights already glowing.

‘I can fight, sergeant,’ Mathos said again. ‘I am not gone from the field yet.’

‘Of course not,’ Kreios snapped. ‘But can you do what you’re told? Reload your weapon and back me up. And accept Hapexion’s ministrations more graciously than you do my orders. He doesn’t have my sweet patience.’

Mathos had the good sense to fall in next to the Apothecary without a further word. From somewhere in the plasmapult’s upper decks, they all heard screams and the revving of chainswords.

‘Work to do,’ said Kreios. He looked past Mathos and Hapexion, to the two enormous shapes that still filled the avenue behind them, and raised his chainsword in salute. But Lupus Noctem and Lupus Lux had already turned their enormous bodies about and were stalking away again.

Kreios turned his attention to a blink of light in the corner of his eye: a communique rune that his helm display’s battle parameters had muted. A Phratry code. Word from the brother-captain.

He read it, read it again, and dismissed it. The Saint was on her way. He supposed that would change things, but who knew how? He gave a mental shrug. Too many variables, too little information. Things would change when they changed, and he would know what to do when they did.

Kreios shifted his focus, and all thought of Priad and the Beati vanished from his mind. He looked down at the heat-tarnished hull beneath his feet.

‘Work to do,’ he said again, and followed his brothers inside.

Platonos
Low orbit descent, Perrochyne hinterlands

Voices.

False voices. Spiteful. Glutinous and muffled by the surge and rush of the Great Ocean. They whispered across one another. They asked him questions. They started to scream threats. They seemed to think they stood a chance. They didn’t realise they were all going to die.

Epistolary Hamiskora, seated without helm and separate in the tilting and swerving Thunderhawk gunship, held his force axe vertically between his knees, his fingers interlaced around it. The heavy pyramidal pommel was braced against the floor, and the double-bitted labrys-pattern head was almost higher than Hamiskora’s own. The metal of the axe-head was dark grey, almost black, the crystalline inlays a deep midnight blue, but as Hamiskora began to step through his mental forms a brighter, paler light began to creep through the crystal.

His mind focused even as it relaxed, the roar of the engines and the yowling slipstream fading away, his breathing becoming a rhythmic, oceanic swell. He let himself slip into that tide, the trance so total that he actually felt the shock of cold ocean water as he plunged beneath the surface.

The voices were at once pushed away, as though his armour had appeared around him upon hitting the water, and yet made louder, as though he had passed through a heavy curtain that had separated him from them and was now hearing them directly.

The voices had teeth, the voices had heat, the voices had malice. They darted around him like a shoal of pygoken hunter-fish, building their courage, waiting for the chance to dart in and nip. Then bite. Then tear. Then feast.

The crystalline veins in the axe-head had lit up with power, shining the bright blue of a fresh spring sky. Every member of Platonos Squad saw. None of them spoke. Sergeant Iapetos went back to watching the avionic data feeding to Cepheas in the pilot’s seat. As the light brightened to fill the compartment he triggered a quick signal to the Imperial Navy pinnace that hung above them in low orbit, shadowing their descent like a kite hanging above a field.

Make ready.

In the dark of his trance, Hamiskora felt himself change. His ghost-form, a glimmering Astartes in the full-helmed blue-trimmed power armour of the Librarius, became a brawny, bare-chested Ithakan hunter, lance in hand, and then grew in a flash of power, uncoiled and spread itself. He was an Iron Snake, king of the wild oceans, and when he coiled about himself the simple surge of his passage sent the voices screeching back from him.

The metal of the axe-head was softly glowing as well now, infusing the blue light of the crystals with a lambent white. Not the fierce white of furnace-heat but a delicate moonglow, as though the axe-head were frosted glass around a lantern.

The voices were beginning to merge, he saw-heard-felt, their words rhyming, echoing, overlapping, the movements of their semi-tangible spirit-shoal looking less like an attacking pack and more like scattered reflections from a single source. Turning among the depthless tides in which his spirit-form now swam, he looked down through that strange doubling of vision, down into the distortion of the immaterium that the planetary mass threw out like a heat haze, down into the physical drop beneath the tiny metal pellet that held his physical body and his brothers’, packed in like pips in a seed-pod, sinking, sinking into the dark where the voice waited.

Voice.

There was only one now. The echoes were only that, echoes of the one voice beneath them, bouncing like a cetacean’s song beneath the waves. Hamiskora could read its location. Then he could feel it. Then he could see it. For the briefest instant he was there, all his own senses looking out of a crackling blue-white ghost of himself manifested on the sloping rooftop in the little derelict township. He could see the colourless afternoon light, hear the breeze, smell the ashy tang of the air. He had it. His half-formed ghost dissipated in a spatter of energy, leaving two scorched footprints where it had touched the corrugated metal. The axe-head flashed, and went out.

Hamiskora’s eyes snapped open. He turned his head to look towards the pilot’s cabin.

+I have him.+

He planted the words directly into Cepheas’ mind, and the pilot nodded without a word and made ready. It was there, the place, as though his vision had left his head and shot down into one precise point in the target zone their orbital auguries had mapped out.

+We hunt.+

‘We hunt,’ Cepheas echoed, and sent them screaming downward.

Platonos
Orbital insertion point, over Perrochyne hinterlands

‘We hunt.’ Cepheas’ voice crackled with atmospheric interference over the inter-ship vox, and Herodion punched the release. The launch-lock blew open, the deck clamps disengaged and with a yelp of repulsors the speeder sprang out of the pinnace’s belly and into the frenzied churn of its slipstream.

‘Speeder away.’ Herodion’s voice was as calm as everything about them was mad. They were tumbling, nose over tail and over again, the dark sky and the drab surface of Urdesh switching places in front of them so fast they were almost flickering. Herodion rode it out, letting power bleed into the motive systems, guiding the speeder by feel and instinct as much as through his instrument readings. Their headlong tumble started to slow.

‘Speeder away!’ came Dardanos’ voice, the second craft a rune-tagged dot in Herodion’s vision nearly two kilometres away, and beyond him the heat blaze as the pinnace pulled out of its swoop and burned its way back out of the atmosphere again.

By steady degrees the two pilots eased their headlong plummet into a directed descent. With exquisite lightness of touch, they tuned the speeders’ gravitics, finding the pull of Urdesh’s mass, blending with it, bending it, finding equilibrium and surfing down into the gravity well. Urdesh’s perpetual shroud of volcanic ash sang and sighed against ceramite plate.

The haze beneath them was resolving into shapes, the zigzag tangle of grey-green water and grey-brown land looking almost like a camo pattern rushing up at them. Now they were below the ash layer, the hiss of dust becoming the scream of wind, heat-spots and smoke-smears becoming visible across the land stretched out underneath them as they came low enough to see the signs of war.

A beacon-blink flashed into their overlay, below and between them: the Thunderhawk, a speck in the atmosphere far below, exactly on course and on time. The air was thick now, the features of the coast beneath them growing and sharpening, the dark clumps and tendrils of landweed spreading in from the waterline and criss-crossing the ground like veins. The yellow trajectory projections in their displays were moving now, curving in, meeting over their target.

Not long now.

Platonos
Township P19, Perrochyne hinterlands

At the last possible moment, the Thunderhawk flattened out of its dive and dragged itself into a howling parabolic arc that even the enhanced bodies of the Iron Snakes inside it struggled to handle. Iapetos, over the hammering of his dual hearts and the thrum of blood, scowled at the heat and shock alerts flowering across the fore auspex feed as las-beams and flak shells lacerated the air. The anti-aircraft gunners had been loaded and ready. Hamiskora had touched the mind they were hunting; that touch had been felt. Of course the enemy had known the Thunderhawk was coming.

And so the Librarian went from being their guide to being their bait.

Iapetos gritted his jaw as Cepheas wrenched the gunship away from another flak burst. Let their target feel Hamiskora’s mind circling overhead. Let his guards look up to the scream of engines and the steel-grey speck weaving through the flak bursts and las-beams. Let them think they were winning, denying the assassins the chance to land. Just let them keep looking up.

Platonos
Township P19, Perrochyne hinterlands

The sky over the empty little township looked like a strange bouquet of black smoke-flowers. the hot pinpricks of each shell burst a split second before the cloud puffed into visibility around it. The flak shells were powerful, the lascannon patterns tight. The air over the township was a dangerous place even for an Adeptus Astartes gunship. For now. Atymnes slid his multi-melta back and forward on its traversing rail, layering his armour’s and weapon’s senses in over his own, preparing to burn.

Dardanos, at the speeder’s controls, barely registered what was going on in the sky. From the moment they had dropped from the pinnace he had stripped his thought processes back to barely more than perception-reaction, making tiny fast-twitch adjustments as they rode down the last part of their curve and the speeder’s repulsor fields found the ground. Now the speeder was no longer a projectile in barely controlled fall but a full-fledged weapon. The brown earth and slick black scribbles of landweed blurred underneath them like a spinning zoetrope as they built up yet more speed, their flight undulating with the rises and gullies. Too high and the repulsors would be unable to push against the ground, making them rudderless; too low and they would raise a dust-trail that would give them away before they could strike. Dardanos’ face inside his helm was utterly still and serene – the bright thrill that only combat piloting could bring would not fully overtake him until the fight was almost done.

The waymarker hung in his vision over a distance reading that was shrinking so fast it was a blur. The township buildings came into view. Dardanos blink-zoomed, his vision flickering back and forth between his own and the magnification of the speeder’s instruments. He took in the little crosshatch of streets, the cars and light tanks blocking the road, the copse of anti-aircraft barrels jutting up from beyond them. They grew too large to process properly in the zoom, then they were expanding in his normal vision, then he tilted and jinked the speeder as the first burst of tracer fire whipped past the canopy, and then he was in amongst them.

The gun post that had shot at them had been hidden in a rusted-out water still by a ruined house, and the quick glimpse Atymnes got of it in his sights was enough. The whomph-hiss of the multi-melta was lost in the slipstream but the explosion behind them was clear enough, as the beam vaporised the side of the tank and cooked off the ammunition inside it. Dardanos threw the speeder almost over on its starboard side to thread them through a V-shaped gap in the house wall, then flipped it back onto the level and yawed it savagely to port, sending them careening almost sideways across the street, veering back and accelerating again. Down an alley, fishtailing wildly, the echo of the engines ululating off the high walls for an instant, and then they shot out into the township’s main road.

Two quick thuds and the front of the speeder was spattered scarlet, two enemy caught in the open. The two Space Marines’ eyes flicked back and forth and mapped the main road in less than a second. Dardanos, by razor-reflex rather than conscious thought, picked a gap between two parked SteG-4s and aimed the speeder at it, never once letting up on the throttle.

Atymnes, as unthinking as his pilot, had assessed his targets and ranges and swung the melta around as they sped up again. He was already sending the firing impulse as the trailer-mounted flak-cannon flashed across his sights. By the time the cannon went up in flames he was raking the beam along the side of the SteG it was hitched behind, detonating tyres and blistering and crumpling the armour. Hard rounds spanged off Dardanos’ armour and then the canopy; then they were past the shooter, buildings blurring in front of the melta’s muzzle as they slewed around a groundcar, the briefest snatch of shouting voices before they were gone behind, and now Atymnes swung the melta to the front to point towards the tank that was growing from toy-sized in his gunsight to life-sized right before his eyes. Less than a heartbeat to aim and fire into the ochre blur of the AT-70 as Dardanos gunned the grav field and the speeder vaulted high into the air, the nose jerking upward, Atymnes compensating reflexively and perfectly for the movement, the multi-melta beam lancing down into the tank’s turret ring.

And then they were on the south road, the township a dwindling collection of shapes in their rear pict-feed, anchoring a plume of smoke, now another, now a brief orange flash as the AT-70 blew apart.

Less than fifteen seconds had passed since they had come in from the scrubland and destroyed that first gun nest. At last Dardanos slowed, and expression came to his face: a slow, pleased smile behind the wind-blasted helmet. It went against the grain to not simply open the engines and make himself a dot on the horizon, but a battle plan was a battle plan. So, then, let them get a good look at him cruising off along the highway. Let them get good and angry. Let them all focus on him.

Platonos
Township P19, Perrochyne hinterlands

Herodion opened his speeder’s engines up and came arrowing in across the bay, pluming up a wake behind him like a great albino dragon’s tail. By the time the cliffs were in clear view there were at least three distinct columns, and the fire stabbing upward at the Thunderhawk had noticeably thinned.

That meant Dardanos had made his pass, north to south. Time to slice the town in half the other way.

In a graceful, serpentine double-bank, Herodion pointed the speeder at the break in the shoreline where the land furrowed down and the pumice beach crept out from the shore. The cliff there was barely more than an embankment and they took it without decelerating, Herodion dumping power to the grav plates and jerking the speeder’s nose up to ricochet them into the air as though they had come off a ramp.

For a moment, he kept the power high, drawing out their descent to let their enhanced vision study the town. It matched their maps: a broad main avenue, the four-floor assembly house on the western side, the tangle of tanks and armoured carriers scattered about the square in front of it, the two remaining flak-cannons labouring away from the flatbeds of heavy haulers. Then he let them drop, almost gutting the machine on the rocky upslope as they hurtled into the township’s east side. Sensor mines felt their passage and boomed in rapid succession, but the speeder was already over them and gone and they kicked dirt and shrapnel into empty air.

Just ahead of them a camo-net parted, a multi-laser mounted on a generator cart reaching for them with quick-snapping bursts of light and Kapis, the speeder’s gunner, swung his sights onto it. Dardanos was a brawler, ever eager to burn the enemy nose to nose, the short-range multi-melta his favourite weapon. Herodion and Kapis were cooler of head, better at range, striking with the patience and poise of a spear-fisher, and their speeder mounted a heavy bolter. A perfectly placed three-round burst tore weapon, gunner and trailer apart. The wreckage tossed into the air by the explosion did not have the chance to start falling again before the speeder whipped by underneath.

Like his brother, Herodion was not above using the body of his speeder to harvest the enemy. He caught a mob of them in the open as he came swooping across a rough-gravelled lot scattered with building ruins and grave markers, and accelerated straight into them. Their reflexes were good and their reactions well drilled. One threw himself prone in time to pass under the speeder’s port wing and several more managed to leap out to the sides, but some were still too slow and now Herodion’s speeder too was badged with enemy blood, spread up over the front fairing by the wind. Up ahead in the street was the burning SteG-4 and its ruined gun trailer, but the gap Dardanos had come through was closed – the tanks had started to move. Herodion banked hard around, the speeder’s starboard wing almost scraping the road, and launched them at the front wall of a derelict enginarium shed. Kapis fired again as soon as the speeder was level, sending another quick burst of shells into the SteG-4 that was edging around its crippled sibling.

Power pumped through the grav plates again and for a split instant the speeder seemed to pause as if it were gathering itself before it once again bounced high into the air. They sailed over corrugated metal roofing-sheets and came down hard in the next street, generators wailing and buzzing and kicking up strange whorls of dust in the gravitic churn beneath them.

Suddenly both Space Marines’ helmet displays were flickering with orange-red alert runes as they heard and felt a string of hard, clattering impacts up across their chests and faces. An armoured halftrack parked inside a horseshoe of sandbags and flakboard blocked the intersection ahead of them, and its cupola had managed to bracket the speeder perfectly with four large-calibre heavy stubbers. Recoil juddered and clawed the muzzles out of alignment until the gunner wrestled them back down and onto the speeder again, the stream of bullets never relenting. A round hit Herodion’s helmet collar at the wrong angle and cracked the seal; another fractured one of Kapis’ helmet optics and the right side of his field of vision winked and shivered. He was switching vision to his weapon’s feed when he felt a quick double impact on the inside of his left elbow and his lower left arm flashed with heat and then went numb. He found time for a frustrated curl of his lip before he yanked the bolter around on its rail, but the speeder was already accelerating at the intersection on an angle and the halftrack had moved out of his line of fire. It flashed by to starboard as they passed through the intersection and then Herodion was weaving and yawing, the hab-rows in the town’s north quarter closing about them and vanishing again, the horizon see-sawing as they banked and came speeding back.

The two Iron Snakes had flown together long enough that neither needed to say a word. Herodion dipped a wing and then slewed their tail around to port to bring the halftrack straight into Kapis’ sights. He knew exactly where his gunner would have positioned the bolter, and for the fraction of a second that the speeder was coasting almost side-on towards the halftrack Kapis’ shot was perfectly framed. Two shells punched through the upper cab armour and blew off the roof. Two more passed through the explosion and detonated in the front of the stubber cupola, blasting the gunner back along the road in a shower of hot debris.

Neither warrior bothered to watch it burn: they were already past it and racing for the main road again.

But their enemies were responding now, shrugging off the shock of the attack and responding to it, repositioning their surviving SteG-4s to box their second flak-cannon against the front steps of the assembly hall. The last SteG – the one whose nose Kapis had lacerated with bolt-shells – was just rolling into place as Herodion brought the speeder sweeping around the corner again.

Las-fire began furrowing the air around them almost straight away. Enemy clambering around and over the tanks, bringing their weapons to bear. Brawny brutes in ochre uniforms criss-crossed with hide webbing. The mouth-covering masks attached to their black helmets were the tanned skin of human hands. The Sons of Sek.

Herodion saw the shell-battered SteG’s turret begin to traverse and reflexively goosed the grav field, setting the speeder rocking and jinking as they closed. SteG-4s relied on relatively clumsy manual aiming but the gunner was well trained: Herodion saw tracer shots flash past in front as the gunner led them and then a string of loud hits cracked home down the speeder’s side. The ceramite cowling cracked and wobbled, a round smashed into Kapis’ left pauldron and skated upward to leave a groove up the side of his helmet, and two more struck the tail assembly. Straight away the note of the engines changed and alert banners unfurled across Herodion’s vision. Kapis’ answering burst hammered against the SteG’s front and two shells burst against its turret, skewing it around and silencing the cannon. Herodion sent another surge through the plates and vaulted them over the corner of a dilapidated feedmarket and out of sight.

‘Dardanos will never let us hear the end of this,’ Kapis observed levelly. The wound in his elbow had not risen above a throb, and movement was back in his fingers – his enhanced metabolism and armour systems rallying to the task. The dead optic in his helmet was obnoxious, but he would live with it. At home on the assault-mazes on the moon Karybdis, Iapetos had sealed his eyes shut with wax and made him gun for hours-long drills using nothing but the speeder’s senses.

‘Fling yourself on the kill, brother, just fling yourself on the kill!’ Herodion retorted in a fair imitation of Dardanos’ voice, swinging the speeder’s nose back and forth as they swerved in and out of the town’s south-eastern outbuildings. ‘I read him as having turned and coming back on another vector, but–’

They shot between two weed silos and Herodion drove the speeder’s nose down, almost burying it in the cracked tarmac as the krak missile screamed over their heads, close enough that their tail fin sliced through its exhaust trail. They had looped almost back around to the main through-road again; the foxhole ahead of them had been dug to cover the AT-70 that Atymnes’ multi-melta had wrecked. Cursing, Herodion jumped the speeder forward, nose still pointing downward and Kapis taking aim, and then the port engine pod blew out in a coughing explosion as the damage from the SteG’s cannon finally caught up with it. The speeder jerked just enough for Kapis’ burst to plough up the far side of the foxhole and detonate in the ground.

Las-fire hammered them, disciplined and powerful shots that scorched Herodion’s faceplate black and overloaded his helmet optics for a moment with a lucky shot. A grenade bounced off the cowling and exploded between them, and Herodion actually felt his helmet shift on its damaged seal. Behind the line of las shooters the heavy team had another krak missile in the tube.

Herodion stopped fighting the controls and let the bucking speeder have its head, letting it slide in the air and spin as it wanted, letting the surviving engine take a gulp of power to accelerate the spin even more. Walls, road, sky blurred as the speeder whirled like a puck until Herodion, on pure instinct, threw power into the inertial locks and then, having made three complete turns in twice their own length, they careened towards the foxhole port-side on.

This time Kapis compensated seamlessly for the movement, and the range was barely a stone’s toss. The heavy bolter spoke, a roar like the stuttering rev of a heavy promethium engine, and the foxhole and its occupants disappeared in a welter of flashing shell bursts and flying dirt.

‘I’m damned if I’m going to finish my half of the strike on his charity,’ Herodion finished as he evened them out and built up their speed again, juggling the engine-thrust and grav-cushion to keep them on a straight heading. They flashed across the through-road yet another time – a halftrack coming down it had time to see them and send a desperate burst of stub-fire through where they had been two seconds ago – and then they were in the maze of silos on its other side.

‘We saw it before on the jump over that roof just this side of the assembly house,’ Kapis said. They swung into a litter-choked laneway, surprising the two enemy militia at the far end. One managed to leap back into cover; the other got punched back and exploded by a single precise bolt-shell. ‘Same again? The workings are exposed, just one shell will do it.’

Herodion lifted them up two metres and the surviving trooper’s autogun burst passed under them. They left him in their dust as both concentrated on their next run at the clump of armour and flak-guns.

The Sons were good; they had anticipated the second pass. The SteG turrets were already pointing their way, and the Sons crouching on the hall steps had unlimbered more missile tubes. Exhaust trails were already curving towards them.

Gritting his teeth, Herodion flipped the speeder from one wing to the other, viffing and jinking, letting the instability from the mismatched engines shape his evasion.

A missile clipped the corner of the cowling and clanged off the port wing tip before it detonated behind them. Herodion gave a pained grunt.

‘More than just one shell, please,’ he said, and shunted everything into the grav plates, driving them up into the air like a kicked ball. Turret fire from the SteGs reached out for them, aimed with deadly skill, and they went sailing past the front of the assembly house with Kapis’ pauldron cracked in half, two new holes in their tail fin and a line of centimetre-deep pockmarks the length of the chassis. And while the enemy guns were punching at them, Kapis looked through his weapon’s eye to the flak-cannon in its little pen of tank hulls, its bundle of barrels still pumping shells skyward.

He only saw it for a moment, but a moment was more than enough.

Platonos
Township P19, Perrochyne hinterlands

The flak bursts fell silent and the threat marker on the cockpit display winked out. Cepheas tilted the Thunderhawk downward and descended to join the hunt.

The SteG-4s that had clustered around the cannons to protect them now found that they were huddled together inside a kill-zone. Their engines revved, their infantry cover scattered, smoke puffed from their exhausts.

Then the lascannons on the wings of the diving gunship peeled the lead tank open, scribbling a molten groove down its length and bursting its back hatches in a dirty orange fireball as the fuel and magazines touched off. The bolter-battered one managed to roll a couple of metres forward before a three-second laser burn came down through its turret, left the remains of the gunner fused to his firing grips, and burned out through the tank’s floor, severing its drive shaft and boring a bubbling hole in the road beneath. The third tank got a brief reprieve as Cepheas took the Thunderhawk out of its dive and into a corkscrewing descent centred on the assembly house roof. It skidded into an ungainly U-turn across the width of the through-road, reversing to try to bring the descending ship within the elevation of its little turret cannon. Cepheas ignored it while he coasted in on his turbofans, ramp down, and then when the rest of Platonos Squad had piled out and onto the roof of the hall he let the ship drift forward over the ridge and gutted the tank with a surgical double lascannon burst.

‘Always in the biggest buildings,’ Iapetos observed as the Thunderhawk rose up and away to strafe whatever remnants it could find. ‘Vanity.’

‘No point in hiding,’ Hamiskora said. ‘He knows we’ll find him.’ He had donned his helmet, Iron Snake grey crested in Librarius blue, the psychic hood framing the helmet like a baroque collar. He looked down. Between his armoured boots were two rough, black scorch marks, the prints of oversized bare feet. The marks his projection had left while he was still riding the high atmosphere overhead.

Hamiskora nodded in satisfaction and swung his force axe down and again, slashing an X into the rooftop. A quick stamp broke the opening a little wider. Metal groaned and tore, and Hamiskora dropped downward and vanished from sight.

Platonos
Township P19, Perrochyne hinterlands

The sensation was a little like gathering in a great whooping breath then releasing it in a blasting war-shout. Like bending a bow forged of spring steel, holding it until his arms shook and then letting it leap loose from between his hands.

Hamiskora came down through the ceiling of the long, gloomy garret dormitory, with half a dozen Sons of Sek hammering at him with heavy-calibre slugs before he had hit the floor. The warp-charge compressed inside him frothed and flared against the shots, rounds turning to dust and slag until he released it – not just released but propelled it in a hard blue-white shockwave that tumbled the Sons backward, blinded, choking as if their throats had filled with seawater, exposed skin blistering. Rickety, long-empty bunk beds toppled and skidded away or simply flew apart; the threadbare seaweed matting on the floor shredded in the blast and filled the air with whirling scraps.

Below him, Hamiskora felt an answering rumble of power, like the heavy churn of machinery overlaid with a thin screech of mental static. It shaped itself into a word he couldn’t quite grasp, and then fell silent.

He could not let that distract him. He tasted the lekt’s mind and hunted for its location, charging forward out of the circle, floor creaking and cracking under his weight, aiming for the Sons who had been furthest away from his blast and were recovering the fastest. His axe made a crackling circle as he whirled it over his head, and two Sons who had been about to fire fell instead, their skulls hewn off from the cheekbones up.

Two bolt-shells from Iapetos whipped by him and detonated just outside the door, cutting off a burst of fire from the support weapon that had sat on a tripod at the top of the stairs. The garret was lighting up with gunfire as more Iron Snakes dropped through the roof and more Sons clambered up from below. Adrastes and Idas, last to descend, crashed straight through the weakened floor and vanished into the house’s lower levels. The rest of them dropped into defensive crouches, pauldrons up to half-cover their faceplates against the blizzard of heavy-cored hard rounds. Chips of grey ceramite pinged off the walls along with ricocheting bullets.

Hamiskora reached into himself, feeling for the slow leak of strange power that never stopped trickling into the back of his mind. He grasped the wriggling thread with his thoughts, dragged it up through himself and pushed it out into reality. It grew out of his hand as a bright haze and then erupted into the air, looking now like a writhing sea-snake, now like lightning jagging through storm clouds. It transfixed one Son after another, throwing them back into the corners of the room to convulse and die in the tangles of broken beds and tables.

‘Alright,’ Iapetos growled over the vox. ‘Let’s not let them do that again.’ The Sons’ slugthrowers were Urdeshi close-assault guns, U-90s or U-1010s, probably barely cold from the forge when they had been handed out to the lekt’s entourage. Even that short exchange had been enough to leave the squad’s armour chipped and chewed. They couldn’t afford complacency about wading into fire.

There was a boom of a grenade beneath them, a swift triple-burst of bolt-shells, then another.

‘Brothers below,’ Iapetos said into the vox as he, Panagis and Alekon followed Hamiskora towards the stairs. Halfway there Alekon’s foot broke through the floor, and Iapetos heard his brother’s teeth grinding in frustration over the vox-band as he worked to loosen it. ‘Call in.’

‘Two levels below you,’ Idas replied. ‘Got stuck in a wall, out now. Resistance doesn’t seem organised. Their order is good but they’re only shooting to cover their retreat.’

‘Three levels,’ Adrastes said. ‘Light resistance, militia on the lower floors not Sons. Structure is very weak here, watch it as you come down or you’ll fall right through into the basement. But I don’t think it’ll even slow my shots down.’ Adrastes carried a plasma gun, one of the Phratry’s oldest heirloom weapons. ‘If the Brother-Epistolary can direct my aim I might be able to–’

‘No,’ Hamiskora voxed as he found the assembly house’s central stair and started down it. ‘No target yet. Continue the downward sweep.’ The prey was hiding. No more retorts or challenges were coming from below. Now there was just a diffusion, the lekt letting his aura drift outward into a whisper-haze that had already enveloped the lower floors. Any part of that shifting layer of invisible colours could be the enemy’s actual mind. He was cunning.

‘Dardanos,’ the Librarian voxed. ‘Herodion. Cepheas. He’s masking. Might be fleeing. Close on us and catch up anything that comes out onto the street.’

Two Sons crewing a drum-fed grenade launcher opened up from the landing below him. Hamiskora cooked one’s brain with a glance but not before a blast took a bite out of the edge of his left pauldron and the plate over his left knee was cracked from side to side. The Librarian started down after the second Son, who was back-pedalling off the stairs and through a doorway, when Iapetos stopped him.

‘No you don’t. You’re the hunter here, we’re your guard. I’ll be the one to walk into their damned gunsights, not you. Primary file,’ he announced to the rest of the squad as he pushed past the Librarian, and they turned onto the next flight down. ‘Hamiskora second. Panagis, keep our stern cl–’

Sound stopped. Iapetos felt the silence pressing in as a physical force. He tried to finish his order but couldn’t even hear the sound of his own voice in his helmet. All the colours faded from his vision. Numbness swallowed his fingers and feet, and settled in on his tongue. Something passed through Iapetos’ senses, something he couldn’t describe.

The corner of his helmet display unspooled a string of alert runes from Hamiskora’s armour feeds, but whatever punishment that event had done to the Librarian it hadn’t stopped him. Iapetos felt a clang as Hamiskora clouted his shoulder with the haft of his force axe.

‘He’s making his break. Move!’

Platonos
Township P19, Perrochyne hinterlands

After the Thunderhawk had descended, Platonos Squad’s two speeders had fallen into their standard light-urban hunting pattern while they awaited their next order. Herodion went high, skimming the rooftops, letting himself be seen, drawing up fire from the ground, while Dardanos kept pace in a mad zigzag path between the buildings themselves. Atymnes’ multi-melta incinerated whatever was throwing fire up at Herodion’s speeder, while Kapis’ heavy bolter bombarded anything he spotted threatening Dardanos.

Between them, they had torched the two remaining halftracks and gutted a squat depot-house on the northern outskirts, where half a dozen enemy had thought to set up a lascannon cart to shoot back down the through-road. Hamiskora’s call brought them speeding down the through-road together, Dardanos in the lead and Herodion riding his wake high and to starboard. Kapis was already shooting, his bursts of shells driving back the enemy who’d come spilling down the assembly house’s front steps.

Even under such heavy fire the Sons kept their heads. Instead of trying to run back into the building and leaving themselves bunched up and ready for Dardanos’ kill, they scattered across the steps and made for cover among the crippled tanks and flak-cannons down on the street. Dardanos sent his speeder leaping at them, skating up the steps. A figure, smaller and lighter than the muscular Sons of Sek, was standing in the doorway and Atymnes swung the melta to bear on it, firing command already cued.

Then the colours faded, the landscape around them going from Urdeshi drab to surreal pearlescent greys, outlines seeming to sharpen as tones faded. Sounds became distant and muddy. Suddenly the symbols on the speeder’s consoles seemed impossibly hard to understand, their functions hard to remember. Dardanos moved his jaw, trying to make his voice work, but it didn’t.

In their vox, their ears and their minds the four Iron Snakes aboard the speeders heard something. None of them quite knew what it was, and none of them would quite remember the same thing. Time seemed to slow for a moment…

…and then crashed back in on them, colour and noise dazzling and shattering, Dardanos dragging the speeder’s nose up and catapulting them clear of the steps even as he retched in his helmet, Atymnes raking up the side of the building with a jittering melta burst that hit no one, buildings dropping away and then bulging up at them as the speeder arced over and down, Dardanos tilting and pivoting and springing away from a wall they had been about to plough through, the speeder rolling over and over in the air, bouncing off an invisible burst of power to its grav plates as Dardanos fought to keep them from smashing flat against that wall, now this roof, now that stretch of road that passed close enough as they came in upside down that Atymnes could see the texture of the paving before they flipped right-side up and the tip of the tail fin shrieked off the road surface. Above them the second speeder slewed back and forth in gradually stabilising loops as Herodion restored what control he could.

A sonic boom rumbled over the town from above. Cepheas’ reflexes had taken over and kicked the Thunderhawk into the fastest acceleration it could manage.

‘Wwwwe-e-eh…’ Dardanos began, then scowled and bit the sides of his tongue, licked his teeth and his lips, trying to get control of his mouth again. ‘We… got chased offffthhh… off the main road. Cepheas has withdrawn high. Front of the building unsecured, give us…’ He blinked hard, looked around to orient himself. Grey-brown rooftops scudded by underneath, and scrubland was opening out ahead of him. ‘Nine seconds. Herodion, confirm nine seconds.’

‘Come about, do what you can,’ came Iapetos’ voice, ‘but I thi…’ The vox fuzzed out for a moment, and Dardanos blinked at a maddening whine across the squad frequency that he had never heard a vox make before. ‘…end here.’

Whatever Iapetos had been trying to say, ‘end here’ was clear enough. Grim-faced, Dardanos slewed the speeder around.

Platonos
Township P19, Perrochyne hinterlands

Braced against the wall of the stairwell, Hamiskora rode the surge for as long as he could – three heartbeats, while his inner ear screamed, his nostrils filled with the smell of burning and his joints, bone and armour, seemed at once to lock and turn strengthless. A dry, hoarse human voice spoke a word into his earpiece but he couldn’t make out what it was.

Then he felt his psychic hood break the swell like the prow of a boat breaching a wave, and slammed a tide of power into it that fractured that frozen, toxic moment and let him move again. He shouted a word of his own – Ithaka! – back into the face of it, and his counter-surge went churning back across the phantom waters between his mind and the lekt’s, rippling out into reality enough to send a wave of creaking, splintering stresses through the building and staggering the Sons who had taken up positions between them.

Iapetos had ordered him to hold back, but Iapetos had been right in the path of the psykers’ exchange. He would be dazed for seconds yet and Hamiskora couldn’t waste the chance. He demolished the bannister beside him with a kick, stepped through it and dropped, stepped back and dropped again, rockcrete cracking and crumbling under his boots at each landing. Then he was striding off the stairs into the dusty, column-lined forehall, dirty sunlight trickling in between the window-slats, and there he was. The enemy, standing in the broad main doorway, looking back at him.

The lekt was no Son of Sek but he carried the Anarch’s mark in another way, remade just as the Sons were on their brutal training fields. Hamiskora saw it as the little man spun to face him. The enemy’s serfs wore the badge of a hand covering their mouths. The Sons of Sek repeated the design in human leather. The lekt wore the handprint on his skin, drawn in gnarled and runnelled scar tissue, as though a red-hot hand had once pressed his lips shut for silence.

Hamiskora’s vision narrowed to the red-black tunnel of a predator closing for the final kill. Blue-white psyker flame splashed from his axe-head and wrapped around him as he launched himself forward.

The disfigured mouth opened, jagged from where it had been fused shut by the branding and then cut open again. It began to shape a word.

Hamiskora struck the floor with his axe-head as he ran. With an ear-numbing crack the air split and a sinuous white seam opened in it between the charging Space Marine and his enemy. Hamiskora heard the lekt’s voice, reedy and trembling, then suddenly bursting with terrifying power. His seam of light faltered, began to dissipate, as the sound of the word hung in the air and then seemed to suck back in on itself and implode. There was a sense of increasing, invisible pressure as if two powerful repelling magnets were being forced closer and closer, and then the tension snapped. Another crack echoed through the hall and the detonation broke the momentum of Hamiskora’s charge, skidding his feet out from under him and sending him staggering backwards. The lekt went flying in the other direction, right over the steps, sprawling onto the road. The back of his helmet smacked into the road with a crack that carried to the assembly house doors.

Hamiskora closed on him like a shark cutting through shallows, Iapetos on one side of him and Adrastes on the other. The sergeant had dismounted a sea-lance from the clamp on his pack – not one of the worm-hunting weapons most of the Phratry favoured, long, lean, barbed and elegant, but one made in the style of the south-western reaches where the boy Iapetos had learned to hunt. Shorter, thicker in the haft, the spatulate head almost as much halberd as lance, it was made to eviscerate an Ithakan karchalid as it leapt out of an onrushing wave. Iapetos’ version was so heavy that even a Space Marine needed to consciously accommodate its heft. Behind him, Adrastes had the plasma gun cycled up to maximum power, burning wisps leaking from the muzzle and leaving a spitting trail in the air as he ran.

The door was not quite wide enough for two Space Marines side by side, but Iapetos and Hamiskora solved that by each taking half a metre out of the lintel and wall when they crashed through it. They each left a single boot-print stamped into the metal-grilled top step before they had bounded down towards the little limp form below them.

Engine gunning, the groundcar came racing around the pack of dead tanks the speeders had left. It was a civilian model, a kind they had seen all across Urdesh, mostly in rusting piles in ruined towns, a stretched, ungainly thing, with a long, off-white snout behind a leering steel grille, six slick tyres squealing as it bore down on them. It reached the lekt moments before the Space Marines did, blocking their view of him, all of its doors flying open.

A hellgun round pocked Iapetos’ helmet almost dead between his eyes, and a burst from a U-1010 gouged Hamiskora’s breastplate and pauldron. The Sons were dropping out of the open doors and into firing positions, and in the limousine’s back seat the wide barrel of a rocket tube sniffed for a target. Iapetos just had time to yell a warning before the missile tore past him. Adrastes shifted his footing and darted to his right, but the missile was smart enough to swerve with him and a second later it slammed into his belly, the heavy detonation stopping his rush so hard that his own reflexes and his armour’s systems could not compensate. Damage flaring in his nerve endings and his helmet display, he collapsed to his knees and lurched over onto his side. Iapetos lengthened his stride. He could see movement beyond the limousine, the Sons trying to drag the lekt to safety.

Half a dozen heavy bolter shells burst the limousine open all down its length, caving in the roof, blasting out the windows and doors, making a flaming crater of the long engine compartment. A second later Herodion’s speeder shot past overhead, as simultaneously the hellish blast of Atymnes’ multi-melta turned the back half of the limousine to slag. The second speeder flashed past through the smoke of the wreck as the two warriors ran forward again. Iapetos turned as he went, scanning for more enemies. Hamiskora saw nothing but the lekt, and ploughed straight through the burning wreck to make his kill.

Two Sons of Sek crouched over the limp little figure, and when Hamiskora came out of the fire they swung around into the attack without missing a beat. One drove a heavy bayonet at the groin seam of the Epistolary’s armour, wedging the point in place and pumping las-fire into the join, and the other raised a fat-barrelled hard-round pistol to Hamiskora’s face. The Son made it most of the way, but by the time his hand was in firing position his arm finished in a cauterised stump just below the elbow, and the return stroke of the axe split him open from crown of helmet to breastbone. The other Son left his gun wedged in place in Hamiskora’s armour and rolled away, grabbing for his own sidearm, but as he landed on his back with the pistol in his hand Iapetos stepped around the burning car and staked him to the road with a brutal overarm lance-cast. The Son thrashed and coughed, pawed at the lance as though he thought he could pull it loose, and with the last of his strength went to raise his pistol. Iapetos stamped his boot down and crushed gun, hand and forearm flat. The Son fell still.

The lekt was still alive. His eyes were unfocused but moving, and his scarred mouth was working. As Hamiskora turned to him he arched convulsively against the road and flopped flat again. He croaked out a sound that ricocheted up and down the street as though there were a hundred more of him whispering it in the air.

Hamiskora bent down. His heavy fingers worked with odd delicacy as he unfastened the lekt’s helmet and lifted it clear. There was no blood on the helmet’s interior but the damage was obvious.

‘Have we churned his brain too much?’ Iapetos asked.

‘There is always something left,’ Hamiskora said. He felt a grating pain at the top of his leg, and looked down. The hellgun was still embedded in his armour joint by the bayonet tip. He tugged it out, catching the brief scent of his own scorched flesh, and tossed it away.

‘Good.’ Iapetos yanked the sea-lance out of the dead Son’s chest, spun it once in his hand and then decapitated the lekt with an easy backhanded swipe.

‘Get what you can,’ he said, and walked away.

Platonos
Township P19, Perrochyne hinterlands

Idas was the one who had found the machinery.

‘A lucky fall,’ he said, pointing up at the ragged hole in the ceiling of the assembly house’s main hall. He had fought free of the wreckage from his first fall through the building, then kicked his way through another wall which had turned out to be an important one. The floor had given way under him a second time and he had come crashing down through the hall ceiling onto… this.

‘Whatever this is,’ said Iapetos, completing the thought aloud. He looked around at the odd, bulbous devices sitting in a semicircle of pallets, connected by snaking bundles of cables. He could see a pallet-truck pushed in under one ungainly metal frame, and there was a cargo-6 backed up to the rear doors of the hall, its engine and exhaust still warm. Whatever it had been for, the installation clearly hadn’t been intended as permanent.

It was all dead, as far as Iapetos could tell. Pushed to their keenest, his auto-senses still couldn’t detect even a whisper of motion or a hint of heat. There seemed to be no power source for them at all.

He turned back to the largest pallet, in the centre of the semicircle. The metal cradle standing on it had held what looked like long pieces of stone, uneven and pitted like meteorites, pierced through and through with power cables and metal spikes. The cables strung through them connected them to the cradle and the machinery beneath it, or what was left of it. Idas had landed square on the thing, shattering it beyond recognition. When Iapetos knelt and peered at the fragments he thought he could see the faintest of blue highlights glittering in there where the drab grey-black rock had splintered.

‘If it’s an explosive, we’re lucky we didn’t trigger it,’ Panagis said. ‘You’d expect a dead man’s switch in–’

‘It isn’t,’ Hamiskora interrupted, stalking into the hall with his helmet in one hand and the lekt’s severed head in the other. The top of the skull was broken open, a cavity where its contents had been. Hamiskora’s mouth and chin were smeared with blood and brain.

‘Not a weapon, not a bomb. A tool.’ The Epistolary stirred some of the broken stone with his foot, and then tossed the wrecked head down and crushed it into the debris with a single stamp. ‘It was almost ready for full use. We are blessed to have got here when we did.’

‘A tool for what?’ Iapetos asked, and tilted his head towards the red-and-white scramble that Hamiskora’s boot had left. ‘When was he going to use it? And for what? Can you get anything out of this machine, or–’

Hamiskora was shaking his head.

‘This wasn’t a normal mind,’ he said. ‘It was powerful. Poisonous. And bound. The Anarch Sek stamps his own mark hard onto his psykers. Makes their mind-voices into echoes of his own.’

‘The voice that drowns out all others,’ Idas murmured.

‘So they call him,’ Hamiskora agreed. ‘Surface sensations, recent memories, there are ways I can fortify myself to take them in safely. But to dive deeper…’

‘The machine, though,’ Iapetos persisted. ‘The machine can’t have had thoughts. I know you can sniff things out. You read the wreck of that atmospheric hopper at the Toloppan lift ports, remember?’

‘Look,’ Hamiskora said, unclamping his force axe from the side of his pack and pointing it down into the smashed machine. ‘The traces. See them?’ He tilted his axe this way and that to catch the light until Iapetos caught on to what he meant.

‘Not that simple. This is no machine-corpse like the hopper was. This was made like my axe. My hood.’

‘This was a machine for that lekt to talk to?’ Idas asked. ‘Or a machine to talk to him?’

‘To talk through,’ Hamiskora corrected, ‘or to talk through him. And while I still have scraps of his mind inside mine, the risk is intolerable. For you as much as me.’

‘Alright,’ Iapetos growled. ‘Surface sensations, you said. Recent memories. What can we learn?’

‘This wasn’t home. They’d stopped here to test and tune the machinery. It was wedded to this particular lekt. There’s a sense of great purpose about it. The combination of man and machine were going to be part of some kind of work. The weight of the Anarch is a crushing presence surrounding the device. Whatever it was to be used for is intimately associated with him. And with her.’

‘Her?’

‘There are after-images from his mind, bound into that sense of work and purpose. A rising shape like a mountain, white and grey in front of it…’ He shook his head. ‘But this thing, here. His mind’s eye saw it as an aquila, defaced, made of green light and bound about with vines. I believe I’m seeing his conception of her. Vivid. Recent.’ Hamiskora looked up from the wreckage.

‘I think they know,’ he said. ‘I do not know what they plan to do about it, but I think they know that she has come out of her place of safety. They know the Saint is on the move.’

Erasmos
Barenzho Straits

The submersible was an old harvester model converted for the war, which gave away how old she was. When she had been new, she had roamed back and forth across the bottom of the channels, with the swathers on her bow slashing and raking in the deep-growing seaweeds the flatboats couldn’t reach. She’d been built tough, to bull her way through forests of clinging tendrils and cable-like stems, and to withstand crews of grouchy civilian workers who considered that dents in her hull were someone else’s problem. She’d been made tougher in the war, with bolted-on armour, jerry-built redundant systems and whatever weapons could be spared lashed on where the swathers had been, but she was showing her age and showing her wear. It was obvious, looking around the flickering lights at her gloomy and rusted interior, why she had been chosen for this voyage. Her last.

‘How far to go?’ Sergeant Symeon shouted. He was almost behind the co-pilot’s shoulder, but the hammering of the sub’s old promethium engine filled the space. The man jumped as though Symeon had stuck a knife through the back of his seat, and called back over his shoulder.

‘Speak up, man,’ Symeon said. He could adjust the gain on his vox, but he shouldn’t have to. There was such a thing as respect. He glared at the co-pilot as he shrugged off his harness and twisted about in his seat.

‘We’re just moving out of the marked safe zone now, sir,’ he called back over the noise. ‘We’re into contested water as of the next few minutes. Marked amber for the next seven, eight klicks or so, red-minor after that. We should…’ The man’s mouth twisted. ‘We should meet their pickets by the time we’re through to red-major. We’ll… you’ll be down by the time we’re at vermilion.’

Symeon could see the maps stuffed into an ungainly wad wedged between two of the piloting consoles, the colours marking the layered danger zones as they got closer and closer to the northern shore and the foot of Old Ourezhad. Their route was scored on it in a thick black line, calculated to mimic the tentative nosings of a scout sub testing whether the Archenemy’s maritime pickets were weakening as the fighting in Ghereppan intensified. Symeon had helped the tacticians plot the route out.

Symeon made some quick calculations. They had made better time than he had expected. The mission proper would begin soon. The thought neither excited nor frightened him. His thoughts were simply of distances and times, contingencies and instructions.

‘You should begin looking to your gear,’ he told the man, and got a blank stare in return. ‘Your extraction. One to drive while the other two’ – he motioned behind them to where the third member of the crew was tending the cranky engine at the rear of the long compartment – ‘keep us running.’ The man kept staring at him, his expression odd, and Symeon felt his face fall into a glower that his faceplate tactfully kept hidden. Hadn’t these people drilled for the next stage?

‘Sir?’

Symeon barely heard the voice over the engine. He didn’t turn around until Anysios tactfully muttered, ‘Behind you,’ into the vox-channel. He turned with slow care, conscious that he could knock a human sprawling with an accidental clip of an elbow or shoulder.

It was the engineer, a lean, careworn woman whose sweaty grey hair leaked out from under a labourer’s cap. Her callused hands worked against one another as she looked up at the sergeant, her expression as strange as her crewmate’s. Symeon couldn’t read it.

‘What is it? You need to be by the engine, unless you’re getting ready for contact.’ Why did she need to be told this? He should be free to focus on what would happen when the enemy heard the clatter of their engine, as they surely must have already. His two rows of Iron Snakes, nine impassive steel-grey faceplates, nine pairs of red-tinted helmet optics, watched the woman flinch and gulp. Her knuckles were white as her hands crushed each other’s fingers.

‘My name,’ she said. ‘My name is Lyass. Sir, when you are… done, when you…’ She gulped again and dropped her eyes. ‘When we are gone, I wonder, sir, would you… will you remember it? At… at least for a little while?’

‘And my name is Zhiery,’ the co-pilot said, and looked over to the pilot seat. But the man there just scowled, scrubbed a hand angrily across his eyes and would not speak.

‘I know we’re not worthy to ask it, sir,’ Lyass went on, ‘but we are asking you to do us just that little kindness. Just remember our names a little while.’ With that, whatever courage had allowed her to come up and speak seemed to drop out of her. Her shoulders sagged and she backed away between the two rows of power-armoured shins and knees, back towards the engine compartment.

‘We’re making good time,’ Symeon told his squad. He was using the helmet vox, and the humans couldn’t hear him. ‘So non-negligible chances of contact start now. The further into the red zones, the harder the contact will be, as I briefed you. If we’re beyond red-major with nothing, look to your maps and speak out if you think we’re at a good point for an unforced drop. Oh, and if any of you can explain that idiocy with those crew members just now, I shall thank you for it. You can recite it in your declaration of deeds when we rejoin the Phratry. I might even mention you in mine.’

The squad remained impassive. Power armour obscured all but the most deliberate body motions, so there was no turning of heads, shifting of bodies, shuffling of feet. There was not even the undercurrent of half-verbalised murmurs, hums and chuckling that the Iron Snakes used to fill the space that body language normally had in letting each of them read the mood of the group. It was only Anysios who actually spoke.

‘They’re on their way to die, brother-sergeant,’ he said.

‘We are all on our way to die,’ Symeon told him, rather more snappishly than he had meant. ‘Here, or elsewhere on this world, or on another world. We are all on our way to a battle we may not survive. We should live every moment of our lives in that knowledge. They are being lax.’

‘I wasn’t clear,’ Anysios’ voice came back. ‘We inspected this vessel when we planned the mission. We examined every part of it. We looked at the saviour pods, port and starboard both.’ Anysios waited just a beat, and said, ‘Look at them again, brother-sergeant.’

Symeon took three sidling steps down the aisle, on hunched legs so that his helmet and pauldrons wouldn’t clang against the hull. It would be a few kilometres yet before it was time to start making those sorts of noises. He reached the waist of the craft, where the quick-slam hatches would let the crew scramble into the coffin-like saviour pods with their buoys and compression-change valves. He stopped there, blinking, wondering how he had missed it when they boarded. He reached out and gripped the metal bar that had been fixed over the hatch’s opening mechanism, but it was welded fast. The job had obviously been rushed, but it was effective. He manoeuvred himself around in the cramped space and looked at the other pod hatch. It was fixed shut as well.

He briefly wondered why they hadn’t simply stripped the pods off the sub entirely… but no, it had to look right. If the pods were gone the enemy might decide to go searching for them.

He pushed his way back up the aisle rather more gracelessly than he had come down it and dropped a heavy gauntlet onto the back of the co-pilot’s seat. The man just hunched and shivered, as though he were expecting a blow to fall.

‘Well?’ he said. His voice boomed through his helmet grille. ‘You obviously know what’s going on here. Explain.’

‘Northside scratch company!’ the man barked, as though the words were being jerked out of him on a string. ‘Beresh City, north island, Scutala Reach! Liberated this invasion by the Tenth Urdeshi Storm Troops, Fourth Urdeshi Siegers, Roane Deepers and the grace of the Emperor, praise Him! All northside scratch companies were judged by Commissariat court, sir. W-we were found guilty of military and spiritual treason by cause of cowardice and sloth. Decimated at the scene of trial, sir, and all survivors sentenced to penal legions.’

‘All of you? All three?’ Symeon closed his eyes. It made sense now.

‘Lyass and myself, sir. The pilot, he hasn’t said his name. He’s here from some court-martial over on the Cowden Ash coast.’ The pilot said nothing, but scowled all the more ferociously and hunched over his controls.

‘So you’re not here to carry us into the red zone and get extracted after we go on,’ Symeon said. ‘You were condemned and sent here to deliver us and then drown.’

‘The enemy has to think this is an ill-advised attempt at scouting,’ Anysios put in over the vox. ‘So it’s important that they find a dead crew inside the sub if they come looking after they sink it. It makes it convincing.’ His tone was as expressionless as his faceplate. ‘You’ve been around the Guard command, brother-sergeant. You know how they think.’

Symeon didn’t answer. He stayed glaring down at Zhiery.

‘Cowardice and sloth,’ he said. ‘Well?’

‘We fought in the scratch companies while the Reach was held by the Archenemy, sir,’ Zhiery said. His voice was still hoarse but it was no longer cracking with emotion. ‘We, Lyass and I, we fought together, in the same cell. We killed… we killed many enemies, sir, but the Commissariat court ruled that we could not prove we had killed enough.’

‘How did they ask you to prove that?’ Symeon demanded.

‘They did not see us as fit to know their methods, sir,’ Zhiery said, and paused to squint at the maps and adjust their course. ‘But they announced that we had fallen short of what the Emperor demanded of us, and exacted the penalty.’ He shivered again, and tried to drop his voice to a conspiratorial whisper. The noise of the engine wouldn’t let him, and he raised it again. ‘I don’t ask for myself, sir, but Lyass… she’s frightened of drowning, she wouldn’t admit it to you, but… perhaps when we are hit, one of you, before you move on…? With a blade, sir, I understand you must conserve your shots…’ When Symeon sat down again without answering Zhiery slumped in his seat, but his hands kept working at the controls.

‘That’s why they’re asking you to remember their names,’ Anysios said over the link. ‘We deal with mortality with our declarations of deeds. All they want is–’

‘Thank you, but I understand,’ said Symeon, and that was that for a little while.

Erasmos
Barenzho Straits

The contact came as red-minor shaded into red-major, and it was more or less what Symeon had expected. Zhiery just had time to shout ‘I think I see–’ and then there was a deafening crunching clang from the rear of the sub and the entire hull jolted as though it had been shocked out of sleep. The Iron Snakes steadied themselves effortlessly; the human crew fought for control as the sub creaked and tilted through an involuntary turn. Water began spraying through two split seams, then a third, wetting the Snakes’ armour. In moments there was enough to start puddling on the sub’s floor.

‘All internal. Acknowledge.’ Out of consideration for the doomed humans in the cabin with them, Symeon used the vox, and listened to his squad chime in to confirm that they had switched to internal breathing. Now it was just a matter of waiting.

There was another ear-splitting clang. The top of the cabin pulsed a dull red, shimmering in preysight, and the air temperature jumped. Melta warhead, Symeon thought. The pickets were well equipped. The objective was just as important as they suspected.

The air was dirty with promethium smoke now, and ugly grinding sounds were coming from behind the engine partition. They changed note every so often as Lyass fought to keep it running with whatever skill she possessed. Both pilots were working their controls. Symeon could see sweat from Zhiery’s palms slicking the panels under his hands.

The sub rolled ninety degrees and then back onto her keel again, and rocked in the water like a screw being worked into a cork. Symeon heard a despairing yell from the engine compartment. The engine gave a metallic shriek in response and then rattled almost to a halt. Every few seconds it coughed into half-life and died again. The lights in the cabin started to dim to a dirty yellow. Only one of the red emergency backups seemed to be working.

There were two rapid clangs against the hull – small ordnance, well back. The enemy had hit the external propellers, and quite precisely by the sound. Symeon could no longer feel a vibration through the hull. They were crippled and sinking. Just as planned.

‘Ready yourselves,’ he said, as another seam gave way. There was already enough water in the little cabin to swirl around the Space Marines’ ankles. There was a crack of electricity as one of the control panels shorted out.

‘How far down are we?’ Symeon said over Zhiery’s shoulder. The man was no longer listening. His face was contorted and although he made intermittent grabs at his controls he didn’t seem to be focusing on them. The pilot had started to rock back and forth in his seat. With the engine noise mostly gone, Symeon could clearly hear him moaning.

‘How far down?’ he shouted, making Zhiery’s hands fly up to protect his head. ‘Distance to sea bottom! You have depths marked on the console map if your instruments are out. Use them!’

‘One…’ Zhiery was breathing raggedly. ‘One fifty metres…’ He appeared to be trying to say something else but couldn’t manage the words. There was another impact to the front of the sub and then a grating shriek of metal along her hull as the damaged swather scaffold started to come away. The smoke was thicker and the air stank of hot metal and melting plas-seal. Something somewhere in the sub had caught fire.

The sub was leaning backward as she sank, and it was the ruined stern that hit bottom first. The broken propeller housing crunched against the rock loudly enough to drown out every other sound in the compartment, and the sub dragged forward over the rocky patch with a protracted scream before she hit sand. Over the course of a long, slow minute, bleeding bubbles from her ruptured hull, she settled forward and lay at rest.

Inside, the water was knee high on the Iron Snakes as they stood from their positions, and almost to the chests of the two pilots in their seats. The engines were dead, and the only sounds in the compartment were the crackle of flames, the spray of water and the hard clanking noises as the Space Marines’ armour brushed against the narrow, curving walls.

There was another sound, and Symeon held up a hand. The others stopped moving, and the sound carried on. It was what he had thought it was. In the engine compartment, Lyass was hissing under her breath.

‘I don’t want to drown in the dark, I don’t want to drown in the dark, I don’t want to–’

‘Hatches,’ he told the crew. ‘Kill the lights and wait for the water to equalise before we exit.’ He almost bit off the words as he realised his order might as well have been a reply to Lyass’ desperate last wish. He said nothing more as he watched the Iron Snakes move to the side hatches.

He looked back. The pilot was shivering violently. Zhiery was gripping the edges of his console hard with both hands, breathing in great gulps, tears streaking his face. He had not bothered to undo his safety straps or rise from his seat. Symeon realised he was trying to prepare himself to drown.

Half the overhead lamps went out as Anysios cut a circuit. The interior of the sub was suddenly a surreal dimness of glints, shadows and reflections.

‘I don’t want to drown in the dark don’t want to drown in the dark please I don’t want to drown–’

Symeon reached for the hatch. They needed to flood the compartment, equalise the pressure so that the Snakes could climb out, slowly, in case whatever enemy craft had sunk them was still about. Let the sub sit here for minutes with no sign of life, their own vitals sealed inside their armour and not visible. Let the sub be reported as a kill, sunk with no survivors. And then they could move. Because after all…

Because after all, he had thought to himself in the planning session, the crew would be long gone in the saviour pods by then. Risky, but manageable.

The water was higher. Zhiery was still gulping air. Lyass was weeping. Lyass who had fought the Archenemy for years, and didn’t want to drown in the dark.

Symeon wasn’t really surprised to find that he was standing at the saviour-pod hatch, his hand on the welded rebar that anchored it closed. He watched his hand wrench the bar free as though it were inevitable. He dropped it into the water that had engulfed half the cabin.

‘Pods,’ he said back over his shoulder, and when they didn’t move: ‘PODS!’

‘Brother-sergeant, I think the mission planners wanted to make sure there would be corpses in the sub in case–’

Symeon ignored the vox and waded down the sub. He clouted the pilot’s chair hard enough to dislodge the little bearded man into the water – he had already shed his restraints and started trying to claw his way higher in the cabin. Zhiery was still in his seat, in water to his collarbones, oblivious to the Space Marine behind him. Symeon tore the restraint straps off the shoulders of the co-pilot’s chair and dragged the man out of it by the scruff of his neck. By the time he got back to the pod hatches in the sub’s waist, Anysios had dragged Lyass out of the engine compartment the same way.

‘What happened to “they need to find corpses”?’ Symeon asked him as the two humans scrambled for the access slot.

‘I felt I ought to point out that we’re probably blunting the effectiveness of the mission,’ Anysios replied. ‘But I don’t stand by it any more than you do.’

A voice outside the vox-link interrupted them. They both looked down.

‘But… sir… I can’t… I sinned!’ Zhiery said. His voice was agonised, his whole body shuddering with the effort of resisting getting into the pod. ‘I… they told me… the Emperor will judge…’

‘A good subject for discussion,’ said Anysios, grabbing the man up by his shoulders. ‘Let’s have it some other time.’ The pod hatches were set high, but water was already slopping into the second one. Lyass and the pilot had sealed the first hatch behind them. Anysios stuffed Zhiery bodily into the little cavity and the hatch slammed closed.

‘Now,’ Symeon said with relief. ‘Kill the lights. And then we wait.’

Erasmos
Barenzho Straits

They gave it half an hour, and then they gave it twenty minutes more to be safe. That seemed like long enough for a hunter craft to lose interest in a battered old harvester that had come blundering through the picket zones and not disgorged any survivors. On the fifty-first minute, they moved.

The saviour pods had enough residual power in their cells to flush some water out of their compartments, but nothing more. Their flotation systems had been broken and the batteries for their motors had long since run down, and when the Iron Snakes yanked them free from the sub the pods simply lay on the sea floor like freakish crustacean shells. The squad considered them, standing in a solemn half-circle in the gloom. Then Anysios and Laukas bent down and gripped one pod by the metal loops at its ends, built on so they could be hooked and winched out of the water. Iacchos and Serapion picked up the other, and Erasmos Squad trooped away across the sea floor.

Urdesh had been under the thumb of war for so long now that her people’s old routines were extinct. No one had been harvesting the seaweed forests and they had spent years growing out of their old neatly cultivated patterns. By the time the upward slope had become noticeable the Iron Snakes were pushing their way through heavy, fringed kelp colonies, slashing a narrow path through the tough stems through which they could sidle, yanking the pods from side to side to keep them from tangling. As they got higher, and the sunlight on the sea began to make a ghostly grey ceiling far above them, they moved into thinner-stemmed weeds with broader fronds growing up from strange arched holdfasts on the rocks, threaded in and out with symbiote species that shot the forest through with glints of red and yellow.

The creatures of the weed forests came to watch them. Sleek ambush-predator crustaceans nesting among the weed bases came catapulting up to clink and scrape against the Iron Snakes’ armour and drop away in surprise. Schools of spiny slate-grey fish writhed away between the fronds, and eels as thick as a Space Marine’s arm lay motionless in the spaces between the holdfasts, staring up at the passing giants with cold yellow eyes.

By the time that the sunlight was a visible sparkle against the water overhead they were only seeing that sparkle one pace in every fifty, and their path was weaving through not just the weed thickets but also a growing armada of wrecked and scuttled boats, slumped on the sea floor, leaning up on their sides or standing on end, some with prow or stern disappearing up into the air. Seaweed harvesters, of course, and all the attendant vessels that came with them: tugs, repair boats, fuel and crew tenders. Scattered through them were the military craft. Patrol boats lay with their leaning auspex towers festooned with weed-fronds like victory streamers, littoral raiders slumped on crumpled and broken hydrofoils next to flat-bottomed, scoop-prowed assault boats mutilated by missile and las. This shore had been fought over many, many times.

Some sat on rock or clear patches of sand, others had had thick seaweed colonies growing up and through them and were so tangled and smothered in it that their outlines were barely visible. They passed corroded wrecks now barely more than heaps of fragments, and newer craft fresh enough that they might be from the current war. Soon there were stretches where they had to thread their way single file through the reefs of dead metal.

Sergeant Symeon had given the sign at the first wreck, and repeated it for emphasis: a hand to the brow and sweep of the arm, a skiff-captain’s gesture. Be vigilant. They had gone over it many times, both in the briefings with the Guard tacticians and among themselves, studying the aerial picts and orbital auguries and checking off all the things that could be planted in the reef of wreckage. Alarms, sensors, deadfalls, mines. Pockets of air with armed servitors or even living sentries.

The Iron Snakes were sea-hunters, whether sailing across the surging waters of their home or diving below them. Erasmos Squad had fallen seamlessly into the hunting pattern of the deep Ithakan grottoes, placing their feet softly, moving their limbs with an almost dreamy slowness, keeping watch in overlapping diagonals, blades ready.

It felt odd to Symeon to be using his hunting drills in an ocean so strange and yet with such familiar touches, and more than once on that surreal slow-motion ascent he was startled to only feel the close embrace of his power armour, or see a sensor tag flit across his vision. The swaying weeds and the filtering shafts of sunlight, stronger with every slow, slow step, kept ghostly sense-memories flitting across his nerve endings: the feel of water on his skin, the sting of salt in his throat. The deep chill of the Ithakan ocean inside his chest and the squeeze of his multi-lung as he breathed it. The hard grip of a lance in his hand.

Movement out on the left of the formation, a waft of stirred-up sediment that shouldn’t have been there. Iacchos let go his end of the saviour pod and raised his combat blade. The others knew something was wrong the instant they heard the thump of the pod hitting the seabed and pivoted outward, putting their backs to one another. Menoetios pointed and they saw something large and dark vanish behind the hulk of a wide-hipped trans-strait tug, swimming with a lashing, sinuous ease. A new scent permeated the water, becoming ever clearer over the harsh taste of the Urdeshi sea. It was a scent they recognised. If they had had more human referents to go on they might have described it as spoiled milk and crushed mint. A shadow flickered over them but whatever made it had snaked away through the water before it could be clearly seen.

Sand fountained up from the seabed and Menoetios had two loxatl on him. Their bodies, as long as his but flexible as snakes, wound around him; their tapering tails churned the water, constantly shifting their weight and position, keeping Menoetios off-balance. One wrapped his waist, clawing upward under the rim of his pauldrons; the other blocked out his sight as it grabbed his helmet and raked at his faceplate. Agenor was turning to help him when a third beast came lunging through the billow of churned-up sand, rolling sideways under a backhanded blade slash. Its thick, muscular limbs untucked from their swimming positions and reached for him, four sets of vicious dewclaws grabbing for the armour-seams at his hip and the back of his knee.

Symeon bit back a war cry – who knew how far it would carry and who or what might hear it? – and dropped the roll of cable he’d been carrying. Akanthe was in his hand and even without its energy field the blade slid up into the jaw of the first loxatl to lunge at him, transfixing its skull. He dragged the thrashing xenos down and pinned it to the sand with one foot, crushing its chest as he pulled Akanthe free and thrust at the next. He was fast, but the drag of the water slowed his arm and all he could do was score its hide with the very tip of the blade. Then it was past him, so quick in the water it almost seemed to flicker in his vision, and two more were already diving down from above. Symeon thrust Akanthe at the first but it corkscrewed away from the thrust and grabbed his arm in its foreclaws before he could pull back for another strike. The blunt wedge of its head tilted and its maw opened wide; the water around them boomed and thrummed with its subsonic hunter’s bellow.

Menoetios felt/heard a click as the dagger-sharp dewclaw cracked the eyepiece of his helmet, and then a chink as the claw forced its way through. With a whine of parting metal another claw pierced his mouth grille, the two points pushing forward, trying to meet inside his skull. Acting on pure reflex Menoetios opened his mouth and bit off the claw-tip, and that made the loxatl flinch just long enough for him to get a proper grip on its wrist. In the moment before his fingers skidded loose on its slick skin he rammed his blade in through its armpit and dragged it down the beast’s body. It convulsed as it died, the rippling colours of its hide fading to white, thrashing the water into gory froth. Next to him, Agenor smashed his fist into the face of a loxatl, who had his blade-hand in its jaws. Although it made creaking cries of anger and pain, he couldn’t dislodge it. Behind them came a whirring of compact but powerful machines and a billow of rancid alien ichor as the Apothecary blades and drills mounted on Spiridon’s forearm went to work on his own attacker.

The Snakes were fighting in a rising haze of churned sand as they grappled and hacked, shot through with clouds and streamers of ichor as they started to make the enemy bleed. The battle unfolded in an eerie semi-silence – Symeon could hear the muffled sounds of blades in flesh, claws squealing on armour and the faint, maddening thrum of loxatl cries that every so often leapt up into audible frequencies with a squeal or a yelp. He felt a pulse of anger. This was intolerable, an insult. These creatures could not end his mission like this. It was not theirs to end.

He half-turned, stepping into the very middle of the brawl. He could see two bigger, sleeker shadows cruising in overhead. Full-grown loxatl. Brood elders. Even through the stirred-up murk his vision picked out the telltale lines of the weapon harnesses bound to their bodies. Flechette guns and blade sleeves. A loxatl slammed into his back, wrapping its limbs and tail around him, one set of dewclaws reaching for his faceplate and the other stretching out to try to prise the sword from his grip. He saw Laukas borne down onto one knee, and beyond him two loxatl had grabbed the spool of cable over Demetios’ shoulder and were dragging it out to tangle him.

Akanthe’s power field flashed into life. The first flare was a brilliant white that lit the sediment wash pearly grey before it began to jitter and stutter. The aura sheathing the blade was made to smash apart and repel any matter it contacted. It could take a quick blow against solid matter in stride but now water was bearing down on the entire field at once, taxing it to its limits. Runes lit off in Symeon’s vision, warning him about the sudden extra drag on his reactor pack as Akanthe sucked in more and more energy. The actuators in his gauntlet sent feedback up his arm as the ceaseless detonation around the weapon jittered it in his grip. The blade looked like a storm cloud, wreathed in a grey roil of vaporised water, flashes of white stabbing through. The sword’s usual crackle of power was now a single buzzing scream like vox-static, like a chainblade.

The loxatl’s senses were exquisitely tuned for the water, even keener than a Space Marine’s auto-senses on land, and the flare caught them by surprise and scoured them raw. Their hearing filled with the screech of the power field, their smell and taste drowned in the harsh reek of ozone, and the electro-sensitive layers in their skins were battered by the power discharges so close by. They couldn’t help but flinch away from the shock, and the Iron Snakes didn’t miss their chance.

Agenor twisted his weapon-hand around and rammed his blade up through the roof of his attacker’s mouth. A delicate calligraphy of blood floated up from where the point had come through the top of its skull, blotted out a moment later when Agenor yanked the blade free and opened the torso from chin to pelvis with a single angry stroke. The loxatl hit the sea floor on its back, its death throes sending up a curtain of red-black ichor and pieces of offal. Laukas hacked off the clawed hand that was gripping his pauldron, grabbed the jaw of its dazed owner and wrenched it loose, tearing away most of the neck along with it.

There was another flash of light, warm yellow through the floating silt, a muffled boom of vapour and a wash of heat. It was answered from the other side of the melee. Shockwaves slapped back and forward through the water. Loxatl reared, bellowed, bared their teeth at the redoubled overload of their senses.

Anysios appeared through the churn of water, silt and blood, melta torch raised over his head like a beacon. The torch was cumbersome, its reach barely beyond what it could touch, a tool rather than a weapon. But that was up above, in the air. In the water, the melta-flame instantly flashed a fist-sized pocket of water into superheated steam that bloomed into a ball of vapour before the pressure of the sea collapsed it back in on itself.

Anysios fired the cutter for another split second and the loxatl riding Menoetios’ chest yanked its claws free of his faceplate and reared back, pawing at the water as if it could ward off the thermal shock and the pressure wave. Menoetios didn’t miss the opportunity. In an eye-blink he reached between the lashing hands, grabbed a fistful of the wattled flesh under the creature’s chin and yanked its face forward onto his blade. Its scream shot up from infrasound to ultrasound that drilled into the Space Marines’ auto-senses like a silver wire sliding into their ears. More ichor swirled into the water. Within a dozen seconds four more loxatl had added their own share.

A sound came through the water, a sharp clack-clack-clack like a hardwood castanet. A sound the Iron Snakes knew very well. Anysios pulled his arm down and hunched his shoulders as a stream of flechettes clattered against his armour, some spinning off the curves of his helmet and pauldrons, one or two actually lodging in the ceramite. Behind him Agenor and Laukas both instinctively grabbed for their bolters – the recoil of their flechette guns would destabilise a swimming loxatl for just an instant and they had drilled hard to take advantage of that instant when it was an easier target – and then broke off, cursing. Instead Laukas drew his own cutter torch and copied Anysios, staggering the cutter’s flares to keep up a relentless battery on the enemies’ senses. Agenor dragged a loxatl off Demetios’ shoulders by main force, its claws squealing across his plate, and when it whipped around with incredible speed to bite at his face, Demetios slammed his blade home, vanishing into the sudden curtain of blood.

No more flechettes came slicing down through the water. By now the haze of silt and ichor was rising to the surface. Symeon thought he had a final glimpse of movement before the long, weaving body above him rippled, blended in with the wave patterns around it and was gone. He raised Akanthe, gave a single snap of the power field to get his brothers’ attention, and then pointed the blade ahead of them.

At the top of the final slope up to the coastal shelf was their objective – a cluster of sheer grey rockcrete pylons, planted on heavy pyramidal foundations driven into the seabed, shrouded in wisps of weed and algal haloes where they breached the surface like clouds wreathing a mountaintop. Above the surface they could see the shadowy forest of gantrywork that rested on the piles, supporting the venting stacks that jutted out from the volcanic shore. A double row of pylons marched out across the seabed, supporting the dissipator pipe that angled down into the ocean floor somewhere back beyond their view. The pipe was broad enough that a Thunderhawk gunship could have flown up it with plenty of room beyond the tip of each wing, had there been anywhere for one to enter it.

Erasmos Squad got moving.

Erasmos
South-west Vents, Ourezhad coast

The pipe station did have a garrison, and one of them did spot Erasmos coming up out of the water, but he was out on the rig on his own which meant that he died without the chance to tell anyone about it. He’d been standing on a catwalk above the looming bulk of the pipe, gawping out at the growing slick of loxatl blood and the clumps of meat and occasional severed limb that came bobbing to the surface. He didn’t think to look down until the clank of ceramite on metal was clearly audible. His mouth, surrounded by an ungainly scrawl of scar where he’d tried to cut and burn the image of a handprint onto his face, opened in amazement, and Laukas put a bolt-shell through it. The headless body toppled over the railing and bounced off the Iron Snake’s shoulder on the way down to the water. Laukas, held in position by his armour mechanisms and his feet locked to the support column, budged not a millimetre from the impact. The hapless sentry’s remains might as well have hit the girder.

Serapion barely glanced at the corpse as it hit the water just over his head. He was standing on Agenor’s shoulders, as Agenor was standing on Anysios’, faceplates pressed close to the rockcrete, making the ladder that Laukas had scaled to reach up and attach a climbing-clamp. The headless shape bobbed above him for a few moments, and then the current carried it away and he forgot about it.

Another splash. This time it was a bundle of braided carbon-cord, unfurling past him as the weighted end pulled it down. Serapion reached for it and hoisted himself into the air, ashy seawater streaming off his armour, his brothers swarming up after him.

Five of them had cleared the water by the time the real shooting started. There was a quick exchange of shouts from above them and then a sizzling puff of steam as a las-shot scorched the corroded metal a finger’s length above his helm. Serapion scrambled around the side of the girder and kept ascending. Above him, Laukas had reached the top of the column and was tearing his way through the curls of razor wire that hung under the catwalks, keeping up a calm stream of updates on the squad vox.

‘Two stub-gunners on the catwalk, hundred by seventy.’ A single bolt-shell detonation simultaneous with the words, no stubber shots. Serapion clambered two more body-lengths. ‘Viewing cabin at catwalk’s end, one-twenty by seventy, looks like someone’s aiming a long-las. Good shot, Demetios, so much for him.’

Another few seconds of climbing and Serapion was in under the thick struts of the catwalk mount. He looked up at it, considering his options, and then slammed a melta bomb into place on its underside and scrambled around to the far side of the stanchion again.

‘Burning in four.’ He hung in place until the count ran out and the bomb slugged a Serapion-sized hole in the catwalk. Seconds later he was up through the cloud of metallic smoke and striding along the catwalk, bolter in his hands, bearing down on the sentries who’d been shooting at him. His first shot punched almost all the way through the nearest before it detonated. Serapion closed the distance in a heartbeat, grabbed the stunned and splattered second sentry by the neck, tossed him one-handed over the railing and kept on for the shore without breaking stride.

There were more sentries further out on the pipe rig, crewing the viewing platforms and gun bunkers facing out to sea. Caught with an enemy who had come up behind their emplaced weapons, the crews were shouting and gesticulating. Some were snapping off shots at the Iron Snakes with their sidearms, others were trying to wrestle lascannons or missile launchers free of their outward-facing mountings and drag them around.

Laukas had mapped the emplacements with a single quick turn of his head and now, his huge form braced against a lighting-mast, he was calmly shooting them to pieces, the sound of his bolter as regular as a metronome. Anysios and Demetios reached the top of the stanchion and added their fire to his. Missile magazines blew out in stunning claps of noise and shrapnel; lascannons and flak emplacements hung like broken limbs or were blown loose from their mountings, falling away to carom off the curve of the pipe and into the sea.

A siren finally started to sound with a flat, adenoidal blaring and a response squad came charging out of the station buildings, firing from the hip, taking positions where the pipe gantry met the clifftop.

But they hadn’t bothered to look down. Symeon and the rest of Erasmos Squad had passed under the rig and climbed up the rough rock of the cliff face itself. Their volley punched up through the catwalks and platforms, sending enemies sprawling with shattered legs or knocking them over the edge to plummet to the water. Eleven seconds of deadly precise intersecting bolter shots and the rig was clear.

‘Iacchos, Menoetios,’ Symeon voxed. ‘With me, into the control station. Laukas, confirm that all those emplacements are dead. The rest of you, get ready to make entry.’ He paused. ‘Wait. One thing first.’

Erasmos
South-west Vents, Ourezhad coast

The saviour pods opened with a creak and hiss of evil-smelling air, and the sunlight fell on the three motionless bundles of uniforms and limbs lying in deep pools of dirty water. For a moment, Symeon was sure he had simply transferred the three crew from one coffin into another, but then the stocky pilot spasmed and groaned, and Zhiery sat up with a gasp. Lyass had wedged herself into place with her arms and her whole body was rigid and shivering. Her eyes were squeezed shut and her nose was bleeding. It took Symeon several seconds to work out what to do.

‘You are… here,’ he said, which seemed inadequate. Lyass scrambled half out of her pod and fell to her knees. Zhiery lurched almost upright, grabbing at the rim of Symeon’s pauldron for support, and then dropped into a crouch and vomited. Symeon leaned down and listened to the whisper of gas from the compressed-air tanks in the pods’ sides. The oxygen tanks had not been disabled, but they had almost run out on the way.

The three seemed almost alert now, but still disoriented and panicked. Symeon wondered how long this was going to take. None of them had asked for a weapon or a briefing yet.

He gave them five more seconds before he spoke again.

‘We are at a venting station on the coast below Old Ourezhad.’ He pointed up at the great volcanic cone brooding in the sky behind them. ‘We are moving on. You are armed now, and this position should be defensible enough that you can sell your lives well if the enemy comes to retake it. There may be provisions.’

All three of them were staring at him. Symeon wondered what else he was supposed to say. In the end, he couldn’t think of anything, so he turned and left them there. In all the time until they were lost to hearing, he didn’t hear any of them manage a word.

Erasmos
South-west Vents, Ourezhad coast

Behind the venting station the pipe disappeared into the slope of the mountain and there, flanked by heavy rockcrete blast-baffles, was their objective. Each of the pipe’s emergency valves was half again the height of an Iron Snake, so heavy a dozen humans would not have been able to drag them open. As Symeon walked up to join Erasmos Squad at the nearest, he became aware of a soft roaring and saw the heat shimmering off the great curve of adamantium.

The volcanic furnace beneath Old Ourezhad drove the enormous geothermal generator spike that the Mechanicus had sunk into the deep magma chambers. Enough power flowed from the mountain to satisfy even the profligate needs of Oureppan’s void projectors and mass-driver and laser silos, with enough left over to even run the miniature city that the Mechanicus had burrowed into the mountain itself over the centuries. Inside that sullenly smoking cone was a bewildering three-dimensional maze of cloisters, passages, barracks, forges and refineries and shrines, home to the generatoria crews and whole covens of tech-priests who extracted and refined all manner of earths and elements from the volcano’s molten heart and ashen breath.

And here was where they sent what they could not use. The ash from which everything useful had been filtered, the gases too toxic to risk using to heat the forges or drive turbines. Along the coast, half a dozen enormous pipes like this one carried regular blasts of red-hot gas and dust under incredible pressure, channelling them far out into the sea. When the Archenemy had taken Old Ourezhad’s city-forge they had had no alternative but to let the venting cycle continue or have their new prize destroyed: choked with ash, poisoned with volcanic gases, ruptured from the inexorable build of pressures. They had guarded the venting stations as best they could and left them to run, counting on the fact that the Imperium would never grow so desperate as to sacrifice Old Ourezhad by destroying the vents.

They had been right. The Iron Snakes were not here to destroy.

The valve designs matched the schematics that Erasmos Squad had all memorised, and they all knew what to do. Anysios and Agenor had already fixed cables to the points on the rotator collars and Demetios was mag-locked to the side of the pipe, standing out parallel to the ground as he tested the pull on the cable. They were ready. All of them but one.

‘It won’t work,’ Spiridon was saying as Symeon joined them. ‘The eye is completely compromised. You’re looking straight at me, brother, I can see the colour of your eyeball. And the breather is gone.’

‘If I can shroud it…’

‘The shrouds were for the water. They’ll be useless in there. You know what the conditions will be. If it were a matter of a quick dart you’d manage it and I’d clean you up when we’re inside, but there’ll be multiple blasts before we’re there. Your system won’t cope.’

‘Show me,’ Symeon said, and Menoetios handed over his helm. The loxatl claw had shattered the eyepiece completely – it was a miracle the point had stopped a millimetre outside the Space Marine’s eyeball. The other claw had torn a wide gap through the mouth grille and the breather mask behind it was wrecked.

‘We can’t take a chance on being slowed once we’re inside,’ he said, handing the helm back. ‘We’ve got the element of surprise for one more stage and then we change stealth for speed.’ He looked at the expression on Menoetios’ face. The tics were barely perceptible but Symeon knew his squad too well to miss them. ‘Every one of us understands how it will feel to stay behind, Men.’ A tightening of the young Snake’s jaw. ‘But I would expect every one of us to do what the mission needs. Remember who you are.’

Menoetios still didn’t speak but he ducked his head in acknowledgement a moment before he lifted the helm back into place.

‘You’ve work here, anyway,’ Symeon said. ‘There are two adult loxatl somewhere out there that we didn’t kill. You can be sure they’ll come hunting. Be on guard. Have those three from the sub arm themselves. Solid shot for loxatl, no las. And have them help you get a distance link working. Our people need to know about this. And be of good spirit, Menoetios. You came here ready to fall in battle, but yet you still stand, and you’ll still fight. Ithaka will sing of us, brother. Off you go.’

‘I’ve been thinking about those loxatl,’ Spiridon said as Menoetios walked back towards the station, his brothers lifting weapons in salute. ‘About how they’re not supposed to be here.’ He looked over at Symeon. ‘Andreos Squad gave their lives wiping out the last of the breeding colonies. The loxatl were supposed to have been expunged from this world.’

‘Escapees, do you think?’

‘No,’ Spiridon said, ‘and neither do you. They were young ones, the ones that came at us out there. Fast, but small. Only the adults were armed, the rest had no fighting harnesses, no flechettes. And they hadn’t fought Astartes before. They didn’t know the trick with the melta discharges, or with Akanthe. You saw it as plain as I did. Somewhere out there there’s another breeding colony. Priad needs to know.’

‘And Menoetios will be the one to tell him. I look forward to seeing the pelts of those last two vermin around his shoulders when we come back up out of the mountain again. But our mission isn’t xenos hunting. Our mission is there.’ Symeon pointed to the valve. The roaring was dying away, and Demetios was getting ready to drag on his cable. Their brothers were assembling by the valve. There would be no time to waste.

‘Have faith, Spiridon,’ Symeon said. ‘The Emperor protects.’

‘The Emperor and His Saint,’ Spiridon said.

‘Of course.’

They took their places in the line.

II

WARP AND WIRE

Priad
Southern Ghereppan approach

It took a day on the road, from dawn to not-quite-dusk, to bring the Beati to the edge of Ghereppan.

Mazho and Auerben had fretted over the route well into the night, sketching out and rejecting plan after plan. Like almost the whole of Urdesh, the promontory ahead of them was a mosaic in shades of amber and red: controlled zone, contested zone, alert zone, active warzone. Priad had looked for the deep blue overlay signifying ‘confirmed pacified’ and couldn’t see it anywhere.

In the end, though, they discarded all the zigzagging paths they had drawn through the tangle of subsidiary roads on the western promontory. The hilly, weed-choked country was crawling with enemy partisans in between the scattering of Imperial strongpoints. Disorganised mass-militia rabble, mostly, and splinter elements fleeing the shattered Blood Pact positions further down the coast, but certainly willing to take a crack at what they would take to be a humble materiel carrier lost off the main roads.

Instead they had taken the simplest, fastest journey, a straight run up the eastern promontory’s spinal highway, hiding in plain sight. They rolled through little artillery-battered habitation clusters with roadway junction numbers instead of names, and past Imperial observation posts set up in the abandoned hulks of buildings or dug into old bomb-craters in the highway itself. A handful of times they came to a halt and Priad heard Mazho conversing with people outside, mostly talking, occasionally shouting. Once he shared a laugh with someone.

Priad was the first to notice the change as they came down into the final flatlands south of the city. He could feel the vehicle slowing, transmission shifts growing more frequent. Smells started filtering in from the outside. Exhaust from smaller vehicles and freestanding promethium generators. Smoke – not battlefield smoke but the sharp tang of chemical fuel tablets or dried seaweed. Campfires. Kicked-up ash from something, someone, lots of someones, moving across open ground. Cooking food. Sweat. The faint, sickly whiff of badly treated injuries. Excrement. The carrier started slowing further, sometimes dropping almost to a walking pace, and when the engine dropped enough he could hear voices. Too many human voices to count, women and men and children arguing, praying, weeping, consoling.

He didn’t think any of it would be audible to human ears yet, but the Beati was already straightening up in her seat and looking around as though she could see through the hull. She already seemed to know what was outside; it took Priad a moment more to check his mental map and put the pieces together.

Out from the southern edge of Ghereppan city, a teeming shanty-sprawl stretched out towards the distant hills. Refugees congregated in their own ragged armies out through the ruins of the city fringes, clustering as close to the Militarum emplacements as they dared, drawn by the promise, however threadbare, of some safety in the shadow of the Imperial lines. It was that or wander south through the hills or away across the open ashlands, and take their chances with whatever enemy might still be roaming out there.

Their driver kept pushing them northward even as the open highway was lost among the rubble piles, craters and crowds. They nosed carefully between the collapsed freight overpasses and crawled through crowds of scrawny, aimless displacees. Their driver began to rev the engine and hit the klaxon to try to make a way, and Priad heard angry voices outside in return. Once a stone bounced off the hull, making the humans jump.

The late sunshine they could see filtering back from the cab was shading into the red-gold of late afternoon by the time the carrier’s nose dipped and the compartment tilted forwards. They were rolling down into the sublevels of some large and gloomy building that seemed relatively unscarred by the war. Finally, the backside-numbing vibration of the SC-3’s engine cut out. The quiet felt strange.

Before any of them left the carrier Priad had all the lights in the underground bay switched off, and leaned out into the pitch-darkness with his vision pushed hard into infrared. His auto-senses had no trouble seeing the soldiers all about them, a little cluster by the bottom of the down-ramp and half a dozen more in a loose perimeter around the carrier itself. A mix of ages and sexes, they were dressed in mostly civilian clothing, one or two with Urdeshi Militarum helmets of different regimental designs. Their weapons were equally mismatched, their postures watchful but with no parade-ground mannerisms. Scratch company, then. Self-appointed soldiers. Did they all know who was in the carrier? Priad watched for telltale body movements, any who seemed hot and agitated, as if they were waiting to pull a weapon. He saw none. He was painfully conscious of the crudity of that security measure, but it still gave him a little peace of mind as he signalled for the lights and clambered out onto the grimy floor.

‘Another handful of klicks north and we’ll be in the city limits, what you could actually consider the fighting front,’ came Mazho’s voice from inside the carrier, ‘and a handful after would put us right in among it. Close enough to spit in a Son of Sek’s eye, ma’am, if I were to suggest you ever try such an indelicate thing.’ Priad cocked an eyebrow at that, but when he shot a look around he saw that it was Sister Kassine the man had been addressing. He put his back to them again and gave the bay another sweeping glance. Nobody had moved, none of the troopers seemed tensed or hostile. Priad’s edginess didn’t abate. He had to resist the urge to flex and tap his fingers inside the mounting of the lightning claw whose housing encased his left hand. If the motion got pronounced enough the tines of the claw would visibly replicate it. As a matter of principle, a warrior never made a move that might let on what was going on in his head.

‘So we’re going past–’ Kassine began, clambering down from the carrier in her turn, and then cut her words short when she looked around and realised how many people were in earshot. They finished the disembarkation in silence: the colonel, Milo, Auerben. He saw a soft stir pass through the guards when the Beati’s careful footsteps sounded softly behind him, but there was no sign of hostility. He noticed that several of them were looking back and forth between him and her as if trying to decide what was the stranger sight, the quiet Saint or the power-armoured giant. He nodded to them, and received a couple of hesitant salutes in return.

‘Ghelon!’ She was breaking away from them now, smiling broadly, walking towards a lanky man dressed in drab grey Urdeshi fatigues but with a foundry-worker’s harness and boots and a rust-red Helixid-issue gun-scabbard swinging behind him. He wore a mantle over his shoulders, a battered and faded cloth of Hagian blue folded around him in imitation of the Beati’s herder cloak. ‘Brin, Yulla, see who it is!’

Milo and Kassine were following her, arms out. Mazho gave Priad a shrug and a sour look as they greeted their new arrival with salutes and embraces.

‘Trooper Ghelon,’ Priad murmured to Mazho as the four led the way towards the rear of the basement. ‘Part of a scratch company that took a shrinehold and defended it against the Archenemy for three years until it was liberated in the Eotine Walk. She took him to her own retinue for the Peshelid Crossing, similar to the way she took on Milo before she voyaged here. Ghelon departed her direct service when the war for Ghereppan began, but didn’t rejoin a formal Militarum formation. Now we know where he went.’

‘You’ve met him?’ Mazho asked. Priad shook his head, then pointed to his eye and his temple.

‘Hypno-eidetic briefings on relevant names when we were tasked as her guard. The recollection just took a second to come up.’

Ghelon led them to a commandeered storeroom off an innocuous sub-basement corridor. Priad, bringing up the rear, had to half-squat and shuffle sideways to get through the door, and his pauldrons and reactor pack left dents and scrapes in the lintel. The others were already standing around a data-slate propped on an empty cable reel, pointing at the display and talking. Looking around, Priad’s eye was caught by a mural daubed onto the rear wall with black paint from a tin that now lay empty in a corner. It was a crude but striking rendering of an islumbine flower, Saint Sabbat’s heraldic bloom. Native to Hagia, unknown on Urdesh. Priad sniffed the air but there was no trace of fresh paint in the room. The mural must have been done some time ago.

‘The Militarum supposedly controls more of Ghereppan by the day,’ Ghelon was saying. His accent had the up-and-down rhythms of Urdesh’s southern polar islands. ‘But things aren’t getting any better out here. Everyone’s hungry and before long we’ll have to start rationing clean water. A lot of the southern edge of the city is standing empty but the Guard won’t let us start moving people back into it. Further in there are Throne knows how many civilians still trapped in the fighting zones. A lot of the old scratchers volunteer themselves to slip in through the fighting lines and help guide them back out to us, those who’ll come, but that’s dangerous work, and of course it just adds to the numbers out here. We’re getting more from all the small conurbs down the promontory and there’s been a steady northward bleed of refugees from that scrapbastard mess along the Achetai Straits that’s never really stopped. We’ve been trying to organise rangers along the refugee trails while the Guard are so taken up with Ghereppan, but…’

‘Taken command of that, have you?’ Mazho said. ‘Trooper?’

‘We’ve done our best,’ Ghelon replied, not rising to the barb in the colonel’s tone. ‘Lot of enemy partisans spilling over from the fighting along Hyelock Bay after they wiped the Blood Pact out of Xavec. The Sekkites are always reconnoitring, too, and they’re better organised.’

‘Forming a rogue militia,’ Mazho mused. ‘Something the Commissariat ought to know about. If not the Ministorum. Or the Inquisition.’ At that last he seemed to finally realise that he’d gone a step too far, and bit off his words. Ghelon stared at him.

‘Not everyone from the archipelago scratch companies was accepted into the liberation army,’ he said, in a voice as cold as his look. ‘When we tried, the Militarum treated us like criminals, like enemy combatants. Even the Urdesh regiments, their own people, they–’ He stopped, collected himself and changed tack. ‘Some of us were shown leniency’ – he gave the word an ugly twist – ‘and permitted to rejoin the populace. We haven’t been idle.’

He hadn’t taken his eyes from Mazho’s face.

‘We build and keep shrines to the Saint and the Eagle. We take in the sick and the hurt. We help folk organise to share work and supplies. The old can still help look after the infants. The injured can still help comfort the bereaved. The able-bodied can keep order and scout the fringes. The children run messages.’ There was a brittle sound to his voice, now, as he held himself in check. ‘We’re Urdeshi, colonel. Ash in our hair and magma in our bellies, just like you. What did you think we were going to do?’

There was a beat of silence, then Mazho spread his hands and gave a gruff little chuckle.

‘You’ve founded New Ghereppan out here, by the sound of it,’ he said. The little company around the table relaxed slightly.

‘Old Ghereppan will suit us just fine,’ Ghelon said. ‘We just have to reclaim it.’

‘Let’s talk about that, then,’ Auerben said, reaching down and ratcheting the data-slate display this way and that. ‘We’ve got reasonable control of the south-western hab districts, and the secondary commercia and bonded fabricatories. You see gains along the scarp and the central forge-tower processional but those are less stable and far more porous.’ She gulped from her inhaler bulb and waited a moment for her voice to strengthen. ‘We’re further ahead in the sub-city and around the eastern islands in the strait, lagging back along the west side of the promontory under the spire-wall there. There’s armour on the eastern docks, Jovani and Urdeshi, going street to street where the Titans can’t get to, and half a division of Pragar Urban Pioneers are taking the sub-city.’

Mazho and Ghelon both growled their approval. The Pragar siege-rats were hive-bred urban infiltrators, tunnel-fighters without peer whom even the Urdeshi respected.

‘General Grawe-Ash is running the war for the city from deeper in,’ Auerben finished up, her words fading to a gasp, ‘but her exact command location hasn’t been passed to us.’

She nodded to Mazho, who reeled the map northward and jabbed a finger at a point on the display.

‘That haulermaster’s tower holds a fortified Militarum post that anchors the southernmost line. It’s the closest major installation to us. I suggest, my lady, that we deliver you there as soon as the carrier’s refuelled. Once you make yourself known there we can be conducted in to meet with the general.’ He looked up. ‘Once word spreads you’ve joined the front, ma’am, we may need a heightened guard.’

‘Now that I have joined the front,’ Sabbat said, her eyes still on the maps, ‘the ruse at Rhole Cliffs is no longer necessary and Damocles Squad can rejoin us. They will be the core of my personal guard, as they were before. Priad?’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘Pyrakmon is listening for my code-seal. I’ll hand it to the colonel or your man here to perform the transmission.’

‘Space Marines,’ Ghelon said, half to himself. ‘A full squad of them. Faith is rewarded with wonder.’ He nodded to Priad, not quite making eye contact. ‘One of your squads has been in the thick of it in Ghereppan, sir. Utterly untiring. Doing Him-On-Terra proud, by all accounts, Throne be praised.’

‘Throne be praised,’ Kassine echoed. Milo’s lips moved in time with hers, but Priad couldn’t hear his voice.

‘How soon do you think we can fully claim the city?’ the Beati asked. Mazho and Auerben exchanged a look.

‘I…’ Mazho took off his glasses and polished them on his cuff. ‘Hah, I want to tell you it’ll be down to just weeks now that you’re here. But, well.’ The slate clicked and scratched as he shrank the map scale down. ‘Look at the scale of it, ma’am. Ghereppan’s one of the greatest cities on Urdesh. The enemy still hold the alpha-shrines, the goldwheel grounds…’ He looked up to blank faces from Priad and Kassine. ‘Apologies, local slang. The holiest, most complex and important foundries and fabricatories, let’s say. The places they know we won’t dare just hit from the air, or from orbit, or just turn the Titans or the artillery loose on ’em.’

‘So the battle of Ghereppan is still there to join,’ said Sabbat. Her eyes were wide, and the data-slate’s bright runes reflected in them.

‘Plenty to go around,’ said Mazho, with slightly less relish in his tone than in his words.

The Beati showed no sign she had heard him. She leaned forward and began working the slate, conjuring and dismissing layer after layer of tactical surveys and grainy aerial and orbital picts. Her finger traced a route in from Ghereppan’s outskirts, followed the line of forge-spires up along the escarpment and down onto the headland, weaving among the cluster of monumental cities-within-cities that were the Mechanicus alpha-shrines. Then she sent the display northward, through the enemy-controlled red zones along the northern waterfront and the islands tangled in their web of bridges. Finally, the city slid completely off the southern edge of the slate, and all that was left was a dark yellow line cutting laser-straight out over the sea – the enormous suspended causeway that linked Urdesh’s two greatest and grandest cities.

The group fell silent, watching the Beati’s face as she moved the map steadily northward over the strait. She brought it to a stop where the yellow line of the causeway crossed the great semicircle of Oureppan Bay. It met the shore in the exact centre of that sweeping curve, passing under a procession of Titan-scale ceremonial arches and into the enormous fortified transport hub that dominated the whole of Oureppan’s southern reach.

The causeway’s end was surrounded by white and grey runes, augury and scouting markers for the last sightings and conjectured locations of the Archenemy forces that swarmed around Oureppan. The whole map sat under a feverish-looking vermilion overlay. Total enemy control. Impassable. Impossible. On a world so deep into war, where fronts shifted like will-o’-wisps and security was a dangerous illusion, Oureppan was the one zone under unambiguous control. The Archenemy fortress that had crushed any Imperial attempt to get near it.

Or had it? Priad looked around at his companions. Outside the Iron Snakes, barely a handful of utterly trusted souls were aware of Erasmos Squad’s mission. Nobody in this gathering apart from Priad himself knew about it, of that he was sure. He looked at the display again. It was still zoomed in on Oureppan Bay, but Priad had spent hours with Sergeant Symeon poring over maps of the coast, the currents and tides and the seabeds. His mind’s eye could project exactly where the fortified power-sluices would be, where the scribbled line of the coast would run, where the looming slopes of Old Ourezhad would be. He wondered if this were the time to say something, and decided against it. This was a new place, there was no telling who was listening. And, he realised, he wanted to see what she was going to do.

The Beati’s hand hung motionless over the slate, although she did not touch the surface. Her jaw tightened and her lips thinned, just a little, as though the enemy markers were a candle flame and her fingertips were scorching.

‘Anakwanar Sek is on Urdesh,’ she said. ‘I do not want him to leave. He is to face the fate that the Emperor has decreed for him.’

‘It’s, uh, I don’t know that I’d quite…’ Mazho shifted on his feet and made a show of adjusting his glasses.

‘If his Sons stand in our way, then they will die for their mistake,’ the Beati said. ‘And if they flee, then we will ride them down. We will return Ghereppan to the Throne, open the way through its gates, march across the causeway and into the heart of Oureppan.’ She looked up, met Mazho’s eyes, and suddenly the tension in her broke into a smile instead. ‘You talked about making myself known, colonel. I shall take your advice. At least no one will say I did it by halves.’

Her voice was as calm as if she were reading from a book of hours. Her expression was statue-serene. Not a single one of them could turn their gaze away from her face.

‘Now,’ she said after a moment. ‘Would you please give me a few moments alone? I would like to pray.’

Once again Priad was last through the door. As he turned side-on to start shuffling himself back through it, he took a glance behind him and stopped short. The islumbine bloom on the far wall was now a fully rendered painting, filling the space from edge to edge, glowing with colour. The kind of work it would have taken a skilled artist days to complete.

He blinked, sniffed the air again, looked around. When he had come in the painting had been just an outline, sketched in rough strokes of black enamel. Hadn’t it?

The Beati was still standing in front of the data-slate, hands behind her back, her head bowed. Her breathing was so soft he couldn’t hear it. Priad thought to say something, thought better of it, and left her there without looking back.

The Enemy
Heddrett Township, Ghereppan promontory

A tiny flatboat came nosing through the wreckage of the little marina. The scrape and slide of its hull against the half-sunken craft all around it was muted by the veinous, finger-thick cables of weed that had reached out of the water and wrapped the hulks like mummified corpses. When it finally bumped up against the seawall, a pack of grey-camouflaged figures scrambled ashore and began tying mooring ropes to rusted bollards. Their rendezvous team came to meet them, darting out of the bombed-out residential mews behind the seawall path. They left behind them the remnants of an Imperial observation post, four sentries and a vox-operator sprawled in still, red puddles. When they reached the seawall the two teams spared a second to salute one another with palms pressed over their mouths, and then went back to work.

With no word spoken they began passing tarpaulin-wrapped bundles up from the flatboat and laying them in a row along the path. The bundles were not heavy but the crew handled them warily, anxious not to bump or drop them.

Only one, the one who’d been first off the boat, did not join in the unloading but stayed crouched on her haunches on the seawall. As each bundle was passed up from the boat, she reached forward and found a sharp point – the bundles all had them, jutting from gaps and tears in the cloth. She pricked her palm hard enough to bring blood, and put her hand to her mouth as though she were stopping her own voice. Her hands were narrow and small-boned, not big enough to conceal the livid brand that covered her mouth. A pattern of burned and scarred skin forming the print of a far bigger hand.

She did not look up at the sound of engines as the Thunderhawk gunship passed overhead.

Priad and Milo
Tithe-house, Ghereppan displacee camp

Priad found Brin Milo sitting at the end of the rockcrete loading dock that ran along one side of the parking bay. The trooper had his lasgun across his lap, the powercell out and sitting by his hip for safety, and he was fiddling with the bayonet mount. The bayonet in question was more of a dagger, Priad saw as he drew closer, with a long hilt and a straight silvered blade. He stopped a few paces away and watched him pluck the warknife out of its mount, spin it in his fingers to take a thrusting grip, angle it for a forehand cut, then a backhand, then back along his forearm, then home into the bayonet mount. He repeated the process once, twice, seated it back in the lasgun mount and then dismounted it again, holding it up and inspecting the blade.

‘It’s an elegant weapon,’ said Priad, walking the rest of the way up to him. ‘No, no need to stand. I was just admiring it. I don’t think I’ve seen a design like it.’

‘May I ask which theatres you have been in on the crusade, sir?’

‘Ambold Seven, of course. Fornax Aleph. Balhaut. And deep space actions on the Khan Group approaches.’

‘Voltemand? Fortis Binary? Menazoid? Verghast?’

‘Some of my Phratry were on Fortis, but not my part of it. Damocles has been spinward of there for most of this undertaking.’

‘Then the design wouldn’t be familiar, sir. It’s particular to my original regiment.’ Milo tilted his hand and the blade flashed in the overhead lights.

‘Ah. Well. I haven’t seen too many of you, it’s true,’ Priad said. ‘Have you had many regimental foundings?’

‘One.’ The man’s voice was flat, indicating the matter was closed. They were both silent for a moment.

‘And these,’ Priad said, thinking he should fill the gap. He reached down towards the set of pipes that rested under the boy’s other elbow. ‘I had heard about your playing–’

The captain dropped into a crouch and cocked his left hand back past his torso, the lightning claw coming to life with a crack of energy. His vision sharpened into combat clarity. Milo, too, was half out of his crouch, knuckles white on the grip of the silver warknife.

There was another moment of silence.

‘I… apologise,’ Milo said. He sheathed the knife with a shaking hand.

‘No,’ said Priad. ‘You did nothing wrong.’ He straightened, and deactivated the claw. Its fizzing crackle gradually dwindled and sputtered out, and for good measure he carefully disengaged the weapon from its mounting on his armoured cuff and set it down on the step. The trooper was still watching him. He hadn’t put the pipes down.

‘I didn’t even know I was going to do that,’ Milo finally admitted. Fidgeting from the adrenaline, he adjusted the pipes under his arm and pressed in on the little bellows. They blew a skirl of soft notes, gentle but with a keenness of edge, like a chill wind coming through the soft warmth of an early-autumn day. Priad had never heard a tone quite like it.

‘The pipes are important to you,’ he said. ‘I should have thought of that, and respected it. Pardon me.’

‘I think I should have thought of what it meant to point a knife at an Adeptus Astartes,’ Milo replied, and managed a brittle laugh. ‘You were ready to take me apart with…’ He looked down at the claw, and took half a step away from it as though it had been about to snap at his ankle.

‘Lightning claw. Ah, you know the term. It doesn’t have a name beyond that. Some of our weapons are named, but not that one. It’s just the lightning claw of Damocles Squad. I took it up when I became a brother-sergeant.’

‘Like a weapon of office? My old commander had something similar.’

Priad nodded.

‘Many of our squads have the same thing. A squad has a name, a banner and usually a weapon that each sergeant in turn is entrusted with.’ He looked from the claw to Milo’s knife and pipes. ‘It helps us to understand our place in our lineage.’

‘The newest link in the chain of tradition,’ Milo said, and smiled with relief when Priad smiled with approval. The last of the tension between them relaxed and drained away.

‘I did imagine the Guard would have its own equivalents,’ Priad said.

‘It’s funny, that,’ said Milo. ‘Heard that certain phrase from a Navy officer, travelled with her from Herodor. She was talking about her shipboard traditions. They were very elaborate, some of them. Went back a dozen centuries. I’ve never quite found the like in the Guard. I’ve thought it’s because every collection of us is new, you know? Individual regiments might have their histories, but when they’re all collected together each new crusade or army group or what-please-you becomes its own new thing. And they grow their traditions on because they aren’t seeing their homes again.’ He trailed off, took a breath. ‘The Navy, now, they take their worlds with them, walk the decks their forebears walked.’ He shrugged, smiled, and drew another dancing little thread of melody out of the pipes. ‘Apologies again, brother-captain. I couldn’t do it with a knife, maybe, but seems we’ll find me talking you to death instead.’

Priad favoured that with a quick laugh.

‘You’re feeding me, not killing me,’ he said, and tapped his temple. ‘Stocking me up in here. No need to apologise. You helped me understand how we’re the same.’ He saw Milo’s eyebrows go up, and nodded towards the pipes. ‘Even if they’re not part of your regimental traditions… They’re not? I thought not. But they’re part of your home, aren’t they? They’re a way for you to bring your world with you and make it anew with each new world you step onto. Every world you fight for becomes your home.’

‘It’s… they are a reminder,’ said Milo. ‘For sure. You have that right.’ His expression was unreadable. ‘Thank you for understanding.’

‘I told you, we’re the same. Look.’ Priad took a silver vial from a set of them secured at his waist. With a press of his thumb the top flowered open, tapering into a simple spout. Priad’s expression softened visibly as he looked at it.

‘Water from the oceans of Ithaka,’ he said. ‘Can you smell the ocean?’ Milo took a cautious sniff.

‘It smells… clean.’ He frowned. ‘Crisp. Makes me think of cold. But I can smell the salt too. Not like the seas here, all ash beaches and weed forests.’ Priad nodded, folded the vial closed, and replaced it carefully at his belt.

‘We’re an ocean people,’ he said. ‘Sailors and divers and sea-hunters. Every new world we land on, we spill a few drops of our ocean on the ground. So we make each world part of our own. It’s touched by our ocean, then. It’s under our protection. We wet our hands or our weapons before a fight when we need to strengthen our spirits because then we carry Ithaka with us more than ever. And we leave a drop of it with a brother’s body where we can, so that he will rest with the scent of the ocean about him.’

‘You are right, sir. There are ways in which we’re the same. I wouldn’t have guessed at how.’

‘See?’ Priad said. ‘We understand each other better than we did. And so if it ever comes to it, the chain we make on the battlefield together will be stronger. Our brotherhood, stronger. Maybe strong enough to win us a fight we would have lost if we had never spoken like this. You’re smiling.’

‘Just thinking aloud, brother-captain, but it seems to me you’re not so naïve about the ways of commanding us plain dog soldiers as you have liked to make out.’

Priad smiled, bent down and picked up his lightning claw. There was a mechanised whine and a rapid series of snicks and clicks as it locked itself back onto his vambrace. He turned it this way and that, pleased with the clean gleam of the blades in the overhead lights, and looked at Milo again.

‘They play the pipes on Ithaka,’ he said. ‘I remember listening to them in the evenings over the low tides. But nothing like yours. I should like to hear you play a melody some time. Something old.’

‘I…’ Milo dropped his gaze. ‘Perhaps in a few days, when she’s led us a little further.’

‘Done, then,’ said Priad. He was aware that the conversation had become more formal, more withdrawn, although he wasn’t sure why. ‘When we have this conversation again in Ghereppan, then I will ask you to play.’

Milo looked like he was about to say something more, but then his expression changed and he stood. Priad stood with him, and turned to see the Beati walking towards them. She was making no evident attempt to be silent, but he had not heard or scented her approach.

‘Brother-captain,’ she said. ‘Your squad will be here soon. After you have met them, I have something to ask of you.’

The Enemy
Southern Transit Arterial, Ghereppan promontory

The Imperial observation post had a groundcar, a high-sprung Urdeshi CTT-2 all-terrainer, sitting under a drape of camouflage sheeting in the access alley behind the mews. A pair of them took that, loading three of the bundles from the flatboat and accelerating away to the north-east without farewell or ceremony. The rest hoisted a sack onto each of their shoulders and set off at a half-jog, north-west towards the outer fringes of the sprawling displacee camps.

Every so often a bundle would shift with their movements and a spike-tip or blade-edge would push through a grey oversuit, through the ochre battledress underneath, and through their skin. They grunted with pain, gritted their teeth behind pinned-together lips, and adjusted their burdens as best they could. None of them slowed.

It sat badly with them to treat their charges this way. They had all been brutally educated to respect their master, and all the blessings and works that flowed from him. The things they were carrying, whether considered as weapons, idols, warriors or anything else, deserved better than to be hauled across the ruined landscape as if they were baggage. But that was how they found themselves, and there was nothing for it but to push on.

Their leader, the young woman with the branded face, carried no load. She ran with her eyes closed, her feet carrying her unerringly on the broken and littered highway, and as she ran she made brief silent word-shapes with her scarred lips. Her senses pushed ahead, and ahead, and although the rich plum-red dusk was filling the sky to the west, and the north was just haze and gloom, it seemed to her that over the horizon there was a different, stranger dawn waiting to rise.

They had been running for nearly two hours when they saw a cluster of lanterns bobbing ahead of them. Survivors from further south, two extended-family groups, who’d stubbornly clung on in the bombed-out towns rather than go north to the shanty-sprawl at Ghereppan. But things were different now. They said the Saint had come to the camps, that she was going to bless and lead them all, drive the enemy out of Ghereppan and burn all Urdesh free of the poison. It was a great time. They turned with smiles on their faces to greet their fellow survivors, this little pack of quiet, dusty folk with the clanking bundles slung on their backs. The newcomers were right in among them by the time lantern-light picked out the bloodshot eyes, the bone fetishes at their throats and the bronze brooches that pinned their lips, brooches in the shape of a hand that covered their mouths. And the serrated steel they were drawing from their belts.

The two families numbered twenty-three altogether. More than enough to make a start with. The lekt and her followers took their blades and went to work.

Damocles
Ghereppan displacee camps

‘But what are they all doing?’ Aekon asked.

The Thunderhawk’s transport bay had no external viewports but Damocles Squad didn’t need them. Their armour was in constant conversation with the gunship’s own machine-spirit and with an eye-flicked command their helmet displays passed on what the Thunderhawk was seeing below them.

‘Waiting,’ Apothecary Khiron said. ‘Celebrating. Hoping. Same as the ones who came to the Cliffs, remember?’

‘I remember,’ said Scyllon. ‘I remember small, carefully controlled delegations coming to Rhole Cliffs and being allowed into her company providing they were never out of eyeshot of at least two of us at a time. Priad made those rules extremely clear.’

‘Still didn’t work, though, did they?’ Andromak pointed out. ‘Even there, word got out. It’s what set this whole journey off.’

‘And you’re going to tell me we’ve moved on to a better situation here?’

In the front of the compartment, anchored beside Pyrakmon’s pulpit, Xander sat half-listening to them. His main attention was on the visual feeds.

The shanty-sprawl boiled with movement. Impromptu prayer circles had formed around bonfires and icon poles, and he could see yellow and white sparks darting between the tents and shacks as people ran to and fro with torches and lanterns. The news was passing through the shanties like a rolling blast front. At first, until he looked away from the feeds and thought about it, Xander couldn’t understand why he kept finding his muscles twitching and his pulse and respiration trying to tick up to combat levels. They were nearly at their landing point before he decided why. His perceptions were Adeptus Astartes-keen but they were conditioned to Adeptus Astartes stimuli. With little experience of humans in large numbers except as enemies on the field, his instincts kept trying to parse the ecstatic crowds below in more familiar terms, as a battle they were about to join. He smiled to himself, rather proud of the insight. He would have to tell Priad about it when he had a chance.

Crethon flew them low and slow on the final approach. Their destination was the stately bulk of an Adeptus tithe-house whose domed roof rose up from inside a multilayered tangle of freightways and overpasses. Several of the passes had yawning gaps where stretches of rockcrete had collapsed onto the ones below – bombardment, sabotage, or just the war starving them of maintenance and repair until one of Urdesh’s endless succession of earthquakes finished the job. Ropes and cables trailed from the sides of the elevated roads and the stumps of the collapsed overpasses, each one knotted from top to end with prayer flags and ribbons. They hung so densely in places that they formed opaque curtains of dusty cloth that seemed to undulate eerily as the breezes and lights criss-crossed over them. In the grounds of the tithe-house itself, rubble and ash had been raked and dragged to form devotional signs on the rockcrete. Xander recognised aquilae and islumbine blooms in amongst masses of half-familiar Urdeshi iconography. And in the enclosure made by the house’s rear wings, a circle of cleared debris with an X hastily slopped onto the ground in white paint: their landing site.

Priad was waiting there, fully armoured and armed, lightning claw raised in greeting. Behind him a small mob of humans flinched and covered their ears against the sound of the engines as the gunship set down. As Damocles came down the ramp, Priad turned and said something to them that Xander didn’t catch. He caught the cheer that came back in return, though.

‘What was that?’ he asked Priad as their battle-brothers spread out around them.

‘Just thanking them for coming together and helping to clear this field for you. I contributed a little help.’

‘They gave you a labour crew?’ Xander watched the humans as they slowly dispersed, casting looks back over their shoulders or actually walking backwards to watch the Space Marines for as long as they could.

‘In a fashion,’ Priad said, as if he were still working it out for himself. ‘They… well, the need for a clear landing space came up, word went around, and they assembled themselves and got to work. Things seem to run rather fluidly here. Henztrom over there, young one, with the fresh scars and the metal leg he doesn’t quite know how to walk on yet. He’s sort of in charge out here to the extent that anyone is, in case you need to know that before I get back.’

Xander waited a few moments while Priad fired out transmissions onto the squad band, coded orders and a handful of pict-captures of the inside of the tithe-house. Affirmation codes rang off in response and the rest of the squad vanished into the building to take up their guard positions.

‘Get back,’ Xander said when the last of them was gone. ‘You’re not rejoining us, then.’

‘She’s announced that I’m to be one of her envoys to the Militarum command in Ghereppan proper,’ Priad said. ‘And a bodyguard to Captain Auerben, who’s her other one.’

‘You’re her messenger now?’ Xander said, a little more sharply than he had intended. Priad stepped closer so he could lower his voice.

‘So people will believe. But I’ve had word from Platonos Squad.’

‘Over on the Khosheal Reach?’

‘An isthmus north of there, sent as they dusted off from their last strike. Their Thunderhawk passed it through orbit to ours and Pyrakmon sent it ahead to me as soon as you were close enough. The lekt was transporting something, or escorting it, and whatever it is – was – it’s put Hamiskora’s hackles right up. The ’hawk is still holding the message and I’ve authorised you to read it. Do that once you’ve got Damocles in place. I need to take this to the Ghereppan command. She agrees.’

‘Do the rest of Damocles get to know this news?’ Xander asked.

‘Assimilate the report, make your decision and act on it,’ Priad said as a red glow washed over them. The carrier that had brought them from Rhole Cliffs rolled to a stop just short of them. Its lights, red-filtered and hooded to be less conspicuous at a distance, clicked off. A clank came from somewhere behind them as the hatch opened.

‘I don’t think we realised how truly fed up she was with being pushed back behind the lines, Xander. She’s going to enter the city, but she won’t do it on any terms but her own. Her mind is made up. The general will have to wait.’ Priad smiled. ‘Apparently an Iron Snake arriving as her herald will help to make the point.’

‘I…’ Xander began, and then bit the words off. ‘Well, we had this conversation already.’

‘And nothing’s changed.’

‘Do the Throne’s work, brother-captain.’ They clasped gauntlets.

‘As will we all,’ Priad said.

They parted ways without looking back.

The Enemy
Ghereppan city fringe

The two men in the stolen groundcar made their uneven way northeast, cutting cross-country as much as they could, using the car’s lights whenever they dared, jerking and stalling as their haste made them clumsy on the unfamiliar controls. They had no way to communicate with the ones they had left behind, but they didn’t need to. Just before they had separated, the lekt had opened her mouth wide and her voice grasped the whole pack’s brains with the same iron grip that a high-authority instruction would do into the blank mind of a servitor. Until the words she had spoken had worn off, the pack would act as one, as in-step as though they were marching side by side, no matter how far apart they were. They knew, simply knew, exactly how much time they had left before the moment came for them all to act at once. The sandglass running down in their minds was unambiguous, implacable.

Out on the inter-town roads they made better time, and grew confident enough to turn on the running lights as the dusk thickened. They saw checkpoints passing by them to the north, but never had to cross one: they were skirting around the fringes of Ghereppan and the tent city, moving parallel with the lines of Imperial checkpoints instead of through them.

The man in the passenger seat used a monocular from the observation post to keep watch out to their left. There was not the blaze of light that Ghereppan would have sent into the sky in peace time, but there was enough sign of the city and the camps to get a sense of their distance and position. They climbed out of the low ashpan country and into the hills. Their wheels jounced on ruts and outcrops. The thin, rubbery fingers of the landweeds squealed against the car’s sides.

A little less than half an hour to go. They swerved hard to the left and began accelerating down a gully almost due north, now aiming themselves straight at the south edge of Ghereppan. With the narrowing of the land towards the city, they had gone nearly two-thirds of the way to the opposite shore. Far enough for their purpose. They brought their lights up to full, swerving hard, back and forth, as the tangles of brush got thicker and the tyre-shredding rock outcrops larger. Soon the car would be expendable, but they could not afford to break it before then.

With just minutes left they came bouncing up onto a bulldozed trail through a cut between the last of the hills and there it was stretched out below them. The vast jumble of tents and shelters gave the plain a strange texture in the bloom. Strung lanterns and cooking fires filled the falling night with twinkling yellow-orange constellations.

The car shuddered with sudden braking and slewed to a halt halfway around on the road. The two men gawped at the sight ahead of them. The road was choked off with three angular caltrops of metal girder, each one higher than their car’s bonnet. There was some kind of vehicle parked beyond them but the two men couldn’t make out what it was. They let the engine stall out and clambered out of their seats as the dust cloud they had raised from the gravel road behind them billowed forward and filled the air with grit. There was a shout from the barricade.

The shaven-headed man, the one who’d been driving, dragged one of the cloth bundles out and yanked hard on a quick-release tag, breaking it open and spilling the contents out onto the road. They glinted yellow in the backwash of the CTT-2 groundcar’s lights, and yellow-white in the stablight that suddenly shone out of the barricade positions. There was another shout and a las-round kissed off the car’s corner, leaving a dribble of melted paint and a scorched stink in the air. A second shot slugged a coin-sized hole in the windscreen.

The lanky man who’d been the passenger dumped out the contents of the second bundle. The construct had been cleverly packed and now it unfolded neatly, sending up puffs of dust as it flopped face first onto the road. The man caught the crude metal helm with the side of one boot, and jumped back in dismay at the inadvertent insult. He would have said something in abasement, appeasement, but the bronze hand-brooch that pinned his lips only allowed him to moan in distress.

The driver shoved the third bundle over the side at him and scrambled for the pintle mount on the car’s roll bar. The pintle had been built for a heavy weapon but now only held a double-barrelled las, barely more powerful than an infantry weapon but better cooled and faster-firing. The driver seized the grips and started to blaze at the barricade, panting hard, eyes saucer-wide. This was it. The end. There was nothing else left. This was what he would die doing. It was a strange thought to think. The las-rounds made crisp little flares as they passed through the dust cloud, and the men at the barricade ducked down into cover.

The third bundle clanked and clattered out onto the dust. It looked like empty corpse wrappings for some quadrupedal predator, a large-headed hunting-cat, but made of hand-hammered metal plating, and barbed and razor wire. In place of a tail it had a trio of metal chains that ended in clusters of needle-sharp hooks. Some of the wrappings were tangled, and the whole creation wouldn’t lie straight on the road. Still moaning, the lanky man tugged at it, tried to straighten it. Blood was already dripping from his cut hands and staining the metal.

A hard-round weapon opened up on the uphill side of them, a heavy Urdeshi assault gun, carried around under cover of the stablight’s dazzle. The first salvo raked up the car’s side and through the shaven-headed man’s legs. He staggered and slumped, clinging to the grips in an attempt to stay upright, spraying las-fire up into the air. The second salvo perforated him and left him collapsing backwards to sag over the back of the car and flop into the road.

The lanky man was utterly absorbed in trying to unravel the strange sculpture he had unbundled. His hands were lacerated messes now, the fingers growing more and more clumsy as the thing’s edges cut them apart. He shot a look up and saw shapes moving down the hillside towards the car. His eyes widened. He looked back down at his mutilated hands. Even if he could get them free of this sharpened cagework they would never be able to grasp his pistol and fire it.

The metal construct in front of him shivered, a movement so quick it was barely there. His eyes bugged out. His pinned lips mumbled something. The words he was trying to speak were lost but the words the lekt had spoken into him were still clear as a hot knife. It was time.

The metal shivered again. A faint moan came from it, as though it were hanging high in a gibbet and a wind were passing through it. The sound was echoed by the constructs behind him. His mouth stretched in a smile. He felt a delighted giggle welling up in his throat.

A las-round hit him neatly in the top lip, cratering his face, cauterising the inside of his mouth and sending the bronze hand-pin dropping half-melted into his lap. A second round incinerated his throat and left the vertebrae of his neck exposed and smoking. At the same time a trio of hard rounds punched into his chest and burst out of his back, splattering the other two constructs in red. He pitched onto his side and only twitched once.

The two troopers from the checkpoint, Urdeshi regulars in grey camo and full-face visors, signalled to the barricade and came moving down the slope, more confident with each step that the resistance was ended. They were not yet close enough to hear the moaning, or to see the off-white light that was starting to drizzle in from nowhere and fill the three empty metal cages lying across the CTT-2’s tyre tracks.

They had just reached the ditch by the roadside when the first wirewolf sat up.

The Enemy
Hill country, Ghereppan promontory

The lekt felt it. Her body jerked as it reflexively tried to copy the motion.

She had come to rest on a ridge of foothills, studded with outcrops and tangled ankle-deep with desiccated ropes of weed, overlooking the ash flats south of Ghereppan. She lay full-length on the ground, motionless, her hands laced on her chest. A thermobaffled sheet covered her completely from head to toe, blurring her heat signature against anything that might be passing overhead. She held a light-amplifying magnoc in her twined fingers, one that would have been powerful enough to pick out the southern fringe of the displacee shanties from here, but she didn’t need it. She didn’t even need to open her eyes.

She was alone. Several of the infiltration team she had come ashore with were already dead, like the two at the checkpoint. Most of the remainder would die soon. One or two had scattered, she didn’t really care where. She had been prepared for that. Her pack had been loyal but they were not from the Sons of Sek; their discipline was imposed, not ingrained. Their faithfulness to orders that turned out to be literally suicidal was not quite what a Son’s would have been. It didn’t matter. They had still been successful.

She observed the three wirewolves tearing apart the Imperial checkpoint through a strange mix of perceptions. There were moments when she would feel their bodies’ movements as though they were her own, moments when she could watch them as if through a grainy sepia pict-feed, moments when that feed sprang into bright blue-purple life and she looked through their eyes. Sometimes her direct senses blanked out completely and the fighting arrived in her mind as words and phrases, welling up out of the constant tide that had whispered through her mind ever since she had received her master’s mark across her mouth.

The art of conjuring wirewolves as it had been passed down from the Anarch’s highest coteries was a subtle one, a process of long preparation. Careful ceremonial defilements would build a point of significance, like toxins accreting in a water table, weakening and softening a point in space, so that any disturbance would burst it like an infected sore and bleed power and essence out into the human-shaped cages.

This time there had been no time for any of that. Their hold on this world had never become as secure as their conquest of Gereon had been, for all that this lekt hadn’t even been in the Anarch’s service when his voice, which drowned out all others, had spoken its claim to that world. For this mission, something different had had to be devised.

Her soldiers hadn’t really remembered what that was. Her words, when she spoke them, had erased whatever was going on in their heads, and when she fell silent again their thoughts just picked up where they had been knocked down and continued on, ignorant of the gap in their memories. But the words had folded a certain pattern into their brains, packed it in like memory wire being crammed into a canister. As each one of them died, that power had exploded out of its confinement, carrying their expiring life energy with it, the lekt’s craft turning that puff of dissipating life into a shaped charge, opening the warp-wound. The cages, already stirred to half-life by the ritual slaughter of the refugees on the road, had been more than ready.

The lekt shifted under the thermal sheet and placed her fingers gently over the hand-shaped patch of scar tissue that gnarled her mouth and chin. Her own hand was nowhere near large enough to cover the brand but the pose soothed her, helped her breathing and her focus. She could feel her creations more and more clearly, little burning points like fingertips, sending back to her the texture of the land as though she were caressing the earth.

One of her pack had tried to wade through the maze of gullies and waterholes in the south-eastern ashpan and put his foot into a tangle of underwater razor wire. When a scratch company patrol from the shanties had come to investigate his cries he had bent over and feigned semi-consciousness until it was time, then straightened up and tried to throw his skzerret blade into the face of the nearest one. He had fallen a moment later, riddled with autogun bullets. The wirewolf that had clambered up from his pack was racing north now, the razor wire from the waterhole drawn up and incorporated into itself.

Two others had rushed a lookout post dug into a crater on the Ghereppan highway. The first had gone down to a prolonged las burst, and in the bedlam that broke out around the manifesting wirewolf and his companion slipped past and into the shanties. She had stumbled on in the gloom and crowds until she found a crowded communal cooking-tent and waded in, shouting curses and slashing with her skzerret. She managed to kill two and wound another four before she went down under fists, blades and boots. The wirewolf that scrambled out from under her dying body ended the vengeful crowd before they could understand what they were seeing.

One man made it to the top of a rubble barricade on the coastal freightway, tossed the unbundled wolf down among the startled Imperials on the other side and woke it when his corpse landed next to it half a minute later. Another got far enough into the shanties to reach a field hospital, unslung his burden at the entrance and ran inside with an armed grenade in each hand. The dust and smoke of the explosions was suffused with violet-white light as the wirewolf straightened up and stretched its limbs.

The lekt’s lips were too stiff with burn-scar for subtle expressions, but still she almost managed to smile. She would hold her head up proudly among the Anarch’s host. The Voice That Drowned Out All Others had spoken, and she had been the instrument that made its words come true. She lay there in a pose of devotion, hand over mouth, and away in the dark her new pack burned their paths through the refugee city like hot sharp irons dragging through flesh.

Roboute
Southern quarter, Ghereppan displacee camp

‘Excuse me, please.’

The shouting ahead of him faltered almost at once. Roboute Frazer drew himself up to his modestly impressive full height and put on his severest look. His left hand grasped the wire-embroidered lapel of his coat. His right was grasped in turn by the small boy who’d come running through the maze of the south-western shanties to fetch him. He gave the grubby little hand a reassuring squeeze before he released it and stepped forward.

‘Well?’ he said. ‘Mikk? What’s going on? Gerreg? What’s the trouble?’

‘Bit of disorder in off the hill roads, sir,’ Gerreg said, tired as much as angry. ‘Sorry to’ve bothered you.’

‘No bother, Gerreg. Tell me how I can help.’ The men shuffled their feet and looked at one another.

It was an effect that Frazer had. He’d been in the shanties for nearly a year and still wasn’t entirely used to it. Until the war had come back to swallow Urdesh yet again he had been an ordinate of the Aug-Ezhter clade, his home an elegant suite of staterooms aboard a colossal floating hearth-house plying the subpolar seas. A lifetime immersed in the clade’s esoteric fiduciary rites had perfectly prepared Frazer to be utterly useless in the dirty hardscrabble life of the war displacee. By the time he had found his way to the Ghereppan shanty-camps, he’d become deeply ashamed of himself, just another mouth to feed who couldn’t put up a shelter, aim a lasgun, dress a cut, even cook a meal. It had taken him some time to find that his old life had given him some qualities that were less tangible, but remarkably useful.

‘They,’ Mikk snarled, ‘have no right.’ He made a sweep and jab with one thick arm, so angrily expansive that Frazer had no clue who or what the man was trying to indicate. ‘There’s right and there’s wrong, and we’ve been patient and faithful, sir. You see it, don’t you? With respect?’

There it was. He suspected it was partly his frock coat and hood, the ordinate’s garb he took care to always be seen wearing. They were laced with memory wires that kept their lines smooth and creases sharp, and used his body heat to power static fields that shrugged off the ashy grime of the camps. The psychological effect was hard to argue with.

But the clothes were just a part of it. The rest of it was so ingrained into himself that it had taken Frazer some active puzzling-out to realise that it was anything at all. Not charisma, as such, not charm, as such, just the way he spoke, how he carried himself. He radiated the simple, unthinking conviction of a man who’d spent his life expecting – knowing – that when he stepped through a door silence would fall, heads would turn and the room would respectfully wait upon his words. Here, in among the crowds of displacees desperate for any kind of order to clutch on to, he fit a gap. People listened to him, deferred to him, treated his approval as some kind of stamp of authority. Their homes might lie in rubble, but the cities of the mind still cast a long shadow.

Frazer only half-understood it, really, or at least only half-believed it, and some part of the back of his mind was still convinced that any moment now they would all suddenly see through him. See through him and drag him away to be flogged at the foot of one of the aquila shrines as they had with the food-hoarder the previous week. Or just dump him over the seawall with a las-crater between his eyes, the way they had with the medicine-thief the week before that.

He pushed the thought from his mind. However strange it still seemed to him, it gave him a way to be useful. And now it was time to be useful.

‘Yes, you have, Mikk,’ he said, spreading his hands, ‘and there will surely be a way to settle this down. Tell me at whom you are angry, good fellow, and what it is they’ve no right to.’

He found he was having to walk forward and raise his voice to be heard. All around the cookfire square – just a gap, really, where the random springing-up of the shanties had left a slightly bigger space than usual – the early-evening noise of the camp was ramping up. But there was more to it now of course. Shouts of excitement, sobs of relief, songs of praise and thanks that wove into and out of one another, clashing or chorusing. Mikk’s angry glower cut across the grain of the mood somewhat.

‘It’s about who gets to see Herself,’ Gerreg said. ‘Or when.’ The old kelp-farmer licked his lips and grimaced at the taste of camp-dust. ‘Mikk’s angry because he made straight for the southern roads soon’s we got the word. He wanted to beg a prayer of her for the souls of his lady and his little one.’ Mikk lowered his head at that, his expression softening. ‘And then, well, he and his mates, they got no chance at that, and now all they want’s to follow up there in her steps, hear her voice…’

‘I went and said,’ Mikk growled. ‘Went to the esholi shrine.’ His Urdeshi accent gave the Hagian word a thick-tongued buzz.

‘Things are on a bit of a boil,’ Gerreg put in. ‘You heard the singing from up north?’

‘I did.’ The breeze was shifting as evening fell and every northerly change brought the faint sound of the plainsong from the direction of the Ghereppan border. ‘Singing to the Saint, Mikk, is that true?’

‘See, we knew it was her! We did, sir, when that tank came through…’

‘’Twas a carrier,’ a voice corrected him, and Mikk’s sloping shoulders bunched in anger.

‘If you think I’m going to stand here while the likes of–’ he began, and only backed off with a growl when Frazer walked across and put a palm on his chest. Frazer had never had to do that before, and he surprised himself slightly with his own bravado. He was sure Mikk was strong enough to snap his arm with one hand. He felt slightly giddy with relief when the big man backed away instead, but he didn’t let it show.

‘Don’t give up hope, Mikk,’ he said, trying for a fatherly tone, kind but firm, convinced that they were all aware how hard he was contriving it. ‘She wouldn’t want you to. While she’s here, there’s hope. If she’s the closest to us she’s ever been, then hope must be close too, mustn’t it?’

‘Anything you can do, sir, is all I’m saying,’ Mikk mumbled, and Frazer was startled to see the big man’s eyes wet. ‘Any word you can put in, y’know…’

Frazer had no idea what Mikk thought he was in a position to do, but he gave a smile and a little incline of his head, and now there wasn’t going to be a fight where there was almost certainly going to be one before, and he had managed to be useful for another day.

‘Let’s all eat, then, shall we?’ he asked them. ‘Perhaps they’ve managed to catch another eel over by the shore. That’s sure to ease our troubles…’ His voice tailed off. ‘That’s not… that’s not singing.’

It was shouting. Shouting, crashing and clattering as lean-tos collapsed and tents were trampled. Frazer gulped. Defusing tempers around the cookfire had obviously just been a warm-up. Something bigger was happening.

‘Gerreg, could you see to the boy, there?’ He made himself smile at the wide-eyed youngster who’d come to his shelter to fetch him. ‘Make sure he finds his way back to his family if things get rough.’ Gerreg was already hurrying to grab the child’s hand. Frazer was breathing hard. The cries had been anger and alarm at whatever was breaking out to the south but now he was hearing screams. Desperate, wordless screams, human souls in horror for their lives. Frazer’s gut twisted. It was more than one or two. They were filling the air, washing over the shanties in a wave. The camp’s entire southern reach was taking up the same hellish chorus.

He looked around, met Mikk’s eyes. With barely more than a nod the two men began walking into the storm.

The first person they met was a man about Frazer’s age, crawling around the corner of a pressboard shelter, weeping and trying to cover his ears as he crawled on. Each time his hand touched his ear it came away with fresh blood in the palm. As they ran to him he was trodden down into the dust by a pair of boys supporting an old woman between them, all three howling wordlessly, heedless of the two men in their way. Mikk grabbed Frazer to one side before they could knock him down too, and when they were passed the two of them hoisted the broken man up onto his feet.

‘What’s happening?’ Frazer asked him. ‘I know you – Tiro, isn’t it? Tiro? What’s – oh, Throne, Mikk…’

A mob came pouring through the gap they were standing in, crashing the pressboard wall down and battering the trio with bodies as they stormed north. There were some words mixed in with their cries – Frazer picked out lost and get away, get away before they were gone. Frazer’s gut twisted once more as he saw two of them plough straight through the cookfire without even trying to turn or slow.

‘Mikk,’ he said, and coughed out a throatful of dust from the mob’s passage. ‘Help Tiro. If you can’t get him out of reach of the trouble, then get him somewhere he won’t be trampled. Wait there with him if you have to. Come back and find me if you think you can.’

‘Not right, sir,’ Mikk said. ‘You’ll need a pair of hands–’

‘I can run if I have to,’ Frazer told him. ‘Tiro can’t. I think I see Belphos up ahead and if she’s there her son will be too. I’ll get them to help. Here, Tiro, arm over the shoulder, that’s it, my friend, Mikk’s got you. Go.’

He didn’t wait to see if Mikk was obeying him. Breathing hard, heart hammering, he squared his shoulders and pressed on.

Everything around him was bedlam now, bodies hurling themselves through the gloom to left and right, sparks and flames as campfires were scattered and trampled, the air still lacerated with screams. Frazer hurried across a circular space they used for dawn hymns to where Belphos was kneeling with her back to him. When he stooped and put a hand on her shoulder she barely reacted.

‘Bel? Where’s your boy? If the two of you aren’t hurt you should come with me, I’m going to see who I can help.’ No answer. He peered down, trying to see her face. She was staring into the dark, tears on her cheeks and blood on her chin. In the strange silver-violet glow that was illuminating her face, Frazer saw that two of her teeth had fallen out.

He started back from her and looked around. He’d never seen a lamp that colour in the shanties, but the light was shining through the ramshackle streets in front of him. When he looked at it he felt a keening in his mind, like a viol-bow being drawn across metal. His vision lost focus, his eyes filling with tears and his mouth with saliva. He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment and then made himself walk again on unsteady legs.

‘Here!’ He raised his voice as he crossed into an alley cutting through the shelters. He couldn’t see movement now, the camp in front of him seemed empty. ‘If anyone’s hurt, come towards the sound of my voice! I can lead you to help! We’ll go north together!’ That maddening keening was filling his ears, making his clothes buzz against his skin, making him pant for air, hanging somewhere in his senses beyond the level of actual physical sound.

And then suddenly it was physical, it was real, it was right in front of him.

The screaming thing looked up from the shape it was tearing at, a limp doll of a human body that was dissolving into ashes in its grip. It was bearlike, heavy-shouldered, its face a woven veil of razor wire stretched over an iron hoop, its hands clusters of steel nails held together with squirming lilac flames. Past it down the alleyway another one stalked into view, a skeletal creation walking on six legs of brass rod, the curve of its back outlined in burning barbs. It swung its metal-tusked snout around to stare.

Roboute Frazer did not die running. He spread his arms out in a useless gesture of protection for Bel and anyone else who might be behind him. His chest heaved and each breath came out hard – huh, huh, huh. Cold, acrid sweat ran into his eyes. The things were looking at him. He had to keep them looking at him. Five seconds? Six? If he could keep them looking at him for six seconds that might just buy enough time for someone else to run that bit further, hide that bit deeper. Six seconds, seven. He just had to hope it would be enough. For at least one life. Seven seconds, eight–

The wirewolf’s leap had the unreal, blinking speed of nightmares. Its claws found Frazer’s chest and it bore him down, dragged him along the path, hoisted him up again as his feet kicked against it and its scream split the skin of his face. His clothes scorched black and began to burn; his lungs were suddenly full of violet fire. His lips were still trying to count the seconds as they shrivelled to ash. A second later all the wirewolf was holding was the metal microweave that had permeated his fine blue ordinate’s coat. It tore the impediment away like a man brushing spiderweb from his hands and raised a fresh shriek to the darkened sky.

And then it was on the move again, loping northward, its companion galloping behind.

Damocles
Tithe-house, Ghereppan displacee camp

They were singing, out there in the darkness.

The sound came welling out of the fire-spotted night and washed against the walls of the tithe-house like waves against a cliff. The frantic festivities that had greeted the news of the Beati’s arrival had exhausted themselves. Now her followers had assembled around the nearest fires and around the building itself, half-consciously stopping at the house’s old boundary as though the handful of battered posts and scraps of chainlink were still a fence line. Islumbine was not native to Urdesh, so the more enthusiastic of the displacees were making do with garlands of fresh salt-weed collected up from the shoreline, brought back into the shanties and passed around to the youngest, oldest and sickest to try and bring the Saint’s blessings that little bit quicker.

For the young Bairet Henztrom, second lieutenant in the 20th Urdeshi Urban Regulars, this night was already full of all the blessing he needed. When he had realised that his injuries might prevent him from ever returning to his unit he had spent the rest of his convalescence almost feverish with despair, thinking of his comrades still out there in that nightmare war-cauldron that was central Ghereppan. More than once he had wished that the mob of Blood Pact had finished the job of hacking him to pieces in that charnel house of a stairwell deep in some random empty hab-block. Then he had wept with shame at such a selfish thought, and begged the Emperor to let him understand why He had seen fit to let him be dragged back alive to the medicae instead. For surely, surely there had been a reason?

And now here he was. Standing with Space Marines – Space Marines – at the doors of a building where a Living Saint was at prayers. He couldn’t stop thinking back to his childhood, he and his sister walking the Stations of the Throne in the refugee transport’s chapel, staring up at the glassaic portraits of the Adeptus Astartes marching along the walls. They had been overwhelming. And they had still been smaller than these.

Henztrom’s heart leapt every time he turned to look at them, the five armoured giants standing at arms along the tithe-house’s wall. None of them had moved since they had taken their positions; they could have been statues lining a temple processional. The distant firelight was just enough to pick out the metal of their weapons and the grey sheen of their battleplate.

The massed singing from out in the night gave the final, dreamlike touch. The song looped through the same repetitions of minor keys, every seventh syllable chanted out louder, every twenty-first syllable rising to a short, barking shout almost like a war cry. The effect was almost hypnotic. Henztrom felt as if he were floating, living in someone else’s ecstatic vision. Surely this wonder was what he had been spared to see.

When he turned again, one of the Iron Snakes was standing at his shoulder. Henztrom tried to gulp and gasp simultaneously, and staggered away from it when his too-new metal leg turned treacherously under him. Two more enormous figures were walking up behind the first, bolters held high on their chests.

‘D-Damocles,’ Henztrom said, and forced himself not to flinch. He had been told these warriors didn’t like flowery ceremony, no ‘honoured sirs’ or the like, but it still felt intolerably rude to start off like that.

‘What is that?’ a voice came. Henztrom experienced a moment of pure panic as he realised he didn’t know which of them had spoken. What was he supposed to–

Blessedly, the nearest one tilted its – his – head to look down at him, and pointed out into the night.

‘That sound,’ the voice said, and that at least he could answer.

‘Urdeshi plainsong, my lo–, uh, sir. One of our forms of devotion.’ He listened along with them. ‘That one’s just known as the Second Piety. An old song, one everyone would know. I think that’s why–’ He stopped and rocked backward, wincing again as the stump of his left leg twinged in its prosthetic mount. The Space Marine had flicked a giant hand out to him, palm outward, for silence.

‘Not the singing,’ he said. ‘What’s behind it?’

‘I think there are… maybe… other people talking, perhaps, sir? Saying prayers, or…?’

‘No,’ came another Space Marine’s voice, and again Henztrom couldn’t tell from which glowering faceplate it had come. ‘No, you’re right, Natus. That’s not human.’

‘I…’ Henztrom said, and then shut his mouth with a snap. An Astartes could see and hear more than a man could, every damn child knew that. So either he could stand here gawping and saying, Oh, I can’t hear anything, or…

He twisted around until he spotted some of the tithe-house’s volunteer worker-guards. The pain and disorientation dropped away and he found his officer’s bearing without having to think about it, donning it as smoothly as a fitted carapace sliding into place. He pointed at the nearest.

‘You, get Ghelon and tell him the God-Emperor’s sons hear something,’ he snapped. ‘And you, get to the vox-room now and raise the south perimeter. Put them on alert and demand confirmation.’ He half-expected to have to argue, or at least repeat himself, but both the ones he’d singled out turned and bolted into the building without a word. A handful more came forward to join him, drawing las and stub guns or unsheathing combat blades. Henztrom drew his own laspistol and winced at another twinge from his metal leg as he turned to the Adeptus Astartes to say–

There were no Adeptus Astartes. Henztrom looked around wildly and managed a glimpse of enormous armoured figures vanishing into the night. Cries and shouts shot through the serene rise and fall of the plainsong like lightning flickering behind clouds.

Just for an instant Henztrom did think he could hear something, a faint alien moaning somewhere deep in the dark. He started to curse, then stilled his tongue. If the moment the Emperor had spared him for had come and gone, then it had gone. Instead he began intoning a Ministorum litany for the dying, and the men and women around him took up the refrain.

Priad
Astra Militarum Command, Ghereppan City

‘Another lekt dead, I understand?’ came the voice through the swirling shoal of holotank runes. ‘Good. Good show. Another one for the tally.’

‘You’re speaking of Platonos Squad, not my own Damocles,’ Priad answered as politely as he could, in the voice’s general direction. Below and behind him he could hear the bustle and chatter of the rest of the command post start to pick up again, after the bow-wave of silence that had spread in front of him when he had first come through the far doors. Even now, most of the humans behind him were speaking in whispers.

Something was nagging at him, and he realised with an internal wince what it was. ‘My own Damocles’, he had said. That was unbecoming. He was a brother-captain now. Every Iron Snakes squad on Urdesh was his equally. He had to be careful of that.

‘It was Platonos who took the task of breaking the lekts’ operating structure,’ he went on, ‘while the rest of our strength came across the straits. Epistolary Hamiskora has done fine work in divining new tracks and targets from each of his kills.’

‘Good. Very good. I second your commendation of your man. I’ll ensure it’s recorded.’ The voice was moving behind a burst of yellow icons about two-thirds up the tank’s height. Priad spent a moment taking them in. The Adrantine Coradna, an Imperial Navy ship, a light one, a variant destroyer class he wasn’t immediately familiar with. It had been careless with a low-orbital surveillance pass over the Ghereppan promontory, drifting too far north into range of Oureppan’s potent space-defence silos. The floating icons marked the superheated shockwaves in the upper atmosphere where lasers and mass drivers had smashed into the warship’s voids, and the aquamarine line arcing up from them was the trajectory along which the Coradna was making its frantic escape. By reflex, Priad’s eyes darted down to the land map underneath it but there was no falling debris, no ground engagement nearby. Nothing to affect any of the Iron Snakes. The fact neither bothered nor relieved him. He simply absorbed it, fitted it into his own mental battle-map and moved on.

‘Platonos’ most recent target was travelling with a convoy,’ he said in the voice’s direction. ‘Almost certainly he was not based in the settlement where my brothers found him. We caught them while they were making a stop. From what Hamiskora could discern after the kill, the lekt had been making his way to Oureppan.’

‘Does that strike you as odd?’ asked General Illin Grawe-Ash, finally coming around the tank and into view. She was built a lot like Mazho, powerful and nuggety, as broad at the hip as at the shoulder, with a thick neck and square hands. Astartes tended to be mostly indifferent to faces but their perceptions of body language and physique were amplified by their transformation and conditioning – reading body movements was invaluable in combat. The general’s build and mannerisms placed her as a widelander, the Urdeshi name for anyone who’d grown up on a landmass that couldn’t be driven across in a day. She’d done well to rise to command if that were true. The standard wisdom on Urdesh was that it was the archipelagos which produced the best the planet had to offer, be that food, art, piety, machinery or people.

Also like Mazho, the general wore eyeglasses. The yellow-green glare of the holotank reflected off them, obscuring her eyes and giving her cropped white hair a bilious tinge.

‘It does me,’ she said, ‘when I start wondering which way one of the Anarch’s witches ought to be travelling. Both we and the Archenemy, the red and the yellow flavours of him, have sunk so much of ourselves into Ghereppan that whoever is eventually routed out of here will have been crippled on a planetary scale.’ She grinned, shrugged and spread her hands. ‘And yet this fellow is on the way to sit behind the lines at Oureppan. That shouldn’t bother me. Set against the scale of what’s going on in this city it’s miniscule. There are any number of reasons for it that would make sense. But it’s under my skin for some reason.’ She peered into the holotank again, then looked back at Priad.

‘Nothing to add, brother-captain?’

‘He had machinery,’ Priad answered. Oddly, he found himself relaxing – it was a refreshing change speaking to a human who wasn’t visibly overawed by him. ‘It was largely destroyed in the strike so we don’t know its precise nature, but it was designed for the lekt to use somehow.’

‘But not operational?’

‘Destroyed in the fighting. But the lekt’s reaction to Platonos’ approach was to try and remove it from the building it was hidden in, and when they closed too fast for that his next reaction was to abandon it and try to escape. Hamiskora says he was still intending to flee for Oureppan. The sense of the place saturated his last few minutes of thought.’

‘What an odd way to put it,’ Grawe-Ash said, tilting her head.

‘Our Epistolary’s term, not mine. My point is that if it had been a weapon then Platonos would have seen it used in the fighting.’ The general nodded.

‘I can order a recovery mission if your squad didn’t bring it back with them. Is there enough there to justify that? What would you judge?’

‘Hamiskora brought away one or two fragments that he didn’t want the enemy to salvage,’ Priad said. ‘But that’s all. If you can call on the Adeptus Mechanicus to extract any meaning from the rest of the wreckage, then I’d judge a recovery justified. Or perhaps the Psykana. Or…’ He let the sentence trail off.

‘The ordos don’t have too much of a presence in this theatre,’ the general said with a tone of distaste. ‘For which small grace I give thanks. Some news from Eltath got them excited enough that what few representatives they had here decamped in a hurry just hours ago. Throne forfend that they have to soil their hands with any of the grunt work of chiselling this city out of the enemy’s grip.’

Priad found himself smiling at that.

‘Still, I’m still a little surprised that none of them cared to stay and meet her,’ he said, and Grawe-Ash snorted.

‘The Saint is a strange one, so I’m told,’ she said, glancing up at Priad’s face when he didn’t answer her. ‘The Inquisition likes strange things that it can grab for itself and control, or strange things it can stamp out and never have to think about again. The Lady of Hagia is too dear to the Throne to be the latter, and far too stubborn to be the former. So none of their favourite tricks work on her, and they turn their backs on her instead. Is that your impression too, sir?’

‘There’s quite a history now of attempts to do both the things you describe with her,’ Priad said after a moment’s thought. ‘Neither kind has worked very well.’

‘I’ve not met her,’ Grawe-Ash said more softly, ‘for all the time she’s walked my world. But you can tell.’

‘Ma’am?’

‘By what the priests and the high-command staffers and the ordos envoys say, and what they’re careful to skirt around saying. Shooing away the accounts from Herodor. Working so hard to paint it all as a useful propaganda anomaly thrown up by a cross-current of the war. Listen to enough of it and you can hear the same prepared lines coming up. There’s a script sheet been handed around somewhere.’ She stared up into Priad’s face again. He could see her eyes now, tired eyes the almost colourless yellow-brown so common on Urdesh, but he couldn’t read the emotion in them.

‘She’s more than that, though, isn’t she? I’m too old for the breathless temple-fevers the young folk get, but I don’t believe this talk about her as just some pretty, charismatic girl who can pose in ceremonial armour and quote a psalm with a bit of conviction. No. She’s more than that.’

It wasn’t a question the second time she said it, but Priad answered it anyway.

‘You’re right, general. I don’t pretend to properly understand what she is, but she is more than that.’

‘Good.’ Grawe-Ash clapped her hands, all business again. ‘So. Where is she?’

Damocles
Ghereppan displacee camp

Xander’s transmission was a curt bark of Phratry battle-code that would have barely been distinguishable as words to a human ear. Khiron listened to it standing in the Beati’s doorway on the tithe-house’s ground floor. Enemy alert, the code said, unnatural signs. Half-element advancing. See to your missions.

He found that he was not in the least surprised. Not just at the alert: they had been expecting another attack since they had left Rhole Cliffs. But the thought came to Khiron that he had been bracing for an attack now.

It was because of her, of course. Without consciously realising it, Damocles Squad had started to watch the Saint even as they watched over her, reading her mannerisms and her moods. And when she had started to show signs of disquiet – breaking off from prayers or conversations to pace, cocking her head as if listening for something, checking and re-checking her pistol load and loosening her blade in its scabbard – they had responded just as they would have to a red-flickering auspex or the distant sound of guns.

Unnatural signs, Xander had said. Warp-bastardry. Khiron grimaced.

‘On its way,’ the Beati said aloud. She was still, but not serene. Her stillness was tight, wary, expectant. ‘Something is on its way.’

Ghelon had tried to install her in what had been the tribunal chamber, in the vaulted heart of the tithe-house where the tithe-master’s throne sat atop a blocky rhyolite dais. In peacetime, the local satrap would have sat there, declaiming orders over a booming amplifier horn as functionaries and petitioners swarmed around the long tables, brandishing sheaves of printout or brass-sheathed code-cores. The high seat was hemmed in by an angled conveyor that would have carried an endless procession of read-outs and certificates past the satrap’s gaze. Overhead hung an armature that had once bristled with vox-wands and directional communicators to make sure that not a murmur from the satrap’s lips was lost. All those trappings were long gone now, but someone had propped a jar of clean water and a sea-grass garland against the conveyor by the throne’s right hand, for the Saint to wash and adorn herself when she climbed up to hold court.

Sabbat had taken one look up at the seat, shaken her head and silently turned her back on it. Now she was sitting cross-legged on one of the long counting-tables, her scabbarded sword across her knees, her pistol and Pragar knife beside her. Aekon and Dyognes flanked her at a respectful distance with the rest of her people and a complement of Ghelon’s all swirling around them, passing around food from the tithe-house’s refectory kitchen as they talked. Now, one by one, they all fell silent as her words sank in.

‘Kules,’ Khiron voxed. ‘Anything to tell us?’

‘Nothing visible,’ the barrel-chested young Snake told them. He was out in the house’s front hall, just out of eyeshot of Khiron in the refectory’s doorway. ‘That creepy singing seems to be breaking up but I can’t hear whatever our brothers outside heard, not yet. Crowds are stirred up but I don’t see a threat. I think it’s mostly a reaction to Xander and the rest charging through… and Crethon’s in the air now, the ’hawk just went overhead. Alert, Khiron, two runners just came through the hall from the side.’

‘Got her.’ Khiron shot a hand out and the runner skidded to a halt, her eyes wide. She stared up at him, gulped and pointed behind her.

‘Y-your brothers, sir, the lieutenant…’ She yelped as Khiron took her shoulder, turned her, examined her head to foot.

‘Runner coming in,’ he voxed as he released her. ‘Short blade on her thigh, pistol behind her left hip. Watch her.’

‘Affirm,’ Dyognes answered. ‘Eyes on.’

Somewhere, a hand-cranked klaxon began to howl.

Damocles
Ghereppan displacee camp

Xander heard the klaxon start up behind them as he led his half of Damocles Squad southward, pushing through the milling crowds like swimmers breasting the incoming sea-swell. The crowds were reacting to the cries they could hear from their fellows further south, and to the running, screaming figures appearing out of the night and staggering past them. But human senses had not yet picked up what all the Iron Snakes could now hear clearly.

It was the thrum of wires, it was the wind through the bars of a gibbet, it was the shuddering scrape of metal in a badly kept machine. It was more than those things and none of those things. It was the living ear trying to make sense of the cry of an unliving throat.

Inside his helm, Xander’s handsome face was locked in a scowl of concentration. He was running through descriptors in his head, audio cues, referents that tried to match the eerie, depthless, distanceless quality of the sound ahead of them. It took longer than it should have, almost a dozen paces, enough to carry him into the thick of the crowd. Finally, the right mnemonic triggers tripped and the knowledge was there.

‘Wirewolves,’ he said into the vox. In an instant each Iron Snake had framed the word in their minds, and touched off a cascade of recall, drawn in from their hypno-assimilated data briefings.

Wirewolves. The Gereon occupation. Warp-hatched conjurations. Made in whatever bestial shape the metalsmiths and warp-workers could imagine, no two alike but their natures always the same. Ferociously animate, barely alive, almost unstoppable, utterly murderous. The sort of creature it would take a Space Marine to kill.

Xander felt a flush of heat through his body as glanded hormones slammed his metabolism up a gear. His vision sharpened and his hearts accelerated into a complex double rhythm. His body prickled and tingled as his nerve endings hypersensitised themselves to the interface carapace grown into his skin. His vision sharpened, then brightened as perception conditioning and auto-senses compensated for the tunnel vision that the adrenaline spike was trying to force on him. Targeting data began to skip across his vision.

But by now he could barely move forward. The crowd ahead of him was in full-fledged panic, the stream of people rushing from the south grown to a stampede. He could walk, move at a stride through the occasional eye-blink-brief gap, but he couldn’t break back into a run without smashing a bloody path through the people ahead of him.

‘Part!’ he heard Andromak bellow from off to his right. ‘Part or get down! Make way!’ But the fleeing crowd showed no sign they had heard. Xander had to plant his feet and physically brace himself, barely able to believe that the sheer weight of bodies was about to bear him backward.

‘Stand fast,’ came Pindor’s voice. ‘Bear up. They can’t understand you, brother. Look at them.’ Xander looked down, into eyes half rolled back into heads, mouths locked into rictus screams. Bodies slammed into him and bounced away, stumbling back into the stampede or falling beneath the feet of their fellows. People began to pile up against the Iron Snakes, trapped by the press of the crowds behind them. Ragged figures were crawling in behind Xander’s feet, curling up in an attempt to protect themselves.

His every instinct was to sweep his arm and send broken bodies sprawling, fire his bolter and blow a bloody clear space in front of him. The conscious thought that kept sparking through the interlocking machinery of his combat reactions was that this was no battlefield, this was no enemy, this was not what an Iron Snake was made for. It was his words with Priad that kept him centred, beneath the night sky at Rhole Cliffs. We were made to fight, but over and above that we were made to serve. He kept his weapon cold, held his arm out to try and deflect the oncoming press. The screams of the stampede were briefly drowned out by the Thunderhawk passing overhead, but when the gunship had gone the wirewolves’ cries were closer, close enough for the human ear. A great groan swept through the refugee stampede at the sound.

‘Crethon!’ Xander shouted. ‘How close? How close?’

‘The rear fringe of that mob is almost on you,’ their pilot answered, voice tight. ‘Enemy right on them, right in the middle of them, I’m trying to confirm but they’re… hard to see…’

‘Stay high,’ Xander ordered. ‘I want you able to get back and carry the Beati clear if it looks like this rush is going to overwhelm her.’

‘Already there,’ Pyrakmon put in darkly. ‘But I didn’t see them trying to break into the house. They’ve just flowed around it towards the city.’

‘Into the rear of the Imperial lines,’ Crethon added.

‘Into the warzone soon, then,’ Pindor supplied. ‘They’re not thinking. Their minds are too burned.’

‘Light up ahead,’ Scyllon reported from out on the Snakes’ left flank. ‘Low. Crethon, that you?’

‘Not us, we’re up and forward of you,’ Pyrakmon replied. ‘That’s enemy. Fixing on it but it’s a hard track. In amongst the crowd.’

‘Advance, then,’ Xander told them. Finally, the crowd was easing. He could straighten up and lean into it as a stream of individual bodies instead of an unbroken advancing wall. He carefully lifted his foot clear of the two scrawny forms trying to cling to it and stepped forward, shrugging the half-crushed humans off his chest and arms as gently as he dared.

After a moment, he could take another step, a moment after that he could walk. Refugees were still streaming past him, stumbling in the ruins of the shelters and fires that they ploughed through without looking down. They were stumbling over one another, too, treading the injured and dead underfoot where at first they had borne up and supported one another. The Iron Snakes got not so much as a glance. Pindor had been right. Their minds had been broken.

The moving lights to the south were unmistakable now. At last, the enemy. Damocles Squad went to meet them.

Priad
Astra Militarum Command, Ghereppan City

‘You’re disappointed,’ Priad said.

‘No point in denying it,’ Grawe-Ash said with a shrug. ‘I told you, I’ve never met her. I was glad she was coming to my own part of this war. I…’ She sighed and straightened her glasses. ‘I fancied perhaps the Throne had heard a prayer.’ She stared back at the holotank, whose display had flicked to a vertical set of Militarum signal-runes whose meaning Priad couldn’t interpret. ‘But no. Just a little further down the road, sir.’ That last phrase had a well-worn feel, an Urdeshi proverb or the like. ‘Will she come here? Or is she a woman of the people now, not prepared to wait on a general?’

‘She has come to Ghereppan to inspire, but also absolutely to fight,’ Priad answered. ‘And she’ll come to speak with you about that. She’s a warrior, she’s been among the Militarum and the Sisterhood for more than ten years. She understands how this works.’ Grawe-Ash gave him a sharp look at that. ‘I promise you she doesn’t mean to snub you, general. She’s angry at her treatment but she doesn’t hold grudges like that. She’s not…’ Priad thought about it. ‘Whatever you’re expecting from her, she won’t be it. Anyone and everyone who meets her, no matter what their expectations are, they seem to find something different.’

‘What…’ Grawe-Ash’s voice tailed off and she half-turned away from him, concentrating on something she had seen in the holotank that Priad had missed. She leaned in and turned a brass crank at one corner of the tank’s dais. The display blurred, scudded and reformed. ‘Alright, then. Should I be expecting her to be responsible for this?’

Priad stepped forward, conscious of the warning creaks of the flooring under his feet when he moved. The markers in the tank were stylised and difficult to interpret until he stopped concentrating on the markers themselves and looked at the pattern they made. Then he recognised the shape of the tithe-house’s perimeter, the collapsed roadway and the landmarks of the displacee shanties straight away. The images stuttered and closed in on themselves as Grawe-Ash turned another ratchet and shrank the display. No ambiguity now. A ragged line of runes had flared up across the map, some far out in the hill country, some deep in the shanty city. They danced and shivered, blurred and sharpened as new information was inloaded, but the trend was clear. They were picking up speed, moving north, and with every update refresh the runes turned a brighter, deeper, more dangerous shade of red.

‘Alarm,’ said one of the scriptor servitors poring over ticker printouts along the post’s far wall. Its voice was dry and tired but it reached every ear in the room. More monotone voices joined it. ‘Alarm. Alarm. Alarm.’

Damocles
Tithe-house, Ghereppan displacee camp

‘It’s alright,’ the Beati said. It wasn’t clear whom she was addressing; the reassurance could have been for any of the people around her in the tithe-house’s main hall. ‘Calm yourself.’ She opened her eyes and looked at the shivering woman who’d come in from the house’s grounds.

To Khiron, watching from the far corner of the room, the runner seemed in scarcely less distress than when she had come in. Only the source of it, he fancied, had changed. The woman’s fear of whatever she had heard out there in the dark seemed to have gone; the Beati had smoothed it away in four words. Now she seemed no less overwhelmed by truly realising whose presence she stood in. Khiron had seen that before, too.

‘I can hear the sirens,’ the Beati said. ‘The enemy, then? Please tell me what you know…’ She stared into the woman’s eyes. ‘…Dree. Don’t be afraid.’

Watchwoman Dree gulped and nodded. ‘Henztrom was out in the grounds talking with the Sp–, the Sp–’ She pointed at Dyognes over in his corner and the Beati nodded. ‘They heard something. The, uh, Space Marines. Far off, we couldn’t hear it but they’re gone.’ Ghelon and Mazho had both got to their feet. ‘Moved out. At speed.’

‘Khiron?’ The Saint had turned to face him.

‘Our brothers are moving through the camps to meet a threat,’ the Apothecary told her. Mazho and Kassine both had sidearms out now, checking loads and charges. ‘I know they have initial contact but no more. Noise in the vox-link.’

‘Why’d you tell her that?’ Aekon griped over Damocles’ closed squad link. ‘Our vox is ours, it isn’t their busin–’ He stopped short. Khiron hadn’t bothered with a verbal reply but had flashed the priority rune for silence into all of their helm displays.

‘Henztrom has the vox-room calling our watch posts on the south fringes,’ Dree went on. ‘He and the rest of the south wall watch are on perimeter at the old fence line.’

‘Answers from the south fringe, Dree?’ Ghelon asked. He was unfolding the wire stock of a lascarbine. Dree looked at him and shook her head.

‘Haven’t heard. I came straight here.’

‘Khiron?’ the Saint asked again.

There was a drawn-out moment before he answered. His three brother Snakes stood as impassive as they had before, but every human face in the room was turned towards him.

‘No signal from the ground yet. We have eyes in the Thunderhawk. Whatever it is has caused a mass panic in the displacee camps, my lady. I’m getting glimpses, pict, tactical feeds. This reaction makes no sense. Whatever’s coming up through the camp is no ordinary military advance. I’m not watching a fall-back. Or an evacuation. This is just blind madness.’

‘How many people out here with you, Ghelon?’ Mazho asked. The militiaman just shook his head.

‘We lost count at a hundred and fifty thousand. That was months ago. Half that again at least.’

‘All of them now crazed beyond reason and rolling into our rear lines like a blast front,’ Mazho growled. ‘What could do that?’

Damocles
Ghereppan displacee camp

Xander tore through a heavy canvas shelter without slowing down, left it flapping behind him, swerved to skirt a battered cargo-6 sitting on sagging tyres and went straight over an abandoned cooking fire so fast that the flames were dragged up and after him by his slipstream. Close now. He could hear steel claws scrabbling at the ground.

There were a handful of human figures still in front of him, silhouetted by the blue-white glow of the wirewolf’s warp-spite, staggering or crawling rather than running. Too injured or infirm to flee, with no one to help them move. Easy prey.

‘No,’ Xander growled to himself. ‘Not so easy.’

The wirewolf vaulted an overturned groundcar and leapt at him.

Xander fired once and twice, cruelled its momentum and spun it in the air, but it was moving too fast to be stopped. It hit Xander in a graceless tangle of metal, boiling light and screams, and clung to his pauldrons with grating talons while it raked at his chest with the spurs on its hind feet. It was not heavy, but the hit took Xander’s balance and he staggered sideways as the howling creature wrapped itself around his head and shoulders. All Xander could see was a lilac-white blaze framing the amber warning runes in his helmet display.

Pindor, leading the others up behind him, could see the monster more clearly. It was a clattering humanoid cage of wire and metal with a sallet helm riveted onto its shoulders. Strips of galvanised sheeting had been bent into shape to make a torso, and its arms and legs were creaking tubes of wire mesh that bent and flailed without heed to human joints. Its hands were bundles of spikes and notched knives; its feet were rows of whetted hooks spot-welded to boxy metal boots.

Both Xander’s shots had been true. As it reared back to gouge at their leader’s head again, Pindor could see two holes punched in its chest. Had it been human, one shell would have detonated its heart, one gone through to explode the spine between the shoulder blades.

The wirewolf screeched and brought its hand down, leaving a smeary trail of light in the air, two of its crude claws biting into Xander’s helm and finding purchase. Twisting around its new handhold, it began to gouge at his faceplate with its other hand, scratching at the eyepiece with the tarnished spines of its fingers.

Natus and Scyllon both sighted as Pindor ran forward with a wordless, ululating war cry that seemed to turn the beast’s noise back on itself. Their timing was flawless: two bolt-shells tore through the thing’s shoulders as it reared back, two more punched through its face and their detonations disfigured the helmet beyond recognition. In the split second that it was off-balance Pindor leapt, crashed his bent left arm around its upper chest, tore it free of Xander with the brute momentum of his charge and bore it to the ground on its back. Still shouting, he pushed back to his knees and wedged his fingers under the rim of the wirewolf’s helm, whirled the creature up through the air and smashed it back down.

The howling took on a different, deeper note, a nauseating rumble that the Iron Snakes could feel deep in their bellies. The wirewolf thrashed its body around, nearly tearing its helm loose in Pindor’s grip, and grabbed each of his forearms in its claws. Light strobed through the cagework of its torso as it flexed and began to tear at his arms. The old Space Marine’s eyes widened as red telltales went off in his vision. He could hear the strain on his armour’s joints, feel it in his own. He smelled smoke, although he couldn’t tell what was burning.

Xander’s combat blade swept down and hacked through the wolf’s shoulder. Another swipe and its arm came free. Natus stepped in past him and almost delicately pushed the muzzle of his bolter into the shoulder-hole. He didn’t bother trying to wound the raging light inside the cage, but fired across it, down and up, his shells passing through the glow and wrecking the wirewolf’s metal shell from the inside. The torso came apart and its head blew clear into the sky on a geyser of warp-glow. For a moment the Iron Snakes were at the heart of a roaring blue shockwave that swept out over the camp, extinguishing fires and scattering debris, and then Pindor was holding a jumble of scrap metal, dead but for a few dim sparks that quickly guttered out.

‘How many of these are there?’ Pindor asked. He dropped the wolf’s remains at his feet and moved his arms in tentative circles, testing each joint and actuator. His suit’s left elbow made a grating sound with each move of the joint, and the grip of the left gauntlet felt floppy and weak. He grimaced.

‘Seventeen traces by Pyrakmon’s last count,’ Xander said. He threw the severed metal arm against the side of the wrecked car. It hit with an eye-watering squeal of metal on metal and slid to the ground. ‘Ready to do that sixteen more times?’

‘We can’t hunt them all together,’ Andromak put in. He had been at the rear of the element when they were closing and there had been no room for him in the melee; he had stood back, taking in the tactical feed from the Thunderhawk while he waited for an opening. ‘These things aren’t working in a pack, they’re strung out all along…’ He completed the sentence with a gesture out into the night.

‘You’re right,’ said Xander. He kept blinking behind his faceplate. His helmet’s vision was fully recovered, and his own should have been, but there was something about that light that made him feel as if there were still after-images in front of his eyes. ‘Spread out. Cydides hunting pattern. Pick your directions based on Pyrakmon’s messages. Pindor, this way, the rest of you eastward.’ He grabbed his bolter off its mag-point on the side of his pack.

‘It just took nearly half the squad to kill one of them,’ Scyllon said dubiously.

‘Which means,’ Pindor snapped, ‘that you can just imagine what they’re doing to the poor souls who don’t even have a weapon to hold, let alone the advantages we have. So you’ll just have to fight. Have you spent so long standing outside the Beati’s door that you’ve lost the taste for anything more vigorous?’

Scyllon didn’t bother to reply or even look at the veteran. He clashed his bolter against his armoured thigh and turned away.

‘I’ll take the east end of the line,’ he said, and was gone into the dark in a couple of bounding strides. Natus and Andromak disappeared after him.

‘Thanks, by the way,’ Xander said.

‘For rescuing you in the fight?’ Pindor asked. ‘Or the argument?’

‘What fight?’

Pindor gave a dutiful chuckle and the two warriors vanished away to the west.

The wailing of more wirewolves carried on the smoky air.

The Enemy
Hill country, Ghereppan promontory

The lekt was aware she had started speaking. She could feel her burned lips moving against the palm of her hand. It did not concern her in the slightest that she did not know what she was saying. Her voice was drowned out, and that was only fitting. Her master’s was the voice that drowned all others, including her own.

The wirewolves were burning their brightest now, brighter than she could have imagined, full of the frantic desire to feel lives unravelling in their claws. Even as her link to them attenuated, their psychic leashes slipping out of her grip, still the intensity she could feel back from them was almost frightening. The sensation was glorious. If they could unnerve her, her, she who had spoken them out of the warp, then there was no imagining what they would be doing to those in their path.

She licked her restless lips at the thought. They were doing exactly what she had created them for. The furnace of spite inside each one had been stoked to a heat meant to scorch thoughts and melt wills. They did not need to run lean and burn low to range after fugitives like the Gereon wolves. They had been made to rush, and cry, and kill, and burn out. And by the time the last one was exhausted it would be too late to reverse the devastation they had started. It had started already. She could feel it.

She could feel…

She could feel a numb patch, a gap like a gap in her thoughts, like a forgotten word that wouldn’t come to mind or the empty spot where a sore tooth had been. Her monologue did not stop but it faded from a whisper to just the silent twitch of her mouth beneath her palm as she shifted her concentration.

One of them was gone already, sooner than she had expected, not as far towards the enemy lines as she had expected. Well, battle had its tides and strange chances. She was not concerned, but she could not afford to be complacent. The work had begun well, but ‘well’ was not enough. She took a shuddering breath and bent her thoughts to her task again.

III

THE FLAME OF HAGIA

Pragar Urban Pioneers
Astra Militarum emplacements, southern Ghereppan scarp

The human wave first struck at Palace Pit. That was what the Pragar 14th Close Urban called their home base, where a bomb-crater had broken one of the old subterranean rail-hangars open and given the siege-rats the perfect place to launch their war for Ghereppan’s sub-city. The ring of cranes and winches worked around the clock to lower pallets of supplies down into the gloom, then winched them back up full of battle-worn soldiers and machines.

Pragar’s soldiery was famously insular, sparing few thoughts and fewer words for anyone but their own. The drab-uniformed troops around Palace Pit had ignored the swelling plainsong they could hear behind them in the camps except for the occasional rolled eyes or snorted mockery. Nobody was paying enough attention to really notice when the singing started to fray and the shouting began. The sentries around the Pit’s southern perimeter were used to hearing the ceaseless boil and bustle of the shanties and didn’t immediately register the growing pandemonium.

Not that there was much they could have done.

The wire entanglements along the south perimeter started to creak and twang. Cries went up from the first ones caught in the barbs before they were borne down and overrun by the press of bodies behind them. Faces suddenly tight, the Pragar sentries unslung their weapons. In a chain of hissing green-white bursts, the flare grenades laced into the wire started to go off.

The sight that sprang out of the dark stunned the closest sentries into immobility for the few lethal seconds it took for the human tsunami to roll over them. Some in the second line tried to shout commands, a couple fired into the air or the ground, and met the same fate moments later. Just a handful had the time and wit to run for cover: crane stanchions, crate stacks, rubble piles, anything that made a dead spot big enough for a trooper to frantically hunker down in. It was all they could do.

By now thrashing, crying bodies were cascading over the lip of Palace Pit, helpless to stop or slow even if they had enough thought left in them to realise what they were being pushed towards. And what would haunt those surviving sentries for many years after that night was that whether the campfolk were falling to their deaths in the Pit or simply running past it, they were all screaming, and their screams sounded the same.

Sergeant Kellare
Transit route 411-yellow-alpha, southern Ghereppan

‘What was…?’ Sergeant Bekt Kellare began, leaning forward over the cargo-8’s dashboard to stare after the figure that had just flashed through the glow of their headlights.

‘Someone running, didn’t get a look.’ Geizner, her driver, was already shifting down through the gears as Kellare punched the yellow button on the dashboard. In the cabs of the nine haulers behind her, yellow lights would be flashing. Alert. Possible contact. Form up. Arm up.

Their headlights were shrouded, throwing nothing more than a red gloam onto the road in front of them. Another running figure appeared in the dimness and then another, dashing in front of them so recklessly that they caromed off the end of the ram-bar and spun away into the dark. In the time that it took Kellare to process that, she could see another half-dozen runners. They started to hear rapid thuds and clangs as bodies slammed against the truck’s reinforced sides.

Kellare drew her pistol.

‘Full lights?’ Geizner asked. He wore the pinch-lipped expression that meant he was concentrating, trying to ease forty tonnes of metal to a halt before they crushed a bloody path through the multiplying figures in front of them. The roadway was flooding with people now. Kellare looked for uniforms, weapons, any sign of a battle order or an objective, but saw nothing to help her. The tumbling crowd was coated with ash-dust and grime, clothes torn, some half-naked, some stumbling as if they were already injured. Some were carrying bundles clutched against their chests. Kellare leaned forward for a better look and her forehead banged against the armaglas windscreen as Geizner finally got them to a halt. She barely noticed it.

‘Children,’ she said. ‘They’re carrying children. They’re from the displacee camps. Throne alone, what–’

There was an acrid mechanical bellow from behind her. Corporal Verzt, in the second hauler, was sounding his klaxon, trying to part the crowds. The idiot, Kellare thought. The sound would carry, and plenty of enemy mortars still had this road in their range. She gritted her teeth and punched the vox-grate into life.

‘Noise down, lights down! Stay ready to move but that’s it. Stop marking our blasted spot for them.’ She winced at a burst of screams from somewhere off to their side but there was no way to tell what had caused them in the dark. ‘Gunners to pintles. Two back to five, anyone see anything but these civvies?’ She listened to the crackle of replies as her crews sounded off in sequence. Negative, all negative, but the screaming hadn’t stopped.

There was a clang in the compartment behind them as Trooper Kolsh opened the roof hatch and stepped up into the pintle position. Now the cries were clearer and louder, gabbled prayers mixed in among the wordless pain and fear. Under the rattle and grind as Kolsh rotated the pintle ring above the cab, she heard a rapid, piercing snap. Kellare knew the sound of an Urdeshi lascarbine as well as she did her own breathing. She jabbed the alert light from yellow to red and took a breath. The poor wretches from the shanties were still spilling across the road. She cursed the order she was about to have to give.

A bright pale light appeared among the ruins out to their left and the screams of the crowd grew to a single tidal shriek. The cab juddered as men and women tried to claw their way up it or beneath it. Contorted faces appeared right outside the window, and Kellare came within an ace of shooting through it on pure adrenalised reflex.

‘Ready to move,’ she shouted, ‘in three…’

The balding man whose face was centimetres from hers on the other side of the armaglas suddenly stared directly into her eyes. His own eyes widened, his mouth gaped. Then it filled with lavender light that brightened to a purple-white blaze. The same light lanced out of his pupils and then his eye sockets were empty and filled with glow. There was a squeak of bone on metal as his hands, now burned free of flesh, slid down the door frame. The skeleton, wrapped in the last shreds of smouldering opalescent flame, held its position for a moment longer then tumbled away.

When Kellare saw what was clinging behind her truck, she did open fire, kicking her feet out to brace herself against the cab bulkhead, her throat too busy retching to give voice to a shout. Muzzle discharge blackened the armaglas, which starred and punctured from the hard rounds she was firing, blessedly obscuring the burning, yowling foulness wrapped in a wire cage that was still, still hanging off her hauler, her bullets simply vanishing into it.

Kellare’s ears were full of the unholy cry of the thing outside. That was the sound, the voice of this thing, not the ringing from the pistol’s reports overwhelming her hearing, the knowledge was just there with the sickening certainty that came in nightmares. She knew its cry, and she knew it was looking at her. Her magazine clicked empty. Her vision swam. Her gums started to bleed. Much later, she would find that two of her teeth had come out of their sockets.

With a scream, the wirewolf vaulted up and over the roof of the cab. There was a quick muzzle-flare as Kolsh fired a panicked burst from the autocannon that went nowhere near the beast. Then the light was coming in the other window, silhouetting the shuddering, doubled-over figure of Geizner. Then it was dimmer, weaving back and forth as the thing took its kills among the fleeing civilians. Then it was just a white smudge in the northern ruins, and then it was gone.

Kellare kicked the door release and swung it open, wincing at the strange stink of warp-burned bone. The running and the screams were done, but the night was still full of groans and weeping from dim shapes that crouched or crawled in the red hauler lights.

Wedging herself into position in the door frame, Kellare stared after the beast, her hands reloading her pistol without direction from her reeling brain. She thought she could still hear a faint wail on the wind, but she was afraid to listen too hard in case she really did hear it again. Instead, she heard a new sound coming from behind her.

Her heartbeat, she thought, hammering in her numbed ears, but no. It was coming from outside her. A hard, rapid impact, powerful enough to crunch rock. Shells, some kind of solid round punching into the earth on automatic, getting closer. Shit. Some kind of enemy gun had found them after–

Something else flashed through their lights, some gigantic bulk that the red glow turned a deep grey, its head level with the hauler’s window, the speed of its passage pulling a roil of road-ash into the air in its wake. It was gone into the dark again before she had had time to even turn her head. Staring downward, gulping for breath, she saw a zigzag pattern of oval craters driven into the surface of the road and the packed ground to each side of it. It took her nearly a minute of staring to realise they were footprints.

It was the first and last time in her life Bekt Kellare would set eyes on a wirewolf, or a Space Marine.

Damocles
Ghereppan southern warzone

Pindor saw it rise up ahead of him, middle distance, still moving, its shape sketched roughly in white glare cross-hatched with the lines of its metal cage. It left a bleary violet comet-trail behind as it arced away from him, landed somewhere just below his vision, and leapt again.

Pindor went after it with his whole body tilted forward, long armoured legs blurring in pumping strides that sent him tearing through a snagwire barricade as though the spiked steel braids were cobwebs. He didn’t even notice the wire dragging behind him for half a dozen strides. His whole intent was on the pursuit, not with the feverish tunnel vision of a hunting animal but with the calm and total focus of a mystic meditating on a candle flame. The red lamps and rumbling engines of the roadway had already vanished behind him.

Only half-consciously, he flicked his helmet’s vision into high magnification, to unenhanced, to wide-angle, mixing in heat vision and light-intensification then shifting out of them again. The blink-quick flicker of different views would have disoriented a human to the point of nausea but Pindor’s augmented senses and brain sifted it effortlessly. After a handful of seconds, he had built up a picture of the darkened ruins ahead of him and the path through it to his prey.

The wirewolf was leading him through a honeycomb of roofless cells where artillery had laid sprawling barrack-blocks open to the sky. It was travelling in lazy bounds, perching atop each crumbling wall for a moment before it launched itself to the next one. Each leap seemed slightly too slow or too fast, or the trajectory just a little out of true, never quite what sane physics would demand. Even without the unnatural light from inside its cage, the wirewolf’s movements offended the eye.

Crack. Crack. Crack. Pindor was closing on it now, punching through the ash-brick walls without slowing down, eyes always on that brain-scratching white glow, ears full of its yelp and keening. Crying shapes scrambled in front of him, without a hope of getting out of his way. Twice his foot or leg clipped a human body with crushing force and then someone was too slow to dive out of his way and spun away from the collision, limp like a doll. Pindor did not, could not, slow.

A pulse of light ahead, smoky and purple-red. The wolf had hunched on a teetering archway where a door had once been, reaching down with a scrawny wire-wrapped arm and burying its meathook fingers in the neck of a man who’d been trying to run beneath it. The smoke of the man’s flesh drifted up through the wirewolf’s body. The charred bones of his legs dropped to the ground where he had been running. A rough augmetic arm came loose as the shoulder bones burned away and clinked down to join them. The wirewolf gave the rest of the remains a little shake, stirring another burst of dim indigo fire out of them, and then Pindor was close enough at last.

The wirewolf tried to leap. At him, away from him, upward off the arch, it didn’t matter. Pindor simply bulled through the archway beneath it, shrugging his shoulders out so his pauldrons smashed the brickwork and the arch collapsed from under the creature’s feet. It fell slowly, as a balloon falls, twisting and spitting like a cat, while Pindor leaned back and dug in his heels, crossing another cell and shattering another wall before he could arrest his momentum. He turned with his bolter already unclamped and armed and had put three shells through the wirewolf before its spiked feet had touched the ground.

The lessons of Damocles’ first wirewolf kill had not been lost on him. Whatever was in that metal cage could not be made to care about something as crude as explosive shells. It was the cage itself that had to be torn apart. As he had closed in Pindor had pulsed a command down to his weapon, lowering the trigger threshold for the shells’ detonators almost to nothing. His rounds did not wait to detect an increase in local mass, the sign they had punched into an enemy’s body. They flew at the wirewolf on hair triggers, ready to detonate the instant their flight met hard resistance.

The first round struck the wolf’s gorget, the impact dimpling the metal inward before the explosion smacked the wirewolf’s head and shoulders backward. The second hit the rough riveted plate that crossed its hips and blasted it in two. The third, aimed at the short pipe that served the thing for a spine, missed its mark as the wolf swayed and slowed in mid-air in a way a physical creature should not have been able to. The shell shot through the gaps in its cagework and vanished into the night. By the time the sound of its explosion came back to Pindor he was already racing at the wirewolf, bolter clamped and blade drawn.

It reached for him, arms wide, but Pindor was moving so fast it had no time to close its murderous embrace. His blade sheared its helm in two and then he smashed into it with his full armoured weight, knocking the wolf back, pushing it down, trampling straight over it before it could grab and cling to him, putting distance between them before he turned.

He had hurt it. The wirewolf was getting up but its movements were clumsy and laboured. The metal cage of its torso was deformed where he had stamped down through its flank and the cloven helm was starting to leak greasy white light. The heavy wire that laced its arms to its shoulders was breaking and whipping loose. Its right arm sagged almost to the ground. And still it came on, still clawing its way forward through the rubble.

Pindor shot out the brickwork it had grabbed, the shell blasting away its handhold and leaving its limb a frayed bundle of dead wire. It reared up and tried to run at him on its hind legs and he kicked a half-metre chunk of rockcrete forward with no more effort than a child kicking a floatball. Even injured as it was the wirewolf almost managed to twist away, but its damaged torso couldn’t quite flex and the missile caught it high on its chest and left shoulder, staving in the cage, killing its charge and dragging it backwards. Lying on its back, one shoulder pinned underneath the chunk of masonry, the wirewolf thrashed and screamed a note that bypassed the ear and drilled straight into the mind. As it filled Pindor’s skull he smelled the ghost of the burning stink from when he had grappled with this monster’s sibling back in the shanties.

Its scream changed when Pindor’s boot came down on its scrabbling, reaching free hand. It dropped through the registers, from a shriek in the skull to a snarling churn in the gut. Pindor took a deliberate step forward and stamped its upper arm flat. Its legs raked the ground as it fought to tear itself loose from his weight.

Pindor trod its shoulder and half of its chest down into the ground. It wailed and the criss-cross of razor wire that bound its chest cage shut seemed to swell and reach outward. The light inside it boiled and crawled along the inside of the metal. It oozed around Pindor’s leg when he crushed the helm and gorget, and trailed off his boot like mucus as he lifted his leg and brought it down again, wrecking the last of the torso cage. The wirewolf ended not in a storm of light but a single white flash and an echoing slam of detonation, leaving Pindor to kick his feet free of the tangled metal remains.

He was crouching in the shelter of one of the tumbled walls, reloading his bolter and scanning the vox-bands, when he realised the hot acrid smell in his nostrils was not the ghost of the first wirewolf fight. It was real and physical, burnt hydrocarbon and hot metal floating to him on the breeze. Stalk-tank exhaust. No Imperial force on Urdesh used stalk-tanks.

Pindor pulsed a command and the heat dissipators on his reactor pack withdrew. His heat signature would not be invisible, but it would not glare. He moved in a crouch-walk to the north edge of the rubble, where the warren of roofless cells gave way to a shattered stretch of paving that might once had been an assembly square for the hab workers. The ash-brick foundations of a preacher’s rostrum were dimly visible out among the craters. From beyond it came cries and the rapid crackle of lasweapons, and in among it, Pindor could hear the grind of metal limbs and the thrum of the stalk-tank’s motor. Motors. More than one. Moving together. And they had found Imperials to kill.

The Astra Militarum
Ghereppan southern border

Pindor was the first to see them, but very quickly there were others. The new contact reports lit up in red pinpricks in General Grawe-Ash’s holotank until it looked like the yellow-green map had started to sweat blood.

Not far west of the roadway where Sergeant Kellare had stared a wirewolf in the face, the Urdeshi and Jovani troops guarding a fortified supply hub found anguished crowds from the shanties piling up against their southern perimeter, too terrified to even understand the orders to disperse and stand back, let alone obey them. It was the Urdeshi troops who first called in the signs that the civilians seemed to be under attack by something and moved out to see what was terrorising their compatriots so. At about the same time the wirewolf appeared, carving a channel this way and that through the roiling mass of refugees, the explosions began in the supply dump itself: Blood Pact mortars dug in around the derelict food silos to the north had found their range.

Over to the west where the city met the sea, the Urdeshi and Helixid regulars who’d spent weeks grinding slowly but steadily north along the waterfront found themselves under ferocious attack. Blood Pact infantry came pushing through the long terraces of war-gutted machine shops and depots to their land side, stalling their advance just long enough for a pack of AT-70 Reavers and SteG-4s to come speeding down the more open docklands and smash into them. Holding on by brute Urdeshi determination and the haranguing of the Helixid commissars, the beleaguered Imperial lines sent signal after signal for aid and support. The reserves that had been dispatched to them were bogged down, half-scattered by the human tide coming from the shanty-camp and desperately trying to pin down and kill the wirewolf that had come hard on the civilians’ heels.

The two wirewolves that had slaughtered the checkpoint crew in the scrub-hills had come racing down out of the high country to cut along the edges of the refugee stampede like two muster-dogs turning a herd. They turned the eastward spill out of the shanties back on itself, compressing the stampede ever tighter as it rolled over the rearward Imperial echelons and crashed through into the no-man’s-land beneath Ghereppan’s spinal scarp. As the stunned Militarum troops tried to hold their positions and called in for orders they found themselves in ferocious close-quarters brawls with Pact soldiery who had cut and shot a path through the onrush of refugees to the Imperial lines.

‘Alarm,’ said the row of servitors in the general’s war chamber. ‘Alarm. Alarm.’

Damocles
Tithe-house, Ghereppan displacee camp

The cries from outside were filtering into the tithe-house again.

Even with the half-broken outer gates swung as far as they would move, and the heavy ceremonial doors closed, Aekon and Khiron could hear them in the main halls. The humans in the room with them didn’t seem to be able to. The tension of their postures and voices came from what they were hearing from Ghelon’s informants rather than the bedlam outside.

Except for the Beati herself, Khiron noticed. Always except for her. She kept her head half-tilted as though she could hear the same sounds his inhuman ears and integrated auto-senses were picking up. He could tell – each time there was a particular rise in shouting or crying he could see her tense or glance around.

‘I’m telling you what my people are telling me,’ Ghelon was telling Mazho, jabbing a finger at a scrawled map of the shanty-camp as the colonel scrubbed at his brow and shook his head. ‘The shrines at the Three-Track Pile and over there on the Highwater approach. And the two on each side of the Sixth Arterial. I know those places, colonel, you don’t. They’re… look, we do what we can but they’re not fortresses.’

‘If they’re not fortified then they would have been taken by now,’ Mazho said for the third time in as many minutes. ‘Doesn’t make sense.’ He’d said that a few times too, and he wasn’t the only one. ‘Whatever enemy force is out there, we know it went after concentrations of civilians. These locations of yours, they’ve got concentrations of civilians, right? Probably the biggest concentrations of civilians left in the shanties. Effectively undefended.’ Ghelon nodded, his jaw working but his eyes still on the map.

‘Except…’ he said, and pointed to the map again. This time his fingertip swung towards the map’s northern edge. ‘Except we all just heard the messages Shuura brought down from the vox-room. They’re almost at the city fringes. They’ve bypassed the shrines. If they’re still chasing civilians–’

‘Driving,’ the Beati corrected him from where she sat on the table. She hadn’t looked around and had barely raised her voice. Her head was still cocked in that listening posture.

‘Driving,’ Mazho repeated when it seemed she had said all she was going to. ‘That’s convincing, too. They’re pushing the crowds from the camps into our lines at Ghereppan.’

‘But not all of them,’ Ghelon said. ‘That’s the point. Look, we don’t know how they spread out from the south but by the time they crossed the old stormwash trenches it looks like they were advancing in a pretty even line. But then that line breaks right up. Here, here, there next to your hand, colonel. Like you say. Big concentrations of victims. All gathered together for refuge, ripe targets. So that…’ He shook his head. ‘That can’t be all of it. Whoever they are, they’re after something else.’ Ghelon’s hands made fists and his arms shook as he fought the urge to smash them down on the map table. ‘If we can see it, we can try and pass word to the Militarum. If they can see it maybe they can help us help our people. But…’

His voice tailed off. In the brief silence, Sister Kassine walked over and stood beside him.

‘You can already see it, Brother Ghelon,’ she said. ‘Stop thinking like a soldier for a moment. Think like an infardi.’ She took the brass aquila from around her neck and held it out to him. Ghelon took it, squeezing his hand around its sharp edges and points. When he turned his attention back to the map, he suddenly barked a bitter little laugh.

‘Thanks to the Throne, Sister,’ he said. ‘Of course.’

‘Care to put it on the table for us, whatever it is?’ Mazho asked.

‘All those places he marked,’ Kassine said. ‘They’re places the frateris set up for worship. The enemy aren’t avoiding our fortifications. They’re avoiding our shrines.’

Damocles
Ghereppan southern warzone

In a dry gully along the north-eastern boundary of the refugee shanties, the wirewolf that Xander had been hounding turned the tables on him. He had seen it drop out of sight ahead of him but not reappear, and so he sprinted to the gully and leapt down into it so as not to lose sight of his prey. He had landed badly, one foot crunching deep into the ashy dirt, and then the wirewolf had come hurtling around the angle of the gully where it had crouched to wait for him, running and leaping along the wall as if it were speeding along a flat floor. Its upper arms were thick bundles of razor wire around cores of blue-white light; its forearms were more than a metre long, finishing in crude metal balls studded with nail-like spikes wrapped in smeary grey corpse-glow. Its burgonet helm already bore a neat crater from a bolt-shell that had failed to even slow it.

Xander, his pack and pauldron gouging earth and stones from the gully wall as he stamped and staggered for balance, fired another shot into its midriff but he thought the shell might have passed through the creature without hurting it. He couldn’t be sure: the wirewolf was moving in a haze of whiteness that flickered and ghosted in his vision. Every sound it made, even down to the scuffing of metal on dirt, was doubling up in his hearing and spawning clouds of echoes that swarmed around the inside of his head. One spiked mace of a paw clouted him across the faceplate and knocked him off-balance again. His teeth grinding, he punched his right hand deep into the soft earth of the wall to anchor himself and fired two quick bolter shots at the wirewolf’s chest.

They both missed. The creature was gone. In a blink, it had leapt straight up out of the gully, arcing through the air to land with a crash and a wail on the hummocked ground above. By the time Xander dragged himself upright and clambered up to peer after it the wirewolf was just a pale and diminishing shimmer, leaping away to the north.

Xander was left behind it, cursing and flailing as the gully wall collapsed around him. Every time he tried to thrash his way clear of it his armoured weight simply tore the bank into another cascade of loose dirt. It took him far too much precious time to plough forward and up to proper ground, and his blood burned with the humiliation of how neatly he had been lured out and left.

The wirewolf screamed in his head, his senses pinning it just a couple of hundred metres ahead, as if it had hung back again to mock him. Grimly, Xander started to build his pace up again, skidding and sinking into the dirt with each step, cursing the sensor ghosts that made it seem like the beast was still only just in front of him.

Except that it was. The wirewolf was dancing and shrieking dead ahead of him. It seemed to be hanging just off the ground, wrestling and tearing at something Xander couldn’t see. He brought up his bolter, his armour’s systems and his own deep kinetic conditioning effortlessly compensating for his movement, his auto-senses reaching out to the weapon to perfectly place the shot. But instead of shooting he came skidding and scrabbling to an ungainly halt, followed and surrounded by a cloud of the pulverised dirt he had kicked up on his dash, staring.

The wolf had come down and been trapped, tangled in something it couldn’t break free from. Xander’s senses were still bruised from the thing and it took a few moments to see – and smell – what it was. It had landed in a patch of islumbine.

Xander had seen it before, dotted across the land here. Priad had said that no one could explain how it had taken hold here – it was native to Hagia, from a wildly different world and ecosystem. Even if someone had hauled enough seed all the way to Urdesh it should never have lived to germinate. But there was no mistaking it. The tough, woody vines with their stiff and crunchy bark, the broad green leaves, the white flowers with that clean, astringent scent, utterly alien among the wet, fleshy tendril-tangles of the Urdeshi landweeds.

And it had entangled the wirewolf as fatally as a razor wire emplacement would trap a blundering human. Limbs that had smashed an armoured Astartes almost off his feet wrenched and tore at the islumbine and could not break it. Spikes and edges that could flense human flesh could not cut it. Poisoned warpfire that could eat a living being to the bone in an eye-blink did not burn it. The wirewolf convulsed, unable to free itself, and howled to the sky.

Xander clamped his bolter, drew his blade. He didn’t want to risk detonating a shell and somehow blowing the creature free. He angled out to the left as he closed, then to the right, surveying the enemy and the trap it was in. It was easier to look at now, its light no longer blurring his auto-senses, the shape of its cage no longer stuttering in his vision. Its cries were loud, but his mind was clear of their unholy echo.

A flat stroke cleaved the burgonet in half, and a puff of violet fire flared up out of it. Xander brought the blade down in a chop that would have bisected a human from crown to crotch, cut one arm away, then hooked the quillions of his sword into the blazing wound and dragged the severed limb free. It twitched and flashed then slumped down and hung dead from the vine. Two more strokes and the metal drum of its torso came apart. The wolf fought against the vines to free its other arm but its efforts only prised its torn-up body apart. Somewhere inside it, some piece of it was strained beyond endurance and the wolf came to pieces, its metal cage disintegrating to hang among the branches like crude metal chimes, its essence exploding out in a cloud of sizzling purple sparks that scored lines along the ground and spattered against Xander’s warplate like snow. And then he was alone in no-man’s-land, empty and dark.

Xander reached forward and took an islumbine branch between his fingers. It bent just as it should. He plucked a smaller limb free, and his strength parted the wood with no discernible resistance. There was nothing about this plant now that should have been able to restrain the creature that had stumbled into it and met its end.

Xander made to toss the islumbine branch away, and then thought better of it. Instead, he reached back to the socket in the top of his reactor pack that held a banner-stave during the Phratry’s ceremonies. The branch slotted into it as though it had been made to, its leaves framing his helm like a wreath. Xander felt better with it there, although he could not have explained why.

He got moving again.

Dzyne and Ottoli
Astra Militarum forward observation point
Encoma-Unitae Clade-Tower, Ghereppan scarp

‘Wait,’ said Scoper Dzyne. He had just started the heavy auspex array swinging around and down on its mounting; now he was trying to stop the movement and drag it back, and the word came out as a grunt.

‘No waiting!’ First Scoper Ottoli was leaning out of his pulpit, glaring that glare that everyone in the auspex nest always dreaded. The polished pewter Transmachina Ocula on the crown of his cap, the badge of his rank as an Mechanicus-ordained lay technician, caught the lights of the controls in front of him and glinted like a third eye even more disapproving than his usual two. ‘No waiting, Dzyne, what d’you think you’re doing?’

The indignation in his voice was palpable. Dzyne was the oldest scoper in the unit, the one Ottoli relied on to set a good example. He was well on the path to induction into the lesser mysteries held by the company’s enginseers, and they had promised him that once Ghereppan was free he would earn his own Transmachina badge at the Markonian Spire just as Ottoli had. One would think all that would buy him a little benefit of the doubt, Dzyne thought sourly, but no.

‘Auspex ghost, mid to low field. Couldn’t fix it before we swung away. I’ll confirm it and then finish repositioning.’ He was trying to keep the strain out of his voice as he wrestled the grips around and pointed the baroque bundle of tubes and vanes back up where it had been before the new orders came in. The rotation was smooth and silent – hands of Mars be praised, its bearing mounts and counterweights were a glory – but it was supposed to have a servitor to move it and Dzyne’s muscles weren’t young any more.

Outside the glassless arch of the window, Dzyne’s unaided right eye saw only darkness. But through the monocular taped over his left he could see the dim shape of Marcher Eighteen, the clade-forge tower that the bastard Blood Pact had hung on to for two months now despite everything the Urdeshi had tried. The scopers’ nest was on the seventy-fourth floor of their own tower, which had once housed the data-looms of the Encoma Unitae clade, and even so in the daytime Dzyne had to lean dangerously out of the shattered windows and crane upward to see its top.

Someone further down the battery of auspexes, someone who’d re-aimed theirs as instructed, gave an exclamation. Dzyne didn’t take his eyes from his new-old target but he could guess what they were seeing. From their position, high in a spire that was built high on the Ghereppan scarp, they had watched as a great patchwork of city below them came alive with the flashes of high-energy weapons, the heat-flicker of brutal las-fire exchanges, shimmering engine-traces, and more and more the distant pricks of light from explosions, fires, searchlights, battlefield flares. The sudden wave of bloodshed that they had been told to bring their machine-senses to bear on.

The whisper had come around that the Beati herself was down there somewhere, but Dzyne had decided he’d wait and see about that. If he had one dead Blood Pact for every overheated rumour he’d heard about the lady herself setting foot in Ghereppan then Urdesh would have been free a year ago. No, he had something closer at hand to think about.

‘If it wasn’t important enough for you to call in when you saw it, scoper, it’s not important enough to be an excuse. Command needs every one of our eyes on the fighting down there. Are you going to be the reason the enginseers have a blind spot in their feeds?’

‘I only picked it up when I moved my array,’ Dzyne said levelly. The brass wheels and stops on his auspex helm clinked and whirred under his hands. The green light shining up into his face made him look like a gargoyle. ‘It wasn’t in any of our target fields. Moving too low.’

‘What was?’ Ottoli still sounded cranky, but Dzyne knew him well enough to hear the sudden concern in his voice.

‘Barely fixed it. Sensor ghost, fast moving, on descent…’ Dzyne blinked his monocular feed into active mode and ran back through it. ‘Pinged like metal, some dead traces mixed in that look like ceramic. Strong movement readings, tight and rapid.’ He didn’t presume to conclude anything from that, but Ottoli was ahead of him.

‘Like an ornithopter.’ There was a stir up and down the line. There had been no flyers around these towers in months. Enemy fire was too dangerous for ’thopters, and the space in among the scarp spires was too tight for anything else. If the Blood Pact still had reserves of fuel and any pilots left alive why then they would have…

‘…waited for a night like this,’ Dzyne finished aloud, just as his auspex finished making his adjustments and threw the picture into his eye.

He shouted in shock, wordless.

‘CONTACT!’ Ottoli roared. He had let himself into Dzyne’s feed and seen the same thing. ‘Incoming! Grips down, arm, arm, to arms!’ His hands were ricocheting back and forth over his pulpit controls, sounding alarms, firing off his feed and warning into every Imperial frequency.

The Blood Pact ornithopter that Dzyne’s auspex had seen hurtling towards them folded its wings and fell sideways in the air, skating past the windows. It barely made a sound, or not one Dzyne could hear over the shouting, but he heard the staccato snap of high-speed las-fire and smelled the sudden sharp stink of ozone, scorched stone, hot metal and burning flesh. He heard screams. The ’thopter filled his mechanical vision, the pilot hunched over his steering bar in the thing’s skeletal metal abdomen, and the gunner behind him, feet dangling off the saddle seat, raking the side of their tower with fire from a heavy double-barrelled lasrifle nestled in a tangle of coolant lines. The man’s bestial brass mask seemed to be leering straight into Dzyne’s face.

There was a whine of power off to Dzyne’s left and then more rapid snapping sounds, deeper and harder than the Pact weapons. The gunners in the scope-nest’s defensive emplacement at the end of the gallery were finding targets, but Dzyne heard no explosions, and his auspex-eye showed no puffs of vaporised metal or flesh. More weapons spoke from up and down the tower, and he saw tracer fire start to scrawl across the night. Then a flare went off, dazzling white, and as it sank down between the two spires Dzyne saw the ’thopters. Dozens of them, and then dozens more. And they weren’t attempting manoeuvres. They were–

With a crunch and scream of metal an ornithopter crashed through the window-arch next to Dzyne’s, shearing both its wings off, the fuselage crumpling on the auspex array there and crushing Scoper Deenagh half to death against his machine. The remains of the craft skidded across the gallery on its nose and disintegrated against the far wall.

The only noise Dzyne seemed to be able to process was the electronic squealing from Ottoli’s pulpit where the feed from the damaged auspex mount was bleeding out of the speaker. He looked over at the first scoper but Ottoli was motionless, twisted around to stare at the ’thopter’s wreckage. He was still gawping when the steel-masked Blood Pact commando pulled free of his crash webbing and put three hellgun rounds square into Ottoli’s chest. The old man dropped without a sound.

Dzyne blinked his monocular into isolate mode, disconnecting it from the auspex feed and staring at the wreckage of the ’thopter. The pilot was hurt, but she was dragging herself out of the wreckage, looking around her. The commando was half-crouching now, firing down the gallery at the gunnery station. With the chilly green precision of his monocular’s dark mode he could count the knifelike fangs moulded into the steel mask’s mouth, the drops of drool sculpted onto its chin. He watched the man fire another burst, his posture firing-range perfect. Dzyne felt numb all over. In that moment he would have sworn he was drifting off the floor of the gallery like a balloon.

But his body remembered its training. His pistol was in his hand, and suddenly he found himself bracing and aiming. The pilot saw him in the fading flarelight and tried to roll over to bring her own gun to bear. Dzyne fired a shot into the floor next to her, then the wall on the other side, then hit her twice in the belly, then twice more in the chest. She lay shuddering on her back while he gulped, sighted, and missed the back of the commando’s head by a finger’s length.

That’s that then, he thought with perfect clarity as he watched the commando spin on his heel and aim the hellgun at him. There was nowhere to take cover. He wondered if his death-wound would at least give him time to say a blessing before the blackness.

The left half of the commando’s neck vanished in a hot mist of flesh and blood. The sudden explosion of his tissues snapped his head over to the right and then his body followed the motion, crumpling down out of sight behind the ’thopter wreckage. Dzyne heard the hellgun shot that would have killed him but had no idea where it had gone.

Then all the other sounds seemed to rush in on him. The crackle of flames from the wrecked gunnery position. The bubbling sobs from Scoper Deenagh as he lay dying by his broken auspex. The crashes and shots from above and below them. Someone gulping out curses next to him. He looked around at Scoper Uzhman, standing in a braced position identical to his with her laspistol still extended. They stared at each other.

‘What are they doing?’ she asked him eventually, and Dzyne didn’t have an answer.

‘What’s that?’ Scoper Stooks asked from behind him, and they all looked at the metal cable that the ’thopter had been trailing behind it when it came in through the archway. Dzyne wasn’t sure what it was for, but the sight of it chilled his guts.

‘Go to your auspex,’ he told Uzhman. ‘Give thanks and get ready to send its spirit home. Follow your orders as long as you can. Stooks, go to Deenagh. He shouldn’t die alone. Back to your array when he’s gone, like you were told. Here, give me his pistol.’

There was an explosion one or two floors below them, one they felt through the floor as much as heard. Smoke started to rise past the window. The other two stared at him. Dzyne looked at them and shrugged. He could hear boots pounding in the stairwell behind him. There was no way to tell whose they were.

‘Enemies on the way,’ he said. ‘Throne willing, friends as well. Not up to us.’ He hefted his own pistol in his right hand, Deenagh’s blood-sticky one in his left. ‘I’ll cover you as long as I can. Do your work.’

And they did, for as long as they could.

Priad
Astra Militarum Command, Ghereppan City

‘Alarm,’ said the servitors. ‘Alarm.’ Even through the chittering of their own scriptor machines and the rising hubbub of the war room, Priad could still hear their doleful chorus. ‘Alarm.’

The map in Grawe-Ash’s hololith was bleeding freely now. The Blood Pact were spilling south and west, breaking the Imperial lines in the dense hab districts beneath the scarp and bursting out along the southbound transport arterials. Throughout the centre of the city territory, markers were turning red, enemy icons swarming over the clash points like crimson flies over an abattoir floor, as Pact-controlled pockets pushed together, merged and launched themselves onward in ferocious, reckless rushes.

As Priad watched, one long stretch of Pact incursion fuzzed and dimmed, twitching and fading as confirmed sightings of enemy movements were downgraded to speculative or last-known-contact. Icons spun into existence over the redrawn map, lines climbing up from them to converge at a flashing red clash point near the crest of the scarp.

‘Flyers,’ Auerben said at his elbow. She was standing with a data-slate in one hand and a handful of ticker paper in the other. ‘Enemy air was supposed to be all gone in that sector but they had some reserve ’thopters hidden in the upper floors on Marcher Eighteen. Attacking the…’ Her voice trailed away to a wheeze and she coughed and shook her head.

‘The auspex nests in the Encoma and Hezra clade-towers,’ Grawe-Ash finished for her as the captain fumbled for her squeeze-bulb. ‘They’re overrunning them floor by floor. Not enough fuel or safe flying time for the ’thopters so they’re just crashing them right in through the bloody windows, dragging bridgelines in behind them. Clever.’ She pointed to the long spear of southward Pact advance, still blurred and studded with query markers. ‘Costing me my best eyes on their main push.’

‘Pragar One-Seventeenth are concentrated around the mag-lifts at the Mitre Spur,’ someone behind her said. ‘We can stiffen them up with the Twelfth Urdeshi Heavies within twenty minutes and that whole force could be on the scarp within the hour.’

Grawe-Ash narrowed her eyes.

‘No. That big Pact lunge there is still going to be coming even if we can’t see it properly, and it’s heading right for where our reserves are tangled up in whatever the hell came out of the shanties. I want the Pragar and the Twelve Heavy to keep their heads down and hit their flank once they’re passing, not try and get in their way. Who’s in charge there?’

‘Major Ozerin with the Twelve. Header Thearol with the Pragar.’

‘Both smart people,’ Grawe-Ash said, ‘even if the Pragar won’t name their damn ranks properly. I trust them to hold fast and hit when they’re told.’

‘Are we… are we not reinforcing the scarp, ma’am?’ one of the other aides chimed in. His voice was shaking slightly as he watched the cluster of scarlet markers dancing over the Encoma Unitae spire and spreading into the avenues beyond it. Grawe-Ash picked up a stylus shaped like a long silver feather and pointed with the green light from its tip.

‘We’re there in strength already,’ she said. ‘The build-up just north of the Mechanicus spire at Hawkbrass Square. Twenty-third and Thirtieth Regulars, armour from the Second Helixid Siegers, the Fourth Urdeshi Liberation Army. And the rapid-assault specialists from the Red Nineteenth. They were there for a big advance down the east side of the scarp to push the Pact and the Sekkites back into the badlands for the Legio to clean up. An operation which is now on hold, it seems.’ She shot a curiously guarded and sidelong look at Priad, and then clucked her tongue. ‘Send the Fourth Lib and the Thirty up the scarp and into it. Thirty and the Helixids to be the second wave to hit wherever the first finds a weakness. Nineteen to nest inside that in turn.’ She stretched and rolled her shoulders, then glared at the young aide. ‘And if you haven’t already got a channel open to the Hawkbrass temple then I want to know why not. The magos fetial’s name is Trave Korriel, and two weeks ago he agreed to release a column of skitarii from the temple guard for our eastward push. Tell him very politely that our schedule has moved up and our needs have evolved.’ The aide scurried away.

Priad took this in at almost the subliminal level. His attention was still on the Blood Pact’s hell-bent rush into Ghereppan’s southern sprawls. He had watched the advance and mapped its trajectory just as the general had: from the box that the enemy had formed in the centre-south, downward along the side of the scarp, forward into where the Imperials were in the worst disarray from the rearward assault.

And through there, the line went straight into the shanties, the old tithe-house, and the Saint.

Legio Invicta
Ghereppan central warzone

‘Wake your engines, my friends.’ Maximilian Orfuls sent the message over the Legio Invicta’s manifold. ‘We’re hunting.’

‘My engine is wide awake, dear comrade, awake and talking to me. What do you have to hunt that’s tastier than what I’m sniffing out by myself? Three armour kills and the night is young.’

That was Arkaly Creel, princeps of the Warhound Raptus Solemnus, who liked to spend her nights prowling the fabricator terraces and western docks for enemy trying to sneak in from the islands under cover of night. What she really wanted was to be hunting war engines out along the reach coast with Princeps Kung and the main strength of the Legio. Stuck here in Ghereppan with the rest of the Warhound cohort, she was making the best of things. She had been vocally jealous of Lupus Lux and Lupus Noctem’s plasmapult kill.

‘We hunt for the general,’ Orfuls answered her, with more than a little reproach in his tone. His position mirrored Creel’s on the other side of the city: Morbius Sire had staked out its territory east of the scarp, and Orfuls, ever dutiful, had lent its fire to the Urdeshi and Jovani commanders in the unruly brawl for control of the hill precincts.

He could not deny the value of his presence: Morbius Sire had become the terror of the Sekkite armoured columns that came through the eastern peninsular docks, trying to grind the Imperial lines back into the weedlands. But he regretted it, too, wished he weren’t so valuable here. More and more he thought that he should be in the centre of the city, leading the Warhounds as a pack, keeping them tight at his heels. He could feel their cohesion coming apart, their discipline fraying, the unruliness of their thoughts and humours seeping into the spirits of their machines. How much longer before they were a Legio in name only, their martial order eroded beyond repair? Orfuls was the most senior of the Warhound princeps, and he felt the weight and responsibility of that question on his shoulders every day. When this city was taken, he was the one who would answer to…

And there it was again. The numb, empty space in the Legio’s soul where Pietor Gearhart should have stood. Orfuls angrily shook himself clear of it. Angry mostly at himself. He had wanted to do the old man proud. What would happen if he could not?

‘Which is to say,’ he went on, keeping his voice even, ‘our beautiful betrothed will hunt for the general. Entascha, Leyden. Respond to me, please.’

‘What are we hunting, Max?’ Leyden Krugmal asked. ‘We’re at the base of the Avenue Solar now but the only thing in our teeth is the night air.’ He leaned back in his throne as he spoke, eyes half-closed, letting the tilt and rock of Lupus Lux’s gait soothe him. He spoke the words aloud as well as canting them into the manifold; in front of him Moderatus Beyran took his cue and made a deft series of touches to Lux’s reactor parameters. Warmth welled up in Krugmal’s belly and along his bones as Beyran fed power through the giant body that encased them.

‘Good,’ Orfuls said. ‘You’ll be all the hungrier for this. Look to your markers. The Pact are trying to chisel their way right through to the Imperial lines.’

‘We were wondering when they’d put their hand out to us,’ Mereschel put in. She was shifting in her throne, shrugging the tautness out of her shoulders, stretching her long legs out in front of her. Her moderati were used to suddenly having her boots appear at their shoulders or over their heads. ‘I trust we’re on our way to tread them into the foundations so the city can be rebuilt over their heads?’

‘Look them over first. Auspex up. Tell Militarum command what you see and then tread away.’

‘There’s going to be something there, isn’t there?’ Creel put in. ‘Are you going to save me some if there is, or is my beloved Raptus going to spend another night sulking?’

‘Of course it’s Raptus who’ll be sulking,’ Mereschel answered. She was grinning and drumming her fingers on the arms of her throne. Steersman Bodinel was easing Lupus Noctem into a steadily faster stride, and her own leg muscles were twitching in sympathy as the feedback came pulsing up through the interface and into the back of her neck. ‘Just Raptus. Of course.’

The grin stayed fixed to her face as her eyes unfocused. The interior of Noctem’s bridge – the baroque sculpted consoles and glowing screens, Amion and Bodinel’s busy, hooded silhouettes – blurred and flowed as she took her Titan’s vision for her own. Lupus Noctem was stepping delicately over the raised central processional of the Avenue Solar, its foot almost clipping the tops of the las-scarred statues that still stood watch down its length. Mereschel let her thoughts reach out and down to the restless machine underneath her. While Noctem’s mind impulse unit was cabled into her skull she was never truly separate from her charge, but she could surface from it when she needed to gather her thoughts back into her own head, speak and be spoken to. Now she sank down into the link again, gently, keeping her mental touch light like a rider soothing a wild and angry steed. A Titan’s spirit was no simple machine, to be grabbed and thrown like a lever. Before all else a good princeps had to respect their Titan’s anima, respect its rage and its power.

She let Lupus Noctem take the lead at first, simply riding along, feeling the monstrous shifts of weight, pressure and tension as it finished its high-step and began to pace forward. Closer, deeper, the heat of the Titan’s thoughts starting to bleed into her, she exerted the gentlest of pressures with her mind, let Noctem feel her, let it accept her. Sealed in his shrine-socket at the back of the Warhound’s head, Tech-Priest Enoq hummed in approval at the sight of Mereschel’s vital signs elevating as though she herself were running. Her cerebrospinal augmetics lit up with throughput and her brainwaves pulsed and spiked as they and the rougher red lines of Noctem’s anima matched one another and became one.

Entascha Mereschel was fully merged now, seemingly in a restless sleep on her throne as Lupus Noctem hit striding speed and boomed down one of the terraced parades that arced through Ghereppan’s centre-south. Building fronts blurred past just beyond each of the Titan’s shoulders. Noctem’s auspexes were alive with power and honed to their keenest, raking the city ahead of them. Mereschel felt pinpricks through them, tiny dots of heat from humans, fires, stoves, weapons, here and there an engine: too small, no prey there, the hunt was still ahead. Lupus Lux was in the next parade, matching her stride for stride, and through the manifold she could feel her lover’s presence, dissolved in union with his Titan as she was with hers, their blood full of plasma heat.

Damocles
South-east transit precinct, Ghereppan central warzone

Several score fleeing civilians had escaped the stampede in the shanties by scrambling up elevated truckways half-shattered by artillery, to a cargo hub that stood above Ghereppan’s southern sprawl on great rockcrete pilings. There was an Imperial position there, word had it, and surely there would be some safety in the crane silos, or in the reassuring bulk of the comptroller’s tower.

Instead, they had started dying when a wirewolf followed them up the crumbling ramp and smashed its way in through the hastily barricaded tower door. Warp-howls, human screams and flashes of violet light through the tower’s slitted windows signalled their end.

Scyllon was desperate to get to them, drag the thing out under the sky and rip it into scrap, but its brother had intercepted him as he went leaping through the rubble of the dockyard and it had seemed to know what he was trying to do. It leapt high over him from a steel tangle of fallen crane, lashed out and wrapped his bolter and right arm in a thick silver chain encrusted with spines. Scyllon reflexively tried to yank his arm free but the chain would not break and he simply pulled the wirewolf through the air like a kite. Then it had landed, somehow sunk its steel hooves into the rockcrete underneath it and started yanking him back and forth as if he weighed no more than a human. Its other arm finished in a length of chain too, anchored to a thick metal ingot whose surface crawled with unclean light.

The wrecking-weight didn’t have the force to breach Astartes warplate but it smashed into Scyllon’s knee, then forearm, then helmet, hard enough to strike dust and ceramite chips with each impact. Each time, Scyllon felt something more than the brute physical force of the blows. His senses reeled, the flaring amber biofeedback icons in his helm blurred. The weight struck again and his very thoughts rang in his head.

Pindor came sprinting up the angle of a fallen roadway, his stride pushed to the limit, actuator bundles in his armour’s legs creaking and buzzing as they tried to match his exertions. He had built up enough speed to launch himself and grip the broken face of the truck platform, but it had taken him too long to claw his way up to its peak. He gained the platform in time to see Scyllon topple onto his face, his movements horribly clumsy and sluggish as he tried and failed to break his fall. The wrecking-weight whooped through the air, building up speed for a murderous downward strike. Pindor shouted Scyllon’s name over the vox and aloud, pelting the wolf with shells, trying to blast its footing loose.

At the last minute, Scyllon gave a convulsive shove and rolled onto his side but the weight still caught the side of his helm, cracking the eyepiece and deforming the breathing grille. The wirewolf screeched and capered, yanking the weight back like a child pulling a bauble on a string, snapping the chain taut to lash it forward again.

And then Pindor was close enough. He grabbed the weight as it swung in front of his face, skidded to a halt on his knees and then dug in his heels. The grip of his damaged left gauntlet was weak but his right hand found better purchase and was gripping hard enough to deform the metal.

Trying to drag the wirewolf away from Scyllon was futile, and he could barely unbalance it: it felt simultaneously as immobile as a building and as insubstantial as gossamer, as though the chain he had one end of was attached to nothing but air. It swung the grille of its face around towards him, twitching as if it were taking his scent, and shook its other arm, pulling the barbed tangling-chain loose from Scyllon to lash at Pindor with.

But instead, the chain snapped taut. Scyllon had let go of his bolter and managed to seize the chain as it unwrapped from him. The wirewolf wailed and struggled, actually managing to drag Scyllon forward half a metre before he braced himself and stopped. In unspoken unison the two Space Marines dragged backward on their chains, hoisting the wirewolf clear of the ground. It kicked its hooves and shrieked, but it was helpless to resist. A shoulder joint parted, then the metal plates of its hunched back began to spread and beams of purple-white light stabbed out against the night sky. Its scream made the rockcrete crack and thrum beneath the Space Marines’ feet, but that was the only damage still in its power to do. A moment later its torso peeled open down the middle and the light inside splattered out, painting the air then raining down on the ground where it puddled, flamed and vanished. Suddenly all Pindor was holding was a thick strip of metal, something even a strong human could have carried. That killing weight was somehow gone from it.

‘Scyllon!’ Pindor’s voice seemed to echo back on him in the vox in the strange quiet after the wirewolf’s screams. The tower windows had gone dark and silent. Was anyone left alive in there? ‘Scyllon! Answer! Second contact, we have to reach the tower! Answer me! Can you fight?’ There was a tired murmur over the vox that Pindor could barely recognise as his brother’s voice.

Then light filled the burst-in door of the control tower and the wirewolf came out of it, hunched and heavy-shouldered like a greenskin, already moving with murderous speed. Light glared from three crude triangular holes punched in its boxy metal head. Each foot was a broad metal chisel pointing straight down but the wirewolf barely ran on them, swaying and jinking as if it skated above the ground instead of treading it.

It took Pindor a crucial split second to realise that it was not running at him, and that misreading cost him his first shot. His shell knocked a crater in the wall of the control tower as the wirewolf veered away, its odd, not-quite-living body language making its movements hard to read and losing Pindor his second shot, the shell passing behind its shoulders almost close enough to clip them. He re-aimed for his third and then the thing was just a white glow flickering through a cluster of burned-out truck hulls, still picking up speed. Pindor fired two speculative shots that punched through the dead machines where he thought the enemy might be passing but if either connected there was no sign of it. In the time it took him to stand up and take a step forward the wirewolf was gone over the edge of the platform, dropping towards the fire-torn city underneath.

Scyllon’s life-sign icons were steady in Pindor’s vision, pulsing to show his body was glanding the stimulants and reagents it needed to drag itself into full consciousness again. Pindor left him and ran to the edge of the platform. There was no sign of the wirewolf’s glow below him. He thought he could hear a metallic cry on the wind, but his hearing was still full of ghosts from the ones he had already fought and he didn’t trust what he heard now. He knelt, bade his helmet’s hearing be silent so its false echoes couldn’t distract him, and stared out over Ghereppan’s southern sprawl.

The stretch of city before him was still almost pitch-dark and the infrared an unruly jumble of roiling air, flares and heat-plumes, but Pindor read it as easily as he could read the ammo count on a bolter, or the telltale movements of an enemy swordsman, or the currents of an Ithakan ocean. He could see where the firefights were, where the light vehicles were on the move, where fortifications were standing, where they were burning. The Blood Pact he had seen scattered through the hab belts weren’t strays or skirmishers. They were vanguard.

Vanguard for what? An assault like this didn’t make sense. They couldn’t maintain this momentum. They were flowing around Imperial-held spires and hab-stacks without storming them; they were leaving the box far too narrow, their flanks far too exposed. They would burn countless lives taking a strip of land through gutted and worthless hab precincts, then throw away whoever had survived that drive when the box they had made inevitably collapsed from the flanks.

Pindor had already made the same leap that his brother-captain had made at the southern command, but he didn’t see how it could work. They were trying to reach the Beati, but they wouldn’t: they would die in the attempt. If the Militarum didn’t kill them then the Iron Snakes would. Pindor had no doubt that the half-element that Xander had led out of the tithe-house could stall the advance in its tracks if they were ordered to. The Blood Pact couldn’t help but know that, and the Blood Pact were not stupid. They were not the mad zealots who made up so many of the Archenemy hordes. They were a military.

Pindor looked up, force-focused his vision, studied the infrared. The heat-boil over most of the contested zone matched small engines – generators for lasweapon batteries, fast strike vehicles like the SteGs and SCUs, personnel carrier trucks. But in the distance, far enough away that it took all his concentration to be sure there was even anything there to see, there was something bigger.

The Blood Pact weren’t trying to conquer the city’s south. They were simply opening a road.

Pindor reopened his armour’s hearing and woke the Damocles vox-band. Even now he could hear the reedy echo of wirewolf voices, as if their ghosts were rebuking him for pausing in his hunting. He ignored it and sent a hail up into the sky.

‘Crethon. Pyrakmon. Are you still aloft? You need to pass this on.’

Priad
Astra Militarum Command, Ghereppan City

‘Wait.’ Priad wasn’t conscious of having raised his voice but that one word silenced the chatter around him. He looked around at a circle of mute, staring faces, then rounded on the war room behind him, pointing at a map table by the pew of muttering servitors.

‘You,’ he said to the cringing tac officer whose voice he had overheard. ‘Repeat that last.’

The young man gulped and fumbled with the shiny length of printout tape with hands suddenly stiff and sweaty. ‘Contact map band Iris-Three-Five,’ he read. ‘Code badge Karybdis Four and apex.’

‘Pindor,’ Priad said. He stepped down off the hololith podium as delicately as he could, and cracked the flooring underneath him nevertheless. Behind him he heard Auerben whispering to the general, explaining what a Pindor was. His little smile at that seemed to terrify the officer even further.

‘It’s alright,’ he said. ‘Really. Stand up straight. Good. Now. What does my battle-brother say?’

‘He’s…’ The man stared at the tape, brow knotted. ‘He’s at the south-quarter freight terminus. Hunting… wolves?’

‘Come back to that. I can see that’s not all of it.’

‘Movement in the… grub? Grub corridor.’ He blinked. ‘Noise. Heat. What looks like code terms. All that he can confirm at this time. Message ends.’

‘Grub corridor?’ Grawe-Ash called from the podium. ‘Something I should know about?’

‘A turn of phrase,’ Priad said, turning back, smiling again. ‘Something from our home world. Damocles uses the nickname for the Blood Pact sometimes. Those masks they wear remind our Apothecary of grubber fish snouts.’

‘Good for him. What was that about heat?’

‘Hold it up, please.’ Priad glanced over the code. ‘My brother sees heat and noise signatures consistent with heavy vehicles moving in the territory the Pact have pushed into. He’ll observe further when he can. His hunt should take him in that direction.’

‘What hunt? If you’re on an operation instead of bodyguarding, I’d like to know about that too, brother-captain. Did you really say something about wolves?’

‘Wirewolves.’ Priad scowled.

‘Term means nothing to me.’

‘Warp-bastardry,’ Priad said. ‘Damocles will stamp it out for you.’

‘Fits,’ Grawe-Ash spat. ‘That’s how they could cause that absolute carnival down in the shanties. And our psykana choir is en route to new quarters on the south scarp. Delicate matter. Alright. Lieutenant Erzien, get their status, best arrival and operational window.’

‘Mamzel.’

Grawe-Ash jabbed the light beam from her quill into the hololith again.

‘Fourth Light are between the Pact advance and the base of the scarp. Jovani skirmisher elements on the other side but not enough. If we push them in to get a bead on what’s coming down that corridor we’re just feeding them in to get ground up.’ She straightened up.

‘Have you flyers, general?’ Auerben asked.

‘Nearly all our combat flying strength got pulled out to fight the air war over Zarakppan,’ Lieutenant Erzien told her. ‘Ghereppan’s been a ground-pounder’s war for months. We scrambled recon flyers from the Luxolar Spire landing-shelves to try to spy out the column but I don’t think we’ve had any report.’

‘Yes, we have,’ Grawe-Ash put in sourly. ‘What we don’t have is any more recon flyers. The Pact are moving flak tanks in there in numbers which stopped them getting in close. Then right before we lost them we got a mayday that they were being torn from the sky.’ She shook her head at Erzien’s look. ‘Funny expression to use, isn’t it? But that was what the last pilot said. “Tearing us out of the sky”.’ She tapped the side of the tank.

‘Orbital’s no good either, before you ask,’ she went on. ‘Low enough for a decent low-orbit augury means low enough that the Oureppan silos can carve them up. Or at least hammer their voids so hard they’ll be half deaf and blind. So. What guns are in range?’

‘Helixid battery at the Plaza of Wheels,’ someone told her, and an icon flashed blue in the hololith. ‘Gryphon mortars mainly. They don’t have the range to hit them yet.’

‘But they can break the road,’ Erzien said. ‘Slow them down? Maybe even draw off some of the Pact and weaken the corridor?’

‘Find me the best support to move up for them if we’re doing that.’

The general’s staff were piling up two deep around the hololith now. Priad took a careful step back and down onto the creaking floor, Auerben with him. The young captain was still staring at her data-slate, but she was not looking at the map of the Pact corridor. She was skimming at high speed along the rest of the Ghereppan contested zones: the western docks, the clade-houses, the superspire clusters at the foot of the scarp, the islands, and the Grand Ascent leading up to the Oureppan causeway.

‘Where are your thoughts, captain?’ Priad asked softly.

‘I wonder if we’re looking too hard at the corridor,’ she said, not taking her eyes from her slate. ‘This is already the grandest operation the Archenemy has mounted in this theatre in more than a year, the most complex and ambitious.’

‘The kind of operation Anakwanar Sek is famous for carrying out as a matter of course,’ Priad observed when she stopped to gulp from her inhaler bulb.

‘Then where is he?’ she said when her voice was back. ‘Why is it the Blood Pact doing the fighting? Even suppose Sek is still holed up in Oureppan, where are his Sons? More than half the Archenemy numbers in Ghereppan are Sekkite, but the areas they control are like tombs. Where are they?’

‘Waiting to strike?’ Priad suggested, and tilted his head towards the crowd around the hololith. Its members changed constantly as aides hurried away to other stations or returned with ticker prints or verbal reports. The one fixed point was the general, arms folded, eyeglasses reflecting the red light of the displays. ‘She’s thought of it too. She’s refusing to stretch Imperial resources away from the central heights and the islands. She’s building the resistance for the Pact drive from the reserves she already has in its way.’

‘Whatever reserves she has at all,’ Auerben said darkly. ‘The whole southern echelon is still in disarray from whatever the enemy is pulling there. She’s wise not to take those for gra… granted.’ She coughed, grimaced, shook her head.

Something was nagging at Priad’s thoughts with the talk of reserves, something about the sidelong look Grawe-Ash had given him when she had given her orders for the forces on the scarp. The look he’d been too preoccupied to take in at the time.

‘How long do you give it before she gives in and starts peeling forces away from the centre and west?’ Priad asked once Auerben had recovered.

‘As I consider it, she is treating the Pact incursion as a raid, not an invasion meant to take territory and hold it. It is time-critical for both them and us.’ Auerben was whispering now to conserve her voice, knowing he would hear her. ‘They know we can’t afford to let them get within striking distance of the Beati’s location, and sooner or later will have to use whatever strength we have to collapse the corridor. But they have to keep throwing their own strength into it in order to be a threat. They’re already overextended, their position is strategically unsustainable. They have to know it.’

She shut her eyes, lifted up the little silver aquila that hung at her throat, and pressed it to her lips for a moment.

‘If they mis-guess,’ she whispered, ‘they have sacrificed the Blood Pact’s entire presence in this city for nothing. If we mis-guess, we either fail to stop the raid and lose the Beati to whatever is coming down that corridor, or we overdraw from our other positions and the Sekkites overrun us right across Ghereppan. Or…’ She gulped moisture and shook her head.

‘Or?’

‘Or both. This city is not easy to move around in. For us, anyway,’ she added, giving Priad a wry glance up and down. ‘If we badly mis-guess we weaken our lines to make a counter-blow to the corridor which does not land in time. The Pact strikes the Beati. The Sons of Sek break our lines while our reserves are en route. And then Ghereppan is gone.’

Priad stared at the hololith.

‘What you said just then…’ he began.

‘I know,’ Auerben said with distaste. ‘“To admit defeat is to blaspheme against the Emperor.” I know.’ She kissed her silver aquila medallion again. ‘I trust you noticed I didn’t actually say–’

‘No, the other thing. And the one before that.’

‘Brother-captain?’ She was looking up into his eyes. She had had to take a step away to be able to see past his pauldron.

‘Whatever is coming down that corridor.’

‘I don’t think we’ve been able to properly–’

‘And for you.’

‘I don’t–’

‘This city, this warzone. It’s not easy to move around. For you, anyway. That’s what you said.’ Priad glanced down at her, then back to the podium. ‘Part.’ Suddenly there was a clear space in the crowd of officers as if he’d tossed a grenade among them. He stepped back up to stand at the hololith, the mortified Auerben hurrying to stay by him. Through the criss-cross of data tags in the upper third of the hololith, he met the general’s eyes.

‘I need your post’s Cult Mechanicus cohort. My armour’s vox is too far away for communion with my brothers. I need to have it ride your signal.’

‘Oshner,’ Grawe-Ash said without taking her eyes from him. ‘Raise Seer Vaenz and have him send in a servitor with a vox-carriage for his shrine’s array.’ There was a stir as the young officer hurried to pass the order on.

‘It’s a privilege we have, my kind,’ Priad told Auerben, ‘that we tend to take for granted. We go where we please in even the most savage of warzones, and know that anything we choose as our target will die.’ The rest of the staff had fallen silent, listening. ‘It tends to shape our strategic thought. Blinkers it, even, towards what we know. I don’t know how well I could command in the general’s position, not over a war like this.’ There was another stir at that. Now it was Grawe-Ash at the centre of a circle of awed stares. Priad looked over at her. ‘But I know Adeptus Astartes operations. Deep decapitation strikes. Pinpoint-precise sabotage. Spear-tip missions sent into impossible situations that nevertheless absolutely cannot be allowed to fail.’

He pointed at the spinning red icon that was almost at the tip of the Blood Pact corridor now, inching its way forward through the Imperial lines.

‘Missions like that one.’

Damocles
Over south Ghereppan

‘Crethon. Respond with location and status.’

‘Brother-captain! Good to hear your voice. I’m aloft over the camp city. Pyrakmon and I are scouting for Xander’s half-element on the ground. The rest are with the Saint.’

‘Double back. Here’s your destination.’ A map reference winked across Crethon’s helmet display. The Thunderhawk was banking and accelerating back over the encampment within seconds.

‘Blood Pact on the move southward,’ Priad’s voice continued over another flurry of tactical data. ‘They’ve taken ground that they’ve not a hope in hell of holding. This isn’t a territorial push, it’s a strike mission. Tell me what’s doing the striking.’

‘What do I expect?’ Crethon asked. He was already rising and banking.

‘There are no other Imperial flyers in the air,’ Priad said. ‘Overflight will be over either enemy or contested space. Last flyers reported some kind of heavy opposition that destroyed them. “Torn from the air”, their words. Ground or air opposition unclear.’

‘Affirm.’

‘Are our brothers still standing guard where I left them?’

‘They are, brother-captain.’

‘You’re about to get a message pulse. Have Pyrakmon forward it to them.’

‘Affirm.’

Crethon looked down below and behind him. The wirewolves were a maddening prey from above, twinkling in and out of their auspex like weak stars struggling to be seen in a still-bright evening sky. Sometimes they returned as metal traces, sometimes a life sign, sometimes as points of heat, sometimes as an almost total lack of temperature. At first they had been easier to track, racing through the shanties on parallel paths that had swerved only to avoid the refugees’ makeshift shrines. After they had passed those some of that purpose seemed to leave them and they had begun to weave and criss-cross, joining up and running together, springing on any humans they found near their path, taxing the Thunderhawk’s ability to shadow them.

Crethon had tried to pick them off where he could, snapping shots from the gunship’s cannons, but even when the wirewolves burned at their brightest and most visible they skittered in his targeter like water-drops on hot metal, and often as not vanished just as quickly only to flash back onto his read-outs a score of metres away. In the end he had started using the lascannons as markers, firing into the ground so his brothers could home in on the infrared flashes and puffs of vaporised earth. He could see their beacon signatures moving beneath him, strong and clear, speeding and slowing as they closed or fell behind, as the wolves fought or eluded them.

They would have to finish that hunt themselves. Crethon pushed the wirewolves from his mind, raised the Thunderhawk’s nose and accelerated into Ghereppan.

Damocles and the Beati
The tithe-house, Ghereppan displacee camp

‘What’s the latest?’ Mazho called over to Ghelon. The other man was leaning against the table where the Saint sat, exchanging low words with Sister Kassine that might have been conversation or prayer. ‘No messages from your vox-crew. Can you send someone up to ask?’

‘If they’re not coming down to tell us things then they don’t have anything to tell us,’ Ghelon replied curtly. ‘We don’t have the luxury of Guard-level comm stations and a Martian seer to run them, and after the attacks all the Ghereppan formations have gone to secure bands and cryptoshrouds. We’re lucky to be able to eavesdrop as much as we have.’

‘Scouts, then,’ Mazho said, unfazed. ‘You kept talking about your scouts and runners. Are any of them in that crowd making the racket out there? I feel in my gut that the show’s moved past us but I want to be sure. If it’s rolled over us, then we might be clear to exfiltrate south if we have to–’

‘There is a strike at the Saint coming,’ boomed a voice from the edge of the room, and every human except the Beati jumped and spun around to see the Iron Snake walk forward from his position by the wall. Throne be thanked, Mazho thought, when he realised it was the one with the red-and-white pauldrons and the frankly terrifying-looking machinery bundled around his left forearm. It was one he could actually tell apart from the others.

‘Word from Brother-Captain Priad,’ the Apothecary went on. ‘The Blood Pact are striking through Ghereppan on direct course for this position. They’re clearing a path for something to move on us. Nature unknown. He bids us be ready.’

‘Thank you, Khiron,’ the Saint said, turning at last from her listening posture. ‘I had thought that perhaps this would happen.’

‘Not this fast, though,’ Mazho growled. ‘Spies. Spies in the shanties.’ Ghelon glared at him as the Beati swung her legs over the table edge and stood up.

‘I should leave this place,’ she said.

‘That,’ Colonel Mazho declared, ‘is a genuine marvel of an order. I fully concur.’

‘The transport you came in took Priad and Captain Auerben,’ Ghelon said. ‘We don’t have much nearby to replace it but I can start sending people to see what they can find.’

The Beati smiled at him.

‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘But I think time is short. I will walk if needs must.’

‘Then we’ll meet your transport out there,’ Mazho told Ghelon. ‘You and I, trooper, we’ll make this our post for as long as we can and be a rearguard if we have to.’ Ghelon looked over at the Saint and Kassine, then back at the colonel. ‘A problem?’ Mazho asked, and gestured at the map table. The crude plan of the shanty-town was almost unrecognisable now beneath ink scrawls, cap-badges, cloth scraps pulled from the room’s upholstery, and all manner of detritus pressed into service as markers. ‘The show’s gone past us,’ Mazho said. ‘Every move from now is a risk. Getting herself moving away from the worst of it is maybe a bit more of one but I think we can manage it.’ He adjusted his glasses. ‘Have you got some scratch company rags we can throw on as we go through the shanties, Ghelon? Our best defence until we get wheels is going to be to blend in. We don’t have to go all the way back to Rhole, there’s a marina outpost…’ An edge crept into his voice. ‘You’ll need to actually look where I’m pointing, trooper.’ But Ghelon looked over at the Saint again, and dropped his eyes.

‘We’re not going south, colonel,’ she said.

There was a very long pause.

‘Ghelon,’ she said eventually. ‘I need to cross out of the camps and into Ghereppan. Into the city proper. It was good to come here and see you but we should not have stopped here. We should have pressed on. It’s not too late.’ She sighed. ‘I hope you’ll come with us, but I understand if you decide your place is here. I will ask you to appoint a guide for us, though, if you do?’

‘It’ll be a blessing and an honour to guide you myself, my lady. As it always has been.’

‘Madam,’ Mazho began. ‘My lady.’ He stopped again, clearly concentrating hard. His posture had tensed but it had not changed. His eyes were still fixed on the map in front of him. He did not look up even when the four Iron Snakes walked forward and took up positions directly around where the Beati stood.

‘The threat marker has moved south,’ one of them said, the same one who’d spoken earlier. ‘We are bade to consider our position and plan to act.’

‘Let your people know, Ghelon,’ the Beati said. ‘Inside and out. Give them the chance to come with us, or to flee the building. Everyone is to have their choice.’

‘The people outside will leave, maybe, but my people here in the house will come with you or they’ll stay. This is a shrine, my lady.’ He pointed at the map. ‘The enemy themselves showed us that that isn’t nothing. Our people created it and dedicated it, to you. They’ll want to defend it.’

‘Nevertheless.’ Her voice was gentle but it brooked no contradiction. ‘Spread the word. Give them the choice. Now, please. When they see me leaving they will need to know what that means. Their faith has been tested so hard, and will be tested yet, and I won’t add to their dismay. I’ll pray for His blessing on everyone who fights here, but I cannot linger. I should be in Ghereppan, and I’m not.’

‘Ghereppan is the source of the observed threat,’ clanged an Astartes voice. Heads turned towards the Apothecary, but the four Space Marines remained statue-still, with no hint of which of them had spoken.

‘Thank you, Brother Dyognes,’ the Beati said without looking around. ‘Nothing will shake my faith in the sons of Ithaka as we go to meet it.’ She put her hands in the sign of the aquila and touched them to her forehead. ‘You are a bloodline wrought by His own hand. The truest reminder of His presence here with us.’ She added a few words in a strange dialect, with barely even the shape of Imperial Gothic, that none of the humans present understood. Then, all business, she pulled on her pilgrim’s cloak and began to fasten it around her shoulders. ‘Fetch Brin, please. I want him in the lead. We’re moving.’

‘This is what I meant,’ said Colonel Mazho. Something in his voice made even the Beati stop and look at him. He was still staring at the map. ‘What I’ve kept trying to explain to you. All of you. This. Exactly this.

‘The Urdeshi Fourth Light are my home regiment, mamzel,’ Mazho said, almost conversationally now. ‘The one from which I was detached to be at your side. The Cinder Storm, so-called. They like to say we come in light as the breeze, but before you know it we’re all around you, inescapable, burning you from a hundred directions.’ He turned one shoulder to them and tapped the unit badge there. ‘My uncle served with the Fourth Light. He brought me the badge, helped me to sew it before I went to our founding fields for our last raising. Four burning cinders beneath an aquila and a half-wheel. My beloved Fourth.’ His hands curled into fists and continued.

‘I’m not sure how much fighting they’re doing tonight, you understand. Tonight, as far as I’ve pieced things together, they are out on the bleeding edge of the Ghereppan battlefront simply trying to keep their feet while the Blood Pact are bringing merry murder down the headland and this… herd… goes trampling through our support positions.’ He shot a hand up to point at the chamber doors, sending several improvised map-markers scattering. ‘Fighting for their Emperor, their world, their city and their lives, in that order. Faithful to their orders. As I have been faithful to mine. I will abandon the Fourth rather than abandon the Saint. I will remain here. With you. Except…’

The colonel’s bearing had become more and more rigid as he spoke, until he was practically at attention. The Beati’s expression hadn’t changed, but she had stopped moving as she listened to him.

‘I think my faith is being squandered,’ Colonel Mazho said. ‘Everything I have done. Followed my orders no matter how they chafed. Swallowed my pride when my advice was brushed off. All to watch you just… just vault the rail and throw yourself into the machinery to be ground up. Everything I have said and done since I walked away from my regiment has gone to waste. May I ask you, mamzel, if you think it was worth it? You inspired all these poor bastards to think the war was as good as over. You ignored the warning signs of what the enemy was willing to do to get at you. You disobeyed the Warmaster’s personal directive to remain behind the lines, where you could have inspired just as many poor bastards just as easily. And here we are.’ Mazho grabbed his glasses off his face and rubbed them against his tunic. Sweat was glistening on his forehead. ‘I must have said a prayer wrong at Vigil before I started this assignment. But then, you would know, wouldn’t you? You’re the one who answers prayers around here, are you not?’

‘Mind yourself, colonel,’ Sister Kassine said in a voice sharp enough to scythe a sinner’s legs out from under them. ‘Don’t shame your beloved Fourth by making them a regiment that produces blasphemers.’

Mazho made a choking sound in his throat at that, but he didn’t answer her. He was still staring at the Beati.

‘Do we need to be worried?’ Aekon asked over the shortest-range vox-frequency. ‘I can smell him sweating.’

‘I understand him completely,’ Kules replied, ‘but I’m not threatened by him.’

‘It’s not about who threatens you,’ Khiron corrected him tartly. ‘But you’re right. He’s sounding off the way he’s clearly wanted to do ever since we moved on from the Cliffs, but he’s not going to be attacking anybody.’

‘Neither are we,’ Dyognes put in. ‘I know Priad accepted this charge, and I know why, and the salted sea knows I’ll obey it, but are any of you happier than he is about being in here?’

‘Let’s leave that argument to them,’ Khiron said. ‘Unless you can think of a way to change places with the rest of them, here we have come and here is where our posts are. Ears sharp, vox open. Any questions?’

‘Yes,’ Dyognes said. ‘That blessing she gave us a moment ago. Not Phratry cant. Old Ithakan. Note-perfect, down to the twist on the accent. Anyone remember teaching her that?’

None of them answered him.

‘Things are not right, colonel,’ the Beati was saying now. You don’t need to tell me. The wrong thing is that I am here.’

‘Well.’ Mazho exhaled hard. ‘I see. Well. Thank you, then, for–’

‘I’m not agreeing with you, colonel,’ she cut him off. ‘Coming here from Rhole Cliffs was the right thing to do. I am sorry for the grief that causes you, but it’s true. The problem is that we are in here, now. You are a good man, colonel, and I am glad you are with me, but you still don’t understand. You’re like Macaroth. You want me comfortable, distant and safe, smiling at supplicants and saying blessings. You want the Saint’s banner over you but you don’t want the Saint herself.’

‘Having the Saint with us is what is driving the Archenemy into this frenzy, whatever the hell it is he’s doing,’ Mazho said, pointing an accusing finger through the chamber wall out into the warzone. ‘Call this blasphemy if you want, Sister Kassine, but my old confessor used to say the Emperor smiles to hear an honest tongue. You want to begin your liberation parade across my world before the war is done. And you’re making it impossible for me, for us, to fight the war so that that liberation can happen.’

‘Urdesh will be free, colonel,’ Saint Sabbat said, finally turning towards the exit again. ‘Walk north with me, and believe.’

They were just at the tithe-house’s outer doors when the first artillery shell hit.

Damocles
Over the Avenue Vertegna, Ghereppan

‘Flak,’ Crethon observed calmly, and twisted the Thunderhawk into a brutal lateral roll away from the airbursts that would have engulfed it a second later. Pyrakmon, seated in his alcove under the cast-bronze visage representing the gunship’s machine-spirit, barely noticed the movement. His armoured body was bolted to the seat at eight different points, and didn’t move a millimetre, and his senses were so heavily merged into the Thunderhawk’s that there was barely any distinguishing between the two. The tilt and whirl of his own body was only a dim flicker at the edge of his awareness.

‘I need a low pass around the far side of that high dome,’ he told Crethon, scrawling a quick indicator line across the pilot’s vision overlay to show the trajectory. ‘I want the medium-gain auspex to forward, five seconds of exposure should do it, then do what you need to.’

‘Dropping.’ There was a brief, windy silence as they fell through the night, through the sights of the flak-cannons, and then the engines slammed into howling life and the gunship corkscrewed out of its drop and into a tight curve behind the cover of the fabricatory dome, so close that their wing tip would have scalped anyone standing on the parapet around its outside. Flak missiles cracked and flared and lascannon beams scrawled the sky behind them. The enemy gunners were still trying to catch up with their new course when the gunship came hurtling around the dome and over the roadway, and Pyrakmon had the five seconds he needed.

The Blood Pact column filled the roadway from edge to edge. Big, ponderous vehicles, engine housings glowing in infrared, roiling heat and chemical traces above them from what had to be exhaust plume from big promethium engines. Visual took a moment longer, enhanced and sifted together from the mosaic of pictures the Thunderhawk’s eyes were passing to him – a double column of lumbering, distended metal bodies, with long, vicious cannons jutting upward from their slope-roofed rear housings. Then fire from the smaller anti-air vehicles around them spiked and flashed through the signal and Crethon broke off the run, standing the gunship almost on its tail and blasting them clear and away.

‘Anti-air first?’ Pyrakmon asked. ‘Small formation fore and aft of the column, looked like basic Urdeshi AEC-2s. Las and missile tubes.’

‘They’re expecting to be strafed down the length of the roadway,’ Crethon said. ‘We’ll criss-cross and cut the leaders up with the lascannons. The big bastards will have to at least slow to push the wreckage aside and while they’re bunched up we’ll do a south-north pass with the destructor. Green light, brother Techmarine?’

‘Green, brother. I will– Wait. Alert, alert!’

The air over the roadway had lit up in his scopes. Flashes of light, heat blooms and shockwaves slammed against the building fronts to either side.

‘Firing! The Usurpers have their range and they’re firing! Priority target, Crethon, kill the artillery! Now!’

Damocles
Tithe-house, Ghereppan displacee camp

The whole north wing of the tithe-house was a roaring, crumbling mass of dust and rubble by the time the Beati and her little retinue ran out of the southward doors. Shells were falling on the main roof now, punching down through it and exploding in the upper floors.

‘Circle left!’ Mazho shouted over the hammer blows of the detonations. ‘Get around to the old elevated road! Then north, north!’ He was making big, exaggerated gestures as he ran. ‘They’ll walk the barrage south, not north! Get in under– damn you, damn you! Move!’

They had run into the crowd of devotees, the Saint’s most passionate followers, who had refused to run from the tithe-house door when the first shells had fallen. They were crowding in now, crying for the Beati, visible only as a mass of bodies so caked with grey ash-dust that their features were indistinguishable. Imploring hands reached for them. Some of the faces and fingers were bloody.

‘Damn you!’ Mazho shouted again, and started firing over their heads and into the ground at their feet. Someone grabbed at his sleeve and he knocked them away with the butt of his gun. ‘Move!’

Suddenly the way in front of them was clear. It hadn’t been Mazho who’d done it. Khiron had seen the Beati look upward to the blank, black night sky and say something, then throw her arm out, palm up, a warning gesture. And the crowd was gone. Not vanished, but he could see them in his heat vision, lifted and pushed back like swimmers riding a wave that set them down on their feet and started them running south for cover. None of them looked back. Khiron went to push his auto-senses to a higher gain, looking for some sign explaining what he had seen, but then another shell blew a crater into the tithe-house’s front steps and they were running again.

There was a scream of metal and air, and then a detonation above them as a shell hit one of the elevated roadway’s rockcrete buttresses. Another one went off so close behind them that Khiron saw brief alert runes in his helm from the shockwave. Up ahead he saw Mazho reeling forward from the blast and about to collapse, until Kules grabbed him by the scruff of his coat-collar and ran with him as two more shells brought down a sixty-metre stretch of the roadway and filled the air with the reek of scorched dust.

Someone had to be spotting for the big guns, Khiron thought. They hadn’t just traced the Beati to the tithe-house and levelled that. The blasts were following them, no matter how they switched their course back and forth. They needed to kill the spotter or outpace them, but how could they even know where the enemy’s eye was hiding? He flicked through his visual range, looking for heat or UV flash where someone might be painting them with a laser, but all he could see in the dust and dark were the armoured forms of his brothers and the lurching heat-silhouettes of the humans.

They had to move faster. Taking his cue from Kules, Khiron caught up with Ghelon in a handful of easy strides and scooped the man up under his arm, the trooper’s long legs trailing out behind them and the toes of his boots bouncing through the rubble and dust. A quick code-bark and a moment later all four Iron Snakes were running flat out, each carrying a human, leaping and zigzagging through the rubble, still heading north and into Ghereppan.

Like the tread of a Titan, the bombardment followed hard on their heels.

The Arnogaur
Avenue Vertegna, Ghereppan

The black iron needle should have sunk in the bowl of blood, but it floated like a feather. The blood itself should barely have been liquid – at least half of it was the Arnogaur Nautakah’s, and Nautakah’s blood was made to flash-clot and seal his skin the instant it was opened. Nevertheless, in the carved bone bowl the blood sat as hot and liquid as when it had pumped through living veins. Its surface rippled every time the monstrous blast of the Usurper cannon rocked the vehicle on its treads. Some had already slopped over the edges, but that was of little matter. The iron needle with the stylised skull stamped into its blunt end remained as unmoving as a compass, and the gore mage crouched over the bowl hadn’t even seemed to notice the spillage.

Nautakah himself sat cross-legged behind the gore mage’s bowed back, taking up all the rest of the space in the tank’s crew compartment. His ancient chainaxe, its colours blood and brass like the Legion livery he wore, rested head down on the deck between his knees. His body was motionless and his eyes half-closed, but he saw and heard perfectly.

‘She is moving,’ he rumbled as the point of the needle twitched. The movement was almost too small to see, but it was there. ‘Find her again.’

The gore mage nodded, licked his lacerated lips, and raised a wedge of bright steel to his face. It was a hatchet-head, the handle long since splintered away, that the mage wore about his neck on a cord. It was exquisitely sharp. The mage had just touched the cutting edge to his brow when Nautakah prodded him in the back hard enough to rock the man forward onto his hands.

‘Not there,’ he said. ‘You need to be able to see.’

‘Sometimes the Brazen King is pleased to confer visions in the blood that wells into the eye,’ the mage said. ‘We are taught this.’

‘No visions for you today. Look to your instrument.’

‘I will look to it.’

The mage turned the axe-head and drew a gash down his forearm to the base of his thumb. Blood welled from it and dripped down into the bowl. The Usurper gun went off again, the carriage bouncing and creaking, setting the needle bobbing with the motion like a feather on water. Nautakah looked up at the bulbous glass ocular fixed to the compartment’s ceiling. He could see the distorted reflection of the mage’s head, the scalp covered in lacerations to provide the blood that the man had used to slick his hair up into a stiff, scabbed crest. Then the mage sat back and Nautakah could see the reflection of the needle. As the mage’s blood ran into the bowl it stopped bobbing and sat as firm and steady as before.

There was a gore mage and a bowl of blood in the gun-carriage sitting next to them on the road, and an ocular to watch them. The little scene was repeated again in the two Usurpers that brought up the rear of the battery. The oculars watched the needles, and fed their movements to the command carriage in the front of the column. The floating needles were very close together, relatively speaking, and their movements must have been infinitesimal, but High Sirdar Haliuk knew his work. He had been able to triangulate the target from the four blood compasses with a speed and confidence that belied his youth, sending a constant stream of firing solutions to the Blood Pact gunners swarming around the cannon mounts. For all that Nautakah considered battering an enemy with shells from kilometres away to cut across the grain of proper devotion to his god, he could still find respect for the commander’s skill.

The divining cut across the grain even more. It had taken Nautakah a little while to mortify his pride sufficiently to accept it. He had soothed it by calling upon a different pride: his pride in his station. There was more at stake than one warrior’s skull tally. Nautakah had sworn the Blood Pact, and so he had sworn to uphold its ways. He had even taken on the rank of arnogaur and the duty of punishing any who betrayed those ways. Blood Pact do not kill Blood Pact was one of Urlock Gaur’s most fundamental decrees, but the arnogaur held the sacred dispensation to kill the Gaur’s people when they broke the Gaur’s laws. The mages were part of the Pact, and so if another worshipper of the Skull Throne interfered with them Nautakah would cut them down himself. And besides…

The arnogaur’s hand strayed to the brass collar worked into his ceramite gorget, the one part of his power armour that always shone as though new no matter how much gore and grime coated the rest of it. In the centuries he had worn it, the diabolical rage forged into it had struck many witches dead as they had tried to work their trickery on him. Imperial battle psykers, aeldari warlocks and greenskin warpheadz had all paid the price of their natures. But the mage had performed his séance untouched, the collar just inert metal at Nautakah’s throat, and he had taken that as a sign. If his god saw fit to send his rage elsewhere, why then so did Nautakah. Let the man walk his own path to his own reckoning.

The Usurper gun went off again, but this time in the aftermath of its shattering detonation Nautakah heard another explosion. Bigger, deeper, further away. Outside the compartment, in the street. Inside, the vox-grille crackled and spoke.

‘My lord! Lord Nautakah!’

‘“Arnogaur” is the only title I use, High Sirdar Haliuk,’ Nautakah answered. ‘Still. Speak.’

‘Another counterstrike! The flak units in the vanguard are gone!’

‘We expected counterstrikes,’ Nautakah said calmly, starting to manoeuvre himself to his feet to the sounds of his power armour – the barely there thrum of the reactor pack, the buzz of motors and actuators and the scrape of ceramite against the compartment’s metal walls. ‘Counterstrikes are the whole reason for my presence here. Our presence,’ he corrected himself. ‘Where are they coming from?’

‘Overhead, lord arnogaur! Air strikes! They destroyed our air defences and damaged the front rank! Do we need to–’

‘Keep firing,’ Nautakah said. ‘There will be no ceasing the barrage while you live. And especially while I do. What nature of craft? More of those little reconnaissance flyers?’

‘It’s a gunship, sir! An Astartes gunship! The stories that the woman travels with the Snakes of Ithaka, they’re true!’

Iron Snakes. Nautakah had known they were on Urdesh, but he had never faced them. Had never even set eyes on Ithakan livery. He was pleased that that would soon change.

Nautakah slammed the carriage’s side hatch open and stepped down into the flicker-flare of muzzle flashes as the Usurper battery threw its shells into the sky. He stared south for a moment, but didn’t bother trying to follow the shots even though his senses were keen enough to allow him to. The more interesting enemy was overhead.

Overhead for now. He doubted the Blood Pact anti-air guns could properly hurt a Thunderhawk, but they were not the Usurpers’ only defence. Soon the Iron Snakes would be down here, with him, and Nautakah’s devotion to his god would find its best and fullest expression.

The teeth of the chainaxe began to move, and Nautakah bared his own iron teeth in a smile. The pain engine in the base of his skull stirred, winching his nerves tighter until they sang like harp-strings. There was a pressure behind his eyes. His muscles twitched, wanting to run, cut, carve, kill and exult. He did not doubt that that would be delivered into his hands. He had faith.

‘Blood,’ he said, ‘for the Blood God.’

Damocles
Over the Avenue Vertegna, Ghereppan

The second air-support tank was already blazing by the time the fragments of the first began to clatter down onto the street. The third tried its best, the cannons in its cupolas sparking as the searchlight on its nose tried to keep up with the Thunderhawk’s bone-cracking evasion path, but it couldn’t do enough. Pyrakmon aimed the rack of lascannons under the starboard wing and skewered it, superheating the front armour, blowing out the searchlight and slagging the gun cupola. A moment later the cupola socket became a roaring fountain of flame as the magazines underneath it touched off. Now the double column of Usurper guns was laid out perfectly for them, still pumping shells into the air but making no attempt to move. They knew they were doomed, of course, Crethon thought, so might as well spite their killers by punishing their target right to the end.

The Thunderhawk’s visual memory had already locked the left-hand column for the spinal laser mount. Pyrakmon would stay with the wing cannons and rake the right-hand column as they went down the line. Usurpers were brutal artillery but not made to withstand the kind of fire a Thunderhawk could lay down. Crethon did not anticipate needing a second pass.

In fact, he was already thinking ahead, working out the course that would most efficiently overfly the straggling line of wirewolves back south of them, when the first glistening shape slammed into the Thunderhawk’s starboard side. It clung to the hull like an ugly, long-bodied tick, malformed legs kicking beneath it in the slipstream, the bulbous pinions over its shoulders shrieking out orange-white jet wash in defiant counterpoint to the gunship’s own engines. A second followed, clanging and clattering across the hull plate until it managed to find a grip.

Within moments, the first creature had clawed a handful of ceramite out of the hull with a sizzling, red-flickering power fist. The second blew off a stabiliser vane in a blink-quick plasma flare. As that guttered out a third creature crashed in and crouched in the shoulder of the wing, anchoring itself by flash-welding its own forelimb to a metal inlay and then unsheathing powerblades from its other arms. Two more were thrashing for purchase on the dorsal weapon mount, screaming unintelligible filth into the wind from their primary mouths and belching hot cutting flames from their secondary ones, neon-yellow eyes narrowed against the slipstream.

Their appearance was bestial but their skill was surgical. Electrified talons gouged into the hull with what seemed like blind savagery until their points made precise contact with interior conduits and pumped paralysing jolts of energy into the Thunderhawk’s nerves. As they clung and clawed, they raised an unholy, atonal keening across the vox and auspex ranges, fuzzing Crethon’s senses and sending panicky, jittery ripples through the machine-spirit’s consciousness and into Pyrakmon’s.

‘Where are they coming from?’ Crethon demanded, shouting over the buzzing cackles filling up the vox-feed. ‘Guide me! I can’t evade them if I can’t see them!’ Even as he spoke he was accelerating, spinning the Thunderhawk on its long axis for a handful of seconds, long enough to dislodge one of the attackers on the dorsal mount and leave it shrieking and burning in their engine wake. Gritting his teeth at the lurch and judder from the damaged airfoils, he brought the ship out of its spin standing on its port wing and arced up and away from the avenue. His thought was to bank back the other way and come in temptingly slow over the second formation of AEC-2s at the column’s rear, to lure up some flak and wager it would scrub these clinging bastards off before it hurt the ship. The yelp of an alarm drove that out of his head. One of the things outside had fed a melta blast into an intake and blown out an engine. They were already taking far more damage than they could afford. And Pyrakmon wasn’t answering.

‘Pyrakmon! Where are–’

‘I can’t see them,’ the Techmarine said. ‘They appear to me in the last seconds of closing. I can’t track their ascent.’ His voice was an odd monotone, a sign that he had invoked a machine-trance down over his thoughts to balance out the adrenaline spike of combat. ‘Point defences are–’

There was a loud bang from the hull directly outside his position, then another from behind them and now the Thunderhawk was listing and staggering like a man with a heavy load that has tilted too far on his shoulders for him to balance.

‘Return to base is no longer within our capabilities, which are degrading by–’

‘I will damn well say what–’ Crethon began, and bit the rest of the mutinous thought off. He had inwardly scoffed at their teachers’ admonitions that war brought every bird to earth eventually, that every pilot of the Phratry must be ready for his charge to be crippled and killed. Just like every other arrogant initiate chosen to train and bond with the gunships, he had been sure that it would always be the other pilots knocked from the sky, never him. Until Urdesh, that had been true.

A staccato distortion burst came through the vox-feed as though the things outside were laughing at him. Well alright, Crethon thought. You’ve taught me something, so I’ll let you have your joke. Just wait till I play mine on you.

His control surfaces were broken or gone; his auto-senses were almost crippled and an ugly metal faceplate was leering in through the cockpit window. Flying blind on instinct and memory, holding the Thunderhawk on trajectory by brute force with its void-manoeuvring jets, Crethon tilted the nose forward and rode his plummeting, burning block of armour down out of the sky.

Damocles and the Beati
Ghereppan southern boundary

‘We are here,’ she said, twisting up in Dyognes’ grip so she could stare about her. ‘This is Ghereppan. This is our place now.’

There was little to show that they had crossed out of the fringes and into the city proper. This stretch of rubble-strewn terrace street looked much like the last few they had come through, just more empty windows, splintered ashblock paving underfoot and the rooflines ragged like beggars’ teeth overhead. Perhaps the buildings were a little higher and more imposing, the facades more ornate, the last roadway they had crossed over just a little wider and grander as befitted the formal boundary of a great city.

That was all lost on the four running Space Marines and at least three of the four humans they were carrying. The streets of the southern reach were lightless canyons, the utter dark only broken by the occasional flicker somewhere towards the north as explosions or high-energy discharges lit up the overcast for a moment. The Iron Snakes could see well enough in the dark but their attention was ferociously focused on the path immediately ahead of them, on their formation and speed, and on the bursting shells that were falling at their heels, terrifyingly close and threatening to get closer every second.

There seemed to be no escape. They would change direction and the bombardment would track them. They would zigzag and the pattern of the shells would spread out, smashing through rooftops and into streets, as whoever was directing the bombardment tried to second-guess their evasions and send shells into their path. Dyognes was certain now that the only reason the bombardment hadn’t crushed them was that whatever guns were tracking them were just slightly too slow to shift their aim. A single badly judged feint would put them under an incoming shell and end them. Had they been human, with human speed and human weariness, they would have been dead twenty times over by now. The humans in their arms were already limp as rags, battered into a daze by the incessant blasts all around them. All except her.

‘I need to stand,’ she said, before another shell caromed off the front of a market house two storeys up and exploded over them, drowning out her voice. Despite the blast and its echoes, Dyognes could still hear her voice. ‘I need to set foot in Ghereppan, brother. I need to stand.’

‘Not here, my lady,’ he told her, as a signal-rune flashed from Khiron and the four Snakes swerved in unison, crashing through four different shopfronts then shouldering their way through the interior walls. ‘Stopping is death.’ He kicked out the building’s rear door and ducked through into the laneway behind. As he started running down it a shell tore into the building they had just left and it came roaring down behind them in a billow of flame and dust.

‘Set foot,’ she said again. ‘Set foot in Ghereppan, to see His will revealed. I… I do not see it yet. It is hard. Dim. That’s what is wrong. Set foot. He meant just that. I have to tread the city under my feet. Dyognes, you have to set me down.’

‘There. Is. Nowhere.’ Dyognes was biting the words out while he turned and crashed side-on through a series of low cinderbrick walls, splashing up dirty water that had collected in the courtyards between them. Somewhere up ahead Khiron was flashing back the rune signal for a way forward and Dyognes was intent on reaching him with all speed. He was unpleasantly aware that the denser the city got around them, the more likely he was to find himself in a dead end that he couldn’t just bull his way out of. After that it would barely be a matter of seconds.

‘There is nowhere ahead that will be secure against these shells, my lady,’ he went on as he followed the other three Snakes through a break in a high rockcrete barrier and out onto a ten-lane roadway strewn with dead vehicles. He could already hear the scream of more shells coming in overhead. ‘This is a fortress-breaking bombardment. Look behind us, there’s no way we can shelter anywhere near here. If I set you down, you die.’

‘Have a little faith, brother,’ she said, and just like that she was gone from his grip.

‘She’s away!’ he shouted into the squad vox, feet skidding under him as he tried to brake and bring his armoured mass around. ‘Down and on foot!’

‘Down?’ Khiron demanded. ‘Injured? We’re doubling back for you–’

‘Don’t,’ Dyognes interrupted, finishing his turn and starting back towards the Beati. ‘The shells are tracking us not you. No use in you running in under them.’ A shell went off on the other side of the barrier and dust and chips of masonry came whickering through the gap they had come through.

The Beati didn’t look around. She was kneeling on the roadway, not like a devotee at prayer but like a sprinter waiting for the start. Dyognes saw her kiss the knuckle of her left fist, then press it against the ground. Agonisingly aware of the sound of the next shell growing louder, he nevertheless heard her words clearly.

‘Iron needles, brass and blood. Throne be blessed, I see it now, even as I am seen. Beloved Emperor, let their eyes be closed.’

The Enemy
Avenue Vertegna, Ghereppan

In each brass bowl, in front of each gore mage, in each of the Usurper gun carriers, each iron needle suddenly lost its buoyancy and sank out of sight, to clink lifelessly against the bottom of the bowl.

The Arnogaur
Avenue Vertegna, Ghereppan

Nautakah heard the rhythm of the guns falter, and looked around. The Usurper cannons still pointed upward into the gloom, shimmering with heat, muzzle flashes pounding the sky. But they were all realigning, spreading apart. They had lost their firing solution and were widening their pattern to hammer a larger area, trying to catch a moving target they could no longer see.

Nautakah gave an approving nod. The fix on the Saint must have been lost mere moments ago but Sirdar Haliuk already had his contingency orders in place. That would be worth remembering when Haliuk’s time came and he lay cold on a battlefield. His skull should be sent to the Gaur’s halls with a commendation engraved on it. Nautakah made a note to himself to ensure the honour was done. The sirdar had shown his worth again, no matter that somehow the gore mages’ sight had clouded…

…but that wasn’t right. They had not lost their sight. It had been taken. Nautakah realised he could feel the change himself. He sharpened his concentration through the increasingly insistent squeal of the machine in his skull and tried to understand what it was.

He was in a different city now. That thought, when he arrived at it, was as clear and compelling as anything his instincts had ever told him. He trusted his instincts, and so he accepted this thought. He just did not yet know what it meant.

Nautakah shrugged and tilted his face up to the sky again. One way or another, it meant blood. In the end, everything came back to blood.

Damocles
Ghereppan southern boundary

Slowing, slowing and spreading, the pattern of the shells grew more erratic with each impact and detonation. Kneeling in the overhang of a broken buttress, eyes closed and tracking the bombardment pattern by hearing alone, Khiron thought of someone plunged into darkness, who suddenly has to grope and guess for something that was just in plain sight.

Then he caught that thought and corrected it before it could lead him to a mistake. The shelling was no longer reaching for them with that terrifying, merciless precision, but it wasn’t blindly flailing for them either. A map was building up in Khiron’s mind with the scream and blast of each new shell, and he could already recognise the structure in it. It was a suppression pattern, working out from the last point where they had been able to fix on the Saint, spreading along her line of travel with an artful scatter about the edges, trying to second-guess any attempt to feint out from under the bombardment. Damocles knew a dozen such patterns by heart, drilled with bolt-shells, grenades, thudd-guns, Thunderhawk cannons.

This pattern was good, but not Adeptus Astartes-good. It had taken Khiron only a few moments of concentration to unpick it, calculate the number of cannons, deduce where their last solid fix on the Saint had been, predict where their shells would go. And, most crucial of all, to pick out the gaps in the bombing pattern where they and their dazed and injured human cargo could find respite.

‘…exx,’ Sister Kassine said, or something like it, on her hands and knees on the ground by Aekon’s feet, talking thickly through a bitten tongue and bleeding nose.

‘Khiron, are we moving?’ Aekon asked. ‘They’ve lost their fix on us.’ He had read the change in the shelling pattern too.

‘Wait,’ Khiron said. He had set Ghelon down in a little cleft in a rubble pile and wedged his armoured body into position over him. He had activated the diagnostor overlay on his vision and the specialised systems in his helm had stirred to life. They were running their senses over the trooper now, reporting back his ragged breathing and thready pulse. Khiron shook his head. Humans were blown glass wrapped in wet paper. He sometimes wondered how they could wage war at all.

‘By making us,’ he said aloud, ‘Throne be praised.’ He realised he could hear his own words. The bombardment was slowing, thinning out, spreading away from them. He wondered if it were a trick, waiting for them to move, but if the enemy still had their location Khiron could see no advantage in not simply crushing them where they were. Whoever was directing it had guessed that they would continue moving north at their original speed, and they had guessed wrong. The old Apothecary allowed himself a little smile at that, and the smile broadened slightly when Ghelon groaned and stirred.

‘…texx’, Kassine said again, up on one knee now, making a half-aquila with one hand while she wiped her bloody mouth with the other. ‘Protects. The Emperor protects. See?’ She stood, swaying, and pointed out into the dark and the swirling dust. ‘The Emperor protects!’

Khiron felt his gaze drawn around. He came to his feet, as did his battle-brothers. Before they could see her they could hear her, and before they could hear her they knew she was there. She drew their senses the way Ithaka’s moon drew the tides.

Urdesh had no moon, no tides. But something had changed, Khiron thought. Something in her, and something in the city. Suddenly, subtly, everything was different now.

The Living Saint
Ghereppan

They all felt it. Every soul in the city. At the moment the Saint’s feet touched the earth…

…the sniper duels that laced the air between Ghereppan’s central spires with las-beams every night faltered away for long minutes, while Urdeshi and Blood Pact alike hunkered down to re-test their sights and rangefinders, trying to get to the bottom of the sudden feeling of difference when they looked out at the city below them…

…the Sekkite detachments that were making their quiet way to their new positions around the north-west seaward quarter began to stall and bumble as nearly every one of them, from the most desperate cultist levies to the elite Sons of Sek themselves, lost their way on paths and streets that they had occupied for weeks or more…

…the Urdeshi urban assault forces in their thirty-seventh day of brutal room-to-room combat in the labyrinthine innards of the Saint Ferethi clade-forge sent panicked and inaccurate reports, stating the Sekkites who still held the vast building’s core levels had managed to start the engines in its foundations, because they had felt some profound change and could only think that it was the deep machinery coming to life…

…fierce fighting broke out in a ragged line along the base of the scarp as Blood Pact skirmish patrols fired on themselves, the troops so totally disoriented by what they were perceiving that dozens fell before anyone realised they had accidentally advanced into each other…

…the Pragar siege-rats hounding Sekkite sappers through the sublevels beneath the enormous north-central transport stacks suddenly scattered for cover in unison and pulled breather hoods and masks into place, because to their hive-miners’ instincts the perceptual change felt like a pressure change presaging a collapse or a tox leak…

The Enemy
Shoreward Ascent, Ghereppan

…and in a bunker cleverly hidden in an engineering shaft near the base of the Oureppan causeway, the three commanders poring over the light-table that held their enormous map of Ghereppan felt their overstretched nerves finally snap.

They were powerful, these ones, stern and loyal. Each of them every inch the uett-magir that Sek had promoted them to be, their devotion and favour recorded in the ornaments on their ochre uniforms, the scars on their arms, the wire inlays in their scalps, the delicate and elaborate hand-patterns stitched and inked around their mouths. And their bond to their Anarch had started to show itself on their bodies in stranger ways. One’s skin and flesh had grown steadily more transparent over the last half-year, the muscles and veins displayed like figures in a medicae text, except for the handprint over his mouth, where the skin remained as brown as it had ever been. Another was growing new eyes: one in her left socket, the old and new eyeball bulging out side by side under the distended lid; one on the tip of her tongue that directed a flickering, slit-pupiled red gaze around her when she opened her mouth wide.

Her jaw was hanging loose now, and the eye on her tongue was glazed with fright.

Everything had been unfolding as it should have. The new truth had been spoken into being by the Voice That Drowned Out All Others and the war had obeyed, taking on the shape that the Anarch had willed. They had been that voice’s instruments and they had done their duty. They knew they had. They had enacted every slightest order, shaped every word, every last syllable of the great magister’s new declamation. The strategem had unfolded as it must; enemy and allies alike had done just as the plan expected and desired.

The passageways outside their sanctum were rattling with noise. Booted feet running this way and that, shouts of alarm and fear. The clatter of weapon harnesses. All the command post guards were convinced an attack was at their doorstep, although none of them could say from where that certainty had come. And in the middle of it all, the three generals stared at their map and could not make sense of it.

It was like suddenly seeing the shape of a camouflaged position or a code hidden in randomised noise, only reversed: the meaning they knew was in their maps, diagrams, the little sigils scrawled onto the table in luminous paints, dissolved into a meaningless jumble of dead shapes. They were looking at a city that was as foreign to them as if they had never set foot on Urdesh, never even heard its name, until this moment.

The three forced themselves back to the table. Slaves to the Anarch though they might be, they were creatures of intellect and will. They drove the fog from their minds. The instant passed. Meaning returned. And the meaning was terrifying.

Now all they could see was defeat. A vast city, too vast to hold, swarming with a foe whose numbers surely not even the Anarch’s brilliance could hope to stem. Every position seemed pitiful, every enemy movement unstoppable, their bold battle plan as absurd and ephemeral as a half-remembered dream. Ghereppan was not their city any more.

The uett-magir at the head of the light table stumbled away from it, shouted a code-phrase and punched a particular ochre-painted key on an etched brass control plinth. He stood there, shivering and arming sweat out of his eyes, and suddenly realised he had sent an order that he should not have sent for hours yet. The silk veil that covered the lower half of his face, painted with the elaborate design of a hand positioned over his mouth, bowed in and out as he panted in distress. But the order had gone.

Intellect and will. The three generals beat their chests, croaked out their master’s name, clawed themselves back into control, ready for command once again. But the order had gone, and they knew it was already too late to rescind it.

What they were sensing was only the harbinger, of course, the city coming to life at the Saint’s footfall like a dog sitting up straight at the sight of its master, or an orchestra hanging ready for the first twitch of the conductor’s baton. The greater miracle was still to come.

Damocles
Ghereppan southern warzone

‘What just happened?’ Scyllon asked. He was out somewhere in the dark on Pindor’s left, circling around at an easy stride that would have been a human’s sprinting pace, smashing in the cupola of a staggering stalk-tank with a careful sequence of bolt-shells.

‘She’s here,’ Pindor answered, and it took him a split second to realise he had spoken and what he had said. In that time, he had got a good grip on the lascannon barrel of the other stalk-tank, sunk his armoured fingers into it until the barrel bent in his grip, and dragged the tank’s cupola around before it could seek out Scyllon and fire on him. A slight change in the angle of the force he was applying and the cannon tore halfway loose from its housing with a bright squeal of parting metal. Quick as a snake he drove his combat blade deep into the gash he had opened in the machine’s side, punching up through the floor of the cupola and eviscerating the machine’s transmission and its pilot at the same time. Pindor held the tank there by main force, armour actuators grinding and feet skidding a little as it fought to pull free of him, until the wet thrashing inside the pilot’s bubble and the grind and spark inside the tank’s thorax both stopped. He shoved the dead machine over onto its side and gave it no more thought. Xander had perfected that way of killing stalk-tanks and between them all Damocles had accounted for more than they cared to recall. It saved on ammunition.

‘Is that what… is that why it’s all different?’ Scyllon’s vital signs were steady now, but his speech was still a tiny touch too slow and his wits still a little blunted. It had taken him four shots to punch through the other tank’s canopy, where the first hit should have weakened it enough for a precisely placed second shot to finish the job. Every reminder of the damage to his young brother gnawed at Pindor as if it were a wound to himself, but until they found Khiron there was little for it but to compensate as best he could. And Scyllon had sounded a little quicker just now. And…

And he was right. The difference was as invisible but as fundamental as lights coming on in a pitch-black room, or shipboard gravity kicking in. Pindor turned his head back and forth, scanning the terrain around him even as he absently swung his blade backhanded and sheared an ululating Blood Pact trooper in two at the chest.

‘Not yet sure,’ he said. ‘Have to evaluate.’ Las-shots sent up puffs of steam from his shoulder and chest – Pindor’s warplate was still dripping from the water-filled crater he’d lain down in when they became aware of the little Pact detachment approaching. The four remaining troopers were falling back from him in pairs, one pair peppering him with las-bolts while the other retreated a few more steps. One of them tossed a flare in his direction. Pindor irritably batted it back into her face with the flat of his blade and then lunged forward and transfixed her, just below her collarbone, before she’d finished flinching. A twist of the blade just so and he hoisted her up then threw her away with a single sweeping movement. Her body crashed into the other fire team, knocking the closest one sprawling at the second one’s feet. Pindor decapitated the man in front of him, leapt, ran, killed the final two with a sword-stroke each, and was back by the stalk-tank wreck by the time the head had stopped rolling.

He saw and heard no more enemy, but by reflex he crouched down by the tank where the tangle of metal legs and the heat leaking from the engine would help mask him to any auspex that might be sniffing around out in the dark. Once again he ran the audit of his senses, both his own and his armour’s, trying to understand what had changed.

‘She’s here.’ Scyllon repeated his words back to him. Pindor nodded. He didn’t know how he knew, but he did. She was in the city with them now.

‘The situation has evolved,’ he said. ‘Blood Pact moving south in increasing force, and the wirewolves are no longer moving north. I don’t know where they are now.’ At the mention of the word he heard the brief shadow of a scream drift through his hearing, but it was a sensor ghost, nothing more. He grimaced as he went on. ‘We’ll evolve with the situation, then. Tack north-west, vox on maximum gain, and listen for our brothers.’ He paused. ‘How badly are you still hurt, brother?’

‘Physical… physical checks out. I know my senses and reactions are compromised. No injury there that I can perceive. Adjusting for it how I can.’

‘We both will,’ Pindor said. Damocles had trained and fought together for so long they could cover for one another effortlessly, in any combination and in any stage of injury. He unclamped his bolter and stood up.

‘I’ll be better soon,’ Scyllon said. ‘Let’s go and find her.’

Damocles
Ghereppan southern warzone

‘Your enemies and mine, my machina,’ Natus murmured as he skidded feet first down a flight of basalt steps and into a plaza lined with long colonnades and studded with broken statuary. ‘Do not let me fight them alone. This is your hunt, like mine.’

He was talking to his augmetic eyes as they struggled to follow the flickering trails of the two wirewolves in front of him, and to the stabilised mechanical left arm that he was relying on to keep his aim rock-steady, steadier even than his old flesh and bone would have been. The greenskins had taken his old eyes and arm on Ganahedarak, and during his months recovering in the Hephaestium the Techmarines had made it clear the augmetics were guests in his body, not simple slaves to his will. He needed to respect them, entreat them.

‘These are your enemies too,’ he said, ‘and you know what I need of you.’

The wirewolves had led him a tangled, switch-backing chase, zigzagging and looping back and forth between the fringes of the shanties and the scarp’s southernmost towers. A few times he had managed to close on them as they slowed to shred a gaggle of exhausted, terrified refugees or pounce on an unwary Militarum position. Once or twice he had been in time to intercept them, and they had broken off their attack as he had closed in and taken off ahead of him again. Once or twice he had been a maddening few moments too late, and had pursued them through scatterings of scorched clothes and bones still guttering with porphyr flame. Perhaps the monsters’ keening took on a mocking edge each time he was too slow, or perhaps that was his building anger putting an edge to his imagination.

Somewhere out beyond him was Andromak, who had ranged out the furthest to where the borders of the camp city washed up against the scrubby foothills. His transmissions had fallen silent after he had spotted a wirewolf in the wreckage of a hospital caravan, but twice after that Natus had seen the infrared flare and heard the interference sizzle in his auto-senses that meant a plasma discharge, and had silently prayed for his battle-brother to have made a kill.

Dappled light burst out through the pitch-black night ahead of him, violet radiance shining out of a gangle-limbed thing as it clambered over a crude ash-brick shelter and vaulted into the open. Natus grinned. This was the closest the thing had let him get. He made it pay for its carelessness with a bolt-shell that raked along its back, caught under the rear rim of its kettle-helm and detonated before it could ricochet away. The blast knocked the helm awry and sank a fist-sized dent into the backplate, but the wirewolf didn’t slow. Natus veered right, clipping the shelter as he crashed through the lean-to awnings hanging off it, so close and fast that the rim of his pauldron scoured a puff of brick-dust out of it. Ahead of him the wirewolf hurdled a gully, spreadeagling itself in its leap, seemingly heedless of his next shot puncturing its backplate and exploding inside its shoulder.

A tight red-gold star darted across Natus’ vision. It left no after-image – his new eyes had been blessed with resolute machine-animae and no longer suffered such things – but his infrared could follow the track of heated, churning air it left behind it back to a heavy shape closing in from his right flank. Shifting the range and gain on his auto-senses, Natus could see a spot of heat whose profile matched an underslung plasma flask, and hear a split second of supersonic keening as the containment field opened up.

‘Andromak!’

A second flash of red-gold opened up a splash of grey-white. The wirewolf stumbled, both forelimbs deformed by the heat, but still it ran, its gait now as ugly as its glow and the shrill, wordless raving that echoed in the mind. The sound doubled and echoed: the second wolf, further ahead, was howling back to its brother.

‘Closing on your right, Natus, I think I’m a little ahead of you.’

‘I see you, I’ll be in your second quarter. Bear back a little and you’ll keep my lane clear.’

‘Affirm.’

They sprinted in silence for several seconds, concentrating on not losing ground. The damaged wirewolf was not much faster than they were now but much lighter, and it could leap across the rough, muddy-soft ground where the two Iron Snakes had to crash and scramble through the gullies. Natus managed to clip it with another shot but barely slowed it; Andromak incinerated one of its legs at the knee with a plasma round that should have bored a white-hot hole straight through its body until the creature danced aside with a mad grace and instinct. After that they almost lost it zigzagging through a maze of cargo-hauler hulks that had been turned into homes with tarps and cast-off boarding. The wirewolf’s bleeding light threw chassis after chassis into silhouette as it leapt and lurched down the makeshift alleyways.

Then they were in the clear again, chasing the thing up and down the rockcreted walls and slopes of storm drains and retaining embankments instead of rocky mounds and dirt gullies. Their ceramite boots rang on the paving, stamping their imprints into the asphalt and kicking toeholds into the rockcrete slopes they ran up.

In the shadows and hiding-places they passed there were human-shaped flickers of heat, and they started to hear cries over the sound of the wolf. Natus, who had honed his use of his hearing in the aftermath of his blinding, caught more of them than Andromak did.

‘Listen to that,’ he said. ‘The people.’

Andromak didn’t reply. He had slowed, sighting along his gun, but the shot was not clear: just a glow from over a crater-rim, no sight of the target itself. His gun was feeding him firelight-orange heat warnings and a hissing alert tone to tell him the plasma flask was close to dry.

‘Warnings!’ Natus went on, firing his bolter from the chest, the shot punching through a roadside watch-booth the wirewolf had just jinked around but missing the creature by a finger-length. ‘They’re giving warning shouts.’

‘Don’t blame them,’ Andromak said, lowering his gun with a grunt of irritation and falling in half a dozen paces behind. Neither Space Marine was breathing hard. Their stride was boosted by their power armour and their re-engineered bodies kept themselves so hyper-oxygenated that even a sprint as fast as their limbs could work wouldn’t put them out of breath. ‘I’d be shouting warnings in their position. I’d be shouting warnings in mine. Just one of those things fought Xander and Pindor together to a standstill. Damn.’ The wirewolf had switched back on its own path and stumbled on its footless leg as it passed through a doorway, but its weirdly staccato stride had masked the movement too well for Andromak to get a proper bead on it.

‘But they’re warning shouts, brother, not terror shouts,’ Natus said. ‘A dozen and a half of these things between them tore the soul out of the displacee camps. The barest of contacts sent those wretches insane, you saw them coming past us. But I’m not hearing madness any more. Fear, alarm, but not what we witnessed before. Someone back at the road junction even took a shot at the thing.’

‘I thought that was what that was,’ Andromak said. ‘So what’s your analysis, brother? Are these ones just the sterner specimens who didn’t flee at once?’

‘I don’t think so. Hindcrown formation right.’ Natus suddenly swerved off to his right and Andromak, a pace or two behind and without a line of sight on the wolf, went off to his left. They passed on either side of the conical rockcrete base of a broken vox-cast pylon, coming around it to see their quarry thrashing its way down a stone-paved boulevard ahead of them. The wolf was now at the point of a neat isosceles triangle with an Iron Snake at each base corner, the hindcrown formation Natus had called. Each of them slowed, aimed, let the anima of their weapon and armour focus their warrior’s eye, and fired.

The stream that emptied the last of Andromak’s plasma flask lit the boulevard up sun-brilliant before it hit the wirewolf in the small of its back and obliterated its midriff. Less than a second after the stream cut off, the second-last shell in Natus’ magazine shot through the puff of vaporised metal and crawling warp-light, hit the back of the wirewolf’s cuirass and blew it clear of the body to clatter on the flagstones. That was the kill-shot, the cage finally too broken to contain the gobbet of spite inside it, and the wirewolf shook itself apart over another half-dozen drunken, crashing steps.

Natus and Andromak kept running at it even as it burned out, although both slowed and averted their faces to the final burst of unclean light. A death-scream that was mostly a ringing, ear-pressing silence reverberated off the sides of the buildings and seemed to thrum in the blood. And then there was just the sound of a dented and tarnished metal helm rolling across the pavement and finally spinning to a halt.

The two Iron Snakes slowed to a jog, Natus slamming a fresh magazine into his bolter while Andromak studied the fragments of the wirewolf’s armour and the oddly scoured paving they lay on. It took a few moments for him to be satisfied that they were inert, and that the thing they had contained was extinguished, and then he dropped to one knee and worked the releases for the empty plasma flask. A hissing cloud filled the air in front of his face, colourless but fluorescing softly in his heat-sight, as the seals broke and a few stray scraps of coolant vented and evaporated.

‘Where did you pick us up?’ Natus asked, standing over Andromak with his bolter raised, turning this way and that.

‘As you came through those outcrops near the rubble of that truckway overpass. I made one kill right out in the foothills, emptied my whole first flask to do it, and the second trail I picked up turned inward. I lost it on my way through some Militarum perimeter barricades, it went through them too fast and there was nobody in fit state to stop it. Then I heard yours coming up beside me and I saw I could intercept it.’

‘That bothers me. Done?’

Andromak nodded and stood up with a full flask locked into the plasma gun’s underbarrel. The two of them began moving down the boulevard again, Natus now following Andromak’s lead, listening for signs of the other wolf.

‘I think we know why these things were sent out here,’ Natus went on. ‘But then when everything…’ – he spent a moment reaching for words – ‘reoriented…’

‘A high-up energy flare, I thought,’ Andromak said, ‘but my auto-senses didn’t see it. It’s as if it went straight from outside me into my own memory without passing through them. But my memory is positive that I saw a green light.’

‘But think on it,’ Natus insisted. ‘The instant it happened, the terror that they had those people in vanished, and the things themselves, they went berserk. I nearly had one pinned in a storm drain when that… thing happened, and the change in it… And that one we just killed could have turned an ambush on us and put up a bastard’s fight. It and its brother would be a real threat. But instead…’ Under his helmet, Natus’ skin was crumpling around the metal mountings of his augmetic eyes – had his face been whole, he would have been frowning. ‘I would want to know what and where that thing was.’

‘Natus.’ Andromak’s voice was accompanied by the subsonic note of the plasma gun’s containment field building up a full-powered charge. Natus’ head snapped around.

Two wirewolves had come into view, waiting for them at the end of the boulevard. One had perched on the top of a headless statue like a barbed metal mantle around the mutilated shoulders, while the other crouched at the statue’s las-chipped feet. They were faceless beneath their wire coifs and metal caps but the Snakes still felt their attention like a hot, foul breeze against their skin.

‘Concentrate fire,’ Andromak said calmly, ‘from half this range. High first.’ As if they had heard and understood the wirewolf on the ground shied and twitched like a cornered dog, while the one atop the statue drew itself up and bayed at the lightless sky. With a scrape of claw on stone it pulled itself down and to the side as a bolt-shell and plasma stream lit up the air where it had been, and shot out into the air, its backward-hinged legs already running by the time it was halfway to the ground. The other one went skittering around the rear of the statue and reappeared a moment later, pelting after it.

‘Craven runts!’ Natus roared as he gave chase. ‘Not too proud to fall on the helpless but you run from the sons of Ithaka! Run, then! The Iron Snakes claim your lives no matter what!’

‘I think I know where they’re going,’ Andromak said grimly. ‘I’m starting to get long-range vox.’

‘Who?’ Natus was snarling.

‘Khiron. General call on the squad band. They left the tithe-house and came north. And they’re in our path.’

‘The Saint.’

The two warriors opened their stride and ran flat out.

The Enemy
Avenue Vertegna, Ghereppan

The Thunderhawk came down through the night in a grand burning arc and ploughed deep into the side of a twelve-storey mercatory block, the fat octagonal tower first swallowing the gunship whole and then bursting and crumbling in on itself as the armoured hulk tore down through its innards. Dust and rubble cascaded out in every direction. The sound of the collapse washed up and down and away through the streets like a basso profundo tsunami wave.

It was only a street away from the double column of Usurper guns that were still pounding at the sky, hurling shells off towards the horizon where Sirdar Haliuk’s calculations told him the Saint must be. Inside the Usurper carriages, the gore mages still wailed and gashed themselves, trying to see the touch of their god’s will in the blood that slopped and rippled in their bowls. Behind them in the gun compartments themselves the sweating cannon crews hauled shells and worked controls with their scar-palmed hands. Through the grinning grotesques they all wore, they grunted out guttural pleas for the power they served to heat their blood and speed their aim.

The warrior sitting cross-legged atop the hindmost Usurper heard all of these sounds and more. They came to it through senses both mortal and esoteric, at once feverishly sensitive and yet clouded and sluggish, filtering slowly into a mind deep and thick as a sludge-polluted well. It heard the voices in the tank below it, the air-splitting blast of the cannon muzzle just above it, the whistle of the shells and the creak of the carriage’s suspension with each recoil. It heard the Thunderhawk spearing down into the skyline a block away, and the angry shrieks of the creatures who’d killed it as they were dragged with it into the crash, scraped off and crushed to pieces in the tower’s collapse. It heard the screech of boosters as the remnant of the flock came swarming after their siblings, heard them scrabbling and howling in the still-settling wreckage, still trying to get at their prey.

It sat wordless as a statue, immobile as one too, letting the sounds percolate through it, barely bothering to waste conscious thought on them. The sky-creatures would see to anything that had survived the crash. The World Eater – it could see him now, prowling the front of the column with chainaxe in hand – would see any threat approaching from the south. There were still enough mortal troopers, the ones who shared the Pact, ranged out along their flanks to bog down any of the enemy’s common host who tried to emerge from the city buildings around them. None of its own comrades had seen fit to show themselves yet, which meant that there was no need. It could still feel that strange disequilibrium that had come over it a few minutes before, but it had no reason to consider that a danger. Not yet.

No need to move. No need to think. Remain in position, calm and motionless as a stagnant pond, patient as rot.

The warrior let its one rheumy eye drift closed. The crusted tumour that filled the other socket itched and pulsed in sympathy. The plates of its armour, deformed and ill-fitting, ground softly together each time the carriage rocked with recoil. The black iron chains that wrapped its torso, holding it together, clinked and scratched. It sank back into itself, into the coldness of its senses, and waited for a threat that was worthy of it.

The Enemy
Austrazi Mercatory Precinct, Ghereppan

The hunt had been a success, but the kill had been enraging. These were the thoughts, such as they were, of the jagged-shaped thing that crouched on a parapet and stared down into the dark and the swirling dust where a building had been moments ago. Pulverised masonry clung to its body, which was a patchwork of red and yellow-painted metal and wet, purple meat. Oddly jointed steel wings flexed and groaned behind it. A block away the Usurper guns spoke again, in almost perfect unison, but the thing ignored the muzzle flashes and pressure wave bouncing off the building fronts and the clouds. It was staring at a broken and blood-wet fragment of machinery that it was turning over and over in its hands. Its hooked, carbon-edged talons squeaked faintly against the metal.

It did not care about the mission, or even really understand what it was that the giant concussions behind it were lobbing shells at (although a maddening dislocation had crept into its thoughts just a few minutes before that it could not quite make sense of). What it understood was that this prey, such an exhilarating challenge after the tiny brittle things they had torn down before it, had denied itself to them, buried itself down there, beyond their reach under the rubble with the corpses of half the flock for company. The rest of them were down there now, crawling over the rubble like wasps over a nest, squealing and yelping as they caught their dead siblings’ scent.

It held up the thing it had found, somehow thrown clear of the wreckage below. A smashed ocular implant from another nameless hunter in the flock, one who had not been able to get free of the prey in time. The yellow ichor that encrusted it was already drying to flakes, its strange yellow fluorescence dulled and gone.

In the smashed-mirror kaleidoscope that passed for its mind, the creature pondered the ocular, the cries of the flock and the pulses of anger from its own hybrid brain. The hunt was not over. It had not yet had fresh meat in its maw. There would be meat in the prey, once they had dug it out and torn its armoured skin open. Every millimetre of the creature’s re-wrought bones and sinews ached for that consummation.

It spread its wings and blew itself into the sky with a double-blast from the boosters in its pinions. It let out a scream to call all the flock to attention, and they tilted their distorted faces back and answered it with screams of their own. It angled itself to dive down to them, still blaring its malice right up until Sergeant Kreios met it in mid-air and killed it, breaking it with a bolt-shell and finishing it with a raking chainsword stroke. Its last sensations were of Kreios’ pauldron crashing it aside, and then its corpse dropped from the sky as the vengeance cries rose up from below. The buried gunship forgotten, the flock took to the air to repay the death.

A dozen keening, splay-winged shapes came swarming up out of the ruins, patch-armoured skins glinting in the strobing light of the Usurpers’ muzzle flares. They climbed hard, trying to intercept Kreios’ descent and swarming onto his tail. The sergeant bled power from his suspensors to his jets, filling the flock’s senses with blue-blazing exhaust as he powered away from them, weaving and swaying in the air, a target so enticing the flock were already almost giddy with killing lust. He turned as he sensed the closest of them hot behind, raised his sword and revved it as the leaders reached for him.

‘Oh, can you not catch me?’ he shouted back at them, voice amplified as far as it could go. ‘Can you not reach a little harder? Flap a little faster?’

He gave a loud laugh at the angry scream he got in reply.

It had been a risk. With only the merest scraps of transmission from the Thunderhawk’s last minutes to go on, Kreios had taken a guess at the furious, animal nature of the enemy and he had guessed right. Now the creatures were stretched through the air in a ragged line, oblivious to everything except the new prey taunting them. Hurtling out of the blown-open summit of a praefectus watchtower, the rest of Kalliopi Squad went across them like a scythe through grass.

A flurry of bolt-shells heralded them, battering armour, puncturing wings, littering the air with fragments of smoking flesh and metal and showers of luminous yellow blood. In smooth unison, the Iron Snakes tilted, adjusted their intercept arc as the flock’s pursuit faltered, and set their jump jets blazing. The flock’s new leader, a barb-tailed, tusk-mouthed thing that had weathered the gunfire the best, spread its wings wide and spun in the air, howling a challenge and shaking sparks from the powered, armour-piercing stilettos at its fingertips. That made it a neat target, and Kandax’s meltagun turned everything from its hips to its sternum into metal slag and bright reeking steam.

‘Ithaka!’ seven amplified voices roared in unison, and the Iron Snakes crashed into their targets.

Hemaeros had marked the flock’s alpha as his target in case the melta blast didn’t finish it, but now he shifted his attention seamlessly to the creature beyond it and the burst corpse bounced off his shoulder as he powered ahead with his chainsword out like a lance. The monster to his left blew apart in a quick salvo from Xenagoras’ double bolt pistol while above and behind him Coenus whirled on his vertical axis and swung his sea-lance out to smash a graphene-feathered wing right off an iron-riveted shoulder. The crippled flyer screeched in terror and fury as it spiralled helplessly downward behind them. Skopelion crashed through the flock’s leading edge with a roar – ‘Ithaka and glory!’ – and when the two enemy he had lined himself up on jinked towards him instead of away he ended up with them both in his outstretched arms like a father gathering in two little children for an embrace. Instantly the three of them were a bunched, screeching, snarling ball falling towards the city below, spinning wildly as all three sets of boost jets fired in different directions.

Apothecary Hapexion went diving after them, barking over the vox for Skopelion to get himself clear. From behind Hemaeros, there was a detonation and a screech as Perdix, the hindmost, got his kill with a point-blank shot, but then Perdix was cursing into the vox as two more of them latched on to his armoured shoulders and jump pack. A plasma arc crackled past Hemaeros’ face as he rolled in the air to fall backward, calmly aiming up at Perdix’s tormentors. They were banking in unison, dragging Perdix sideways and upwards, out of Kalliopi’s formation. Hemaeros chased them with two quick shots before distance, movement and crosswind made pistol shots futile.

A crackle of plasma again, scoring off his pauldron and all the way down his right arm. Ceramite cooked, blackened and smoked, pain flared in the elbow joint and two fingers of his gauntlet locked solid; alerts flickered orange in his vision and rang in his right ear like tinnitus. The attacker, barrel-chested and hunchbacked with jet mounts, wings just metal frames projecting buzzing power fields for control surfaces, rolled out of the way of Hemaeros’ bolt-shell and flung another white-hot blast into Xenagoras’ abdomen as he twisted to try and target it. His grunt-gasp of agony came clearly over the vox in among the distorted electronic screams of the enemy.

‘Stone!’

Kalliopi Squad had responded to Kreios’ voxed command before they were really conscious of hearing it. In unison they killed the suspensors in their jump packs and brought their feet in under them as they began to fall. Hemaeros felt the change, from the odd skidding semi-weightlessness of the jump packs to the sudden awareness of his own mass, a three-quarter-tonne block of ceramite and plasteel hurtling towards the ground.

A handful of metres away Xenagoras was falling too, slightly above him – pain and shock had delayed his reaction to Kreios’ command by seconds. Their enemy had been caught out by Kalliopi suddenly plummeting out of the fight but now they came yowling down in pursuit. Xenagoras was the weakest, wounded, hindmost, rocking in the air as his system laboured to suppress the agony in his belly. He was trying to stay stable enough to shoot up at the shapes diving down at him, barely visible except as trails of exhaust plume in their infrared until they were almost on him. A sinewy tentacle encrusted with weeping thorns of pressed carbon wrapped around Xenagoras’ right hand and forearm, twisting the limb around, his augmented muscles and joints aching with the strain of resisting it. A many-jointed metal arm lunged for his faceplate, the heavy powered claw on the end of it ready to crush and tear.

Hemaeros didn’t bother with his suspensors. A short burst from his jump jets interrupted his fall for a split second that still seemed sluggishly long as glanded adrenaline pumped through his system. Letting his instincts compensate for speed and slipstream, he emptied his magazine with a five-round burst that sent a fan of shells through the air over Xenagoras’ head. The plasma damage made his aim clumsy, and two missed the mark and vanished into the opaque night sky. One clipped the cuff of the power claw and spun away to detonate in the air. But two hit home, and a limp headless form crashed against Xenagoras’ head and shoulder then fell past him. Its flock mate flexed its wings, opened its own jets to maximum and tried to hold the Iron Snake in the air. Using its grip on his arm as a pivot, it swung its feet around, grotesque bunches of talons sprouting from legs of grafted and machine-boosted muscle, and began to kick and rake at Xenagoras’ face and chest with buzzing vibroblades. The Iron Snake tried to bat the attacks away with his other hand but could barely counter them, and the gun he held in that hand was empty.

Hemaeros hit the rooftop with a concussive crash of ceramite on rockcrete, sending sparks and chips spitting out from under him. He was down only as long as it took him to crouch, engage his suspensors and leap, so powerfully that the actuators in his legs and hips groaned with the effort of matching his muscles. The white downwash of his jump pack’s exhaust lit the whole rooftop, illuminating Coenus who had landed at the far edge, piledriving his armoured legs through the rooftop’s parapet and then almost toppling off as three square metres of rooftop collapsed around him. His pistol was still empty but Hemaeros didn’t trust his damaged right gauntlet to release or reload it, so once again he levelled his chainsword and ran the motor up to maximum.

He had judged his leap and thrust perfectly. His chainsword came up between the creature’s kicking, raking legs and left a ruinous gash from its crotch halfway up its back before the sword lodged and its teeth jammed on some inner metal part. Using the embedded sword as an anchor now, Hemaeros let his momentum swing his part-gravity-proofed body around and over the enemy, then once again killed his suspensors an instant before the three of them hit the rooftop.

Xenagoras landed on his back in the centre of an instant spiderweb of cracks. His attacker, still with his arm in a death grip, landed atop him and an instant later took the whole, brutal impact of Hemaeros crashing down on it in turn, pulping flesh and crushing metal, splattering glowing yellow blood in every direction, killing it in an instant.

Without missing a beat Hemaeros rolled off the pile of wounded squadmate and dead enemy, fetching up on one knee next to Xenagoras and reaching for a new pistol magazine. The reload was clumsy with two of his gauntlet’s fingers seized, but his hands were steady.

‘Well?’ he asked.

‘I can… move,’ Xenagoras gasped, and showed it by pushing himself clumsily out of the rubble and onto one knee in echo of Hemaeros. He too began to reload. The creature’s ichor, its acrid yellow light already fading, dribbled off their armour and puddled on the rockcrete beneath them. ‘Senses fine, full body movements… uh…’ There was a beat or two as he tried to flex and turn himself, holding the pain in his mind and weighing it. ‘Compromised to about a half. Can get about half of that back, I think, once some of it… uhh… knits.’

‘Dull it so you can manoeuvre,’ Hemaeros told him, ‘then get down to the street and start killing those guns. Crethon and Pyrakmon are either dead or they’ll keep. We want that artillery silent. Go.’ The thruster-flare of Xenagoras’ departure illuminated Coenus as he half-walked, half-jetted across the rooftop.

‘Skopelion went down into that,’ Coenus said, pointing a lance over the parapet and down into a smoke-and shadow-filled alleyway. ‘Kandax and the brother-sergeant have jumped again to help Perdix.’ Like Hemaeros, he was speaking the Phratry’s battle argot, a series of accelerated monosyllables that needed Astartes-keen hearing to properly perceive and years of deep hypno-teaching to properly decode. He had communicated the squad’s tactical picture in the time a human would take to cough.

Noises from above them framed his words: biomechanical howls, the whoop of jets and whistle of bolt-shells. Hemaeros looked up to see a quick, die-straight line of heat flare in his infrared before it puffed out and dispersed: a meltagun shot, although he couldn’t see what it had hit.

‘You get up there and help them,’ he told Coenus. ‘I’ll clean up in the alley. Rendezvous behind Xenagoras at the guns.’ The other Snake crouched, leapt and vanished upward in a roar of blue glare. Chainsword growling, Hemaeros stalked to the rooftop’s edge and stepped out into space, dropping on part-powered suspensors, steering mostly by simply caroming off the sides of the alley, bringing showers of dust and rockcrete chips down with him. Below him he saw a ballooning yellow flare from Hapexion’s hand flamer.

‘Ithaka and glory,’ he growled, and was about to turn himself head down and fire his jets when Xenagoras’ shout came over the vox.

‘Traitors! Traitors, my brothers. Kalliopi, eyes on.’

Priad
Astra Militarum Command, Ghereppan City

‘You were right,’ General Grawe-Ash said to Priad, when the new icon appeared in the holotank. Her expression was unchanged but her face had gone pale and her shoulders taut. Around her there were murmurs and curses. Several of her staff made the sign of the aquila. Auerben had drawn a medallion from under her tunic, a silver disc etched with a stylised map of Holy Terra, and she pressed it to her forehead and then kissed it before tucking it out of sight again.

Priad remained motionless. He had already known where the ugly red symbol would be before it winked into existence in front of him. The vox-input had been growing steadily stronger and more complete as more Guard units converged on the avenue and their vox-units spoke to each other, conjoined their spirits and meshed their signals. His battle-brothers’ transmissions were catching that network now, riding it out of the battle zone and all the way to his ears.

The Thunderhawk down, Crethon and Pyrakmon silent. Kalliopi caught in a struggle with some twisted Archenemy creation none of them could identify. The Usurpers still firing. Traitor Marines unleashed to defend them. And the Saint…

It took a conscious effort for Priad to remain still when he thought of her. He had multiple confirmations that her makeshift command post in the tithe-house was gone, obliterated by the first volleys from the Usurper column. The Beati was somewhere out in the fire-swept ruin belt between the house and the enemy artillery, out among the scrambling and disoriented Guard units and the Blood Pact skirmisher packs that seemed to be just materialising out of the dark.

Damocles would be with her, always, to the death, but Priad had not heard from Damocles for too long now. Could the Beati be killed? He thought she could. But…

Priad shook his head. But he would know. He didn’t know why that certainty sat on him as solidly as the warplate he wore, but it did. If she had met her death out there, he would know. Now that the city was hers.

That was another strange certainty, that he did not know he had until other thoughts took him to it. The city had changed, and now it was hers, and if she died in it Priad would know.

So she was still alive.

His eyes had drifted half-closed with concentration. He opened them again to the general’s voice, and realised he had missed what she had said.

‘My apologies, madam general. You said…’

‘I said you were right. Missions like that one, they call for your kind.’ That guarded look was in her eyes again, and this time he saw it and understood the double meaning. She was talking about the Archenemy assault, and she was talking about Erasmos Squad, deep in their mission by now, lost to communication. Of course Grawe-Ash knew where Erasmos had gone, and of course she wouldn’t speak of it here.

The reserves. That was what Priad had noticed earlier. Her mention of the reserves, the careful description of why they were there as if her staff were hearing it for the first time. Those had been the reserves she was moving into position over the docks. To be ready to strike at the seafront and then across the strait into Oureppan if, when, Erasmos succeeded.

The reserves she had been forced to spend here, now, simply to save what she already had. Priad was sure he was the only one in the room who fully understood the weight of that, and it drove the situation home in a way that a week of briefings and tactical studies would not have matched.

Priad felt the itchy warmth spread deep in his body as his augmented metabolism began to speed up. His blood mix was already changing and the armour interfaces were sharpening themselves.

‘The transport you came in is outside where you left it,’ Grawe-Ash was telling him. ‘We’ll speak again, Throne willing.’ It took him a moment to grasp her meaning, and then he nodded and raised a fist to salute her.

‘The Emperor protects.’

But she was already lost in the holotank display again, zooming the map back out, spinning and magnifying again, pointing out moving markers and giving orders in quick, terse bursts. Brey Auerben looked up, smiled and returned his salute before she stepped back into the knot of officers and runners around the podium. And that was how he left them.

Kalliopi
Avenue Vertegna, Ghereppan

Xenagoras’ weight dropped away as his suspensors redlined. He kicked his feet up behind him and his jets slammed him forward on a trajectory barely above the horizontal, barrelling forward barely two metres above the road with his pistols out in front of him. The shape that had stood up from the cover of the rearmost Usurper’s gun mount, the slumped and degenerate silhouette which mocked the clean curves of Xenagoras’ own power armour, raised a weapon but the Iron Snake was already rolling in the air by the time he saw the muzzle flare, barely a quarter-turn but enough for the bolt-shell to skate off the curve of his breastplate and away rather than cave in his faceplate. And then he had his range and his own guns were blazing in answer.

The Dark Tusk was only just firing a second shot when Xenagoras’ twin salvoes detonated in his face and chest, cracking his breastplate, shattering the chains that wrapped around his shoulders, battering and deforming the case of his bolter. The force of them leaned him back from the waist, then forced him half a step back, a full step. He turned the motion into a pivot to put his pauldron towards the Space Marine, hacking out a wordless, angry moan, but before the foe could do any more, Xenagoras crashed into him, velocity and approach perfectly matched against the traitor’s height and heft. Cawing with fury, the Tusk overbalanced and toppled onto his back, the ugly scalp-bedecked reactor pack on his ancient armour hitting the gun-carriage’s hull and tilting him over onto his side, Xenagoras on top of him. The Iron Snake had once again killed his jets and suspensors and now bore the Tusk down with all the mass of his own body and pack, pinning the bolter to the Traitor Marine’s chest first with a forearm and then a knee, struggling with his right hand as the Tusk gripped his pistol and tried to twist it away.

That should have been no contest. The Tusk’s armour should not have been functional, should barely have held together. It looked like something dragged from a deep-sea wreck after centuries. But its servos buzzed like corpse-flies and the muscles inside it flexed like maggots and the Tusk’s arm pushed Xenagoras’ back, and back. He fought to find leverage, or to twist the gun in his enemy’s grip, triggered the pistol in his left hand and exploded the frame of the enemy’s bolter, only to have the Tusk discard its remains and grab Xenagoras’ left gun too, pushing it away, denying the point-blank shot to the face that he was desperately trying for.

The young Snake’s damaged abdomen churned with hot agony as his threw his whole body into the struggle, and despite all his glanded suppressors and rigid conditioning the pain was fogging his judgement and sapping his strength. When the monstrous cannon above them fired another shot the jolt to the carriage took him by surprise, shaking him off-balance for just the split instant the Tusk needed to kick his legs aside and buck him clear.

Shouting in pain and frustration, Xenagoras triggered his suspensors and bounced into the air, light as a tethered balloon. Before the Chaos Space Marine could release its grip on his hands he gave a single blast of his jets and dragged it the length of the gun-carriage, bouncing the armoured form off the gun mount and then dragging it into the air. When it tried swinging its weight to drag him down Xenagoras went with the movement, let it spin him and smashed the Tusk headlong against the ground. Instantly it tried to plant its feet and pull him in, but that moment in the air had given Xenagoras the opportunity he needed to twist his guns in the enemy’s grip and point them into its face.

If the traitor had time to realise what had changed, he didn’t have time to react to it. Xenagoras fired both guns through the leering, corroded faceplate and snarled into the backsplatter of ceramite and flesh. The body under him moved and he fired again, the shells exploding side by side in the middle of the Tusk’s skull. The helm, cracked and deformed by the detonations, bounced free of the armour and clattered away across the paving as the avenue was lit by another thunderous gun salvo. Somewhere in among the flashes of pain and the relentless drive of his deep combat conditioning, the conscious part of Xenagoras’ mind was exulting in the affront he had answered, the traitorous mockery he had put an end to.

Kneeling half-on, half-off the corpse, he propped himself up as best he could. Bright slices of pain criss-crossed his belly as his enhanced flesh tried to knit around the burned tissue, and a strange crackling sensation came with each move as internal haemorrhages flash-clotted inside him and then broke again. Wrung-out as he was, he managed to push himself into a crouch, and began to change the magazines in his pistols. He had no krak grenades, but shells would be enough to disable the guns if he was careful about where he–

A bolter round hit the back of his left knee, punching through the armour join, exploding in the centre of the joint with enough force to knock Xenagoras’ severed lower leg away. He fell wordlessly onto the stump, the burst of blood clotting so fast and hard it almost glued his severed knee to the road. He twisted about, trying to aim a pistol behind him, but that turned the concealing bulk of the jump pack and exposed his head. His attacker had anticipated exactly that, and had the second shell already on the way. The hit was clean and perfect, striking the side of Xenagoras’ helm and caving it inward. The young Snake sent a single wild shot away into the air before he pitched face first onto the pavement with a clatter-clank of ceramite on tarmac.

The second Tusk remained where it was, bolter still raised. Cold, brackish water sloshed inside its armour as the Usurper it was standing on rocked with recoil. Without emotion it watched as the others started to emerge from their vehicles and take up positions. Two tanks down was its brother Tusk, an old comrade whose name it had known back when any of them could remember their names. There was the blood-seeker, pacing about at the front of the column, looking at the sky and hefting his axe. Now he was joined by the one in the black-winged helm that hefted a broad-barred chainglaive as tall as himself. The one in the misty-grey armour, with a gold Chaos star where the eagle had once been, was carefully positioning himself at the base of the Usurper he had been riding in. He lifted a combi-bolter to the ready position. The one carrying a heavy bolter into position halfway down the column had brawny arms but no head: the ring between its pauldrons that would have mounted a helm instead framed a circular mouth, facing straight up to the sky, in which rune-engraved ceramite teeth constantly gnashed. Despite the lack of apparent eyes, the mutant moved with quiet assurance as it took a firing position. A sucker-coated tongue came swaying up from its mouth, tasted the air, and dropped back down the steaming gullet and out of sight.

Thoughts began to bubble sluggishly up through the Tusk’s mind. This enemy, they went about in numbers, in squads. The one he had killed had let out a cry for his fellows: the Tusk couldn’t really remember what it had been, but that didn’t matter. Soon the others would be here. They would be coming to avenge the stripling.

Let them, then.

Damocles
Ghereppan southern warzone

First contact came as a tick of haptic feedback as the anima in his armour felt the presence of another and reached out. A second tick said that identity had been established, and an icon blinked into the edge of Khiron’s vision.

‘Pindor!’

‘I’m moving up straight aft of you, Khiron. Scyllon’s behind me in turn. We’re about to catch you.’

‘Affirm,’ Khiron said. He picked out the shape of the Beati in the dark, drew in a breath to tell her the news, and saw she had already slowed and turned to look behind them, a smile on her face. As she so often seemed to, she had simply known.

They were still moving north, beneath the curved curtain wall of a towering vapour mill. Sometime early in the war an enemy Hell Talon flyer had come crashing down through the pipework that ran out to the chem-houses around it, carving a long trench through the jungle of ducts and flues that was now their road deeper into the city. The mill itself was still running in some capacity – Khiron could see the dull glow of heat from the enormous dome that rose up over the basalt walls, but there was no other sign of life. Except for Pindor, now, and Scyllon, clambering over the dusty wreckage of the Hell Talon and hurrying to join them.

‘Enemy?’ Khiron asked as their little expanded formation started to move again, Snakes in the front and rear and the humans in the centre of them, clustered around the Beati. That seemed to help: the closer to her they were, the faster they seemed to be able to recover from the gruelling forced march and the fearful battering of the artillery.

‘Wirewolves along the southern border of the shanties,’ Pindor told him. ‘Killed two that I know of. One well to the south of the house, then we split up to hunt the others. Scyl and I killed one more. No more data. Crethon was spotting for us in the Thunderhawk but he got pulled away.’

‘I think he passed over us, actually, going north.’ Khiron paused, adjusted his auto-senses and scanned around them before he bent down and crouch-walked under a pipe that had somehow stayed intact in the crash. ‘All I had was the contact, no message, but I’ll wager you he was heading for the source of that artillery that destroyed the tithe-house command. It was following us as we evacuated.’

‘It was how we found you,’ Pindor said. ‘When we felt the change, whatever that was…’

‘It was her,’ Scyllon put in from behind them. The other Snakes said nothing but affirmation markers from Dyognes and Kules lit up and vanished in front of Khiron’s eyes.

‘We came looking,’ Pindor went on. ‘When that artillery came marching north we took a guess on what it was.’

‘Far too sharp to be natural,’ Khiron said.

The way ahead was blocked by a piece of collapsed gantry and Khiron and Pindor wordlessly put themselves back to back, watching the flanks with Scyllon watching the rear, while Kules helped the humans over it. ‘Not even with forward observers and markers. Can you think of a spotter who could have paced us through all that?’

‘A Vindicare adept with a hard-radiant designator light?’ Pindor said, and snorted. ‘Which is an answer to your question, not a suggestion of what might have been out there. I can take a better guess at that.’

It was their turn to clamber over the fallen gantry.

‘It’s that girderwork creaking,’ Aekon said from ahead of them. ‘It made those noises under us, too.’

‘Well then tell me,’ Pindor said calmly, raising his bolter, ‘why we’re still hearing it when none of us are on the girder anymore?’

The squealing was becoming louder, growing. Sharper. More distinct. Going from squealing to screaming. Turning into an icy pressure in the ear and on the nerves. It was the cry of wirewolves.

Pindor turned this way and that, tried to fix the direction the creature was coming from. At first he thought that the echoes and clatter of the pipework was foxing his hearing, conducting the sound, blurring its origin, before he realised the truth and flashed a scarlet danger icon across the squad’s vision as purple-white light began to shine through the tangled metal wreckage. Straight ahead of them. Off to their right. Coming in behind them. Another almost alongside it. Two behind them. Three.

The cry was surrounding them because the wirewolves had surrounded them.

‘For Ithaka,’ Pindor said, sighting towards the brightest glow he could see, and the other Snakes repeated the words.

‘Throne light our way,’ Sister Kassine said, with only a tiny shake in her voice.

The first of the enemy came into view.

The Enemy
Hill country, Ghereppan promontory

It took the young lekt several moments to fully understand what she had found, and when it did hit home her reaction was physical, whole of body. She jolted under her groundsheet, clenched her hands, gulped in a harsh lungful of air. Around the groundsheet that still covered her top to toe, the brown-grey dust of the hillside shivered and the tangles of wrinkled, rubbery landweed creaked and pulsed.

It was her. The one he had spoken of. The one that the Anarch had named to them. Whispered her description into their minds. Told them the stories of her, all her faces and likenesses. All her crimes.

The lekt had known her mission at the camp city this night, but she had known that it was part of a larger plan: she and her actions were just some of the words in the sentence that the Voice That Drowns Out All Others had passed upon the upstart Saint. She would perform that task that was part of the greater task and she would rejoice in the honour. But she had never dared dream that she would have her, have the object of Father Sek’s design in her own grip, trapped in a tightening circle of warp-spite and steel as her wirewolves stalked forward. She could feel them meeting resistance, the feel of pushing against a tight-stretched net or against a wind or a current, the feel of labouring up a hill that grew ever steeper beneath their feet. No matter. A dozen wirewolves, every one of them burning as fiercely as when they had first burst to life. The upstart Saint had run out of time.

The thoughts flashed through her mind’s eye, making her giddy. She pictured herself walking into Ghereppan and then through it as the Saint’s followers wept and fell upon their weapons in despair. The magister’s faithful would join the great march, falling in behind her, hands over mouths in reverent silence as the lekts shouted the words of the Anarch into the warp and the materium alike. She pictured herself leading the grand parade across the causeway from conquered Ghereppan to proud Oureppan, climbing the steps to Anakwanar Sek’s throne beneath Pinnacle Spire with the girl’s charred bones cradled in her arms. She would kneel and place them at his feet, and she would look up and behold his face, the greatness and kindness in his eyes. And then, perhaps, and she barely dared to think it, perhaps the Voice That Drowns Out All Others would speak a word that was just for her.

She held the wirewolves steady, held them to their kill. There were only moments left in it now.

Kalliopi
Avenue Vertegna, Ghereppan

Kandax dropped out of the sky with his suspensors and jets off, and his full armoured mass hit the hull of the rearmost Usurper with a bone-jarring clang. Even he felt the impact, although it didn’t slow him. His leg actuators automatically cushioned the blow and the mag-locks in his boots kicked on at the instant of impact, anchoring him to the hull as securely as if he had been welded there. He had lined up the exact shot he would need as he fell, landed with the meltagun exactly positioned, and now simply let his reflexes pull the trigger. The hull under the gun-muzzle flashed red then white as the beam speared through, burning away the top of the gunner’s head and slagging the cannon’s breech mechanism. Kandax tilted the gun, swinging the beam through the compartment to where the Usurper’s magazine would be as a batch command unlocked his boots, woke his suspensors and ignited his jets. The beam did not pierce the ceramite box that encased the magazine but it filled the gunnery compartment with hellish heat and vaporised metal from everything else it touched. The gun crew were choking too hard to scream as they died, and Kandax was in the air again.

Kreios and Coenus shot past him, leading the rest of Kalliopi down the column of guns to where Xenagoras lay. They moved fast, intent, auto-senses scouring for heat and movement, for the shape that Xenagoras’ helmet feed had shown them. The Tusks were a foul and formidable enemy, known to the Snakes since they had done battle on Rosetta more than a century before, but Kreios was determined that Kalliopi would have their measure. There was no recklessness in his advance, just the deadly, predatory need for revenge.

‘Movement dead fore.’ Coenus had seen something. He and Kreios tilted and flitted sideways, out of the line of fire of anything in the aisle between the two lines of guns. ‘Adeptus Astartes proportions, running between the guns.’

‘Perdix.’

‘Above you, one aft zenith, no sight of a running figure yet.’ Perdix and Skopelion had leapt high where Kreios and Coenus had gone flat, watching their brothers’ path. ‘But I might have a mov– fire, fire, incoming heavy!’ And then the first heavy bolter shell smashed into him, shattering the front half of his pauldron and spinning him in the air. Another shell cracked Perdix’s chestplate, one skated off his other pauldron and blew a jump pack intake, two more punched into the pack itself as the salvo knocked him right around in the air. There was a bright blossom of flame as the rest of the jump mechanisms blew out, and then Perdix was dropping like a rock through the air.

Skopelion somersaulted and blasted himself downward, grabbed the torn edge of Perdix’s exploded pack and fell with him, the two of them spinning erratically around one another as Perdix’s suspensors flickered off and on. There was little altruism to it: this had been the quickest way for Skopelion to make his movement uneven and hard to predict, to spare himself Perdix’s fate. It barely worked. Whoever had the heavy bolter on the ground was unnervingly good. Salvo after salvo came screaming through the air, passing so close to Skopelion he could smell the propellant in the bolt-shells’ trails, compensating for their movements with deadly skill.

But the shooter was also marking their own location as clearly as if they had lit a flare. Above the west side of the boulevard, Hemaeros rose from his perch atop a high ceremonial arch and ran off the edge of it into empty air. He came down in a silent curve, suspensors on but jets off, riding nothing but his momentum, until he had his range and began firing careful shots with unerring metronomic rhythm. His first shell went low, exploding in the ground; the second was higher and hit hard armour – to Hemaeros’ eye bolt-shell impacts were as easy to read as the insignia on his battleplate. He had his aim in now and his third shell should have taken the enemy’s head, but it passed through empty air where the head had just been and vanished in among the tanks.

Still, the shooting had done its work: the barrage flying at his brothers abruptly cut off. The shooter’s next target was an easy guess. Hemaeros killed his suspensors and dropped as a volley of heavy bolt-shells lit up the air over his head, then cursed and fired himself sideways as the gunner adjusted their aim.

‘Someone kill that heavy bolter!’ A shell made a furrow through the top of his helmet and detonated between his shoulder and pack. Hemaeros hit the road hard enough to smash a crater into it.

Kreios sped past him, moving in great gliding strides on half-powered suspensors, skating his boots along the roadway and pushing himself through his turns. Going around the final corner he raked his chainsword along the gun-carriage’s hull and used the gouging teeth as a brake and pivot, swinging himself around without having to slow, and running straight into the creature that was coming the other way.

The Usurper gun on the other side of the boulevard from them went up in a roar of orange flame and Kreios had a quick and revolting picture by firelight and silhouette. It wore old Astartes plate that was disfigured with strange organic-looking grooves and whorls, the pauldrons rimmed with curved spines, the feet misshapen and thick.

It had no head. That slowed Kreios for a moment, thinking Hemaeros’ counter-fire must have decapitated it, but it was still moving, trying to sidestep him, and by the time Kreios had adjusted to the fact that this thing still needed killing it had swung its heavy bolter around. Kreios’ jets flashed into life and blazed but the Chaos Space Marine anticipated that, yanking the bolter upward and unleashing a blaze of heavy shells straight into the sergeant’s upward path.

They hit nothing. Kreios had not engaged his suspensors, but had put a boot against the Usurper carriage and mag-locked it so the jets couldn’t lift him. The misdirection bought him back the split second he had lost, and he fired, point-blank, the first shell deforming the heavy bolter’s case and the second breaking its ammo feed, the third driving in between the thing’s pauldron and plastron and detonating in its shoulder. Kreios could see puffs of steaming breath in the space where a head should have been. It was still alive, and if that bolter could still fire then a single one of its heavy shells could finish him if this abomination managed to bring it to bear.

Coenus came up and over the Usurper carriage, sea-lance in one hand, the other free to grab for handholds. He saw the headless thing facing off against his sergeant, could look directly down into the ugly round mouth panting and gnashing between its pauldrons. His lance-cast was perfect, sending the steel shaft straight down the thing’s gullet, following through and driving it downward with his whole armoured weight until the point was grating against the inside of the armoured groin and the Chaos Space Marine was driven to its knees. Coenus let go of the weapon, spun in the air and caromed off the back of the next Usurper as Kreios stamp-kicked the wounded enemy, pinning the bolter against its chest. The mutant resisted, then let the kick shove it backward and turned with it, crashing backwards against the gun-carriage’s tracks with its weapon free again. Kreios shouted a warning and blasted off, Coenus following as the heavy bolter sucked up the last stub of its ammunition belt and fired. A shell clipped Coenus’ thigh and another one fractured his armoured boot; the last three went square into the back of the Usurper he had just been standing on.

The first one punched the rear plate inward and then blew it open. That was enough to wreck the engine with the channelled blast and the white-hot debris it carried in with it. The second ploughed through the top of the engine compartment and detonated on the far side of it, blowing through into the cab, the blast pulping the nearest crew and slamming the rest against the compartment walls. The third struck the shell that was hanging in the loading sling just above the cannon’s breech.

The explosion burst the Usurper’s armoured carriage apart at the seams, the upward-pointing gun barrel falling like an ancient tree to the axe, the hatches blasted clear of their mountings and spinning away into the night. Coenus, already hanging by his suspensors, was bowled through the air over Kreios’ head as Kreios himself twisted in the air, grabbed the lance-shaft jutting up out of the mutant’s mouth, and swung his weight around it, cutting the power to his suspensors and letting his full mass grind the lance-head around inside the Chaos Space Marine’s torso as though he were stirring a cauldron. The misshapen body underneath him spasmed, the clawed gauntlets dropping the smoking bolter and grabbing vainly for the lance-shaft. The wet yellow teeth clacked against the steel and the mouth began to cough thick gobbets of red gore and foul yellow foam. With one final convulsion and a geyser of blood and pulped innards, the mutant fell still. Kreios set himself down by the burning wreck of the Usurper and yanked the lance clear.

‘Gunner’s dead,’ he declared into the vox.

‘Good,’ came Hemaeros’ grim reply, ‘because there are plenty more to go.’

Kreios weighed the odds and dangers. The darkness around the avenue was crawling with mortal Blood Pact troops moving to box them in. How much time did they have? Could they afford to hunt for more Dark Tusks and let the guns go on speaking?

He had only a split second for a decision, and he made it. The Tusks were a threat to their mission and for whatever reason they were vulnerable now, up and out of cover, neither moving nor firing.

There was not a moment lost between decision and action. Kreios launched at the right-hand Tusk as Coenus bulleted away to the left. Behind them, Kandax’s melta touched off another Usurper’s magazine and a wash of orange light lit up their targets, the slouching, soiled forms standing oddly poised, as though they were watching, listening to something that only they could perceive.

Shrapnel from the destroyed gun behind them whipped past, ricocheting off the Iron Snakes’ armour and hurtling ahead of them. When it struck the Dark Tusks it seemed to jolt them out of some reverie. Kreios’ target looked around in time to take a bolt pistol shell in the forehead instead of the temple, cracking its helm and knocking it reeling with an ugly squeal of fury; Coenus’ prey had half-turned and the tempered adamantium lance-head kissed off the curve of its pauldron instead of driving through the neck seal of its helmet. Seamlessly readjusting his attack, Coenus directed the lance-point past the back of the traitor’s neck and in under its other pauldron, catching it firmly in under the armoured curve, driving the Tusk off-balance with the charge as he brought his bolt pistol around. The Tusk was quicker than it looked, getting one hand up in time to grasp the lance-shaft, but then a bolt-shell cracked its helm and another round burst it and the head inside. Coenus shoved the ceramite shell full of dead meat off the gun cupola and onto the road, reorienting himself on the next Tusk kneeling ahead of him, its bolter still smoking from the shots that had killed Xenagoras.

Kreios’ opponent had all but shrugged off the hit and brought up a fat-snouted sidearm in a futile attempt to fire before the sergeant closed with it. The bolt-shell had burst against some kind of steel-hard bone growth that had threaded its way out through the pitted and discoloured ceramite of its helm; Kreios didn’t waste time trying to damage that obscenity further but slashed his chainsword around in the last moment before he collided. The Tusk let out another porcine squeal as the chain-teeth bit through the armour gap inside its elbow but even as it was squealing it was being smashed over backwards as Kreios hit it with his pauldron, its pistol squirting a stream of yellow-green plasma up and away into the night, crashing down as Kreios rocketed past and was gone. The sergeant tumble-turned as smoothly as if he were swimming naked in an Ithakan lagoon instead of hurtling over a battlefield in a quarter-tonne of armour and machinery, then killed his suspensors and dropped hard onto the pavement, pistol already aimed and hammering the Tusk’s head with shot after shot. The gnarled, pallid lump of its face splintered under the hits but it was still standing, switching the gun to its unwounded arm and taking aim.

Hemaeros passed behind it on an easy striking trajectory and took off the top half of its head with a chainsword stroke. Its body swayed in place for a second until Kreios put the final round of his magazine through a cracked panel in its belly armour. The detonating bolt sent a single brief shudder through the traitor’s body and then the unlovely shape crumpled down on itself in death.

‘One left,’ Kreios voxed. ‘Hem, it’s ours. The rest of you, kill the guns and then get to Crethon’s ’hawk until I tell you differently.’

Ahead of him, the next Dark Tusk jerked into motion, unlimbering a thick-handled, single-bladed axe from the side of its pack. It looked around at them, then stepped off the far side of the carriage and vanished.

‘You’ll rest easy soon, Xen,’ Kreios whispered as he burned his jets and shot into the air in pursuit of it. Behind him, another Usurper carriage exploded into flame.

Damocles
Ghereppan southern warzone

‘Concentrate fire,’ Pindor said. ‘Confirm kills as they close. Engage the ones that are left, cripple as many as you can before you go down. Give her the chance to get free and keep going north. Any of us that survive are her rearguard.’

A wirewolf leapt straight up out of the pipework, landed on a broad conduit that ran parallel with their path and skittered along it, leaving scratches in the tarnished metal that glowed violet like its own flames. With a squeal of metal and malice another one squeezed through a gap between two girders and came scrabbling down towards them. Two more burst into view blocking the path north of them, galloping towards them in haloes of dirty light. Another behind them. Another bounded up to roost on a broken buttress almost directly overhead and then launched itself downward, stretching lazily through the air, the jagged spade-blades of its hands drooling purple fire as they reached out. Three salvoes of bolt-shells tore at it but it barely did more than rock in the air, wailing like a siren, accelerating now as it fell towards the Saint. The light around them brightened as the other wolves rushed forward in unison. Their cries had all blended into one. The air felt solid with the blasphemous noise.

She stepped out from between Pindor and Khiron and walked into the open, her eyes down and her hands by her sides. Kassine tried to follow her but the force of the wirewolf screams crushed her down onto all fours. Mazho was shuddering on one knee, teeth bared, nose bleeding. The wirewolves’ claws were moments away.

Her face was expressionless when she looked up. She stared into the helm-mask of the leading wirewolf and its glow bathed her face. She pursed her lips in disapproval, lifted a hand and flicked her fingers as though batting away an annoying question.

The purple-white glare went out. A mass of lifeless, strung-together metal fragments crashed to the ground at the Saint’s feet. An empty wire cage trailing a tangle of chains skidded down the girder, in pieces by the time it hit the ground. All around them in the sudden dark there was the cacophony of collapsing metal as a dozen inert bundles of scrap tumbled down and lay still.

For a moment, Pindor thought what he was seeing was an after-image, or a sensor distortion, until he realised that the nerve-scratching ghosts the wirewolves had left in his senses had vanished. His eyes and ears were clear again. What he was seeing and hearing was real. There was no source for it, no explanation for it, but they were surrounded by a gentle green light.

In it, although he could not make out the words, he could hear her speaking.

The Enemy
Hill country, Ghereppan promontory

Far out in the foothills the lekt felt it all, saw it all. The extinction of her wirewolves was a sick emptiness, like a limb going numb, like the chilly, wrenching vertigo of fresh grief. She bit back a whimper, the livid hand-shaped brand over her mouth twitching, and tried to concentrate. Even then, she could not take her mind’s eye from the bright green star that had been born to the north of her. She could hear/feel a voice in that light, something speaking new truths into being around her. It was revolting. She lived to only hear one voice, the Voice That Drowns Out All Others, and she threw every scrap of will she had into reaching out for it, desperate to hear it, shelter in it, to become the mouth through which that voice would speak to the terrible green light.

But the light spoke to her, instead.

‘Let your master hear this,’ it said. It was a woman’s voice, soft and calm but with the quiet strength of a rock against which the ocean wave breaks. ‘Let him be warned, if he can still be warned. Let him understand that his voice will no more drown out the voice of the Throne than his Gaur’s charnel-fires can dim its light. Let him hear this, and know there is one greater than himself who watches over this galaxy and this Imperium. Let him speak no longer, but instead let him hear. Let him learn.’

The hillside scrub was salty-smelling grey-black landweed but the lekt realised her nostrils were full of a crisp, sweet floral scent. Her eyes widened. A drop of blood ran from her nose and she snuffled more blood back in, then coughed it out. The vision in one eye swam and went dark. Cramps ripped her belly and spasms gripped her spine. She blurted out a mouthful of blood. Her vision blazed with pitiless green. She tried to scream but the scream never came. She died there, under her groundsheet, smoke drifting out from her nostrils, her ears and her bloodied mouth.

Kalliopi
Avenue Vertegna, Ghereppan

The gun crew had panicked. Blood Pact discipline was not enough to keep them labouring in their little metal cell while they listened to their comrades’ deaths outside. The Usurper was revving its engine and jolting its treads to life, turning its nose to the stepped outer edge of the boulevard where it had a chance to push its way clear.

That stopped when Kandax landed behind it and slugged its track with a melta shot. The carriage lurched on through thirty more degrees before it ground to a halt. The gun tried to traverse again for a moment before the crew gave up. There was a rattle as the side hatch facing away from the boulevard was released. Kandax fired his jets and vanished overhead, leaving the kill to Hapexion. The Apothecary waited until the hatch had swung halfway out, smashed it back into the Pact gunner leaning out through it, then wrenched it open again hard enough to tear the handgrip loose. The broken trooper tumbled out of the hatch and Hapexion trod the man’s head into the road as he leaned in and scoured out the Usurper’s cabin with a long burst from his hand flamer. That was when Kandax let out a yell into the vox.

Perdix’s wrecked jump pack would not disengage cleanly and he had come staggering and hobbling down the aisle between the guns trying to wrestle free of it, his cracked and injured armour struggling to bear him up and keep him on balance. Finally, he twisted his arm around, jammed his pistol into the gap between his hip and the pack, murmured an apology to his wargear and shot out the last connection. The dead pack crashed to the road behind him and he was able to run forward to the fight. Skopelion was speeding ahead of him, high and fast, exchanging bolt-fire with shadowy figures clambering across the hulls of the furthest guns. Kandax was closer, brawling with a bloated Traitor Marine who’d unlimbered a heavy cleaver with a blade of glistening white bone. Neither dared let the other back away; space between them meant space for a murderous cut or a point-blank meltagun shot, so they stayed almost nose to nose, stamping and smashing at one another with elbows, knees and the butts of their weapons.

Perdix kept running. Skopelion was under fire that wasn’t being answered and that was a greater threat. His helm display showed him the markers for Kreios, Coenus and Hemaeros out to the left side of the column, which meant it fell to him to take the shooter to the right. He could see it better now, an ugly Tusk with gnarled bone hooks erupting from its hands and a rotting cavity where its mouth grille should have been. He raised his pistol as the enemy took a more careful bead on Skopelion…

‘Blood and skulls!’ The amplified roar filled his hearing. ‘BLOOD AND SKULLS!’

The Arnogaur
Avenue Vertegna, Ghereppan

‘Blood and skulls!’ The pain engine was alive in the base of Nautakah’s skull and the hot sharp fingers it had worked into his brain-meat squeezed his thoughts in time to the words. ‘BLOOD AND SKULLS!’

It felt wonderful.

The Snake ahead of him wasn’t prepared for his speed. The bolt-shot went wild and his chainsword was still only halfway to position when Nautakah closed. His chainaxe sheared the Snake’s sword hand off at the wrist; the return stroke drove into the armour gap at his hip and wedged the axe-head there, spraying and screeching. Nautakah let go of the axe-haft with his right hand and grabbed it with his left, kicking the Snake in the chest, knocking him backwards and widening the cracks in his plastron, batting the bolt pistol away as the Snake aimed it at his face and tearing through his faceplate with the backstroke. Nautakah bore the loyalist over, hacking at him blur-fast as the metal spurs in his head goaded him into a bloody delirium until he caught himself by force of will, dragged himself back down, crushed the cybernetic raving in his hindbrain and forced himself to stop.

‘Another skull for you,’ he heard himself say as he looked up to the sound of a grunting, bubbling war-shout. The Tusk from the gun-carriage above him had its axe buried deep in the shoulder of the Iron Snake that had attacked it, down between the pauldron and helmet, straight through the shoulder armour, a difficult stroke that Nautakah found a moment to admire. The wound had driven the Snake down onto one knee and now the axe came back up for the kill-stroke that would split the skull. Even the throb of the pain machine seemed to pause, as if it too were spellbound waiting to see the blade fall.

Pain flashed in his shoulder instead, and Nautakah was driven forward face first against the gun-carrier’s side. Something had pierced the armour join on the right side of his pack, all the way through the technorganic carapace underneath the warplate and into his actual flesh. He could feel the blood welling around it and crunching solid to seal the wound, then welling again as the point twisted. The lance-point. One of the bastard Snakes had speared him.

Snarling against the pain, he shrugged his shoulder back and trapped the lance between his reactor pack and the rim of his pauldron, then slowly, deliberately, turned his body, hearing the squeak as the steel lance-shaft bent, finally looking at his attacker. The Space Marine hung in the air, jets on full, trying to use his weight and thrust to hold Nautakah pinned.

‘Ithaka!’ the Snake shouted at him.

‘Skalathrax,’ Nautakah answered. A swing of his axe smashed the lance free and he roared and launched himself into the attack.

The Enemy
Avenue Vertegna, Ghereppan

The Tusk at the very vanguard of the column coaxed the sludged muscles of its legs into motion and walked to the end of the Usurper it stood on, waggling the spent magazine loose from its bolter like a rotting tooth from a gum. The cannon had finally fallen silent; perhaps the crew had run out of shells, or perhaps they had broken and fled the vehicle. The Tusk had not been paying enough attention to know.

A new magazine slid home with a slick damp noise and it raised the weapon again, chewing on the sensations of the battle, trying to decide which kill would taste the best. Its brother was about to take the head of the enemy that knelt before it. The hot-blooded butcher who fancied himself their leader was doing joyous work in the middle of the fighting, fresh loyalist blood flying from the spinning teeth of his axe. The grey-armoured gunner standing on the next carriage over had his combi-bolter raised to his shoulder and was methodically landing grenades in the middle of the fighting, plasmas and incendiaries whose blasts glittered golden off his skeletal augmetic arms.

The Tusk’s helm squeaked and ground as it turned its head outward. More enemy out there. Its ears and nose were mostly scabbed shut, the openings in its armour clotted and stopped, but still it heard and smelt the two Iron Snakes as they darted from cover to cover, closing the distance, coming to kill the support gunners then crash into the melee from the rear. Simple, obvious, effective. A move the Tusk had been ready for as soon as the assault had begun. A move even the mortals had spotted, because the Tusk could hear the Blood Pact troopers around the column’s sides shouting for their god and their Gaur as they saw the enemy moving. To the Tusk’s hearing, the snap of their lasweapons and the deeper voices of the crew-served and stalk-tank guns sounded comically sporadic and slow. But they did not matter, and the Chaos Space Marine forgot them almost at once. It hawked a clumsy word from its clogged throat and the grey-armoured Space Marine whose name it didn’t remember nodded and reloaded. The bone hooks on its fused fingers clacked against the casing of its bolter as it got ready and took aim. It had the space around it mapped in its mind, knew exactly when it would need to stand, turn, aim.

The loyalist striplings never understood its kind. They always seemed to think its abilities were equal to their own, at best. These would not be the first to think it an easy kill. It would have a bolt already in the air as the loyalists were about to come into view. By the time that one struck home, two more would be following it. In the time it would take those shots to knock the first adversary to the earth, he and his companion would have taken the second to pieces.

Then the light came. A brilliant emerald light that filled the night like an atomic detonation, washing over his eye and his mind, sluicing along the avenue as if the dawn had come early, in a new place and a new colour, just for him.

Kalliopi
Avenue Vertegna, Ghereppan

Hapexion had been too slow and the swing of the Tusk’s cleaver too astonishingly fast. He had leapt and swung to get his chainsword in front of the executioner’s stroke that would end Kandax, but without looking around the Tusk had readdressed and knocked him sideways with a savage backhanded arc into the side of the Apothecary’s helm, with enough force to knock him bodily through the air with his senses reeling. He had had enough wit left to jack his suspensors up to full power as he toppled off the top of the gun carriage, rolling out into mid-air instead of crashing to the ground. He thrashed himself around, glanding stimulants to blow away the fog in his head, desperate to get to them again, horribly conscious of Kandax’s life-signs faltering in his display. The wound should not have had that effect – that blade had done something to him. It was about to do something worse. Hapexion knew with cold despair that he would not get there in time.

But the Tusk had no thoughts left for the wounded Snake in front of it. The Usurper’s hull seemed to be swaying beneath its feet even though the cannon was no longer firing. Its nerves were thrumming, its senses alive in a way it had almost forgotten how to understand. Its atrophied eyes opened and began to weep. Rich green light filled the air in its peripheral vision but vanished under its focused gaze, and where it fell on the Tusk’s ancient armour the remnants of the body inside it felt at once warmed and cooled, as though the armour had ceased to exist and sunlight and air were passing over its old human skin. It opened cold and cracked lips but could not imagine what it had been about to say. Time seemed to slow.

Hapexion’s chainsword hewed through the haft of its cleaver, sending bone splinters flying. The blade had barely begun to fall as Hapexion smashed the Tusk bodily out from underneath it, sending it staggering off the edge of the Usurper’s hull. Hapexion had killed his jets and suspensors a split second after impact and now locked himself to the hull again, dropping his chainsword, grabbing the meltagun from Kandax’s hands.

The Tusk was lying on its back on the roadway, propped into a half-sitting posture by its reactor pack. One hand had gone to the grip of the bolter hooked into a loop of chain that circled its hips, but it was staring off to the south, making no move to grip the weapon and raise it. Whatever strange reverie had stalled its killing strike at Kandax still had a hold of it. Hapexion didn’t bother to speculate about that. He dropped onto the thing with both feet, ceramite boots pinning its arms, and drilled a white-hot tunnel through the centre of the Tusk’s skull.

Chainblades were screaming barely metres away and by reflex Hapexion shot himself up and away, spinning in the air to reorient himself with the rest of the fighting. That made him the first of Kalliopi Squad to see what it was that had stolen the enemy’s senses so. Out of the darkness to the south, a green comet was coming.

The Beati
Avenue Vertegna, Ghereppan

One moment, she was a distant presence somewhere out there in the war-torn night, and then she was simply there, among them. She came to the guns behind a bow-wave of green light that flared out around her like an aurora and made a shining river in her wake.

The Blood Pact hunkered down around the flanks of the artillery column howled and wept at the sight. They brandished weapons, tried to cry out prayers that caught in their throats, lashed at her with las and shot.

Nine shadows grew in the light behind her, loomed over her, took on shapes and assembled around her, the snakes on their shoulders basking in the emerald glow. Xander looked around, the islumbine bough framing his head seeming to take a light of its own from her presence.

‘Teach them fear,’ he said.

Damocles
Avenue Vertegna, Ghereppan

And they went out to clear her way. Natus and Scyllon swung out to the left of the avenue towards a rabble of stalk-tanks and Pact weapon crews wrestling with their tripod guns. Khiron and Kules went to the right, treading dazed and blinded infantry underfoot as they tracked the flashes of snipers’ long-las. Xander, Pindor and Andromak were the Beati’s vanguard; Dyognes and Aekon were at her side as she walked onward, head bowed, hands clasped in front of her, eyes downcast.

Scyllon was homing in on his targets by the palls of heated air they were sending up, marking the spots where the crew-served guns had dug in as neatly as if they had hoisted banners. Natus, a step ahead of him, was already sighting with his augmetic vision. His first shot killed the autocannon’s spotter, plastering his remains over the rest of the crew, knocking them sprawling and cutting off their shooting.

Scyllon overtook him, running forward to finish off the team when the lascannon beam from the next defilade struck him at an accidentally perfect angle, neatly severing his knee just below the thigh plate. Scyllon snapped off another shot as he fell forward but the angle was already lost and his shell blew a crater out of the defilade instead. Hissing in pain and frustration, Scyllon pushed himself up on one arm and sighted on the autocannon nest. Natus leapt over him, dropped almost to all fours and fired at the same time the lascannon team took their second shot. The bolt-shell blew the cannon apart and sent the crew reeling, their bodies scorched and shrapnel-spattered, but not before the las-beams scorched a layer of armour off the back of Natus’ helm and burned deep into the gap between his backplate and reactor pack.

Alarms yelped in Natus’ ears as his systems cut the pack connections dead before they could overload. He burst up from his position, running on his armour’s internal capacitors, the strain on them already showing. His helmet display grew muddy and the tactical overlay flickered as the armour’s anima struggled for nourishment; the heavy ceramite casing became a noticeable weight on his limbs instead of an ally to carry him.

Without breaking stride, Natus cracked the seal on his helmet and let it fall behind him before its eyes could go dark and take his own vision with them. Natus had fought blind before; once was enough. The optics implanted in his skull could draw energy from his body if they needed to. Sights, smells and sounds washed over him, startlingly vivid, no longer filtered into tidy layers by his auto-senses. His bolter flashed once, twice, and the exploding autocannon magazine lit up the foxhole ahead of him. He let the weight of his armour pull him to his knees, concentrating on the fleeing troopers ahead of him. ‘Hit and damaged,’ he said aloud. Damocles would have already seen the change in his armour-sign in their own visor displays, heard the sudden influx of sound as his helmet came off and his communicators switched to the secondary vox in the collar ring of his armour. His voice gave no sign of the fury that some distant part of his mind was giving rein as he saw a glaring yellow-white plasma burst go off over the middle of the avenue. His brothers were still fighting and he was powerless, literally, to join them.

The Tusk that had waited for Damocles atop the Usurper was still gripped by that strange, dreamy slowness that the light of the Saint had brought it, and it fell to the grey-and-gold traitor to spring the attack on his own. But it sprang it perfectly, bolt-shells cracking Andromak’s pauldron and faceplate and knocking Pindor off-balance with a detonation between his pauldron and plastron. Xander was able to desperately swing his arm out and backhand the traitor’s grenade straight upward and the plasma ball detonated over their heads instead of in their midst, illuminating the new enemy standing haughtily in the middle of the avenue, waiting for them.

It was tall, even for a Space Marine, its power armour gleaming black, worked in hard angles instead of the usual curves, studded with silver rivets with a single silver skull diadem on its brow. Wings flared from the temples of its helm, sweeping back to meet behind its head, joined with a bright silver ring. Every inch of it, ebony and argent, was polished to a beautiful sheen – not a single mark of battle showed on it. As the two Snakes ignited their jets, it swung its monstrous two-handed chainglaive up in a duellist’s stance and silver-white alchemic fire jetted from nozzles mounted on the sides of the bar. Xander’s bolt-shell detonated in that burning, shimmering cloud and then the traitor was closing the distance in easy, rangy steps, chainblade a blur.

Pindor had time for one shot before it closed. It struck the deftly tilted bar of the glaive and skated away to explode behind the warrior’s head. Then he was back-pedalling, bolter discarded, grabbing for his combat blade as another blast of shimmering silver flame engulfed his head and shoulders, filling his vision, the fire clinging and crawling into his armour seams. He planted a foot behind him, ready to lunge forward and low, denying the glaive the swing and pressure it would need to find purchase on the curved ceramite of his warplate, but the damage the Tusk had done slowed his movements just enough. His blade was barely out of the scabbard when the jet-and-silver warrior brought its blade around in a descending sweep powered by the pivot of its whole body, catching the side of Pindor’s helmet and shearing his head from his shoulders.

Xander grabbed for his own blade, trying to circle to his right, in close where the combi-bolter couldn’t target him and the glaive couldn’t get a swing. He had to use the space, try and get the chainblade hitting the tank hull to foul its swings, but if Andromak were too badly injured and the Tusk shook off whatever had–

With a boom like a macrocannon the two gun-carriages flipped up and away, tumbling through impossible arcs in the air, flashing with green glow that turned to bright orange flame bursting out through every vent and hatch, the two Chaos Space Marines standing atop them swatted away into the night.

The Saint stood in the empty space where the war machines had been, and spread her arms wide. In her right hand, the green light brightened in the shape of a long and slender sword. She raised her left, and over her wrist the light coalesced into a two-headed aquila, wings spread, each cruel beak opened in a war cry. At her chest, at the back of her head, her calf, collarbone, all around her body, it became a white blaze: nine white stars marking the Nine Sacred Wounds.

Pindor’s killer spun to face her, her flames reflected in the jet mirror of its armour. It stepped towards her, readdressed its stance and weapon with a dancer’s grace, and drove forward in a fleche that would cleave the Beati effortlessly in two.

Then it was down on its knees in the grime of the road, the glaive’s adamantium teeth carving nothing but air, the ethereal flame lancing out and then evaporating in the cool green glare. As easily as if the Chaos Space Marine were a statue and a stair, she walked up and over it, placing a foot on its forehead between the swept-back wings and continuing walking, up into the air. The glaive motor fell silent and the chain still. The winged helmet sprang free and clattered away, the head beneath hairless and featureless, smooth ashen-grey skin where eyes, ears, nostrils, mouth would have been. The heretic began to crawl away down the avenue, its elegant movements of a moment ago broken down to ugly, spasmodic jerks.

The Saint ignored it. Her eyes were on the arnogaur.

The Arnogaur
Avenue Vertegna, Ghereppan

Nautakah felt himself pulled, as if all the world were tilting towards this new, abhorrent green dawn. Every combat instinct he had was blaring at him to rush into that light, pound it with shells, carve it until it bled, but the green light shone through him, rushed through him like cool water, and the machine in his skull shrieked and sizzled as the water met its baleful heat. He revved his chainaxe, sending flakes of Coenus’ flash-clotted blood scattering, but he could not seem to swing it.

Nautakah’s feet left the ground. The Saint was still staring into his eyes. There was no battle-rage in her face, not even revulsion or contempt, just pitiless determination. The fiery aquila was gone from her wrist. Now the wings were her own, pinions of white light and feathers of green flame.

The Saint was wrapped in a cold, whipping wind. The force of her began to push everything implacably back: dust and debris, traitor and Iron Snake corpses alike, then the Usurper guns themselves, bulldozed back and away. The road underneath them cracked and crumbled, compressing downward.

She rose, Nautakah held helplessly before her, a reptile in the claws of an eagle. She was looking beyond him now, out and over the city. He twisted and writhed in the grip of her light.

He found his voice.

‘Blood for the Blood God,’ he said. She ignored him. He thought they were still climbing. He wasn’t sure how high they were. He said it again.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ The squirming metallic heat from the base of his skull was answered by a dull red throb of pain around his neck.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’ he screamed at her. ‘Skulls for His throne!’ A crimson stain was bleeding out into the green, washing out from around his throat. She was looking him in the face again. He thrashed and clawed the air, trying to fight his way to her. He looked at her eyes, her skull, her throat and the Nails shrilled in his nerves, begging for the axe-stroke.

‘Blood! Blood! Blood! For my lord Khorne!’

When he said the name, the brazen collar beneath his jaw sent a great jolt of panting blood-heat through his body. For a moment the gore-rancid breath of his patron, the keening of the engine in his head and his own steely will were all in perfect harmony. He raised his chainaxe over his head, two-handed, as the light around him frayed into tatters.

She brought her hands together in the sign of the aquila. The air between her and Nautakah cracked and burst with green lightning that catapulted the arnogaur away. They were over a kilometre into the sky now. Nautakah vanished into the dark and began the long fall down towards the city spires below.

Saint Sabbat hung in the air, fiery wings spread around her, green flames making a garland for her head and a robe for her body. She spread her arms and closed her eyes.

‘We have been given a hard road,’ she told the darkened city beneath her. ‘A road to walk through a galaxy that does not welcome or forgive us, behind one who asks no less of us than He Himself has given up. A road that will lead many of us to bleak and bloody places with nothing but the knowledge of duty done to console us at the end. It is not my work to absolve you of that duty. But He-on-Terra has willed that a light shine in the dark. A sign to lift His people’s hearts. Strengthen our stride.

‘And I am here.’

The Miracle of Ghereppan had begun.

TO BE CONTINUED IN VOLUME II…
URDESH: THE MAGISTER AND THE MARTYR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Matthew Farrer is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Crossfire, Legacy and Blind. He has also penned many tales set in the Sabbat Worlds, including the novella ‘The Inheritor King’ in the Sabbat Crusade anthology, ‘The Headstone and the Hammerstone Kings’ in Sabbat Worlds and ‘Nineteen-Three Coreward, Resolved’ in Sabbat War. For the Horus Heresy he has written the short stories ‘After Desh’ea’ and ‘Vorax’. He lives and works in Australia.

An extract from Avenging Son.

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

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

But that was yet to come.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Messinius stared at him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He closed his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He opened a vox-channel to Gate Command.

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

‘On whose order?’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

<threat detected.>

‘They’re coming again,’ he said.

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

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

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

‘Stand ready.’

‘My lord?’ The voice became more insistent.

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

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

‘Fire,’ he said coldly.

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

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

Vitrian Messinius awoke groggily.

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

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

‘Shall I?’ Selwin gestured to the hypnomat.

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

‘The wall again?’ Selwin asked.

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

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

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

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

Selwin bowed. ‘Already done, my lord.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

First published in Great Britain in 2021.
This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Lorenzo Mastroianni.

Urdesh: The Serpent and the Saint © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2021. Urdesh: The Serpent and the Saint, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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For Dan and Nik. I couldn’t ask for better role models, mentors and friends.

Thanks also to Donna Hanson, Steve Murphy, Joyce Chng, Russell Kirkpatrick, Aaron Dembski-Bowden, Nichola Loftus, Rob Porteous, and Ray Lewis.

Very special thanks to Robert Frazer for his generosity.

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