Table of Contents

Cover

Table of Contents

Votum Infernus – Nick Kyme

Remorseless – Josh Reynolds

Ship of the Damned – C Z Dunn

Animus Malorum – L J Goulding

The Dark Hollows of Memory – David Annandale

From the Flames – Graeme Lyon

About the Authors

Legal

VOTUM INFERNUS

Nick Kyme

They ran and the howling followed them.

Gerst led. He was the youngest, the fittest and arguably the most scared. Sergeant Zlodni had been the only thing keeping them together, finding adhesion through authority and fear of reprisal. When Zlodni died, with most of his throat ripped out and his torso spilling up wine-red intestine, the troopers of 64th squad learned to fear something else more.

For it wasn’t only screams that followed the men of Vostroya, the knife-sharp howling also gave chase. Half-glimpsed through mist and the accumulated dust and smoke of a recently fought battle, the Guardsmen’s pursuers took on almost spectral forms, little more than flecks of shadow.

Around dawn, just before the infantry divisions of the proud Vostroyan First-Born 85th were due to launch their attack, a thick fog had swept over the ruins of Kaeros. Aggressive preliminary bombardment had reduced the city and its outlying regions to rubble. That rubble now made for uncertain footing as the Guardsmen fled through it. Fog clung to the hollowed-out shells of buildings and pooled in craters like exhaled breath reluctant to depart. The ever-thickening soup was everywhere, foul with the stink of petrochemicals, coppery blood and the strangely soporific odour of the enemy.

The fog made orientation difficult and gave their fear even sharper teeth, but it was that soporific scent that really addled the mind. It altered perception, made dead men come back to life and live ones crave oblivion. Out in the fog, across the ruins of a battlefield now lost, the hazards were manifold.

Some though were absurdly mundane...

A trooper squealed in pain as he twisted his ankle. Churned earth, made that way by a procession of booted feet, had snagged his foot.

Hersk, who was third from the front, thought it sounded like Andrev. Then Andrev screamed, short and clipped. Then there was nothing. Hersk glanced back in time to see a shadow, but no more than that. He blinked and the shadow was gone, swallowed up by the fog, the auditory memory of Andrev’s death the only evidence Hersk had not imagined it.

Six became five.

Soon it was four.

Gerst stumbled, too eager and heedless to escape the danger, real and illusory, that champed at their heels. A second later and the others heard a grunt. A few seconds after that and they found poor Gerst slumped over, impaled by a spike of shrapnel jutting from the ground like a gnarled finger. His warm blood steamed as it ran down the rusty metal.

No one stopped to check Gerst’s vitals. There was no time. If he wasn’t dead already then whatever was chasing them would finish him. It would not likely be quick.

Hersk spared a few seconds to look around but it was just fog and the looming, indistinct silhouettes of whatever it concealed. For a brief moment as he passed the corpse-like figure of his comrade, Hersk was envious of Gerst. Then he hated himself for thinking that, and ran a little harder, a little surer.

‘Slow down,’ he called ahead to Rzanev, who’d taken over as frontrunner in Gerst’s absence.

‘You khekking insane, comrade?’

‘No, zadnik, but you’ll be dead if you don’t slow down. Where are you even going, Rzanev?’ Hersk was breathless; they had ran almost three kilometres at full pace in heavy kit already. Polished armour was fine for parade grounds and useful in combat, but only dragged at the resolve and the body during a panicked flight. Olek was lagging. As the oldest of the group, he might have a veteran’s experience but he had also lost some of his former youthful vigour.

‘Away from here, comrade.’

Through the mists, which were rolling heavily across the rugged battlefield now, Hersk saw Rzanev’s head darting back and forth like a bird’s, scouring the fog for attackers. He found none, for the enemy they faced did not allow themselves to be seen until it was too late. If you saw them at all, it would be your last sight before you went to the Throne or were cast into the soul-shriving hell of the warp. Or so the campfire tales had said. It had been amusing back then, scary stories to put the living shaznek up Gerst and have a few laughs at his expense.

Now Gerst was dead. No one was laughing now.

Raiders had come to Kaeros. They had plundered and murdered, and the planet’s defences had been unable to throw off their yoke. So Vostroya had answered. They had come with regiments of men in their gleaming breastplates and furred helmets, banners snapping in the wind. The First-Born would show Kaeros how they had earned their prestigious reputation and they would give the alien aggressors a pertinent lesson in Imperial military prowess. But their histrionic marching displays, their pomp and grandeur, had amounted to nothing.

Except death. A count of almost three hundred men from the vanguard, if what Hersk believed in his gut was true, that he and his comrades were the last men alive in Kaeros. Or at least the last free men alive. Rumour was that the raiders took slaves. Hersk had already decided death would be preferable and had resolved to keep enough power in his laspistol for a single, suicidal headshot.

‘To where, Rzanev? To where?’ hissed Blezni as loudly as he dared. Hersk could hear the vox-operator’s laboured breathing just behind him. He didn’t have the heart to tell him that it didn’t matter if he shouted at the top of his lungs, that their tormentors knew where they were and had been toying with them. Their only hope for survival was to find a place to hunker down and fight back until help arrived.

Blezni’s last received communication before all had gone to shaznek was that reinforcements from Colonel Ketsbya’s main battle group were inbound. That meant armour, lots of armour. They just needed to stay alive long enough for it to arrive.

‘Rzanev!’ Hersk snapped when the trooper just kept going, head still darting back and forth, while behind them, all around them, the howling persisted. It reminded Hersk of cruel laughter, only sharper and eerily resonant. Altogether alien.

‘Up there,’ said Rzanev, with more hope than conviction. ‘There’s a ridge. I think I remember it.’

‘From what?’ asked Hersk, still skeptical, though he noticed Blezni and Olek had upped their pace. Hope will do that to a desperate man, even if it is false.

‘A road. The road into Kaeros. The tanks will be on it.’

‘Colonel Ketsbya’s armour,’ Blezni whispered naively.

The ridge loomed, thronged by cloying smoke until the wind blew it clear and gutted Rzanev’s hopes just like the aliens had gutted Zlodni.

It wasn’t a ridge. It was a mound. Rzanev had mistaken flesh for earth. They were Vostroyan, the bodies of those who had died in the ambush arranged like some mad artist’s mortal sculpture. At the summit of the mound, stacked four metres high, were all the officers the aliens had slain, their limbs intertwined then bound together with spools of razorwire. It had been hard to see at first, like a black smudge in the air had somehow besmirched the view. Only when Rzanev got up close and disturbed the corpse-flies did they truly see. Commissar Rudinov was the crowning piece, a spike stuck through his pate. His gaping mouth and lolling tongue made him look surprised. Hersk wagered the commissar had not been expecting it.

With Rudinov’s death there had been no call to arms when the running began, no bolt shell to the temple and the Imperium’s shouted catechisms of hate towards the alien. Instead, there was blood and razor-edged blades, a promise of torture and death muttered on alien lips.

A terrible sickening feeling built in the pit of Hersk’s stomach when he realised where they were.

Olek threw up.

Rzanev stared disbelieving at those same skeletal ruins they had bombed not three hours earlier.

Blezni started weeping, and cried out despite his terror of what would happen if he did.

They were back in the centre of Kaeros. They had been running in circles.

Somewhere in the fog, the cruel laughter redoubled.

Slethial drank in their fear. As the mon-keigh were enervated, he was nourished but far from sated. Their pain was an altogether sweeter and more fulfilling repast, for a tortured soul has more value as an offering to She Who Thirsts than one at peace.

To Slethial, his prey’s fear was a soaking rag he planned to wrench dry of every panicked drop. But, it seemed, the feast was not to be his to enjoy alone.

‘I tire of this game, brother,’ hissed Yethanda, as she draped her sinuous body over his.

Slethial seized her wrist, the concealed draucai blade millimetres from his neck.

‘I’ve told you before, sister, you won’t usurp me as succubus of this cult with such childish play.’

Yethanda winced as Slethial twisted, forcing her to release the blade before it was turned back on its wielder.

‘Whoreson!’ she spat, freeing herself from her brother’s grip and retreating back apace, a hurt expression on her porcelain-white face.

Slethial shrugged, ‘She was your mother too, dear sister,’ and paused to admire her.

Yethanda was beautiful, even by the high standards of Commorragh, but it was an ophidian allure she possessed, with a viper’s bite in kind. She pouted, ‘One scratch of that poison–’

‘And I would doubtless be writhing in agony at your feet,’ Slethial concluded for her.

Yethanda gave a coquettish smile that only made her seem more dangerous and unpredictable.

Her body was lithe, her armour of red carapace and crimson leather both questionable in terms of the protection it offered and very revealing. The blood spatter dappling her body was more encompassing than her bodice and greaves. She wore a half mask and crown, her lustrous raven-black hair cascading from it and down across her bare back.

Yethanda was a Lacerai. As well as the small curved draucai blade she had tried to poison her brother with, she also carried a pair of razorflails. They were deactivated at present and looped around her waist, the segmented teeth currently in the form of a whip. One twist of Yethanda’s wrist and she could hold a serrated sword, such were the chimeric properties of the weapon.

More pragmatic than his sister, Slethial wore heavier armour. Even his face was shielded behind a mask, a white and featureless opal that Yethanda often taunted was there to hide his aberrant appearance. Polished to a mirror sheen, its surface was incapable of tarnishing and reflected the faces of Slethial’s victims as he tortured and killed them. To the succubus, this small measure of additional sadism was also an appealing reason to wear the mask.

Like his sister, Slethial wore the same red and crimson to reflect the colours of their cult, the Serpent Incarnadine. But he was a Hydrae and consummately skilled with the crystalline-bladed gauntlets from which he derived the name of his fighting discipline. Unlike Yethanda’s blades, Slethial’s were already whetted by their latest prey.

‘It is just a little knife, dear brother,’ she purred demurely, slipping the draucai blade back into its sheath on her ankle, bending down lasciviously to do so.

A muffled shout through the fog from the swine they had been chasing interrupted their sibling flirting, forcing them back to the task at hand.

‘Four slaves would fetch a price,’ Slethial observed. ‘Adrachis might pay handsomely for a few more live subjects...’

At the mention of the haemonculus’s name, Yethanda jabbed out her tongue in a mock retching expression.

‘He is a diseased worm. I’ll not parlay with him,’ she said, springing away acrobatically after their prey who had started running again. ‘I want four more heads on my trophy rack,’ she called, the mists rapidly enveloping her until all that remained was her voice. ‘If you’re nice to me, I might give you one, brother.’

‘Bitch...’ Slethial smiled, deciding he would not kill his sister until after their sport, then ran into the mist after Yethanda.

‘We are dead men,’ murmured Blezni, a dangerous, almost catatonic, look taking over him before Hersk jerked him back to life.

‘If we stay here, yes.’ He turned to address the others. ‘If we continue to rush around blindly.’

Instinctively, they had formed a circle facing the outer void of spectral fog. Each man cradled a lasgun, except Hersk who only had his pistol and held it like it was the last link to this existence.

‘Then what do you suggest?’ snapped Rzanev. ‘We can’t stay here.’

The grisly flesh totem of their former officers glowered down on them with dull, glassy eyes. No, none of them wanted to linger here any longer.

Blezni rocked back and forth on his heels. His eyes seemed far away, and his lips moved silently in the words of a prayer.

Oh, Saint Nadalya the Grey Lady, oh Throne of Earth, deliver our souls from peril this day so we might yet become your shield again.

Over and over, Blezni mouthed the words.

‘He’s gone, comrade,’ observed Olek to Hersk. ‘What have you got left?’

Hersk was thinking, realising abruptly they were looking to him for leadership. Without knowing how it had happened, he had just become responsible for these men. His fear redoubled, but he marshalled it and sought the horrible nullifying fog for an answer.

He saw it reaching up out of the endless white: the crenellations of a tower.

‘There, a redoubt,’ he said, trying not to cling too tightly to hope. They turned and saw it as if for the first time, the summit of an old tower not in keeping with the rest of the city’s aesthetic and rising from the base of a rugged hill. Crags and boulders jutted from the base but at least they could see it, and it was miraculously intact.

‘I thought we’d bombed everything in this shaznek town,’ said Olek, about to wipe his feverish brow with his jacket sleeve before he realised there was no hand at the end of it and blood was spouting from the cleanly severed stump like a geyser.

‘Saint Nadalya! Throne and Earth!’ Rzanev backed away from the bloodied Olek, who tried to staunch the bleeding with his other hand then realised that it had been removed too. On the sallow breeze, Hersk thought he made out a playful giggle, an oddly coy and uniquely disturbing sound in the circumstances.

Blezni’s praying became audible. Rzanev joined him and the chorus grew louder still.

Hersk was torn between helping Olek and getting the others to move.

Then a flash of silver caught the eye – it looked like the weak sun overhead had caught on Olek’s armour at first – and poor Olek’s body separated into two. Hersk’s decision was made for him.

He roared.

‘Run!’

Crying, urinating all over his fatigues, Blezni bolted for the hill. So did Rzanev.

They prayed, all three, shouting their voices to the murky heavens above and the unseen earth below, shouting desperately to anyone or anything that would listen.

Oh, Saint Nadalya the Grey Lady, oh Throne of Earth, deliver our souls from peril this day so we might yet become your shield again.

And as if in answer, a figure emerged from the mists around the tower, clad in heavy black armour.

Yethanda was laughing so hard, her body pulsating with the pain and fear of the slave she had bifurcated, that she almost missed the apparition in the fog. She blinked to be sure it wasn’t some hallucination from the copious amounts of narcotics she had taken prior to the battle, then licked her lips in anticipation.

‘You’re a big one...’ she purred, sprinting off into the fog when she felt Slethial close on her from behind. ‘He’s mine, dear brother. All mine.’

‘Who is that? It looks like a…’ said Rzanev.

‘Does it matter, comrade? He’s a friend and we are surrounded by foes.’

They had reached the edge of the hill. It was still a long way to the summit and the ground was far from certain. No one wanted to end up like Gerst, not so close from salvation, so they took it slow despite their fear of what was closing in behind them.

The tower loomed, tall and forbidding. Though it was closer now, it seemed equally indistinct as it did when Hersk first saw it, and the armoured figure was no clearer either.

Frowning, trying to discern a better idea of their would-be saviour’s nature, Hersk failed to realise how far he had dropped behind the others. About to increase his efforts, in spite of the risk, he felt a whisper breeze caress his left side and was promptly seized by paralysing agony.

Hersk went down in the dirt, ripping open his gloves and cutting up his hands as he tried to brace his fall. His head struck the sharp edge of a stone, denting and dislodging his helmet. For a few moments, he blacked out. He couldn’t be sure exactly how long for. When he came to again, he tried to cry out, looking up through blood-rimmed vision at Rzanev and Blezni slowly disappearing into the fog as the savage gash on his forehead bled freely into his eyes. Suddenly, he found a booted heel on his neck, silencing him.

‘Shhh, not yet little slave...’ The voice was female and perversely soothing as she pressed the bladed heel of her boot deeper into Hersk’s exposed throat. Managing to half-turn his head, Hersk saw the alien standing over him. She was painfully beautiful, cut from a cruel, terrifying cloth, and statuesque, pale and hard as stone.

She sank down onto her haunches, and the pressure on Hersk’s neck eased as she lifted her boot at the time same. Leaning in close so he could smell her scent, she whispered demurely, ‘Now you can scream...’

Hersk’s gaze followed the line of her outstretched finger. It had a baroque-looking claw fashioned from some strange, dark metal on the end.

A few strides further up the hill, Blezni and Rzanev were dead. Locked in each other’s arms, their final embrace was made all the more disturbing by the fact that their arms were inside one another’s chests and came out through the extension of the ribcage at the back. It was horrific, and at that moment Hersk knew he had met the sculptor of the flesh-totem.

Despite the paralysing poison running through his body, Hersk tried to scream.

Yethanda shuddered with undisguised pleasure at the suffering of the slave. She laughed uproariously as he tried futilely to wail, spit and curse even though one side of his body was limp with the poison administered by her blade.

‘Don’t worry, little bird,’ she cooed like a mother to its child, ‘I’ll return soon, and by then the medicine I gave you will be wearing off. You’ll feel everything that I’m going to give you,’ she promised and rose languidly to her full height.

‘Now,’ Yethanda muttered to herself, ‘where is your large, armoured friend?’

Slethial realised he was not alone. At first he thought it might be another mon-keigh slave that had somehow managed to elude him and his sister, that had found some cranny in which to hide and was only just now daring to resurface. But he was wrong about that, and certain of the fact as soon as the figure began to appear through the mist.

He had been chasing his sister when the deviation was forced upon him. Yethanda was swift, and Slethial knew she would kill all four slaves if he wasn’t around to deter her. A favour, however small, from a haemonculus was useful. Slethial had need of Adrachis’s patronage. He had lost an eye in a gladiatorial duel with another wych, the previous succubus of the Serpent Incarnadine as it happened. With Adrachis’s esoteric arts, it could be regrown. It was another reason why Slethial wore the mask, to hide his flawed beauty, as much from himself as his fellow dark eldar. He wanted the eye back. Slethial’s vanity demanded it.

He had been close, just behind Yethanda, when he caught the vaguest sense of someone watching. Slethial had good instincts. They had kept him alive longer than he probably deserved, and they were warning him again as he stalked the figure in the fog.

It was taller than the others and clad in thicker armour, but every time Slethial tried to outflank the strangely materialised apparition, he was in front of it again and no closer to his prey.

Yethanda was lost to him again, absorbed into the fog that had grown thicker and more pervasive in the last few minutes, or was that Slethial’s imagination? Like a hidden cancer, doubt crept into Slethial’s mind and he pushed it down, usurping his sense of unease with arrogant self-assurance.

‘Your blood on my blades, mon-keigh,’ he hissed to the dark figure in the mist, only to find in his momentary lapse in concentration that it had gone.

Slethial scowled, at once incredulous, annoyed and afraid. ‘What is happening?’

Hersk clawed his way up the ridge. Still numb from the paralysing toxin in his body, he scrambled on his belly with only one arm to propel him. It didn’t matter that the sharp rocks beneath him tore his tunic and scraped his armour, or that blood painted his face in crimson from the gash on his forehead – all that mattered was the tower and the imagined salvation it offered. But as Hersk reached for it, desperate just like a drowning man is desperate for a rope, he noticed that his would-be saviour was no longer there. Without the time or luxury to wonder why, Hersk kept climbing, his eyes on the distant summit.

Yethanda wondered briefly what had happened to her brother, but decided she cared not. This slave would be hers, this kill. She had killed bigger, and exulted in the terrified shock on her victim’s faces when they realised she, a lithe little female, had murdered them. Many outside of her own wych cult had made the mistake of underestimating her. She revelled in proving the fatal error in that assumption.

The hill was steep and littered with jutting rocks that reminded Yethanda of pulled teeth. In fact, now she considered it, the entire hillside was almost like a giant maw gaping in agony. The symbolism pleased her, and she was smiling as she stormed up the rugged earthy flank of the hill, hands behind her back reaching for the hilt of her razorflails.

She was used to a reaction when she allowed a foe to see her bearing down on them. Some fled, a good honest response to a wild-haired harridan such as she. Others stood their ground, weapons drawn, or even attacked. Yethanda could dodge bullets, shells or energy beams easily enough – she had been doing it all of her life. But this one did not move, still as a statue of onyx.

Yethanda decided to scream, a shrieking war cry that could chill the blood of men. With a twist, she released the razorflails and they slid serpent-like, almost sentiently, off her body. She ate up the last few metres to her prey with long, powerful strides. The low breeze caught in the mane of her hair, which flared behind her like black fire. Now, with the prey so tantalisingly close to being within striking distance of her favoured blades, Yethanda saw and processed further details of her enemy.

The armour was not only black, it was also ebon. Trimmed and fashioned with bone, in fact. So too its helmet, which resembled a dour skull, and in the pits of those cold and lifeless sockets... fire. Yethanda would often look into the eyes of her victims as she killed them, she enjoyed the pleasure of witnessing the terror there and the stark realisation that this was their last moment of existence. She revelled in the sense of power it gave her.

But the black and bone warrior betrayed none of this. The eyes only burned, and incredulous as it was to her, Yethanda discovered in those final few seconds before combat that she was the one that felt fear. No, not just fear... sheer, unreasoning dread.

Like a shade drawn from the shadow realm of Aelindrach, Yethanda beheld an apparition before her. The edges of its armour shimmered and smoked as if they too were aflame and bled slowly into the mist, becoming a part of it. Flesh and blood enemies, she knew how to fight, but an incorporeal wraith... Yethanda had always feared and despised the mandrakes of Commorragh for precisely that reason and here she found herself confronting something that had less in kind with the slaves she had already butchered and more in kith with the shadowy creatures of Aelindrach. Something happened then, during that crashing cascade of realisation and emotion, that had never happened to Yethanda before. She faltered.

The razorflails whipped out, driven by momentum, two lashing tongues of hell-steel forged in the hidden workshops of the Bone Middens, but failed to land a blow.

Yethanda, half staggering by now as she was undone by her own failed acrobatics, gaped in disbelief as the razorflails simply passed through it. Her eyes widened as the black and bone warrior seemed to disappear and reappear, as if it wore an archon’s flickerfield, and was abruptly within reach. Despite the evidence of her eyes to the contrary, Yethanda refuted that she had been outmanoeuvred. The feeling did not last. It was replaced by another. Pain. It began as a warm sensation in her torso, and grew needle-sharp in seconds as she realised she had fought her last duel. And though she hated herself for it, cursing inwardly as her precious soul was released unto the warp and to She Who Thirsts, she cried out, as weak as the wretches she had once so gleefully culled.

Slethial was rooted to the ground when he heard his sister scream his name. Yethanda had done so before, but in very different circumstances to this. It often presaged pain too, but again not like this. Confronted with the spectral figure in the mist, and the aching knowledge of his sister’s fate expressed in that scream, Slethial felt suddenly alone.

For a few moments he was caught by indecision. He had lost the one he had been stalking anyway, and he loved his sister, however uniquely.

Even though he knew it was foolish, he cried out to her in return, ‘Yethanda!’

And then he ran towards the still echoing sound of his own name. Through the fog, he perceived a hill. Its flanks were studded with nubs of rock that looked like teeth. Here was the mouth of pain that had swallowed his sister. The poetry of that greatly disturbed Slethial.

He slowed, survival instincts flaring again, as he saw Yethanda’s slayer. One of the mon-keigh was attempting to crawl towards it on his stomach, but Slethial was not interested in the slave now. He wanted the one in black and bone; he wanted revenge for Yethanda. His sister lay in two halves on the side of the hill, her split-apart corpse steaming in the cold air. Slethial forced himself not to look away, for to do so would mean losing sight of his enemy and he would not do that again. His jaw was set as he began to stalk anew, and he experienced a rare emotion he had not felt in many years. Grief.

Suddenly the desire for vengeance became palpable, an ache in his gut that could only be cured with blood sacrifice.

Slethial ran back down and across the ridge, skipping and leaping over crags and gullies like a shadow-dancer. His gaze never left the black-bone figure, and although he fought not to tremble, Slethial managed to move up and around the ridge to arrive on his enemy’s blind-side. The blades of his hydra gauntlets extended...

Every increasingly painful inch, Hersk prayed. He muttered the benediction to the Grey Lady, Saint Nadalya, and to the Emperor, in the hope that they would heed him still. They had granted him the favour of the tower and its guardian, but he needed just a little more to see him to them safely. So the words kept coming, the caked blood across his lips cracking with every syllable he uttered, the salt tang of tears in his mouth and the agony of his wounds returning. It hurt more as the paralysis faded, just as the alien warrior woman had promised, which meant he could also move easier... and faster.

Hersk had closed his eyes as he crawled past Blezni and Rzanev, still locked in their bloody embrace, comrades even in death, but now he opened them. The summit of the hill was only a few more metres away and Hersk rose shakily to his feet as desperation fuelled his limbs. Staggering and slow at first, he then began to build momentum. The black armoured figure, one of the Emperor’s Angels, loomed above, beckoning him. Then Hersk saw the figure of the alien behind it and tried to cry out a warning.

Slethial did not hesitate. As he reached the black-bone figure, he lashed out with his gauntlet, driving a deep wound in the warrior’s flank that cut through its armour like a razor cutting through flesh. It was deeply satisfying as the figure slumped to one knee but that was merely a sting – a debilitating move to slow the enemy down so Slethial could face it mask to eye as he delivered the killing blow. Not even pausing to relish the prowess of his art, Slethial came around the front of the figure and rammed both his hydra gauntlets into its chest. Eight deadly blades punched through the warrior’s back, every one piercing a major organ.

‘My sister sends her regards,’ he spat, only for his expression to change dramatically a few seconds later.

Rather than falling down in agony, the warrior actually got back on its feet. For the first time, Slethial saw its eyes and watched, fascinated and terrified, as they burned like pyres.

It was not supposed to be like this. His enemy was meant to look upon his own agonised visage and despair, yet the apparition reached out for Slethial’s mask instead and tore it off.

Slethial felt powerless, as if he had already fled his body and was watching events play out without the will or agency to influence them. He managed to tear a gauntlet free, noting the absence of blood on the blades, and raise his hand. Fingers clenched into a claw, Slethial gripped the edge of the black-bone warrior’s faceplate just as he felt his own neck seized by that same enemy’s armoured glove. Defiantly, he tore the faceplate away and what he saw there with his one remaining eye turned his blood to ice. What little colour was left in the succubus’s face drained away. It took his soul with it as Slethial was literally scared to death and knew at last the true meaning of fear.

Hersk watched the black armoured warrior drop the dead alien on the ground. He was almost there and, despite the mist, could see his saviour clearly for the first time. It was no Space Marine, not like Hersk had ever seen. The figure was not fully corporeal, the tower just visible through it as if its armour were made from dark gossamer and not ceramite and adamantium at all. It stood at ease, replacing its faceplate, and Hersk was abruptly glad it had for he had no wish to see what visage lay beneath it. The fire in its eyes was pitiless. Whatever mercy it had performed in saving him, Hersk realised it was unable to express it. Perhaps it was not mercy at all. Perhaps something else drove the actions of this revenant?

Finding his voice hard to come by, Hersk stopped and cleared his throat. He had survived, and was about to give thanks to his fearsome saviour when the sound of a slow clap interrupted him.

Hersk’s gaze was drawn upwards where, as the mists began to part, he saw the edge of an ornate balcony and a figure enthroned upon it. His lamellar armour was a deep and lustrous green, a scalloped cape rested languidly on the arms of the baroque throne upon which he was seated. He wore a crown above an alien visage and it was he that was clapping.

Archon Kuellek.

Some of Hersk’s scrubbed memories began to return. There were others on the balcony, more of the dark eldar, courtiers and warriors, artisans and slaves. It was a cornucopia of the foul alien breed that had enslaved Hersk and his fellow Vostroyans.

He remembered the nights of torture and fear, of coming out into the arena for the pleasure of these animals. This had been the final act, Hersk realised as the amphitheatre surrounding him resolved through the fading mist. He also belatedly realised that the archon of this province, a sub-realm they referred to as Night Spur, was not speaking to him. He referred instead to his slave master, the one who had orchestrated this vile display.

‘An illusion then...’ Hersk muttered, seeing the extent of the battlefield revealed. It was vast. The aliens had fashioned everything, every detail, a perfect simulacrum representing the place from which Hersk and the others had been taken. It was a game. He and the others had merely been part of the entertainment.

‘And you an illusion also,’ he said to the black armoured warrior, who had yet to move or fade.

Archon Kuellek was not often given to praising his inferiors but this was an unparalleled feat that Night Spur had just witnessed. A pity about the Serpent Incarnadine’s wyches but it would serve as a salutary lesson for the cult that wielded power in Night Spur. Kuellek even dared wager that High Commorragh had seldom seen a show of its like, although he would never utter such a bold statement aloud for fear that Lord Vect might hear of it and condemn Kuellek’s sub-realm to banishment and extinction.

‘Impressive. I thought only the lesser slaves had been taken in the last raid.’ Kuellek gestured to the black bone warrior. ‘But this one is worthy of more sport. Where did it come from?’

‘My lord,’ Kuellek’s slave master bowed obsequiously. ‘I confess...’ he stumbled. ‘...I do not know. I have never seen this slave before.’

Hersk saw the archon turn savagely. His slave master’s answer had evidently displeased him. Abruptly, the archon rose to his feet and unleashed a crackling beam of dark light from a ring on his finger. The slave master withered under its touch, turning to ash. Then the archon was shouting down into the arena. Concealed cannon emplacements slid open and their lance-nosed armaments stabbed forwards, whilst at the same time the archon’s warriors rushed to the edge of the balcony, weapons drawn.

But it was too late for them, Hersk realised, because the black-bone warrior was no longer by his side. It was standing on the balcony. Nor was it alone. Throughout the amphitheatre, more black-bone warriors appeared. First there was a squad, then two squads, then three, until the arena was overrun. The shooting began thereafter and did not end until every one of the dark eldar present was dead, including Archon Kuellek.

Silence descended like a veil and the black-bone warriors departed with the fleeing of all sound.

Hersk was left alone. He trudged up the hill, knowing it was not true earth but some version of it the dark eldar had created. He entered the tower, though it was only a ruin and not the bastion he had first believed it to be. The stone was authentic, some enterprising slave master having reclaimed it to use in the archon’s games. A fatal error, for in the base of the tower, encased in a reliquary and surrounded by stone, was an armoured corpse. Such was the age of it, only a skeleton remained, but its armour had endured. It looked familiar. Hersk imagined the ebon trim, the black, and knew it was the same warrior who had stood sentinel upon the hill. This was his tomb, taken from its final rest. And as the truth dawned, Hersk saw the tower and the reliquary it housed began to fade.

He thought about the pistol, and the one shot remaining in it. But the aliens would not let him die like that, not with dignity. They would bring him back and return him to the arena. Still scarcely able to believe what he had witnessed, his mind still piecing together reality from fiction, Hersk turned to regard the slaughtered alien masses. They were burned, reduced to a clutch of smoking and ruined corpses as their evil hearts had been put to the flame.

‘I don’t want to live...’ Hersk murmured, holding the laspistol in his hands that he knew would not end his suffering. ‘I want to rest. Only in death...’ he whispered, and faced the tomb.

The black and bone breastplate of the warrior blocked his view. When Hersk looked up, its blazing eyes were already upon him. The damned warrior, for it and its kindred were certainly thus, placed its hand upon the Guardsman’s head.

‘Only in death…’ it uttered in a sepulchral voice that seemed to emanate from inside Hersk’s head and not the warrior’s skeletal vox-grille.

Understanding, Hersk closed his eyes and as he muttered the benediction of Saint Nadalya one final time, he surrendered to the fire.

REMORSELESS

Josh Reynolds

The external alarms of Hive Coramonde shrilled in mechanical panic as the defensive grid went down and the sky over the oldest and greatest of the hives on the shrine world of Wayfarer was lit up with fire. The artillery batteries of the Iron Warriors had done their work. Imperial forces scrambled to meet the invaders as vessels rose, carrying terrified hordes of refugees to the dubious safety of the transport vessels above the once verdant world. They would not escape. Rings of iron encircled the planet, even as they encircled the hive, and all would become grist for the daemon-machines of Medrengard.

Skaranx blinked slumber from his eyes and stirred on his bedroll as the subcutaneous implant at the base of his neck prodded him into wakefulness. He saw smoke rising overhead, curling into the ash-choked sky and sighed. It was time, at last, to earn his keep.

‘Bring me my helm,’ Skaranx murmured, motioning towards the item in question with one thick, scar-covered hand. The helmet, black and shaped like a skull, sat grinning in a pot of red embers. The latter were stirred occasionally by one of the hooded and cowled mutant slaves who saw to the needs of the men in the crooked siege-trenches sprawling across the muddy wastes before the hive. They were bred to serve, and reacted to his soft voice the way a dog twitched at the huntsman’s call. A second mutant moved forward with awkward alacrity, bobbing and shuffling as he – or she, Skaranx couldn’t be sure – lifted a heavy set of tongs and snatched the helmet out of its heated nest. In the cold air, the skull steamed. The slave shuffled towards him, the tongs extended as far as possible from his – its – body.

The skull helm was a thing of curved plates with thick, spike points lining them like rivets. A loose gorget, on which the eight-pointed star of Chaos was crudely carved, dangled from a gargoyle jaw. It flexed in the air, and seemed to twist and squirm in the clutches of the tongs as if fighting to be free.

Skaranx sat up, heavy body moving smoothly despite the ache that sometimes infiltrated his joints. He flexed his arms and legs, one after the other, and then rose to his booted feet. His thick frame was clad in grimy fatigues that had been washed in the mud of a thousand worlds and he wore a battered armaplas chestplate, stripped from a fallen enemy, that had seen better years. His arms were bare, and heavy with muscle, scars and the branding sigils of his Master. The equipment belt that hugged his middle was another trophy of war, and his fingers brushed across the defaced Imperial eagle in a ritual gesture that was so ingrained as to be instinctive.

‘Well, look at that, the gland-hound is up and about – must mean the war’s almost over,’ one of the other men in the trench said. Like his fellows, he was clad in the mottled uniform of the 23rd Brigannion Ironsides – dark fatigues and ill-fitting body armour, with a bug-eyed gas mask dangling from his sore-encrusted neck, raw fingers playing idly with a bayonet. Raucous laughter from the others greeted this witticism. Skaranx took no offence. He could hear the panic below the mockery. The war was almost over, and that meant that they would have to fight. They all knew, to a man, just who and what they’d be fighting against. Of them all, only Skaranx was looking forward to it.

He ignored the cat-calls and jokes and reached forward with his bare hands to gently pry his helmet from the tongs. The skin of his fingers sizzled and blackened, but he felt nothing. The others in the trench fell silent, their laughter pattering away into nervous silence. Pain had been flayed from him, like all weakness. He lifted the helmet up and set it over his head. He felt the red-hot metal bite into the scar tissue that served as his face and smelled the stink of his flesh cooking. Men edged away from him as that stink filled the immediate area.

He snapped burnt fingers in a gesture of impatience. ‘My philtres, my blade, quickly now,’ he said. He did not roar or bellow. That too was weakness. And Skaranx was not weak. He knew neither fear, nor rage nor frustration. Or so he liked to think. The Benefactor had promised him that he was free of such hooks as the gods used to goad men. That was what made him useful to the masters of the black mills of Medrengard and his Master both. He could not be goaded, frightened or lured. He could only obey, as the slaves hurried to do now.

One unrolled a leather strap, revealing a number of rusty, unpleasant looking syringes, while another hefted Skaranx’s wide-bladed chainsword in two flipper-like paws and waddled forward to present it to him, hilt-first. He took the blade, the muscles in his forearm bulging with the effort of lifting it, and swung it experimentally. It had belonged to an angel, once, before Skaranx had taken it for his own. He had carved the symbols and deplorable words into it himself, to baptise it into its new life. Like him, it had been made into something better.

‘Kneel,’ he said.

The slave did, hesitantly. It whimpered, rubbing its malformed paws together. Skaranx thumbed the activator switch and the chainsword gave a discordant howl as it awoke. The vibration of the teeth caused his arm to tremble. He paused, admiring the dull, deadly weight of it. Then, with a lazy swipe, he split the kneeling slave from crown to groin. He tore the blade free of the slumping red wreckage and gave a grunt of satisfaction. The discordant howl had smoothed out to a rumbling growl at the taste of blood. It was always grumpy, first thing, and needed to be fed.

‘My philtres,’ he said, extending his free hand. The other slave ensnared his wrist with a scaly pseudopod and Skaranx made a fist. The slave jabbed each syringe in turn into his bulging veins. Skaranx shuddered as the combat drugs cycled through him, mingling with the philtres and chemicals that already inundated his system. His vision sharpened and he could hear the thudding, bird-nervous heartbeats of the men who shared the forward trench with him. He felt strong, all of his aches and pains swept aside by the cold fire that now roared through him.

The Benefactor had cut him to the meat and beyond that, to the marrow, with his humming butcher’s tools. He had emptied him of weakness and filled him with strength, and made him a fit hound for the kennels of Medrengard. Skaranx was a hunter of heroes, an angel-slayer and a retriever. And he was good at it. The Benefactor had made sure of that.

‘My pistol, my vials,’ he said. The remaining slaves scampered forward. One fastened his pistol belt about his waist. The holster was made from a man’s scalp, and the grips of the laspistol were made from the same man’s jawbone and teeth. Another mutant held up a bandolier of brass and armaplas cylinders – progenoid vials – and Skaranx looped it crossways over his chest. Between the vials hung grenades, scavenged from a thousand armouries – frag, krak and smoke grenades, the tools of his trade.

Drums thudded from deeper within the trench-works. ‘Time to go over the top,’ one of the troopers muttered, clutching his lasgun tightly. Smoke boiled out of the cracked hive, eclipsing the sun, and covering the field of shattered ruins that separated the trenches from the outer shell of the hive in a grim pall. Somewhere in the smoke and thunder, angels walked, waiting to be harvested. Skaranx grabbed the lip of the trench and hauled himself up. Shouts echoed behind him as the company commanders shrieked out orders. Whips hissed, men groaned and kit rattled as the soldiers of the 23rd Brigannion Ironsides rose up from their trenches and scrambled in his wake, fixing bayonets as they fell into a semi-disciplined dogtrot and advanced into the burning ruins that lay before the hive. The barrage resumed, hammering the space ahead of him, clearing it of opposition so that the gap in the enemy’s defences could be exploited by the Ironsides and their masters.

Skaranx caught glimpses of the latter, moving purposefully through distant trench-lines. The light of the hive’s destruction caught on gleaming power armour, wrought in the forges of a thousand worlds. They were in no hurry, and he knew from previous campaigns that they would choke the defenders with the corpses of the Ironsides and the other mortal regiments until it came time for the final, surgical blow. That was how the Master and his brethren fought – cold, calculating, their collective will like a thing of iron. A flicker of pride stirred in him. The Benefactor had raised him up at the behest of the Master, he and his brethren. Of a hundred chosen through test and trial, only a bare handful had proven worthy to be made over into something better, something with purpose – something without remorse or fear. They had been made better than mortals, by the will of the gods.

The antique comm-unit in his helmet had cooled enough to begin receiving, and he heard a crackle. A holographic image sprang to life before his eyes.

‘My hound,’ the Master rumbled. His voice was as deep and as wide as the gulf which separated him from Skaranx. ‘Are you ready?’ His dark eyes, like two smudges of ash in the cavernous sockets of his pale, battle-scarred face, bored into Skaranx’s own, even in hologram form.

In person, he was almost twice the size of Skaranx, and, as ever, clad in gunmetal-grey battleplate that upclose stank of forges, gun-oil and spoiled blood. His greaves and pauldrons were painted with hazard chevrons and cracked, yellowed skulls hung from his kilt of iron hooks. He wore a cloak made from tightly woven scalps, threaded through with armaplas plates, and the gorget that rose from his featureless chest-plate was decorated with the fangs of some great beast, drawn from the warp and smashed down by the massive, ancient powerfist that, even now, occupied one hand. It clenched and relaxed constantly, the clawed fingers flexing with apparent impatience. The other hand rested heavily on the pommel of a broad-bladed gladius sheathed on his hip. Heavy coils of pressure tubing and bundles of reinforced cabling snaked down through the crevices in his armour, which wheezed and grinded with each and every movement. Skaranx could still make it out through the linkup.

‘Yes, Master,’ Skaranx said.

‘Good. Hunt them for me, hound. Bring them to ground and collect my bounty.’ The Master raised his powerclaw and extended a talon as if to poke Skaranx gently between the eyes. The helmet vibrated slightly. ‘My brother captains, Grievoux and Malvount, claim their gland-hounds shall outstrip mine in the culling of the enemy. I would show them otherwise. Do me proud, my pet, and I shall reward you. I shall let bile play with your flesh some more, eh? Win me this contest and I shall make you a masterful hound indeed.’ The bone-deep rumble of the Master’s voice thundered through him and the ancient targeting relays in the helmet fuzzed and blurred to life, fastening on distant targets that even his chemically sharpened vision could not yet discern amidst the crackling flames and billowing smoke.

The helmet had been fashioned by warpsmiths in the employ of the Master, and fed Skaranx the electronic ‘scent’ of his prey. The Master spoke a word and strength flooded through him as endorphin caches spilled their contents into his bloodstream. He swiped the chainsword through the smoke and it roared with an exultation that he could not feel.

‘I shall take your prize, Master,’ he said, as the hologram faded.

‘Up and at ‘em, boys, and after the gland-hound, or the masters will have our skins for pillows,’ someone said behind him. A whip snapped and he heard those who’d shared his stretch of trench hurrying after him. He didn’t bother to slow down. The angels were coming and he needed to be ready to meet them.

The ground shook beneath his feet as the artillery continued to unleash a deadly rain. The Master and his brethren cared little if their own soldiers were caught in it, so long as the enemy were driven from their entrenched positions. The once-graceful curve of the hive’s outer dome, composed of millions of solar intake plates, rose up before him, cascading upwards, filling his vision. The ruins that surrounded the dome had once been factories, moisture plants, reservoirs and strongpoints. The latter had been erected early in the siege but the defenders had been forced to fall back as the trenches of the invaders crept closer day by day, and the artillery batteries had swelled in size. Skaranx had not been in at the first thrust. He was too valuable. But now he was to be the tip of this particular spear, as he had been many times in the past. He would seek out an angel, and strip him of the geneseed that his Master desired, as they attempted to stymie the assault. The tools hanging from his combat harness had been crafted specifically for that task by the Benefactor.

It was not an easy task, even for one such as Skaranx, who had been modified for that very purpose. It took time and preparation, and the sacrifice of lives. Once, there had been many like him – they had acted in packs, dragging down their prey. But war had made many into some, and some into few. Now there were only a handful of them left. Not enough to risk all in one go, but killing angels was a tricky business and it required a sacrifice. Those like Skaranx who remained were forced to make do with less reliable materials than their pack-mates had done. They joined the lesser dregs, huddling in their trenches and spending as many lives as required to accomplish the goal.

The tramp of boots filled the air as the Ironsides were fed into the maw of Coramonde. Smoke and dust mingled, filling the air like a choking cloud. Heat from the growing flames washed over him, and he occasionally heard the howls of men who’d gone too close to superheated metal or slagged rock and been burnt. The carcasses of shattered structures still stood, despite the barrage that pounded at them, and they sucked in the heat and vomited out flame. He moved beneath shattered arches and across fallen columns. The rulers of Coramonde, as befitting the masters of a shrine world, had not been content with functionality in their facilities. Every building had been a nave, with wide aisles and curved vaulting. Some of the latter remained, even now. The stone walls were soot-stained and heat-blistered, but they still stood. Scenes of holy meaning had been carved on them, and Skaranx considered defacing them, before pushing the desire aside. That was not his purpose.

Glass crunched beneath his boots and the ground was covered with debris as well as the cooked remnants of year-old corpses. The ruins had been a no-man’s-land for some time, and the enemy had made them as inhospitable as possible. The latter point was driven home when a number of explosions rocked the area. Booby traps, Skaranx knew. There would be more the closer they got to the outer shell of the hive. He climbed up the slope of a roof that had collapsed long ago, creating a weird hillock within the four crumbling walls of the building it had once topped. He paused at the apex.

The hive stretched from horizon to horizon before him, and he could see it rising up through the gutted windows and above the cracked curves of the walls. He could see the rupture in the dome, where the artillery barrage had cracked it like an egg, and he could hear the thud-thud-thud of the enemy’s anti-infantry emplacements attempting to drive back the first wave of besiegers – the 35th Brigannion, he thought, or the 12th, or more likely one of the many blood-cults now running loose across Wayfarer who’d been rounded up at the Master’s order, to be set loose at opportune times. The frothing lunatics made excellent shock troops, and would bury the defenders in their own corpses, if nothing else. The war for Wayfarer was done. All that was left to do was claim the prize owed them.

There were two of his remaining brothers somewhere out there, sent by the Master’s rivals. There was a bounty on Medrengard for viable geneseed. Commanders who brought in a viable progenoid gland were rewarded handsomely. Even one was cause for celebration amongst the reclusive Apothecaries of the Legion. Whole worlds had been immolated to secure but a handful of geneseed, uncorrupted by the vagaries of the Eye of Terror. Wars were fought in the dark alleys and industrial cul-de-sacs of Medrengard to claim the merest opportunity to create more Space Marines. It was a prize like no other, and more valuable than the lives of a thousand men.

Said men murmured nervously, somewhere behind him. The Ironsides had been tested in the crucible of battle many times, both against the Imperium and against the rivals of their masters. They had held their ground against howling, armoured Imperial fanatics and stoic, bulge-bellied fly-worshippers alike. But the defenders of Coramonde had tested them to the breaking point. Skaranx could feel it in the air. The sour smell of fear clung to them even now, with victory so close.

There was something different about Coramonde. Something different to all of the other sieges and sackings they’d participated in. That was what they said when they thought no one was listening. They had seen burning angels stalking the trench-line, moving like phantoms out in the smoke and dust. Some swore that it was a sign of the gods’ displeasure, while others said that the enemy had already slipped out, and were waiting to launch a counterassault while the attentions of the masters were on the hive city. Still others, more quietly than the rest, whispered that it was the sins of the masters come back to haunt them. Invariably, they had been looking at Skaranx when they murmured the latter, crouched in the wet trenches. He knew what they meant, though he ignored them. As long as they did as they were told, what did he care whether they were afraid or not?

He looked up, and saw stone cherubs crouched in the angles where columns met arches. They gazed down at him in stony disapproval. He felt no remorse, no shame at his undertaking. This world was no holier than any other, the claims of its defenders to the contrary. The world and the Imperium it belonged to were things long past their allotted span, fit only to be ground under and gutted. Their gods had no power, compared to his. The Master and the Benefactor were the only fit gods for men, for they rewarded and punished as they saw fit.

The crack of lasguns pierced the gloom. The men behind him stopped and sank down in a firing line. Skaranx paused, and looked at them over one brawny shoulder. Then he dropped off the fallen section of roof and scrambled quickly out of the way. No sense getting caught in the line of fire. The sound of las-fire rippled through the air. Men screamed.

In the dust and smoke, something yellow flashed. Skaranx froze and sank down, suddenly alert. The targeting relay in his helmet beeped dolorously as sigils flashed across the internal screens. His prey had taken the bait.

Stone paving crunched beneath a swift, heavy tread. The firing line tensed as the commander of the squad bellowed instructions and imprecations with equal volume. Silence fell a moment later. Skaranx sank down into a lizard-like crouch, his belly level with the ground. The chainsword vibrated in his hand, its growl muted. He could see the shape of the angel, as it stood hidden in the roiling smoke that still spewed from the cracked dome of the hive.

Then, the angel of death spoke and men died. The bolter in the power-armoured giant’s hands roared out a greeting to the invaders. Men were sent sprawling, in pieces. Skulls disintegrated, limbs were shorn clean and torsos vanished in a red mist as the Space Marine began to stride forward unhurriedly, firing as he came. Every shot was like a roll of thunder in the confined space of the ruin. Skaranx watched the carnage, sizing up the newcomer. His armour was yellow, and on his shoulder plate was an insignia shaped like a black fist on a white field. Skaranx let loose a hiss of satisfaction. It was an Imperial Fist. The Iron Warriors favoured their geneseed, though as to why, Skaranx had never learned.

The giant’s armour was blackened in places, and stained with soot. A bandolier of grenades and extra ammunition clips hung across his chest, and he had a bolt pistol holstered on one hip. On his opposite hip hung a square, ironwood case, carved to resemble a reliquary. He wore a helmet with a targeter mounted on the side, and purity seals and parchments hung from the flat surfaces of his armour. He was kitted out for war, and fully capable of waging it alone for some time.

Skaranx scrambled further into the ruin, circling the confrontation with practiced ease, the chemical cocktail in his blood heightening his sense of spatial awareness even as it dulled the jitteriness caused by the combat drugs. As he moved, he caught glances of further targets moving through the ruins around him. It was a single squad then – ten at most, likely less – moving forward to slow the advance. Which they would do, until the Master or his brethren arrived, or some bright young Brigannion officer called in the heavy armour or an artillery strike. But that wouldn’t do, not for Skaranx’s purposes. He didn’t want the angel mangled until he got what he was after.

It was always a race, to see which death felled the prey first – Skaranx and his fellow hounds or the guns of the army. After this initial contest, he would be content to scavenge from the dead, but with the living ones, you were sure of getting a viable gland. The problem was that the living ones fought. Skaranx, at his best and doped to the eyeballs with combat drugs, couldn’t equal a single Space Marine. Not alone, at any rate, but with the deaths of his comrades, he’d had to become inventive.

The Imperial Fist moved forward, ignoring the las-bolts that struck his armour and glanced away until he reached a defensible section of rubble and dropped below it. As Skaranx slithered through the thicket of broken steel beams and tumbled stone columns, he could hear the Space Marine relaying his position to his fellows. When he’d done so, he leaned around the rubble and fired off a burst from his boltgun, plucking the leg out from under an unlucky trooper and sending the man’s body pinwheeling through the air.

The squad was falling back now, hunting cover. Half of them were already down, dead or good enough as either. Their comms-operator was shrieking for help over the vox. The Imperial Fist continued to fire. Skaranx, perched above him on the slope of the sunken roof, saw what he was up to immediately. The Space Marine had a frag grenade palmed and ready to be thrown. His shots were herding the squad towards a crater in the floor. They thought it was cover. In reality, it would simply make it easier to kill them all with one grenade. Skaranx grunted. If that trick were repeated enough times, the advance would almost certainly falter. It wouldn’t stop it, but he knew that the yellow-armoured giants weren’t trying to stop the advance. They were merely trying to bog it down while the hive’s defenders retreated to stable defensive positions or fled altogether.

Skaranx had seen similar stratagems played out on a hundred battlefields. It was the same tune, over and over again, and he had grown used to it. When he had been a man, he would have found the idea of confronting the warrior below him a frightening prospect. Larger than two men, clad in battleplate as thick as any tank hull, firing with a precision that was impossible to match, the giant truly was an angel of death. He was a thing to be feared and fled from. But the Benefactor had stripped fear from Skaranx and made him into a harvester of angels. He had hunted them across the segmentum at his Master’s command. He had killed angels who wore red and angels who wore blue.

And he would kill this one.

With a bit of help from what was left of his trench-mates, of course. That was what they were there for, after all. Skaranx reached up and plucked a grenade from his combat harness. It likely wouldn’t do much more than startle his prey but that was all he needed. He primed the grenade and readied it. Before he could toss it, however, something caught his eye. A flicker of what might have been a tongue of flame, curling through the smoke close by. He stared at it, unable to look away, and felt something stir within him. The air felt thick with heat and something he could not define or describe.

The lenses of his helmet whirred and focused, trying to isolate and enhance. The targeting relay was having fits. Was it another target – or something else? He caught sight of its outline, a heavy shape, armoured, and then – nothing. He blinked. There was nothing. Another Space Marine perhaps – coming to his fellow’s aid? Skaranx blinked.

Suddenly, it was there again, impossibly close, bone and flame and black armour and eyes like twin suns burning into his own. He jerked back, slashing at the phantom with his chainsword, the growling blade biting nothing but smoke and air. Rubble shifted beneath his feet and the grenade slipped from his hand.

It bounced down towards the Space Marine. The Imperial Fist’s enhanced senses outstripped his own and the giant whirled at the first bounce, firing up at Skaranx who flung himself backwards – all thought of the phantom banished. The grenade exploded, but the Space Marine was already moving. Skaranx slid down the incline as the Imperial Fist stepped out of cover, hurled his own grenade towards the Brigannion squad, and began to run steadily towards the other side of the nave. A spatter of las-fire brushed across the yellow-daubed power armour as a second squad entered the ruin and tried to assemble into a gunline. The Space Marine ignored it and raced towards them. What was left of the first batch of Brigannions was trying to regroup but they’d be no help to their comrades, from what Skaranx could see.

The Imperial Fist smashed into the gunline like an out-of-control grav-loader, sending men flying. A yellow gauntlet backhanded a soldier so hard that the head tore free of the body and bounced across the floor, leaving crimson puddles to mark its route. At close range the bolter wreaked even more terrible havoc, and men died in twos and threes. The Space Marine drew a combat knife and bisected the skull of the squad leader as the latter’s crackling power maul bounced off his shoulder plate. Skaranx watched for a moment, waiting, judging the distance, and then made his move.

He’d hoped to flush the Space Marine out of cover and bog him down with the Brigannions. It was a tactic that had worked several times before, but if it hadn’t been accomplished exactly the way he’d hoped; well, Skaranx had never been one to look askance at a gift from on high. He came in low. The Space Marine was fully immersed in his wet work. Skaranx took a breath and felt the drugs cycle through him. Then, with no sound at all save the shriek of the chainsword, he lunged for his prey.

Despite the Benefactor’s gifts, Skaranx was not a match for the Imperial Fist and he knew it. He was neither as strong nor as fast, and his reflexes were at best on par with those of the Space Marine, even bolstered as they were by the drugs. Nonetheless, he had killed them before, albeit with much effort and sacrifice of materials. In this case, the materials in question were the Brigannions, though he’d happily use any tool provided. Angels were mortal and anything that could be killed was not to be feared. Skaranx had studied his prey over the course of long campaigns and he had the scars to prove that he’d earned his experience the old fashioned way.

It was the shell that was the main problem. It was nearly impossible to crack unless you got close and even then you had to have the right tools. A meltagun or plasma gun would have done the job, but there was also a chance that what he sought would be ruined in the use of those. He was left with old fashioned brute force. Applied properly, it was as effective as any weapon.

He waited until the Imperial Fist extended his arm and then launched his blow. The chainsword smashed down on the crook of the Space Marine’s elbow, biting through black carapace and pressure hoses. The giant spun, bolter booming. Skaranx ducked aside, spinning an unlucky Brigannion in front of him to take the shot. As he whirled about, he cut a gouge in the Space Marine’s backpack. It vented steam. The backpack was the suit’s power-source, and Skaranx knew that harming it was as good as harming its wearer.

Blood pumped from the wound he’d made, staining the yellow gauntlet. The Space Marine didn’t seem unduly troubled, but Skaranx hadn’t expected him to be. He scuttled through the crowd of desperately fighting soldiers, keeping out of the Space Marine’s line of sight. It was an old trick, but a good one: flood the field with targets and strike while the prey was distracted. It was a tactic that the Master had used to good effect in his sieges, and Skaranx was happy to utilize it on a smaller scale.

An opening presented itself. The Imperial Fist jerked a screaming trooper from his feet and crushed his throat. Skaranx darted in. His chemically strengthened muscles propelled him quicker than the human eye could follow. His chainsword bit into the armoured power cables that clustered thickly across the Space Marine’s belly and vanished up into his chest plate. Sparks and steam spewed, and the Space Marine staggered in surprise. He swept the bolter around firing, tracking Skaranx as he sprinted away. Skaranx used the panicked soldiers as cover, weaving through them, forcing his prey to expend ammunition.

It was a game of increments. That was what the Master said. You had to peel the defences away one at a time to reach the prize within. A Space Marine was an army in a can. Every blow weakened that army and the can as well. You just had to make sure that you hit them often and hard enough.

Skaranx’s perceptions were stretched tight. Everything was moving in slow motion as he slipped fully into the flow of battle. Out of the corner of his eye, he caught sight of an armoured shape, wreathed in flame. He blinked and it was closer. With every blink of his eye, every thud of his augmented heart it drew closer, without seeming to move. It was a twist of smoke, a curl of flame, a gleam of bone, drawing ever closer until it vanished between one blink and the next. The targeting relay fuzzed and sparked and he shook his head, trying to clear the static that had infected his vision. The Imperial Fist rose up, throwing off his attackers. Bodies tumbled past him like raindrops. Skaranx threaded through the falling bodies, taking his chainsword in both hands and letting the screaming blade extend behind him. The Space Marine turned, the bolter coming up.

Skaranx sliced the bolter in half, rotated on his heel, and brought the chainsword around to crash against the side of the Space Marine’s helmet with every ounce of muscle he could muster. The Imperial Fist stumbled, but recovered quickly. A yellow fist struck out like a piston, nearly taking Skaranx’s head off. He backed away, blade extended. The Imperial Fist pursued, battering a soldier out of his path with the remains of his bolter. He drew his bolt pistol and fired, splitting rockcrete at Skaranx’s feet. Skaranx skidded backwards.

Las-bolts struck the Space Marine, drawing his attention. He twisted around and blazed away at the Brigannions who’d taken cover in the crater. Men lunged at the giant with bayonets and gun butts. None of it was effective. Skaranx primed a krak grenade and rolled it towards the knot of struggling figures. The explosion consumed the group. Bodies toppled, flesh smoking and voices silenced.

Skaranx stalked forward, through the cloud of dust thrown up by the explosion. Bulky shapes seemed to glide through the dust towards him, but when he turned, they dissipated. His flesh tingled, not from the heat, but something else. He blinked, trying to focus. It was as if something were trying to distract him. A black hand reached for him out of the dust and for a moment his heart froze mid-beat. It stretched towards him, trailing fire and greasy smoke and he could see the white bones that gilded the fingers and knuckles. He heard a voice, almost like that of the Master, crawling up towards him through the layers of static that snarled in his ears – no, not a voice, many voices, low and dolorous, like the intonation of some dark apostle, praying to a hated god. The words seeped through him, and pain followed them. They were asking him something – no, demanding it. But he couldn’t make it out, and he didn’t want to. He had his purpose. He had no time for voices.

He stumbled on a chunk of rockcrete, and was startled back to the matter at hand. The voices vanished as if they’d never been, leaving behind only static. He looked around. The explosion had cracked and shattered the ground. The Space Marine staggered in the middle of a newborn crater. He had been shielded from the worst of the blast by his opponents, but the grenade had done its work well enough. The yellow armour was covered in cracks and fissures but still functioned. The Imperial Fist had dropped his pistol in the explosion, leaving him defenceless save for his knife, which was still buried in the twitching body of one of the Brigannions.

Skaranx knew from experience that an explosion like that at close range jostled the sensory feeds in his prey’s armour, though only for a few moments. Blind, deaf and dumb, the Space Marine had two choices – tough it out or to remove his helmet. Skaranx hesitated, waiting to see which it would be. When the Space Marine tore his knife free of the dead man and his armoured fingers began to fumble at the edges of his helmet, Skaranx sprang forward. He would only have a few moments to act.

The helmet came off with a hiss of separated hoses and slipped vacuum seals. The Space Marine dropped it, but not quickly enough. Skaranx’s chainsword roared down and bit into the exposed face of the Imperial Fist. Blood and weather-beaten flesh were gouged free of bone and the Space Marine bellowed in shock and pain. It was the first sound he’d uttered, and Skaranx intended it to be his last. The Space Marine swayed, off balance, one hand seeking his wounded face, the other slashing out with the knife, trying to drive his attacker back.

Skaranx slipped back into the fuming smoke and circled his prey. He ignored the chirp of his targeting relay. Whatever it was trying to warn him would have to wait. He was too close now. His blow had nearly chopped through his opponent’s skull and had severed the Imperial Fist’s jugular. Blood pumped freely from between fingers that clutched at the wounded area. But even grievously injured, a Space Marine was dangerous. Drug-fuelled synapses fired, showing him angles and probabilities. His mind settled on the quickest. He stabbed his chainsword down and snatched his laspistol from its holster. He snapped off a shot from the hip, catching the Space Marine as he tottered forward. The las-bolt tore through the Imperial Fist’s eye with improbable accuracy and turned the brain behind to mush. The giant reeled forward, one step after the next, smoke issuing from his eye socket and mouth. Skaranx hesitated, wondering if he’d misjudged. Sometimes they didn’t die right away. Sometimes they didn’t die at all, and kept coming despite having a brain burnt to gruel.

Then, with a something very much like a sigh, the angel toppled backwards. The rockcrete trembled as if in sympathy as his body smashed down, arms flung out. Skaranx quickly holstered his weapon, snagged his blade and trotted towards his kill. He looked down at the dead warrior, and dropped gracelessly to his haunches. He looked into his prey’s remaining eye, and waved a hand over it as the light of life faded from it. He wondered what they saw just before death. Are you afraid, he wondered. Are you afraid of me?

He hoped they were.

He hated them. He hated them for what they were, and for what he could never be. He was as good as them, fearless and strong, but he was not an angel. He was a dog. And he hated them even as he loved the Master, for making him strong.

His vox-feed writhed suddenly, piercing his skull with a high-pitched whine. Slithering around the solid nail of agony was a babble of confusing voices, muted as if by distance, their words lost in a jumble of solid noise. He struck the side of his head with his palm, trying to switch frequencies. His comm-unit whirred and clicked. Every vox-feed was the same. Voices that rumbled like distant thunder, saying nothing understandable, but in a tone of – what? Promise? Or perhaps it was a warning. He shook his head, discarding the thought. It didn’t matter. Nothing mattered, save that which the Master commanded.

Without further pause, he severed the Space Marine’s head, just to be sure, and kicked it aside. Then, with a deep breath, he set to work. The chainsword yowled as he used it to cut away the chest plate and torso armour, in order to expose the body inside. He tossed the ragged sections of ceramite away and set the weapon aside. He drew his flensing tools and set to work, extracting nodes and peeling flesh from the hard carapace beneath. A monofilament scalpel was next, to slit the carapace and expose the muscle tissue.

As he worked, he heard the Brigannions regrouping. There wasn’t much left of either squad. A few ragged remnants: those too cowardly, too injured or too frightened to fight the enemy. Their squad leaders had been the first to die, though whether at the hands of the Space Marine or at the whim of an ambitious subordinate, Skaranx couldn’t say. The Master encouraged such upwardly mobile thinking in the mortals, if only for the amusement it provided to him and his brethren.

All told, the encounter had only taken a few minutes at most. He could hear the rhythmic bark of other bolters nearby and the pitiful screech of lasguns. He paused and let his gaze sweep across the ruin. Something prickled at his senses. He felt as if he was being watched, and he looked around. Through the cracks in the walls, he saw black smudges of shape move and writhe, ballooning up and fading to bare sticks like the wavering of a mirage. He smelt burning meat, stronger than it should have been, as if he had just put on his helmet, fresh from its fiery nest. More shapes passed through the smoke around him, fading between footsteps.

Abruptly, eyes like red-hot coals set into a skull-faced helm bored into his and he snatched at his laspistol, bringing it up. The eyes vanished in a swirl of smoke and he swung his pistol around, trying to track the phantom. His throat felt dry and his veins cold. The initial flush of the drugs was wearing off. He blinked, trying to clear his vision. It happened sometimes... Ghosts got caught in the targeting array, leaving him hunting things that had already died. He holstered the pistol, saw the soldiers warily examining him and ignored them. They had served their purpose, and the survivors would serve again until the battle was won and the bounty claimed.

He set aside the scalpel and selected a wedge-knife to crack the reinforced ribcage and expose the internal organs. Siege guns roared, and he heard something explode nearby. A tank, perhaps – were the enemy employing tanks? He paused again, listening. It paid to be wary, even at this stage.

‘There are more of them out there,’ one of the troopers said. He was crouched near a shattered window, his lasgun held close. Skaranx recognized his voice – the wit from earlier, in the trench. He thought the man’s name was Otto, though he couldn’t be sure. They all looked alike, with their worm-pale faces and fear-bright eyes. ‘I can see them moving around in the smoke.’

‘Yes, several,’ Skaranx said. He hissed in satisfaction as the object of his hunt was revealed and opened one of his cylinders. Men backed away from the sight as he extracted the dead Space Marine’s progenoid gland and slid it into the cylinder. They were superstitious about such things, even now after all they had seen and done in the service of the masters of Medrengard. To gut an angel of death was a sin in the eyes of the False Emperor. To them his wrath was no less real, though somewhat less potent, than that of the gods they served. He sealed the cylinder and wiped his bloody hands on his fatigues.

‘More than several,’ Otto said. ‘They’re preparing to march out of the city.’

‘Good. More yellow shells for me to crack,’ Skaranx said, staring at his prize. It was beautiful, in its bloody way. The lump of meat and gristle held the secret of the angels within it. It could make a man over into an angel. He wondered what it would be like to be an angel, clad in baroque armour and wading through oceans of blood and eternities of slaughter.

‘These don’t have yellow armour,’ Otto said.

Something in his voice caught Skaranx’s attention. There was a raw note there that coursed through the others, jumping from one man to the next like chain lightning. They began to mutter amongst themselves or stumble towards the windows. Skaranx made a quick calculation – there were fifteen men left, from the two squads, barely enough to slow down another Imperial Fist, let alone more than one. He cocked his head, listening. He could hear the crackle of flames and the hiss of dust falling from the dome as the siege guns pounded at it. He could hear the crash of shattering solar panels and the rumble of collapsing rockcrete. He could hear the roar of artillery and the screams of dying men. But he heard no tell-tale tread of power armoured boots, no bark of bolters. He thought of the phantom shapes he’d seen on the targeting relay and the skull-faced thing that had lunged at him.

Curious, he scrambled up the slope of the collapsed roof, chainsword in hand. It murmured in warning as he swept it through the smoke. The fog of war wasn’t dissipating anytime soon. His targeting relays focused in on nothing. The Space Marines he’d spotted earlier had vanished.

He tried to focus the sensors in his helmet, to pierce the ambient atmospheric effects of the battlefield. There was something out there – he could feel it, like a fingertip brushing across an exposed nerve ending. He saw nothing, save smoke and fire. Even the sound of weapons had faded, leaving only the crackle of flame and the grinding of collapsing structures. The vox-feed pulsed softly, with strange murmurings, like hundreds of quiet conversations taking place just out of earshot.

For a moment, the cloud of ash and dust cleared and he could see movement, the heaving columns of the Brigannion infantry moving forward in the wake of siege tanks and spider-legged daemon-engines. The advance continued, unimpeded. The dome of the hive rocked as artillery smashed down on it. He saw no sign of resistance, no indication of a counterattack coming through the gap in the hive’s dome, only fire and smoke. But he could hear nothing. It was as if a bubble had settled over the ruin, blotting out all noise from outside.

Down below him, he heard a clatter. He looked and saw one of the Brigannions wrestling open the reliquary that had hung from the dead Space Marine’s hip while his companions were occupied. The man attacked the ancient, lacquered wood with his bayonet, gouging the face plate loose. The conversations on the vox fell silent. Everything went quiet, as if the cherubs that crouched at the shadowed corners of what was left of the archways were holding their breath.

Skaranx’s perceptions shifted and warped. He could see the smoke that lay like a shroud over the ruin thickening and solidifying around the trooper as he reached into the reliquary and pried loose the object within. It was a skeletal hand, clenched in a fist, the yellowing bones scrimshawed with curt, intricate characters whose meaning Skaranx could not discern. The trooper held it up for a moment, eyeing it. Then, satisfied that it held no intrinsic worth, he tossed it aside.

It never struck the ground.

A hand, garbed in night-black armour, fell atop the looter’s head. The fingers, painted to resemble fleshless digits, closed almost gently on the unfortunate trooper’s pate. Bone cracked and burst and the man screamed in agony. The others whirled or shot to their feet, comically slow to Skaranx’s altered perceptions. More figures, clad in black plate and surrounded by flickering halos of ghost-light, glided soundlessly from the smoke. Or perhaps they were the smoke, given form and flesh. A chainsword revved soundlessly and swept down to split a screaming soldier in two, slopping gore across his fellows.

Otto, still at the window, made to fire his lasgun when hands wreathed in smoke and flame grabbed him from behind, from within the very brick of the wall, and broke him like a child’s toy. Black shapes oozed through the walls, hefting bone-gripped bolters that roared like dragons as they spat flame and death.

Shapes stalked through the smoke. They were Space Marines, but not any kind Skaranx recognized. They flickered and faded, bleeding in and out of sight like phantom spots on his retinas. Flames licked the oily air about them, and their char-black power armour was covered in gleaming bone, bleached painfully white. They seemed to have no more substance than shadows in one moment, and then more solid than anything around them in the next. He could not even tell how many of them there were. The bolters spoke death, spitting burning bolt-rounds into the Brigannions, tearing the hapless soldiery apart with hellish ease.

Skaranx stood, rooted to the spot. He felt a flicker of something in his gut, a quaver of sensation that he had not felt since he had first gone under the Benefactor’s knives. He could only watch as men died, quickly save for the one who’d opened the reliquary. He clawed at his punctured skull and wailed like a broken-backed cat as he was held aloft by his attacker. Flames curled from the fingers that pierced his skull, dripping across his blood and grime-streaked flesh, and enveloped him with a greedy whoosh. He kicked and screamed for long moments, thrashing in obvious agony, his cries bouncing from broken arch to grinning cherub before spiralling up into the air. Then, he made no more sounds and hung limp. His killer dropped him.

It was over in an eye-blink. Fifteen men dead in as many moments, their bodies lying spoilt and burnt on the ground, spread out in a circle around the body of the Space Marine. The skeletal fist had been placed back in its reliquary, which sat beside the corpse of its owner. Skaranx realized that he was clutching the cylinder with the progenoid gland. He looked around. Eyes glowed hot in the swirling gloom. They were all around him, waiting, but for what he couldn’t say. They filled the ruin, from one end of the nave to the next, a congregation of bone and fire, and all eyes were on him.

Something rattled. Two helmets, which superficially resembled his own, were tossed up to him. Both were ruined and dripping. He kicked them aside. He heard the tell-tale clatter of progenoid vials. A hand was raised, and two bandoliers identical to his dangled from it, the cylinders catching the firelight as they shifted slightly in the breeze. Some of the cylinders were occupied with two or three progenoid glands, glistening wetly. He felt a flare of annoyance that the others had beaten him by such a wide margin. The bandoliers fell, and the sound they made when they struck the ground put Skaranx in mind of the Imperial Fist’s body toppling over. A hand pierced the smoke, one finger extended. Skaranx touched his prize to reassure himself that it was still there. Whoever they were, he knew what they wanted.

‘No,’ he said.

A second later, the smoke roiled and a massive, black shape charged up the incline towards him, the chainsword purring quietly in one hand, the other hand reaching out as if to grab him. Flames flickered on the giant’s armour and bones rattled as he moved, and the sound of it shook Skaranx from his paralysis. Skaranx brought his own blade up and blocked the blow. He’d traded blows with his prey before. This one was stronger than any he’d faced. His arm ached all the way to the shoulder at the first touch of their blades.

They whirled around each other, blades drawing sparks from the air. His veins swelled as more and more adrenaline caches released their payload into his system, swelling his muscles and drowning his aches and pains in a rush of strength. He forced his opponent back, hammering at him. He’d gone toe-to-toe with Space Marines more than once when it was necessary. It was never pleasant, but it could be done when it had to be done. He was conscious of the others, how many he still didn’t know, watching the duel from below. Well, they could watch all they liked. They could watch him kill their companion. And then he would take the geneseed lying below as his prize.

Energized by the thought, he stepped back as his opponent’s chainsword slashed towards his face. He made a swift lunge, into the Space Marine’s reach, and ripped the grinding teeth of his own blade across the warrior’s belly. As the giant staggered back, Skaranx ripped his bandolier from his chest, popped the full cylinder from it, and slung it around his enemy’s head. Then he leapt back, dropped his chainsword and drew his laspistol. He fired. The las-bolt struck one of the frag grenades, causing it to explode. The remaining grenades followed suit, and the Space Marine was enveloped in multiple explosions. Cradling his bounty to his chest, Skaranx snatched up his chainsword, slid down the incline and made to scoop up the two other bandoliers.

An armoured boot slammed down, nearly taking his fingers off. He scrambled aside, falling over the bodies of the dead Brigannions in his haste to get out of range. Red eyes gazed at him, and he felt as if some silent judgement were being made. The voices on the vox fell silent for a moment. Then, as one, the strange Space Marines looked up, towards the incline, where their champion had been consumed by Skaranx’s ploy.

Skaranx’s heart stuttered in his chest. The Space Marine wasn’t dead. He wasn’t even hurt. He stalked down the incline, stripping the charred remnants of Skaranx’s bandolier from about him. His armour was seemingly untouched, the flames that crawled across his battleplate undimmed, his eyes blazing more brightly than they had before.

It was impossible. The sable armour should have been cracked open as easily as an eggshell by the explosion. But Skaranx couldn’t deny the evidence of his own eyes. The Space Marine was untouched. Even the spot where he’d hacked at him with his chainsword was unmarked, though he’d felt the blade bite metal.

As the giant descended, his eyes seemed to grow brighter and brighter, until Skaranx could not meet them. The comm-unit hissed and crackled, and a voice spoke. He could not make out the words, but the message was clear. The others looked at him as one, and the cacophony bristled in his ears, a riot of voices, tight with the agony of ages, clawing at his ears.

Are you afraid, they hissed. Are you afraid of me?

And Skaranx realized that he was. He felt the gelid weight of fear settle in his stomach, anchoring his feet to the ground, and he could taste the bitter ashes of his pride and eagerness. He had been a killer of angels and the angels had at last come to make him pay for his crimes. He clutched the progenoid cylinder more tightly. Otto and the others had been right to mutter and whisper. Skaranx swiped at the smoke as it stretched towards him, carrying the heavy armoured shapes closer. They moved without sound, closing in on him, and he could feel the heat of their flames.

All he could think of was escape. There had to be a way. He looked up, his eyes fastening on the columns. If he could get up, over and out, he might stand a chance. He needed room. He slashed out at them as they closed in around him. If he could reach the Master, he would find protection. The Master would not let his hound die the way the others had. He hacked at them, screaming imprecations.

Then, when he saw an opening, he seized it. He sprinted towards a window and hurled himself through. He lost his chainsword in the process, but did not stop for it. He could hear it wailing for him as he ran, like a child left behind by its parent.

Outside the walls of the ruin, noise buffeted his unprepared ears from all sides. The siege of Coramonde was not going well. The ground shook, and the whine of rockets and the grotesque roar of dying daemon-engines filled the air. Men screamed and gods bellowed in agony. He gaped, stunned by the sight that greeted him.

Across the battlefield, the burning, flowing army swept over the dead, trampling their corpses into something unrecognizable. Before Skaranx’s eyes, a hundred men died, and then two hundred – three, four – whole regiments swept aside by a burning scythe-edge of black armoured ghosts that marched slowly, purposefully out of the broken hive. A hellbrute slashed out at phantasmal attackers and swung massive claws, but was dragged under by sable-clad enemies. A maulerfiend cried out in distress as it was pierced by burning weapons that stripped its ruinous protections from it as if they were nothing.

He looked down at the single progenoid gland in its cracked cylinder cradled against his chest and clutched it more tightly. He began to run, sprinting through the explosions that chewed the battlefield around him. It was his only chance. He had to find the Master. And behind him, all around him, the black armoured shapes of the bone-encrusted Space Marines pursued him silently.

They did not run, but they kept pace regardless, winnowing through solid objects like tendrils of smoke. They moved like a flock of ravens, like a pack of loping wolves, charging bulls and swooping angels, never still, always out of the corner of his eye or above him or behind him, keeping pace like his own shadow given flesh. They reached for him from metres away, and he could feel the scalding touch of their fingers regardless of how fast he ran. And through it all, they whispered to him through the vox, their voices like sand pouring through metal, or the hissing of embers.

If they were part of the army that even now swept through the besiegers, they seemed to have a different purpose. They stayed close to him, showing no interest in the fleeing Brigannions or the dying daemon-engines that vomited smoke and collapsed nearby. He knew why. They wanted what he had. It was just as much a prize for them as it was for him. A small voice inside him whispered that if he only gave it to them, they would stop chasing him. They would leave him be. They would let him lose himself in the rout. But he couldn’t. He wouldn’t.

The siege of Coramonde had been broken. The Master would be falling back to the bastions erected during the first week of the siege, where the Legion’s vessels awaited, ready to take them back up to their ships in orbit. Skaranx felt the drugs in his system fading as he pushed himself harder and faster. His muscles tore and his bones creaked as he ran faster than he’d ever run before, hurtling tank traps and sections of strangle-wire. And through it all, he cradled his prize. Hatred and fear flooded him in equal measure, lending him strength as the effects of the drugs weakened and vanished entirely.

He could make out the blocky shape of the bastion, far ahead of him. A moment later, it was gone. Fire plumed up into the sky, and chunks of smouldering rockcrete struck him. He dove into a trench and covered his prize with his body. A ship rose from the flames, but didn’t get far before it lost altitude and crashed somewhere close by.

Shapes surrounded him, and rose up behind and beyond him. He tore his laspistol from its holster and fired again and again at them. He wondered, idly, if this was how the Brigannions had felt as he fed them to his prey, one squad at a time. His laspistol beeped and hummed, its power-pack running low. He dropped it.

There was nothing for it. There was no escape. But he didn’t want to burn. He didn’t deserve to burn. He had been a good hound. He had only done as the Master commanded. But they had run him to ground, even as he had run his own prey. Fear rippled through him. The Benefactor had lied. The Master had lied. He saw their lies in the flat, searing gazes of his pursuers. They were not gods and he was not better, not superior. He was just a man, and he was frightened.

‘Is this what you want then?’ he screamed, raising the cylinder. If he could give it to them, they would let him go. That was what the voices had been trying to tell him. All he had to do was show penance. ‘Take it, just take it!’

The shapes stopped. The armoured giants stared at him, their silence enveloping the trench. He swallowed bile. His eyes flickered to the cylinder.

It was broken.

The gland inside was charred and pierced by broken metal. It was ruined. Something like a sigh swept through his pursuers. There was an ache in that sound. Like an old wound, newly reopened. One of them cradled the reliquary he’d seen on the Imperial Fist. The sable-armoured figure held it tenderly, as if it meant something to him to them.

The vox crackled. He could hear the Master snarling orders, but the words were lost in the painful static that consumed communication as swiftly as the newcomers’ fire consumed their enemies. Other voices, louder than that of the Master, roared in his ear, bellowing wordlessly. It was the raw, throbbing roar of a fire, the growing pulse of a frigate’s engines nearing overload, or the crackle of a comet impacting upon a defence shield. It was the voice of doom and damnation, the bellow of the warp-leviathan before it swallowed you whole. It was the scream of ten thousand gutted Space Marines and of their corpse-emperor as well. It was the howl of the unborn and the never dying, of fates broken and destinies never to come to fruition. Skaranx knelt and clawed at his head, trying to pry his helm off as the sound smashed through him and his brain pulsed in white-hot agony.

As the howl washed through him and over him and the black shapes of his pursuers filled the trench, their armour covered in flame, he knew that he had been given a chance for an easy death, and he had turned it down. He had been given the chance to show remorse for his crime and he had ignored it.

Now it was too late.

Now he would burn.

Ship of the Damned

C Z Dunn

Agentha looked out across the chapel, her gaze returned by dozens of pairs of glazed eyes. Clad in filthy rags, the unwashed horde remained silent, their motionless forms held rapt by the woman in the rust-coloured robes addressing them from the raised lectern. Agentha removed her eyeglasses and cleaned them, being careful not to cause further damage to the cracked left lens, before replacing them and pushing them up the bridge of her nose. She cleared her throat.

‘Somebody?’ She surveyed the room as she spoke. ‘Anybody?’

As her eyes fell upon them, many of the children averted their gaze, looking to the ground or up at the corroded roof of their makeshift schola. Others put fingers to pursed lips, feigning deep thought while some made no attempt at forming a response, instead choosing to cockily chew their nails or yawn out of disinterest.

‘Not a single one of you can tell me the date of the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension?’ Agentha spread her arms, palms held open and upwards in a gesture of exasperation. The heavy fabric of her sleeves rustled gently under the influence of the vibrations from the ship’s sub-warp engines. Receiving no response, the Sister Dialogous tried a different tack.

‘Seelia. Was your home world so far from the Emperor’s light that you neglected to honour the anniversary of the sacrifice he made for the good of all mankind?’ The girl Agentha addressed made a face like a small rodent caught in a searchlight beam, and her cheeks began to turn from an unhealthy white that had not seen sunlight in years to pale crimson. ‘No wonder then that you and your family chose to seek passage on a pilgrim vessel. Perhaps once you have seen a few of the holy wonders of the Imperium and the monuments and worlds raised and settled in His honour, then you might return and enlighten the heathens you left behind.’

Agentha knew the lie in her words. The pilgrim vessels that slowly traversed the sub-warp space lanes of the galaxy very rarely made return visits to worlds. Those ships fortunate enough to avoid pirates, xenos attacks and other void-bound predators and survive long enough to complete their round trips often found themselves back where they started hundreds, if not thousands, of years later. Turning her attention from the now sobbing Seelia, Agentha made eye contact with another of the girls in the class, a slight, raven-haired figure who swallowed nervously once she realised she was next to face the Sister’s questioning.

‘Ephrael. You have celebrated at least thirteen Feasts on board the Herald of Piety. Surely you must remember the date upon which it is celebrated?’

The girl stared at Agentha with big, dark eyes. Ephrael was void-born, one of the many children whose existence had begun on board and who had never set foot on the surface of any planet or moon. Having never been exposed to any form of natural illumination and living in the artificial twilight of the habitation decks, her eyes had grown large to drink in all available light and her irises were only a thin sliver of blue. In spite of this, Ephrael still looked human, unlike some of the third and fourth generation void-born offspring where the sclera had disappeared entirely to be replaced by inky black. Those not killed at birth by appalled parents and who survive through childhood often ended up in the bowels of the vessel, choosing to live with others who had been similarly shunned.

‘I don’t know, my lady,’ Ephrael answered through a chewed lip.

Agentha smiled warmly. ‘Thank you for your honesty, child.’ Her smile melted away and she peered out over the top of her cracked eyeglasses. ‘But how many times do I have to tell you – all of you – to address me as “Sister” not “my lady”?’

It had been over a year since Agentha had secured passage on the Herald of Piety but the awe of having a Sister of the Adepta Sororitas on board – even one from a minor Dialogous order – had yet to pass. Ever since the moment Captain Keifmann had eagerly agreed to transport her as far as the next world with a reasonably sized spaceport, those around her had treated her differently, preferentially. The captain had offered her the choice of the officer’s cabins and even suggested he would vacate his own billet should she so desire. Agentha vehemently rejected these offers and instead chose to live out her journey in the spartan priest’s quarters attached to the Herald’s main chapel.

Though the Ecclesiarchy preacher on board had died of some unspecified contagion that had ravaged the ship decades earlier, the chapel had been better maintained than other areas of the aging vessel. Laymen from among the passengers had led congregations in daily prayer and the few on board with a modicum of education had used it as a place of learning, imparting what little they knew to the pilgrim children. Though Agentha could not serve the Emperor in the way she had been trained until she made it back to the convent of the Order of the Fractured Cipher, that did not mean she could not serve Him at all. She had taken over both preaching and teaching duties within hours of coming aboard.

It had not been without its problems though.

For a ship that could comfortably transport five thousand pilgrims – and uncomfortably three times that figure – the chapel was tiny, capable of holding no more than a few hundred souls. The first time Agentha held a prayer meeting almost the entire ship, crew included, tried to attend. The ensuing riot took two days for the ship’s militia to quell and resulted in the deaths of close to a hundred souls. It was only when Agentha addressed the pilgrims over the shipwide vox promising to hold multiple prayer sessions each day in various parts of the ship that the violence abated.

Her lessons too did not commence without incident. Accusations abounded that parents had forcibly evicted other pilgrim families from the decks closest to the chapel in an effort to enrol their own children under Agentha’s tutelage and several men and women above the age of the majority tried to pass themselves off as minors in an effort to learn to read and write. Again, Agentha mediated and found a workable solution. Younger children would be taught for a few hours each morning with older children taking lessons in the afternoon. Any adults wishing to better themselves could attend in the early evening before Agentha started her rounds of the ship to lead the various congregations in reverence of The Emperor.

Though the Sister Dialogous found the attention and adoration she had attracted unnerving, she understood the reasoning behind it. The Herald of Piety, like all pilgrim vessels, was not capable of warp travel, and as it slowly wended its way towards Terra it would make infrequent stops at shrineworlds and other holy sites. It could take decades to make the journey from one planet to another and so many on board had never experienced the rapture and fervour of setting foot on the same ground the Emperor had once trod upon or beheld a relic that was once within his grasp. Being of the Sororitas order – a bride of the Emperor as some called her – Agentha was regarded as having a direct line to the Golden Throne and was therefore venerated by the pilgrims.

Despite understanding the reasoning, she still went to bed in the early hours of every morning praying to the Emperor that she might be granted just a little more sleep.

Agentha stepped down from the lectern and placed herself on the same level as her pupils. Agentha moved along the aisle between the pews, walking past a crude statue of the Emperor, which looked as if it had been carved by somebody who had been told what the Emperor looked like by somebody who had also been told what the Emperor looked like by somebody with a severe case of cataracts. Heads turned away and eyes looked towards the ground as her booted feet trod the metal deck. Halfway along the ranks of functionally constructed benches she stopped and stood over a blond youth who was whistling under his breath in the vain hope that if he ignored the sister, she would ignore him.

‘Constantin Urfmeier, surely you must know the date of the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension?’ From what Agentha could gather, the boy – though he was well on his way to manhood – had received some education prior to coming aboard the Herald and despite spending all of his afternoons in lessons would be present at several of her prayer sessions each night. What he gained in knowledge and piety was matched by his shyness, always reluctant to volunteer answers in front of his classmates.

Agentha never did find out if Constantin Urfmeier knew when to celebrate the Feast of the Emperor’s Ascension, or if indeed – as she suspected he also knew – that the exact date was the subject of contention between various factions within the Ecclesiarchy and other branches of the Imperium. At the exact moment he found the courage to part his lips in preparation to speak, a commotion from the front of the chapel rendered Constantin silent and drew everyone’s attention.

‘That’s mine! Give it back!’ yelled a small boy. A much larger boy was looming over him, holding aloft what looked like a black ball out of the younger child’s reach.

‘Or what, Dolgan? You’ll tell your filthy refugee mother on me?’ the older boy scoffed.

‘Both of you, sit back down this instant,’ Agentha scolded, purposefully striding back down the aisle towards the two squabbling boys. Understandably, when so many people from vastly different backgrounds were placed together in such a small environment, cliques had formed among the pilgrims – not just the children but the adults too. Sharing a home world was obvious common ground, but even within groups with the same planetary heritage splintering often occurred along regional and racial boundaries, or within their affiliated sub-branch of the Imperial creed. Dolgan belonged to one of the smaller but newer groups on board the Herald but, despite having had months to integrate with his classmates, had barely spoken to anybody outside of those he had come aboard with.

Both boys ignored Agentha.

‘Give it back to me right now, Stevan. It’s mine. I picked it up when the Space Marine dropped it,’ Dolgan spat. He pulled his arm back ready to throw a punch but another boy, a few years older and a head taller than Dolgan, jumped up from the pew and grabbed his arm, preventing him from striking Stevan.

‘Be quiet,’ the other boy hissed. His hair was a similar light brown, curly mop to Dolgan’s and they shared the same near-albino skin tone. ‘We’re not supposed to say anything.’

Agentha stopped in her tracks. Dolgan and the other boy, Yurkan, had not come aboard in the same way as the other pilgrims. Rather than joining the Herald at a shrineworld or one of the many supply stops along its seemingly endless journey, the two boys, along with fifty or so other refugees, had been found drifting in deep space, their shuttle emitting a weak distress signal that Captain Keifmann had picked up. Because none of the refugees spoke Low Gothic, Agentha had been called upon to act as interpreter, but had not managed to glean much information from the castaways. They claimed their home world, Sertis, had come under attack – a not uncommon occurrence in the Draconis sector – and that they were the only survivors. When pressed on how they alone had survived not one of them would answer.

In the months since, the few children that had been among the Sertisian refugees had attended class every day and seemed to be making good progress with learning Low Gothic, but the adults had made very little effort to either integrate or even gain the means to communicate with their fellow passengers. Of their means of escape, no more had been said but now Dolgan was talking of Space Marines. Could it have been Castellan Kaleb and his Black Templars who had come their aid? It had been a little over a year since Agentha had been left behind on the shrineworld of Stern’s Remembrance by the Castellan and it was likely that they would still be operating within the sector. If it was the Black Templars then why would the Sertisians be so reticent to talk about it?

‘You’re a liar. A filthy refugee liar,’ Stevan taunted. ‘You’ve never seen a Space Marine and you didn’t get this from one. This is a totem that you and your heretic mother use to perform witchery.’

‘That is enough!’ Agentha boomed with such force that it silenced not only Stevan but the near two hundred other souls in the chapel who had began murmuring in speculation as to the true purpose of the dark sphere. She stamped over to where the two Sertisian boys were facing off with the much brawnier Stevan and stepped between them. ‘Accusations of heresy are not to be tossed around lightly, especially in the House of the Emperor. Do I make myself clear, young man?’

Stevan’s chin sank into his chest and he stared at the floor. ‘Yes, my lady. I mean Sister. Yes, Sister.’

‘I’ll take that,’ Agentha said, impolitely snatching the orb from Stevan. Dolgan started to protest but Yurkan held his friend in check once again.

Agentha turned the object over in her hands, marvelling at the smooth surface covered in a fine, intricate tracery that seemed to have been painted or printed on rather than carved. Though its cold surface suggested it was made from some form of metal, it felt light in her hand. However, when she tapped it with one of her unkempt fingernails, the ball was solid rather than hollow.

‘Where did you really get this from, Dolgan?’ she asked kindly. The boy had been through so much already in his short life – his father had been killed during the flight from Sertis, that much Agentha had been able to establish – and hectoring the boy was unlikely to yield positive results.

Dolgan looked up at the orange-robed sister, tears welling. ‘But it is true. The Space Marine in black armour dropped it.’

She was about to ask him about the Space Marine when the huge wooden doors of the chapel were flung open abruptly, the sound of them slamming against the metal bulkhead bringing everybody to attention. Three uniformed figures, each carrying an autopistol holstered at their hip, entered. Agentha recognised them all from the nightly prayer sessions she ran for the crew – Aswald, Vorchek and Bukwald of the ship’s militia. The latter, the highest ranking of the three, approached her while the other two remained on the threshold.

‘I beg your pardon for the intrusion, my lady,’ Bukwald said, removing his cap and giving a slight bow. Agentha slipped the metal sphere into one of the pockets of her robe. ‘The captain is asking to see you right away.’

‘Did he say why he wants to see me, Armsman Bukwald?’ Agentha asked.

Bukwald looked nervously around the room at the children and then back to the Sister Dialogous, his eyes saying more than his next few words. ‘I’d rather not say here, my lady.’

‘Very well, armsman. Lead on.’

Agentha turned to look back at the three boys who had disrupted her afternoon class. ‘I’ll deal with you tomorrow. Class dismissed,’ she said before pushing her eyeglasses up the bridge of her nose again and following the three armsmen out of the chapel.

‘And it has been broadcasting the same message ever since you first picked up the signal?’ Agentha asked, leaning over the cobbled-together vox array. Exposed circuit boards and bare wires crackled and sparked as the ancient unit relayed the same faint words over and over, occasionally punctuated by the sound of a bell chiming.

‘There has been no variation whatsoever, my lady,’ said Captain Keifmann, his voice dry and scratchy. ‘Just a man’s voice saying the same words on a loop and that infernal bell.’ Keifmann was advanced in years, certainly nearing a century, and every year was delineated in the lines and wrinkles of his face. He had been the captain of the Herald of Piety for over half his life and was the twelfth generation of his family to have commanded the pilgrim vessel.

‘Is there any way you can boost the signal? I can’t make out what he’s saying,’ Agentha asked, leaning in even closer to the tarnished brass speaker grille. She was suddenly overcome with a sense of déjà vu, memories flooding back to her of being on the bridge of the Black Templar’s vessel and listening to a similar, static-laden vox message.

A much younger man, Brynla, one of Keifmann’s many, many grandchildren, answered. ‘I’m sorry, my lady. The long-range vox is barely operational as it is. I’m surprised we’re picking anything up at all.’ His arm was gripping the captain’s elbow, supporting his frail grandfather as both men puzzled over the signal.

Agentha gave a weak smile in return. The Herald had been plying the subwarp pilgrim routes of the Imperium for thousands of years and, though its structure was as strong as the day it left some long forgotten orbital shipyard, its systems – those that remained operational at least – were held together by repair tape and blind faith. ‘Is it being broadcast on a distress channel?’

Brynla looked to his grandfather, who returned the look with equal bemusement. ‘I… I don’t know, my lady.’ Just as the ship’s electronic arrays and sensors had degraded down the centuries, so too had the knowledge of the crew to operate them. Essential systems like the air and water purification filters and the engines were maintained along similar dynastic lines to the ship’s bridge; knowledge passed down from father to son, mother to daughter, so that the Herald could traverse the stars for all eternity if need be. Less vital systems, such as the vox and heating, had not been properly looked after for years, only enthusiastic amateurs attempted to keep them operational in the absence of a skilled crew.

‘What do you think it is?’ asked Keifmann, pulling his elbow away from Brynla’s grasp and moving nearer to Agentha.

‘I’m not sure,’ she replied, ear still close to the speaker. ‘I don’t understand what is being said but I recognise the urgency in the voice. Whether this is being broadcast on a distress channel or not, it sounds as if somebody was in trouble.’

‘Was?’ exclaimed Keifmann.

‘Yes. This message could be decades, even centuries, old. You don’t think…’

The old man had put one hand down on the console array to steady himself but was stroking his chin in contemplation with the other.

‘Oh,’ said Agentha. ‘You do.’ Keifmann was a gentle soul, a rare optimist in a harsh, unforgiving universe. He had willingly given over his entire life in service to the Emperor, ferrying the faithful across the stars to venerate His name, knowing that he would receive no reward in his own lifetime. His greatest hope was that one day, many years from now, the Herald might finally reach Terra and his descendents cast their eyes upon the Imperial Palace, the Petitioner’s City and other places from the lessons and scriptures. Provided his good nature didn’t get him and everybody else on board killed in the meantime.

Agentha had a horrible sense of déjà vu again, this time to six months prior when the Herald had intercepted a similar message.

‘I seem to recall your cautioning before we picked up the Sertisian castaways. Are you going to caution me again, my lady?’ Keifmann said, the sparkle in his eyes belying his advanced years.

Agentha sighed. She had warned Keifmann against following a distress signal on the previous occasion on the likelihood that it was outdated, or worse, a ruse by xenos raiders. Fortunately for all on board the pilgrim vessel, as well as the Sertisian refugees, those fears had proved to be unfounded. ‘We were lucky last time. The law of averages–’

‘The only law I care about is the law of the Emperor of Mankind’ Keifmann interrupted, though not rudely. ‘If there are faithful adrift among the stars then I am compelled to come to their aid.’

Agentha had spent her entire lifetime studying not only linguistics and scriptures both human and alien, but also the tenets of the Imperial Creed and the Holy Word of the Emperor. She could not recall a single instance where the faith she shared with the captain had espoused compassion. From the look on Keifmann’s face there was no telling him that. ‘How long before the ship is close enough to be boarded?’

Brynla moved over to opposite side of the bridge and consulted an auspex screen. ‘Five hours. Perhaps six,’ he called back after bashing it a few times with the base of his fist.

‘Then I at least have a little time to decipher the message to determine whether this is folly.’ Agentha reached into one of the many pockets about her robe and pulled out a slender stick of charcoal. ‘Do you have something I can write on?’

The sudden sound of parchment tearing made her nauseous. ‘Here you are,’ said a helpful female voice from behind her. While the Herald was in transit between worlds, the bridge only required a skeleton crew to be on alert for the unlikely event of vox traffic or the auspex returning a reading. In a few hours time, when the ship was attempting a complex docking manoeuvre with the source of the mysterious signal, the entire Keifmann family would be at their stations. For now, it was just the patriarch, Brynla, and his twin sister Katylyna, who was standing before the Sister Dialogous with a tattered bound tome in one hand and a page torn from it in the other. Katylyna offered the loose leaf to Agentha.

‘Please, child. Have some respect.’ Despite the fact that Katylyna was the older of the two women, Agentha still addressed her as child, not only because she was so used to addressing her pupils as such but also as a hangover from her days in the convent. ‘That is no way to treat a book.’

Embarrassed, Katylyna replaced the book – some kind of manual from the look of the cover – carefully into the small, dusty alcove where it had likely sat since it had first been brought aboard. Then, almost reverentially, she pulled a frayed sleeve over her hand and swept away the dead skin and detritus of the ages that formed a layer around the now damaged book and similar volumes.

The scowl retreating from her face, Agentha leaned in as close as she could to the vox speaker and carefully transcribed the words she was hearing, each syllable carefully rendered in flawless High Gothic.

Leaving Keifmann and his progeny to rouse the rest of their clan in readiness for the docking procedure they would soon be carrying out, Agentha took her leave and returned to the chapel.

Agentha slammed shut yet another book in frustration, the noise carrying through the unusually empty chapel. At this point during the ship’s cycle it should have been full of worshippers being led in prayer and devotions by the Bride of the Emperor. Instead, she was stood alone at the lectern poring over the small collection of books she had accumulated since being seconded from her order by virtue of a long-standing pact between her Dialogous order and the Black Templars.

Castellan Kaleb had gifted her a volume from the extensive library on board the Inevitable Retribution and though it was both a rare and impressive tome – The Mirror of Smoke by Gideon Ravenor – it was of no use in deciphering the strange words she had scrawled in the margins of the torn out page.

Agentha’s time on Stern’s Remembrance had expanded her library and though she had acquired books that were both desirable and interesting, she still felt a pang of guilt. Setting herself up as a scribe, she had vowed to save all of the money she earned to secure passage back to her Order, spending only what she had to on food and water. Yet somehow, every time she strolled through one of the many market places that dotted its mazelike planetary capital, some merchant or other was offering a new title that had just come into their possession, likely sold by pilgrims trying to raise capital for an onward voyage. Though she knew that every book she purchased delayed her return to her sisters, it was more than compensated for by the bounty of knowledge she would bring back with her.

She picked up a fine leatherbound folio from the floor and sat it on the lectern. Over the past few hours she had kept coming back to this book, but if it held the key to understanding the intercepted transmission then she had yet to find it. Dialects of the Draconis Sector was the first book she had taken possession of during her temporary layover on the shrineworld and, although the author was anonymous, he or she had put together a fine study of the often disparate languages from almost a thousand worlds.

In the six months she had been stranded on Stern’s Remembrance Agentha had taught herself fourteen new languages, three of which were entirely unrelated to any she had previously known. Unfortunately, none of the fourteen, nor the other two hundred and nine she had learned during her time at the schola progenium and within the Order of the Fractured Cipher, were of any use to her now. It was as if the language that was being broadcast from the drifting ship was something entirely new. Or, as Agentha had suspected from the beginning, something completely ancient – a language that was already dead before the Herald of Piety set sail among the heavens.

Licking the tips of her fingers, she hurriedly flicked through the yellowed pages, scanning chapter titles and headings on the off-chance that there was something she had missed. She allowed the book to come to rest on one of the appendices outlining possible links between the languages of the fringe worlds of the Draconis sector and certain xenos tongues. Even possessing this book could earn her chastisement, possibly even excommunication or death, from some of the more militant of her order but, after whispering the correct litany to protect her immortal soul, she quickly scanned the pages. One word in particular caught her attention, not an exact match for any in the message but one of the syllables seemed to share a root with another word she had seen in a different book. She picked up the loose sheet of paper she had copied the message onto and placed it as a bookmark in Dialects of the Draconis Sector.

She was just about to lean down and retrieve another book when she returned her attention to the torn page, not the words she had written on it but the ones already printed there.

That was it. She had not been looking at this the right way. They were listening to the wrong part of the message.

Tucking the page into one of her numerous pockets, she hurried back to the bridge.

The thud of two vast spacefaring vessels gently coming together reverberated through the hull of the Herald of Piety as Agentha raced onto the bridge. A score of crewmen, all with similar facial features and colouring, turned to look at the panting, orange-clad Sister Dialogous. She stood partially bent forwards with her hands on her thighs for a few moments before pushing sweaty locks of auburn hair from her face and adjusting her eyeglasses.

‘Katylyna, the book,’ Agentha said breathing heavily. Even in her Adepta Sororitas trained peak physical condition, her exertions to traverse almost thirty decks had taken their toll. She held out the torn page. ‘I need the book you took this from.’

The woman pushed her way past several of her brothers, sisters and cousins to reach the alcove. Retrieving the book she once again pulled her sleeve down and brushed the dust from it before passing it to Agentha.

‘Docking complete, captain,’ reported one of the bridge crew, almost an exact duplicate of Brynla except for lighter hair and darker eyes. ‘The armsmen are cutting their way in now.’

‘You have to stop them!’ cried Agentha, frantically searching through the musty book. The pages were creasing with the force she was turning them but she seemed to neither notice or care.

‘What is it? What have you found?’ asked Keifmann, suddenly concerned.

Finding the page she was looking for, Agentha opened the book wide, its spine splitting with a dry crunch. ‘We were concentrating on the wrong part of the message. The words weren’t important – well they might have been important if we knew what they meant – but the bell was. The bell was telling us all we need to know.’ She passed the book to the aged captain who struggled to hold it in his frail hands. Brynla stepped in to help his grandfather, holding the book up so the words ‘Call signs of Battlefleet Draconis’ were visible in gold leaf along its damaged spine above the similarly printed characters ‘M.33’. The old man’s eyes went wide with realisation, what little pigment his skin retained rapidly draining.

‘Raise Bukwald on the vox,’ Keifmann said dryly, all moisture having escaped his throat. Vox-casters droned into life, tinny static mingling with the beeps and whirrs of instruments and cogitators. After a few seconds a man’s distorted voice answered the hail.

‘We’re almost through, captain,’ said Bukwald, joy evident in his tone. ‘You were right, sir. There are people alive on there. We can hear them moving behind the airlocks.’

Keifmann threw Agentha a look of horror that she would never forget for the rest of her life. In that instant, all of the hope, all of the optimism, all of the faith that Keifmann held bled away from him as if his soul had become an open wound.

‘They’re not alive, Bukwald. They’re dead. All of them dead.’ Keifmann’s words were lost under the sound of metal tearing over the vox.

‘Say again, captain. I missed that last part,’ said Bukwald.

‘It’s the plague, Bukwald. The plague of unbelief.’ Brynla’s hands fell away from supporting his grandfather, the younger man’s hands moving to his face in terror. Keifmann sank to his knees.

What he said next was drowned out by the sound of distorted screams already emanating from the vox-casters. ‘They’re plague zombies, Bukwald. Throne-forsaken plague zombies.’

The crimson-hued emergency lighting was one of the few archaic onboard systems that still functioned but, deprived of the accompanying klaxon, which had long since fallen into disrepair, the rust-rimmed corridors of the Herald took on a surreal aspect. The wail of alarms was replaced by the cries of pilgrims, a tide of humanity surging for the safety of the upper decks. Under the strobing red glow, Agentha swam against that tide, heading for a very different refuge.

Seelia and her younger sister Dotta surged past the Sister Dialogous, and Agentha thrust out a deceptively muscular arm and grabbed the older girl by the shoulder. Startled, Seelia spun defensively dragging Dotta with her by the hand.

‘The chapel. We’re making for the chapel. We’ll be safe there,’ Agentha said, her tone the very epitome of calm in stark contrast to the panic surrounding her.

Seelia looked on anxiously as her father, oblivious that he had left his children behind, was swallowed up by the throng, disappearing around a bend in the corridor without so much as a glance back.

‘There’s only room for the children, Seelia.’ Agentha looked down at Dotta, the girl’s face grubby with dried tears. Seelia said nothing. Her younger sister’s pleading eyes said everything for her.

Taking their place at the rear of the twenty or so children Agentha had already gathered to her, the Bride of the Emperor led His children towards sanctuary.

By the time they reached the lower decks, close to fifty children followed in Agentha’s wake. Many she had plucked from out of the flow of pilgrims but some had been left under her charge by desperate parents who had realised what she was doing. The younger children held the hands of elder brothers and sisters, or clung to the folds of Agentha’s robes. Some of her older students, who were more aware of the graveness of their situation – Stevan, Constantin and Ephrael amongst them – formed a protective cordon around the infants, broken table legs and corroded chunks of bulkhead grasped tightly as impromptu clubs.

No pilgrims remained this deep into the ship, all having fled higher once word of the plague zombie infestation had spread like a contagion through the accommodation levels. Thankfully, they had not yet encountered any evidence of the tainted invaders and had it not been for the screams of the dying at the other end of a vox-link fresh in her mind, Agentha would have though the whole thing a hoax.

That situation quickly changed.

Coming to the corridor that led directly to the chapel, Agentha halted and spread her arms to prevent any of the pilgrim children from continuing any further. ‘Stay here,’ she said quietly.

Leaving her charges to linger on the threshold of the passage, she cautiously proceeded towards the shape on the floor fifteen metres further down, its immobile form picked out by the flashing red lights. As she got closer, the sound of her footsteps took on a wet aspect and she looked down to find herself walking through a puddle of blood. Reaching what she assumed to be a facedown corpse – nothing could have lost that much blood and lived – she rolled it over with a swift jab from her bloody boot.

In her time aboard the Herald of Piety, Agentha had prided herself on getting to know as many of the sixteen thousand or so pilgrims crammed aboard, if not by name, then certainly by sight. If she had known this man while he had been alive then she certainly could not recognise him in death. Scraps of militia tunic clung to bloodied meat, chewed internal organs spilling out from rents in the flesh. One arm was missing entirely, as was his face, which looked like it been ripped or bitten off to leave only muscle, exposed cheek and jaw bones.

Curiosity got the better of some of the children and Agentha heard them creeping forward to take a look at what she had found. ‘I told you to stay back,’ she hissed sternly over her shoulder. The children, who by now knew to obey the Sister Dialogous or pay the price, did as she said.

Returning her attention to the armsman’s body she found that he still gripped an autopistol in his one remaining hand. Prising away his stiff fingers, she retrieved the weapon and appraised it in the palm of her hands.

It was a common misconception in the Imperium that sisters of the non-militant orders of the Adepta Sororitas were not trained to fight, that the limit of their usefulness was in healing the sick and translating esoteric scriptures and tomes. While it was true that those of their sorority who donned power armour were bred for battle, their entire lives dedicated to the art of warfare, many an enemy of the Emperor had come undone by believing that a Sister Dialogous or Hospitaller did not have the inclination or faculty for violence.

It had been many years since she had fired a weapon in anger but the training drilled into Agentha during her first few years in the convent came rushing back to her, sense memories triggered by the feel of the gun in her hand. From the length of the barrel she could deduce that it had an effective range of no more than two hundred metres, more than sufficient for combat on board a vessel such as this. The length of its magazine told her that it held a clip of twelve rounds and its weight revealed that there were only three shots left. The temperature of the gun, compensating for the coldness of the ship, led her to believe that it had been fired less than an hour ago. Gripping the autopistol by its handle and slipping her finger over the trigger she rose to her feet with it raised in case the armsman’s murderers were still nearby.

Noise from along the corridor alerted her to the plague zombies’ presence moments before the emergency lighting illuminated their foul forms in a red glow. Breaking off from feasting upon another poor soul, seven of the unholy abominations fixed Agentha with their dead stares and shambled towards her. Behind her, she could hear a murmur of panic pass between the children.

‘Be brave, children,’ she said, raising the pistol with a straight arm and looking down the barrel through the uncracked lens of her eyeglasses. ‘The Emperor protects.’

The sound of her first shot rang out uncomfortably loud in the close confines of the ship’s corridor, causing some of the children to wail and scream. The bullet found its mark and the lead plague zombie, an emaciated thing that was barely more than a skeleton, collapsed to the ground, a clean hole punched through the front of its weathered skull.

Agentha heard the second bullet slide into the chamber and with the sound of her previous shot and childrens’ screams still echoing, she pulled the trigger again. This time two of the monsters went down, the bullet passing through one rotten brainpan and embedding in an equally decayed forehead behind it.

Her ears ringing, she waited for the final bullet to chamber and adjusted her aim. The shock of recognition stayed her hand briefly as Illyia Vorchek appeared in her sights, the armsman’s usually jovial features now a snarl of malevolence. She fired again and his visage went slack, the shot messily exploding his temple.

Agentha swung her arm again and pointed the gun at one of the three surviving plague zombies before pulling the trigger in hope rather than expectation. Instead of the report of a shell, all she heard was the sound of metal on metal, the clip exhausted. She tried again in the forlorn hope that the weapon had malfunctioned but met with the same result.

Such was the noise and her level of concentration that she had failed to notice a group of the older children move up alongside her and was momentarily startled when Ephrael, Constantin and Stevan appeared at her shoulders flanked by other adolescent pilgrims.

‘The Emperor protects, Sister,’ Ephrael said, raising a chunk of metal that looked as if it was once part of a doorframe.

‘Indeed he does,’ Agentha said, flipping the pistol in her hand so that she gripped it by the barrel and raising it above her head ready to use as a cudgel. ‘But sometimes He gives us the means to protect ourselves.’

The plague zombie at the head of the pack lunged forwards suddenly, eliciting screams from the younger children and a flurry of blows from the armed teenagers. Agentha struck the monster so hard with the butt of the autopistol that it dropped to one knee, the side of its head broken open. She was just readying to strike it again when the sound of lasgun fire eclipsed the screams and moans.

Simultaneously, all three of the plague zombies’ heads burst open, showering Agentha and her ad hoc child militia in gore. The trio crashed to the ground, wounds smoking from where shots had found their mark. More movement from along the corridor caught Agentha’s attention and several dark shapes emerged from a side tunnel before disappearing down the branch opposite, silhouettes of laspistols evident in each of their hands.

The final figure to appear stopped in the middle of the corridor, his enormous black eyes blinking uncomfortably under the emergency lighting. His bare torso was lithe, muscular and covered in simplistic tattoos of Imperial aquilas and other holy symbols. Even from a distance Agentha could tell that his skin was almost albino. He tucked his weapon into the waistband of his ragged trousers and made a perfect sign of the aquila across his chest. Agentha stowed her own pistol in the folds of her robes and returned the gesture. The man – though the longer he remained in view, the more Agentha realised that he was no older than some of her students – smiled serenely before following his fellow voidborn along the side corridor.

‘Quickly. The route to the chapel is clear,’ she called. The pilgrim children filed past her, some of them running for the sanctuary behind the sturdy wooden doors. Once she was certain that all of her wards were safely in the chapel she too ran after them.

‘Stevan. Constantin. Come here and help me move the statue,’ Agentha said, wrapping her arms around the representation of the Master of Mankind. The two boys looked horrified, as if the Sister Dialogous had just asked them to repaint the Golden Throne in a lurid shade of green. ‘It’s a statue, boys. The Emperor won’t smite you down just for moving it.’

Hesitantly, Stevan and Constantin joined Agentha in sliding the statue across the rust-coated deck, revealing bare metal where the memorial’s passage had scraped away the centuries of corrosion. Much to Agentha’s surprise, Dolgan pitched in and helped for the last few metres, assisting them in putting the statue into position behind the now barred double doors. An even greater shock was the way Stevan playfully ruffled the smaller boy’s mop of hair by way of thanks.

With their immediate safety ensured, Agentha allowed herself to sit down on one of the pews and exhaled long and loud. When Keifmann had finally come to his senses, he ordered the bridge locked down and began transmitting a distress beacon. Not prepared to sit idly by while the faithful were slaughtered, Agentha had fled from the bridge before it was sealed to round up as many of the pilgrims as she could and lead them to the safe haven of the chapel.

Fortunately, it did not take long for reason to take over. It could take months, possibly years, for the distress beacon to be picked up and that was if the emergency alert systems were actually working. Crowding the chapel with hundreds of pilgrims for The Emperor alone knew how long would be just as dangerous as remaining in the open and taking their chances with the plague zombies. Even if they could remain calm and resist the urge to turn on each other, what few supplies they could scavenge would quickly run out and that was provided the ship’s systems remained up and running to purify the air and water. No. Saving the souls of all on board the Herald of Piety was beyond both reason and her abilities, but the children? She would save as many of those as she could.

Some of the younger children still sobbed and friends or siblings did their best to comfort them, wrapping their arms around them or swaddling them in the blankets draped over the pews in the chapel. Others set about menial tasks to take their minds off the horrors they had lived through and the bleakness of their situation. Agentha was just about to pitch in herself when Constantin and Seelia approached her.

‘Sister,’ Seelia said, her voice unsteady. ‘What were those things? One of them looked like that armsman who came here earlier.’

Sighing, Agentha sat back down. From the moment they are able to comprehend them, the children of the Imperium are taught about the horrors of the universe. Of the mutant and the heretic, and of the alien and, obliquely, the malign powers that vie for their immortal souls. They are taught to hate and abhor any form of deviation, to reject totally all that does not shine under the rays of the Emperor’s benevolent light. Agentha’s own lessons and sermons were full of warnings about both the enemy within and the enemy without, but even in these dark times the chances of encountering any of those threats was still remote. There were some things, though, that she could not have prepared her students for.

‘I can tell you what I know,’ Agentha began. ‘But my knowledge is based on conjecture and hearsay, and what little I have read in my studies.’

Other children began to gather around the sister, intrigued by what she was about to say.

‘Please. This is not for the little ones’ ears,’ Agentha said noticing that Dotta and few of the infants had perched themselves on a nearby pew. Ephrael led them away to the side of the chapel and lay them down wrapped in blankets in the hope that they would fall to sleep.

‘Those… things you saw outside are suffering from a contagion, a malaise created and disseminated by a dark and insidious power.’

A ripple of gasps passed among the listeners. Some of them rolled up their sleeves or examined the back their hand to check for signs of contraction. Without warning, Seelia screamed.

‘He’s bleeding!’ she cried. ‘One of them bit Stevan.’

The children closest to Stevan retreated away from him and Agentha could clearly see the crimson stain along his sleeve. Constantin and Ephrael reached for the makeshift clubs at their feet.

‘It didn’t bite me!’ Stevan yelled, panicked. He pulled up the sleeve of his simple pilgrim attire to reveal a thin wound, likely the result of being raked by one of the plague zombies before the voidborn intervened.

‘That doesn’t matter,’ said Constantin, raising the chair leg in his hand and advancing on the bleeding Stevan. ‘Let’s kill him before he turns like the armsman!’

He hadn’t even taken two steps before Agentha’s powerful hand gripped him around the wrist. She dug her fingertips hard into his tendons causing him to both cry out in pain and drop his weapon. ‘Have you been keeping secret from me that you are in fact a Magos Biologis, sent from Mars to live among pilgrims?’ Agentha said, not relinquishing her hold on the boy.

Despite the pain, Constantin still looked bemused. ‘No, Sister,’ he hissed through gritted teeth.

‘Then why do you presume to know how this disease is contracted?’ Agentha said, finally relinquishing her grasp. She looked sternly at the other pilgrim children who had taken up arms. Each of them laid down their weapons without the need for the sister to physically intervene. ‘I have some old bandages in my chamber, Stevan. Why don’t you go and dress your wound while I explain exactly why you aren’t about to turn into a monster and feast upon the brains of your classmates?’

The relief was evident on the boy’s face but some of his peers were not as convinced, giving Stevan a wide berth as he moved through the chapel to Agentha’s chamber. The Sister Dialogous motioned for the rest of the children to sit again.

‘The disease does not spread like an ordinary virus, for it does not affect its sufferers physically, but instead attacks them spiritually. It is called the Plague of Unbelief and only those who lack complete faith can succumb to it.’

More gasps.

‘Do not worry, children. Though the disease is likely already in the air that we are breathing, we are all immune.’

The gasps gave way to sighs of relief.

‘Is that ’cos of the ’jections we had before we came aboard?’ asked a scrawny youth, arms wrapped around his knees to preserve heat in the freezing chapel.

‘If only it was that simple, Jonas,’ Agentha said, smiling warmly at the boy. ‘No. It is no inoculation that protects us from this plague. It is our total faith in the Emperor that prevents us from becoming like one of those mindless beasts. The armsman who tried to attack us outside was lacking in faith and so he fell under the sway of the Dark Powers. Our faith in the immortal God-Emperor prevented us from sharing his fate and as long as our belief is unwavering, our souls will resist its corrupting influence.’

She looked at the faces of her students, all rapt yet some still bearing the marks of scepticism or worry.

‘And besides,’ she added, turning to look in the direction of the chapel doors. ‘We have the Emperor himself watching over us.’

Any doubt seem to melt away from the pilgrim children as they looked up to regard the basic rendering of their figurehead.

‘Now please, children. Try and get some rest,’ she said, pushing her eyeglasses back up her nose.

The huddle of figures surrounding her dispersed, hunting for blankets and empty pews on which to rest. Agentha stood up preparing to make her way to her chamber behind the pulpit but stopped abruptly, a hot sensation running through her leg. She ran her hand over it checking for any wound that she, like Stevan, may have unknowingly sustained during the melee with the plague zombies but could find no evidence of bleeding. Her hand came to rest on something solid and warm and she dug into the folds of her robes and retrieved the object she had confiscated from Dolgan during lessons. The thing gave off a faint orange glow, the fine tracery pulsing rhythmically. Agentha stood transfixed by the sphere for several seconds before breaking her reverie with a shake of her head and looking around the room for its owner. Dolgan was nowhere to be seen but Yurkan was over by the lectern tidying up the books the Sister Dialogous had been studying earlier.

‘Yurkan. Have you seen Dolgan recently? I know he was here because he helped me move the statue in front of the doors.’ Agentha said, walking along the aisle between the pews. The tousle-headed boy glanced up at her nervously before carrying on about his business as if he hadn’t heard the sister speak.

‘Yurkan. I’m talking to you. Where is Dolgan?’

‘Please, my lady – I mean, Sister. He made me promise not to tell,’ Yurkan said, his cheeks flushing bright red.

‘Where is he?’ Although she had always tried to remain patient with the children under her care and tutelage, events of recent hours and a lack of sleep were conspiring to drive her temper to the fore.

‘It’s his mother,’ Yurkan said, the promise of tears sparkling under the candlelight. ‘She doesn’t believe like we do. Doesn’t have the same faith in an Emperor who would abandon her and her people to xenos raiders.’

‘Where. Is. He?’ Agentha asked, forcefully pushing her eyeglasses back up the bridge of her nose.

‘He’s gone to find her,’ Yurkan said, starting to cry.

The pipes that carried the purified air around the Herald of Piety were more than wide enough for an eight year-old child to traverse but for the two metre frame of a battle sister, it was slow going.

Dragging herself along on her belly, Agentha slid past vents that allowed cleansed air to circulate around the ship. Under occupation of the plague zombies that air was now foetid and rank, filling the corridors along with the guttural moans of the shambling horde. She came to the end of the pipeline supplying this particular deck of the ship that opened out slightly, allowing Agentha to rise to her haunches and utilise the hand and footholds that would carry her up to the deck above.

Though Yurkan knew that Dolgan had escaped from the chapel to hunt for his mother, the older boy was unaware of how he had left the sanctuary. A quick search of the room had revealed an open air-vent and so Agentha had followed the Sertisian refugee boy into the dark pipeline. The Sister Dialogous knew that if their distress beacon was not picked up soon then she and the children would need to use the air filtration system to move around the ship and scavenge supplies. She had not expected to be cramming herself into the close confines of the pipes quite so quickly.

Hauling herself upwards and back onto her stomach, Agentha at last came to the hab deck where Dolgan and his mother lived. The noise of the plague zombies was louder here and the smell so cloying that she had to pull her robe up over her nose to block it out. Though she knew the deck on which Dolgan and the other Sertisian refugees resided on, Agentha did not know exactly where their hab-dorm was located and it took her an uncomfortably long time to locate the kicked out vent where Dolgan had made his exit.

Poking her head out to check for undead boarders, the pulsating ruby light picked out a trail of torn and ruined bodies running the entire length of the corridor. Drawn by the warm, living flesh of so many pilgrims crammed together the plague zombies had torn through the hab deck, their mindless, unstinting desire to kill and feast claiming young and old alike. In only a few moments, Agentha had already identified more than a dozen dead faces she recognised from her prayer meetings and classes.

She dropped down onto the deck and pulled at her robes, which had become bundled around her in the pipes. Adjusting her eyeglasses she patted a pocket at her waist and felt the warmth of the orb, its glow lighting a patch of material covering her thigh.

Though no zombies remained in the corridor where they had butchered so many, Agentha could hear that they were still nearby and cautiously picked her way through the corpses, bunching her robes at the waist so that the hem did not drag in puddles of blood. She paused over the still form of one of the pilgrims and knelt down to inspect her. Gripped in one hand was an autopistol, a cruder model than the militia-issue gun that Agentha still had secreted in her robes, and with a bent barrel no doubt damaged in a futile struggle against the reanimated horde. The dead woman wore simple pilgrim attire rather than the tunic and fatigues of the militia so Agentha assumed she had either found the weapon or had smuggled it with her when she first boarded. Removing the clip, Agentha took the pair of bullets she found and, praising The Emperor that they were the same calibre as her own weapon, reloaded her autopistol. Now rearmed, she continued onwards with gun in hand.

Reaching the end of the corridor, where it terminated in a T-junction, Agentha looked carefully in both directions, weighing up which would be the best route to follow. She had just settled on the left-hand passage when a noise from the other branch caught her attention. She waited to hear it again and after a few seconds had passed she was rewarded with the indistinct sound of a child’s voice.

Quicker than before, but still careful not to trip over trailing or torn limbs, Agentha followed the noise. Coming to another junction, she halted momentarily before picking up the aural trail again and clambering over a pile of desecrated bodies stacked in the entrance to one of the Herald’s many hab-dorms.

Agentha blinked as the dull red emergency lighting ceded to the flickering white light of a single lumeglobe set high in the dorm’s ceiling. Under an intermittent power supply, the room was completely illuminated for a fraction of a second before the light rapidly faded, bathing the dorm in total darkness for several moments before the cycle began anew.

The lumeglobe flared brightly and Agentha could see Dolgan standing with his back to her, immobile and fixated on a point at the rear of the cramped, communal living quarters. The light died and just before the room was cast into pitch blackness, the boy uttered a single word, his voice cracking as he fought back tears.

‘Momma?’

The light blossomed again and Agentha became aware of somebody else in the room, the subject of Dolgan’s attention. Hunched over a corpse at the back of the dorm, an unmistakeably female figure – long dark hair and full of breast – feasted on entrails. The illumination faded once more and from the darkness Dolgan repeated his question.

‘Momma?’

When the room became bright again, the woman was no longer devouring the corpse and was stood to face Dolgan and Agentha. Unlike the zombies Agentha had seen earlier, the woman’s body was unravaged, the only signs that she had succumbed to the Plague of Unbelief the bloody smear around her mouth and the lifeless yellow eyes that regarded the two newcomers without any emotion whatsoever.

‘Momma?’ Dolgan asked one last time, as the room again went dark.

When the light came back on, the thing that was once his mother issued an unnatural wail and began to advance on the pair. Agentha moved closer to Dolgan and placed a hand gently on his shoulder. ‘I don’t think that’s your momma, child. Not any more.’ She positioned herself between the boy and the plague zombie. ‘Look away, Dolgan. You shouldn’t have to see this.’

Heeding her, Dolgan buried his head into the voluminous folds of the sister’s orange robes. Agentha raised the autopistol and aimed it directly at the woman’s forehead. Uttering a silent prayer, she pulled the trigger just as the room was plunged back into darkness.

When the light returned, Dolgan’s mother was at peace, the contents of her skull sprayed across the back wall of the hab-dorm.

A sudden noise from the doorway caused her to turn around, pistol still raised. Whether drawn there by the moaning of what was once Dolgan’s mother or the promise of living flesh, a horde of zombies, at least twenty in number, had congregated at the entrance to the hab-dorm and were clawing and tearing at the stack of bodies barring their way.

Agentha drew Dolgan to her, the boy clinging tightly to her gore-encrusted robes, her eyes darting about the room, desperately searching for an air vent or some other means of escape, but she found none. Another cycle of lightness and dark passed and suddenly the horde were in the hab-dorm, hungry mouths moaning discordantly.

Keeping the boy behind her, Agentha moved towards the back wall, using herself as a shield should one of the pack break and lunge for them. The plague zombies still had ten metres to cover but even at their sluggish pace they would be on the Sister Dialogous and the refugee boy in seconds.

Agentha took aim with the pistol again but, realising that she could take down no more than four or five with a single shot, instead considered another, darker option. With only one bullet left she could spare the boy an agonising death and place her faith in the Emperor that she would be prevented from suffering too greatly. Turning to Dolgan, she placed the muzzle of the autopistol against his forehead. The boy looked up at her, his eyes becoming as wide as those of the voidborn.

Agentha had just started to apply pressure to the trigger when the constant warmth at her thigh became a burning sensation. She tried to ignore the pain but some compulsion forced her to lower the pistol and remove the sphere from her pocket. Bizarrely, the object felt stone cold in her hand but the tracery burned with an intensity that was painful for her to look at. New symbols and runes that she had not seen before, but in an ancient language familiar to her, manifested across its surface and in an instant she knew what she had to do with it. The room lit up again and with the plague zombie horde almost an arm’s length away, she held the orb in both hands and twisted it hard, rotating around a previously unseen seam. Its glow took on an unnatural blue aspect.

The lumeglobe went out. This time it did not come back on.

Agentha’s nostrils filled with the scent of scorched ozone and every hair on her body rose, charged by static. Dolgan buried his head back in her robes again, sparing him the temporary blindness of the teleportation flash as multiple, bulky figures materialised in the room.

The room lit up suddenly with the unmistakable muzzle flare of bolters, the noise of the weapons unbearable in such a confined space. Agentha could feel the heat of the discharge and the splatter of the plague zombies bursting open under the intense barrage.

After two seconds, the firing ceased.

Although used to being in close proximity to bolter fire, Agentha could do nothing to prevent the inevitable ringing in her ears and as her vision righted itself after the intense burst of the teleportation flare, she could hear nothing. Dolgan still clung tightly to her and she looked down at him, his shape unclear through her hazy vision. What she could make out, even with her sight impaired more than it usually was, was that the boy was pointing.

Following the line of his shaking finger, Agentha was startled to find that one of their mysterious saviours remained in the room. She held up the sphere, its glow slowly fading, and the blue light caught the edges of what she instantly recognised as power armour. Space Marine power armour.

The same compulsion that had come over her when she activated the device took hold of her again and she moved forwards, each step revealing more of the massive figure rooted to the spot before her. One vast pauldron sported a simple skull icon while the other was decorated with a flame motif that was repeated across both greaves. The black of the armour was the deepest Agentha had ever seen and it seemed to swallow what little light the sphere gave off. She came to a halt less than a metre in front of him and held up the orb, offering it back to what she believed to be its rightful owner.

The Space Marine looked down at Agentha and regarded her. To the Sister Dialogous it felt as if he was peering into her very soul, holding it up to the light and examining it for any flaw or imperfection. Agentha gave an involuntary shudder, not because of the biting cold but out of fear; fear that the Space Marine might look inside her and find her wanting. The last of the orb’s light faded and the armoured figure reached out a gauntleted hand. Agentha closed her eyes.

When she opened them, the hab-dorm was lit up again but the Space Marine and the sphere were gone.

Agentha trod lightly down the aisle between the pews in the chapel, careful not to wake the children sleeping on them. She had just returned from the bridge where the new captain of the Herald of Piety had briefed her about how he planned to make for the nearest inhabited world and put in for repairs and to resupply. Brynla was a good man and Agentha was certain he would live up to the high standards of command and piety set by his grandfather. Her only regret was that the old man had died under such horrific circumstances.

From what she could gather from the few crewmen and surviving pilgrims she had spoken to, the operation to cleanse the Herald of its plague zombie infestation had taken less than five minutes, the Space Marines teleporting from skirmish to skirmish and putting down each pocket of infection quickly and ruthlessly. As to the identity of their rescuers, nobody was sure. The best look at them anybody got was from the brief bursts of muzzle flash and that was only enough to positively identify them as Space Marines, their chapter affiliation still as mysterious as how and why they come aboard in the first place. Agentha had her theories but chose to keep them to herself.

She reached the entrance to her chamber and looked back into the candlelit chapel with a sigh. The statue of the Emperor had been moved away from the entrance and the pews rearranged to make it once more appear like a place of worship rather than a refuge from plague zombie invasion. Soon, the faithful would return and her lessons resume, though with smaller congregations and class sizes. The Plague of Unbelief and the mindless violence of those afflicted had accounted for fully two-thirds of the pilgrims and crew aboard and until the Herald reached the next shrineworld, those numbers would not be bolstered.

By the time the ship was once more overcrowded with pilgrims, it would be somebody else delivering the Emperor’s Divine Word from the pulpit, Agentha having already informed the new Captain Keifmann that she would be disembarking when they put in for repairs to try and seek passage on a vessel heading in the direction of Segmentum Solar and the Order of the Fractured Cipher.

She smiled sadly as she watched the dozen sleeping figures huddled under piles of blankets and whispered a prayer for each of them. When the Herald next docked, the newly orphaned would be handed over the planetary authorities and be put into whatever system was in place there for dealing with the parentless, be it indentured servitude, military service or other vocation that benefited the Imperium. Wise to their potential fate, some of the older orphans had already headed towards the depths of the ship, throwing their lot in with the tribes of voidborn and criminal gangs who would grant them protection when the armsmen next swept the ship. Dolgan and the other Sertisian refugee children had not been seen since the ship had been brought back under control and Agentha could only assume that they too had gone below decks.

Turning away, she lit a candle in her Spartan chamber and gathered together her blankets and bedrolls. She had not slept at all in over a day – or slept well in over a year – and with slumber so near, she yawned as she lay down and removed her eyeglasses, carefully placing them on a stool beside her. She scrunched up a blanket to use as a pillow and, closing her eyes, rested her head upon it.

The side of her temple came into contact with something hard nestled into the folds of the blanket and she sat up again, replacing her eyeglasses with one hand while she retrieved the foreign object with the other. Cold and light in her hand, she held up the orb that she had given back to the Space Marine, the runes and symbols no longer evident and the tracery lacking a glow of any hue.

Agentha smiled wearily and put the orb on the stool next to her along with her eyeglasses. The mysteries of the artefact could be fathomed another day. Right now, Emperor willing, she was going to get a long overdue good night’s sleep.

Animus Malorum

L J Goulding

The vaults shook with the ferocity of the conflict raging on the surface. Even here, beneath more than fifty metres of reinforced rockcrete and plasteel, the xenos’ assault sent tremors running through to the very foundations of the basilicae.

Brother Marco knew that it would not be long, now. He had to work quickly.

Each muffled impact brought a fresh rain of debris and masonry dust from the tortured stonework over his head. Beneath the gaze of shrouded saints and the lifeless eyes of uncounted Imperial heroes, he retraced his path with an artisan’s care, and considered whether what he was about to do might be remembered as anything other than sacrilege, once this war was done.

His suit-lamps cast a pair of twin spotlights before him; although the augmented systems of his battleplate could run diagnostics on the circuit before it went live, there was no substitute for one last visual confirmation that the line itself remained unbroken. Stooping low in the cramped confines of the tunnel, he brushed away handfuls of dusty, shattered bone with his gauntleted fingers and slowly, delicately, checked the connections to the forty-sixth demolition charge. In that moment, it would have been difficult to imagine anything else existing in the almost oppressive darkness beyond.

He almost started at the sudden burst of static over the vox-bead in his ear.

Steady…

There were a few seconds of filtered battle din before any voice came. The identi-rune displayed upon his vambrace readout showed that the link had been opened by Captain Erices himself, but it appeared that he was somewhat preoccupied. Marco heard the staccato bark of boltgun fire, the war cries of the greenskins, and the shriek of chainswords hewing xenos flesh.

‘Marco, report.’

The captain’s tone was curt, and spoke of desperation and exhaustion in equal measure. This glorious endeavour had become nothing more than a forlorn hope.

‘It is almost done, my lord,’ Marco replied, one hand cupped over the side of his head as another tremor shook the catacombs. ‘I have sealed off the access tunnels at points nineteen, twenty-six and twenty-seven. The charges are set around all of the primary junctions, and under the foundations of the main shrine complex. I await your command.’

There was another pause. A particularly loud detonation clipped out the vox-channel from Erices’s end, and Marco even felt it reverberate through the gritty flagstones beneath his feet. A greenskin’s roar was cut short by a fresh flurry of bolter fire, and the captain grunted in pain.

‘You are prepared to remain in position, when the order is given?’

‘Of course, my lord. If this holy ground is to be denied to the enemy advance, then we cannot risk a technical failure. This is my true calling, as a Techmarine – my worthy sacrifice will be to ensure that the demolition–’

Fresh static began to creep into the channel, rising in faint pulses like an erratic heartbeat. Marco realised that the identi-rune had flickered out, though Erices’s vital signs remained strong.

‘My lord. My lord, can you hear me?’

Fragmented bursts of vox-chatter, crazed with squealing interference, were the only answer he received. It might have been rad-fallout, or crude xenos teleportation fields fouling the Chapter’s comm-frequencies.

That, or the thousands of tonnes of earth and rock separating Marco from his battle-brothers.

‘My lord, please confirm instruction.’

The channel dissolved into pure white noise, before cutting to a sudden, gaunt silence. Marco cursed and tried to open a fresh link.

Then his suit-lamps flickered; first one then the other guttered out like a weak flame in the night wind. His enhanced sight could still pick out the rough shape of the tunnel stretching away before him in either direction, but the subterranean darkness was almost impenetrable. He recalled leaving his helm upon the hololith table in the billet chambers and gritted his teeth in frustration.

The auspex unit at his belt chimed. He took it up, expecting to see rising rad-levels or the structural integrity of the architecture above him shifting beneath the weight of the apocalyptic battle raging on the surface.

He frowned.

Movement?

There was movement inside the perimeter.

Impossible. All of the access routes had been closed off. There was no way that the xenos could have penetrated beyond–

He froze, feeling a chill creeping through the stale air of the catacombs.

Crude xenos teleportation fields. Had they managed to achieve a locus? Somewhere in the vast underground reliquary chambers where there was more open space, perhaps?

He drew his plasma pistol without thinking, training it into the black maw of the tunnel. There was nowhere for him to go, even had he wished to abandon his sacred appointed duty. So he simply stood where he was, and waited.

The auspex began to chime more insistently. There were multiple contacts, approaching from the eastern vaults. His twin hearts hammered in his chest.

The vox crackled, just for a second, and Marco swore that he heard something beneath it.

A whisper. A voice.

He put a finger to the vox-bead. ‘Brothers, this is Marco. Your signal is weak. I have multiple inbound contacts, presumed hostile. Requesting immediate assistance, or confirmation of the demolition order.’

No response came.

He was alone. Alone in the dark.

But for how long?

The walls shook again, sending a whole alcove of interred remains clattering to the floor. Marco stared down the sight of his pistol, trying in vain to focus on the fitful shadows that were only half-illuminated by the weapon’s power coil.

He glanced at the auspex again. The enemy were almost upon him, though he could hear nothing of their approach. He frowned – orks were not known for their stealth.

Resigned to his fate, he dropped the unit and took up the detonator switch. If Erices and the rest had already fallen, then the order still stood and Marco would not hesitate to bring down the whole basilica district as planned. He sensed that death was near.

And then he saw them.

They were black on black, like deeper shadows in the darkness. They filled the space of the tunnel with their armoured bulk, and their eye lenses burned darkly.

These were not orks. They were Space Marines.

Marco let out a breath that he did not realise he had been holding, and lowered his pistol. ‘Holy Terra, brothers – why did you not observe approach protocols? I could have shot you down where you stood.’

The warriors did not reply, but came on. As they drew nearer, their faceplates resolved into grim death-masks, their livery dark and fearsome.

These were not orks, but nor were they Marco’s Chapter brethren.

With a fresh surge of hyperadrenaline, Marco brought his pistol back up. His back-mounted servo-arm, too, snapped around almost reflexively, the manipulator claw spinning in an improvised combat stance.

‘Hold!’ he called out, raising the detonator. ‘Identify yourselves.’

The silent warriors halted. They gazed impassively back at him, their weapons held low.

Marco took half a step backwards. ‘Identify yourselves. Now. Or I will bury us all.’

Though he could not see clearly how in the gloom, the foremost of them seemed to step aside in the narrow tunnel to allow another of their number to pass. He approached Marco with slow, measured strides, a chainsword sheathed at his hip.

Marco flinched at the sight of the newcomer’s face. This surely could not be any servant of the Emperor…

The warrior’s flame-touched pauldron bore a discoloured scroll, upon which was a name. It was a name that, for some inexplicable reason, Marco found that he did not like to linger upon for too long.

CENTURIUS.

Erices fired, felling a howling greenskin at almost point-blank range. Without pause, he spun inside the guard of another as it lunged, his sword flashing out to spill the brute’s innards onto the dusty, rubble-strewn earth. Then he stamped down upon the throat of one that had stumbled mid-charge, before striking the head from the shoulders of a fourth.

There was no time to confirm each kill. The xenos were seemingly without number; it was as though the city had fallen beneath a dirty green tide and the only men who would not drown would be those who could kick back to the surface, with blade or boltgun. The battle-brothers of Seventh Company had fought to the bitter end, but now it seemed that the tide would claim them too.

Amidst the riotous din of battle, Erices thumbed the vox-link in his helm again.

‘Marco! This is Captain Erices – damn you, fire the charges! We are overrun!’

The captain’s breathing was laboured. His breastplate was already cleaved open, down to the bloody, armoured undersuit beneath it, though that was only the most noticeable of his many injuries. Mercifully, the heady cocktail of supra-hormones and armour-shunted stimulants coursing through his system would keep the pain at bay for as long as…

Well, long enough, at least.

‘Marco, respond!’

Another thunderous impact shook the street some two hundred metres away, the blast hurling dozens of ragged xenos bodies – and body parts – into the outer walls of the buildings on either side. The line-breaker tank squadrons had suffered heavy losses themselves, but at Erices’s command had pulled back to the basilicae, firing as they went. Only two of the six Vindicators now remained, but they would continue to reap a bloody harvest until their magazines ran dry, or the enemy overwhelmed them.

A stray shot clipped Erices’s pauldron, spinning him around and pitching him to his knees in the rubble. Within the space of a heartbeat, three of his surviving warriors had muscled through the press of bodies to shield him, determined to protect their captain with their lives. It would likely come to that, too.

With a roar of effort, he powered himself back to his feet and impaled a hulking greenskin with his blade as it shouldered into the group. The beast roared and spat thick blood into the captain’s face, before swinging its right arm up – a rusted, clanking pneumatic claw that fixed around Erices’s sword arm at the wrist, and began to close.

Diving in, Brother Janner whipped out his combat blade and stabbed repeatedly at the crude pistons, but the beast merely swatted him aside and howled at Erices again.

The captain could not pull his sword free from the ork’s guts, nor could he find purchase enough to free his arm from the grip of the claw. Ceramite squealed and integrity warnings flashed inside his visor display. He planted a boot into the dying creature’s chest as it sank to the ground, desperate to haul himself away before it could sheer his hand off. He felt the bones begin to grind under the inescapable pressure; then, first the ulna and then the radius splintered like dry wood. Erices gritted his teeth against the jagged blooms of pain.

Bellowing a wordless war cry, Janner hurled himself back at the beast. He had taken up a chainsword from one of his fallen brothers, and hacked again and again at the greenskin’s elbow joint, the teeth of the blade spraying blood and pneumatic fluids in a foul rain.

The creature shrieked in agony as, with one final overhand blow, Janner severed its mechanical arm before swinging around again to cleave through its bullish neck.

The sudden dead weight of the claw pulled Erices down, though mercifully he fell away from the dead greenskin and his sword slid free of its belly. He toppled onto his side, trying to open the seized mechanism and release his crushed wrist while Brother Janner and the others laid about themselves, driving the horde back.

Two more Vindicator shells streaked low over their heads from behind. The first tore into the arched fascia of a scriptorium building, filling the street with shrapnel and billowing plascrete dust, while the second blasted out the pedestal of the towering bronze statue of Saint Theobellius that dominated the ruined plaza beyond the next intersection. For an agonising moment the saint appeared to stumble, before pitching forwards with a groan of twisting metal, falling to crush those hapless greenskins who had somehow managed to survive the explosion.

Pinned in place and unable to release his sword hilt, Erices wiped the xenos blood from his helmet lenses with his free hand. He tried to open a link to Marco again.

‘Marco… this is… Erices,’ he gasped, his chest feeling leaden and tight. ‘There are only… seventeen of us left. Make… your sacrifice. Destroy the–’

Janner’s voice cut in over the vox. ‘My lord. Beyond the plaza. Look.’

Erices twisted his body, trying to turn and look back towards the fallen saint. In the shadow of the Cathedral of the Emperor’s Undying Magnificence, the ork advance had faltered. There seemed to be some confusion – they were firing in opposite directions.

Were they attacking one another? Was this some fractious display of animosity between the warbands, at their moment of victory?

No.

The captain blinked hard behind his visor, trying to clear his vision.

Surely, it was some madness, some illusion or hallucination brought on by the many physical traumas that his transhuman system had endured. A Space Marine might only withstand so much, he reasoned, and when his body was not allowed to fail then his mind might step in to take the hit instead.

Surely, his eyes now betrayed him. Only, no matter how hard he tried, he could not reconcile the scene that appeared to be unfolding before him with the reality that he had known only moments earlier.

Darkly armoured Space Marines strode out from the low, balustraded walkways at the base of the cathedral, their bolters blazing magnesium-bright as they cut into the xenos ranks. Through the haze of smoke and dust, more than half a company of battle-fresh angels of death stalked down the bewildered orks, lashing out with flickering blades or unleashing gouts of green-white flame from their strange weaponry. Their livery was unknown to him, a scattered collection of bonework, fire and leering skulls upon plate as black as the depths of night, without any uniformity or suggestion of rank that Erices could discern.

Something about that gave him pause; where he should have been rallying his own men and issuing orders for a combined counter-offensive, instead he found himself transfixed by the sight of this silent, dark brotherhood.

At their head fought… who? An officer? A champion? The warrior was unhelmed, sallow and pale skinned. He hewed left and right with a chainsword whose motorised whine seemed to pierce the melee like a banshee’s call, setting Erices’s teeth on edge even through the filters of his armour’s auto-senses. Though he was more than a hundred metres distant, the warrior’s eyes blazed with murderous intent, and his resolute brothers followed him as he cut a new swathe into the xenos lines.

Before this hellish host, against all reason, the orks began to fall back.

Not daring to question the providence that had delivered the remains of his company from certain death, Erices returned his attention to the severed claw still gripping his ruined vambrace. As Janner and the rest joined the rout, the captain started to feel the inexorable pull of unconsciousness tugging at his limbs, and only then did he notice just how much of his own blood had slicked the rubble beneath him. With trembling fingers, he tried to prise the claw open even as the sounds of battle seemed to fade into the grey fog that was growing in his head.

Then the vox-link chimed, clear and clean.

‘Captain,’ came Brother Marco’s voice in his ear, ‘the light of Terra shines upon us, for certain.’

Erices looked back towards the cathedral, and saw the silhouette of the Techmarine trudging up from the same walkways – the entrance to the vaults beneath the shrine complex. He held the detonator switch in his hand, with the safety catch closed.

Though he meant to reprimand Marco for failing to trigger the demolition, Erices found that he could only let out a weak, juddering gasp before his legs gave out and darkness took him.

It was a fearful darkness, haunted by half-glimpsed faces and half-recalled legends.

Light. Cold and sterile.

The chemical tang of counter-septic. The faintest scent of burnt metal.

There was a pressure in Erices’s chest, and a pleasing analgesic numbness to the lack of sensation in his extremities. His cerebral interface jacks ached, his armour clearly having been pulled from his body by force.

He opened his eyes slowly, trying to counter the disconcerting spin of the chamber. The elderly regimental surgeon, Gideon, was working on him, kneeling at his side and assisted by one of the drafted medicae personnel from the civilian sanctuaries. The girl seemed too young to be proficient with a scalpel.

Rheum-blurred, stimm-addled, Erices winced when he realised that his shattered wrist was open to the air.

His eyes rolled with the movement of the chamber, and he turned his head away. He tried to reach up with his other hand to remove the ventilator mask from his face, but found that he could not summon the strength.

Two figures stood at the foot of his pallet.

He recognised Marco by the bulky servo-arm folded at his back. The Techmarine raised a gauntleted hand.

‘My lord, be still. Let the sawbones do his work.’

Gideon grunted, his expression haggard and weary. He was holding a retractor pin between his teeth until he was ready to insert it. ‘Aye, captain. You risk worsening the tendon and nerve damage if you move. Besides, this young adept seems to have no stomach for her work today, and my task is already hard enough.’ The old man sniffed, distracted. ‘I’ve seen some strange and terrible things in my time, but this...’

Erices turned to regard the medicae adept again. Above her surgical mask, her eyes were raw with tears and her gloved hands trembled uncontrollably. As he looked at her, she stole another fearful glance towards the foot of the pallet before sobbing openly and murmuring to herself.

She was terrified. Even someone as unused to human contact as Erices could see that.

‘Ack, damn you then,’ Gideon snarled, snatching the suction tube from her quivering grasp. ‘Get back to your refuge. I don’t need you.’

The girl blundered to her feet, bawling and making a dash for the chamber doors. The surgeon ignored her, muttering quietly.

‘I’ll not see you ended by civilian incompetence, captain, after surviving all the terrors of the greenskin horde.’

Erices let out a pained gasp of laughter, before sucking down the cool air of the makeshift apothecarion in greater lungfuls through the ventilator. His eyes settled again upon Marco and his companion.

For a long while, he stared at them as Gideon closed him up.

Eventually, the old man rose to his feet, wiping his hands on a blood-stained apron.

‘My lord, I’ve done the best I can. You will not be combat-ready for at least forty-eight hours, not until the grafts in your chest pink up and the sealant gel has hardened. Your wrist will be stiff for a while, though. Your fencing days are over.’

The poor attempt at levity was met with silence. Gideon shrugged, being careful to keep his back to the chamber.

‘You only narrowly escaped an augmetic. Let me know how you feel in a week, and if you’re not happy with the movement recovery then I’m sure Brother Marco will be only too happy to take you for a bionic fitting.’

Erices could only continue to stare.

The surgeon frowned. ‘I’ll leave you to rest. Your body will recover with time, my lord.’

As Gideon left, Marco stood quietly, watching him go. In the corridor beyond the chamber, the local Militarum troops waited uneasily – some knelt in prayer, while others tried to steal a look into the apothecarion before the door pistoned closed. None of them seemed particularly concerned by the war that until very recently had threatened to be the final chapter in the chronicle of this world.

Erices continued to stare. He could feel his heart rates quickening.

The Techmarine smiled. ‘My lord, it gladdens me to see that you remain among us still. I was convinced that you had fallen, when we lost contact before.’ He gestured to an arming post in the corner of the chamber, lit on either side with votive candles and incense. ‘As you can see, I have restored your pistol and your helm, and they await your inspection, when you are ready. I regret that your battleplate and sword will require my further attentions before they are worthy of blessing once more.’

The captain wheezed in groggy disbelief. Was Marco blind?

He tried to speak, but his tongue felt thick and heavy. He swallowed a few times, and each time it caught in his throat.

‘Captain, is something wrong?’ Marco asked, leaning closer to him. ‘Let me know what you would have me do, and I will see to it.’

Weakly, Erices pulled the ventilator mask aside, and coughed bloody spittle onto the back of his hand. It felt like his lungs were filled with razor blades. Each breath was a fresh agony, but he managed to choke out a single word.

‘Dead…’

Marco nodded, and straightened. ‘Let me bring you water, my lord. You are weak, and old Gideon, for all his talents, is not blessed with gentle hands.’

The Techmarine crossed the room to a still-pump and basin, and drew a cupful of cold, slightly brackish water. Erices lay helpless on the pallet, his chest heaving; he could no longer tell if the whirling disorientation he felt was a result of the injuries he had suffered, or the maddening horror of the sight before him.

Marco brought the metal cup to the captain’s unsteady lips.

‘Here, my lord. Drink. It will help.’

Erices gagged, but managed to take a few painful sips. True enough, it soothed the wretchedness of his throat, and he shifted his weight to bring his head and shoulders up. He blinked, and stared hard. Once again, he willed himself to disbelieve what he saw, but to no avail.

All the while, the other figure remained utterly silent.

‘Marco,’ the captain whispered. ‘There is a dead soul here.’

Marco rose again, holding the cup in both hands. ‘Not dead, my lord,’ he said, looking down at Erices. ‘Not in the sense that you or I might have once understood the term, at least. Dead men do not perform the Emperor’s will.’

The words confused Erices. It felt like they should be true, their logic undeniable – and yet, something was amiss. The creature that regarded him with those cold, lifeless eyes had no place in the material realm. Of that he was certain.

‘Abomination,’ he muttered. ‘That’s what it is. This is no servant of the Emperor.’

‘Ah, but that’s exactly what I thought too, my lord! When he came to me, down in the catacombs, at first I thought that we had been undone by sorcery or the perils of the warp. Mine is a rational calling, requiring a specifically practical mindset. I understand things in terms of quantifiable evidence, cause and effect, and physical truths.’ Marco scoffed. ‘What place is there in that world-view for spectral warriors and their ghost-fire?’

Walking slowly around the pallet, he gestured to the dark figure.

‘The people of this world cried out for deliverance, and when our noble company could not provide it, fate stepped in. He is their saviour, just as he is ours.’ After a moment’s contemplation, Marco smiled again. ‘Just as he is yours, my lord.’

Erices found that he did not like the tone of the statement, nor the implications behind it. But instead of anger or indignation, an irrational, animal panic began to build in his wounded, transhuman hearts.

‘Marco...’ he gasped. ‘Marco, why does it not speak?’

The Techmarine looked slightly baffled. ‘But he does speak, my lord. He speaks to me. He tells me that his name is Brother-Sergeant Attica Centurius, and that he and his brothers were sent here to ensure that the basilicae could not fall.’

The ghoulish figure still did not move, though for the first time Erices saw that it held in its gauntlets a blackened wooden box, perhaps thirty centimetres across. It held the box as though it were a treasure, or at least something to be guarded jealously. Marco did not seem to find anything unusual in that fact.

‘He tells me that there must be a reckoning, Captain Erices. A reckoning for what has taken place here today. He tells me that no miracle is without cost, no loss without ultimate recompense.’ Then Marco’s expression became darker, and more stern. ‘There is a rising tally, captain,’ he said, ‘and the debt must be paid in souls.’

At that, Erices balled his one good fist and slouched forwards on the pallet. His words were slurred with the blood on his teeth, but his rage lent him conviction.

‘Does it threaten the people of this world, Brother Marco? Does this revenant creature hope that by masquerading as one of the Emperor’s finest and walking among us as some kind of hero, it can take whatsoever it pleases from the Imperium?’ He lurched, bringing his hand up to point accusingly at the figure, in spite of the pain. ‘I shall not countenance it! Not while I yet draw breath! I would spend my own life to defend the people and the sanctity of the reliquary-cities, be it from orks, heretics or even this half-dead filth.’

The cup slipped from Marco’s gauntlets, and it clanged to the floor in a wet splatter. He looked aghast.

‘My lord!’ he exclaimed, before regaining some sense of decorum and lowering his voice. ‘I might expect such a reaction from the common soldiery, or those poor, ignorant wretches who cower in the civilian shelters, but not from you.’

He raised his hands placatingly, sparing a look towards the silent figure.

‘There have been… incidents. Panic. As thankful as they are for the intervention of Centurius and his warriors, the people are unsettled by them. You have seen this for yourself – they fear them almost as much as they did the xenos brutes. The war is as good as over, but still we should seek a resolution quickly. Out of respect for the brother-sergeant’s heroism, of course, but also so that we might spare the survivors any further unnecessary distress. Let us repay the debt, my lord, and let the Legion be on their way.’

Alarm fluttered in Erices’s gut.

‘The Legion?’ he croaked. ‘I see only the ghoul before me.’

Marco nodded. ‘They remain with us still, in the halls beyond, though it is only this unfinished matter that holds them here.’

He pointed to a battered old viewscreen mounted high up in the corner of the chamber. Erices strained to look, pain cramping his chest as he turned.

It was a closed circuit security feed. Though the frames were flickering and indistinct, they showed more than a dozen of the darkly armoured warriors standing sentinel over the billet and armoury chambers. They were still – almost unnaturally so – and stood in stark contrast to the few remaining battle-brothers of Seventh Company who tended to their duties as though nothing were out of the ordinary. The dismounted Vindicator crews were hauling a refitted cannon barrel up from the reserves, even as a distraught mortal retainer scuttled past them in the opposite direction.

The captain squinted. ‘Do our brothers not see them?’

‘They do, my lord,’ Marco replied, ‘though I have already spoken with Janner and the rest – the Legion will remain watchful while we tend to our fallen.’

Erices saw, then, the bodies that lay in the open quadrangle outside.

There were easily three score armoured forms, shrouded in rough tarpaulins and rendered as grainy silhouettes upon the screen. He winced and looked away for a moment, clutching feebly at his chest, though the pain he felt was not from the wounds that he had suffered.

‘Brothers. Oh, my brothers... Forgive me.’

The feed tracked slowly to the left, to reveal the company Apothecary going about the sombre task of reclaiming the warriors’ gene-seed. Gideon had joined him, the old man’s head bowed reverentially as he catalogued each retrieval on a data-slate.

Marco, too, bowed his head. ‘Rest well, brothers,’ he murmured.

Erices could not bear to watch for a moment longer. He slumped to one side on the pallet, trying to turn his back to the viewscreen.

‘Is this it?’ he choked, his words almost failing him. ‘Is this the price of our victory?’

The Techmarine inclined his head. ‘The price, perhaps, but not the true cost. As I have said already, captain, there is a debt here to be repaid.’

Erices’s sorrow soured once more. ‘You speak of debts, and tallies. Speak more plainly. Does this Centurius hold me to blame for the dreadful loss that our Chapter has borne, here? Or does our tragedy perhaps reflect poorly upon his own efforts this day? We called out to the others, Marco – you know that. We sent out our pleas for assistance, and while some did respond, not a single company came. For whatever reason, our Chapter-brothers abandoned us. They abandoned this world to the horde.’

Marco stood, listening quietly. His impassive, sympathetic demeanour was the foil to Erices’s grief and frustration, and the captain felt his voice cracking as he went on.

‘I will take the blame for the deaths of those under my command. I will take the blame for my poor tactical decisions, or the loss of the outlying complexes. But I will never accept that this was all that could have been done here. No one can blame me for the xenos reaching this far.’ Erices gritted his teeth. ‘We were not sufficient, Marco. We alone were not enough to save this world, and I’ll be damned if I ever say otherwise.’

From the pallet, Erices finally found the strength of will to lock eyes with the ghastly figure of Centurius. He did not falter for even a moment.

‘We alone were not enough,’ he repeated, at length. ‘If I must repay you, then it will be only for my failings as a commander in the field. I will not accept responsibility for the judgement that stranded us here. We could never have won this war.’

Slowly, Centurius shook his head, though his eyes remained bereft of anything resembling emotion.

Erices frowned. Marco leaned towards him.

‘You misunderstand, my lord. The debt is not yours.’

Confusion fogged Erices’s thoughts. ‘But, you said–’

Releasing the corroded seals, Centurius drew back the lid of the wooden box to reveal what lay within.

For what seemed like the longest while, the chamber was as quiet as a tomb.

Erices swallowed, steadying himself. He felt cold. Detached.

‘What… What is that?’

‘It is the Animus Malorum, my lord,’ Marco replied. ‘It is the most sacred artefact of the Legion. Brother-Sergeant Centurius would have you know that your courage and honour are second to none – you remained steadfast and true in the face of overwhelming odds, and doubtless you would have led us all to a glorious end even though you knew we could never prevail over the xenos. But this world has great significance, even if that significance has been forgotten by the Imperium at large. He could not allow us to destroy the reliquaries. He could not allow the Animus Malorum to be lost.’

Time seemed to stretch out for an eternity in each direction. Erices could not tear his gaze from the relic – the curve of the polished brow, the deep hollows of the empty sockets. It all seemed oddly familiar.

‘The debt…’

Marco’s voice became somewhat more stern again. ‘The debt is the Imperium’s, my lord. For time immemorial, the Legion has watched over the galaxy. They are the last hope, the thin line drawn against the enemies of humanity, and they will stand where even we cannot.’ He shook his head mournfully. ‘But no one, save perhaps the almighty Emperor himself, can ward off death forever, and so much has now been lost. The tally is always rising, my lord. The Legion has suffered–’

Without warning, Centurius’s eyes snapped towards the Techmarine, glaring hard. Marco bowed his head in apology.

‘Forgive me. It is not my place to speak of such things.’

Erices barely heard him. He was entranced.

‘What does it want from me, Marco?’

Surprisingly, it was Centurius that answered, though his voice was just as haunting and terrible as Erices could ever have imagined.

‘We would have you, Captain Erices. We would claim you as a worthy member of the Legion. You were ready to give your life in defence of this world, and even in death to deny it to the foe. From the bones of your noble kind were the foundations of the Imperium once built. Where you lead, others follow without question.’

Erices could barely speak. Disbelief, horror. Righteousness. Humility. All fought within his being as he struggled to take in the dead warrior’s words, though he found that he did not want to hear them.

‘As a martyr, you would be wasted. As a legionnaire, you will be eternal.’

Fumbling weakly at the edge of the pallet with his good hand, Erices tried to reach out to Marco.

‘Brother… Brother, am I… dead?’

The Techmarine smiled one last time. ‘Not dead, my lord. Dead men do not perform the Emperor’s will.’

His eyes growing dim and his gaze drifting, Erices lay back upon the pallet. He would have sworn that he could hear voices in the growing shadows at the corners of the chamber. ‘What must I do?’ he whispered.

Marco laid a hand upon the captain’s brow, his fingers tracing the three titanium service studs embedded there.

‘Give yourself to it, my lord. Give yourself to the Legion, and redress the balance.’

Erices stared at the polished, oversized skull in the box held out before him – into the infinite, timeless abyss that yawned in its sightless eyes. It was like a grim mirror held up to reveal the fate of all men that lived and died in this cold and pitiless galaxy.

And in that moment, he saw the truth of Centurius’s brotherhood.

It was the truth, too, of the Animus Malorum, and Erices would have wept for them all, had he any longer possessed eyes, or hearts, or even a soul of his own.

Brother Marco offered up a prayer, and drew the thin blanket up to cover his captain’s lifeless features.

‘He will be missed,’ he said, truthfully. ‘Of all his brother-captains, he was the most loved by the warriors of the Chapter. Word will reach the others, and they will mourn him. Perhaps they will finally see the folly of–’

He started at the sound of a crash in the hallway outside the apothecarion chamber. A woman shrieked in terror, somewhere further away.

Marco spun to look up at the pict-feed viewscreen, but it was fouled with formless static. Every frame was dead. Cursing, he reached instead for the vox-bead in his ear.

‘Brother Janner, send a–’

Bolter fire erupted over the open channel. Marco heard the cries of his battle-brothers, and the screams of terrified mortals.

‘Janner!’ he yelled, making for the chamber door. ‘Janner, report!’

No reply came. Nothing coherent, at least.

He barged through into the hallway, only to be greeted by a gout of green flame that overwhelmed its target and licked hungrily at the bare walls. The passage blazed with spectral light as the burning form of Brother Janner staggered into view around the corner, his flesh crisping and his eyes burning white-hot in the unnatural conflagration.

Marco drew his plasma pistol, but could only watch as his brother’s silhouetted form crashed to its knees and toppled forwards onto the flagstones.

In spite of the fire’s intensity, barely a few metres away a pair of drafted civilian personnel in grubby fatigues cowered behind an upended table. Both of them were screaming and screaming, though they seemed untouched by the emerald heat that spiked hazard warnings all across Marco’s battleplate systems.

Then, one of the Legion warriors stepped into view.

Wreathed in flame, he was like some spectral, avenging angel of darkest myth, and his cold glare froze Marco’s hearts where he stood.

Forgetting his pistol almost entirely the Techmarine turned to pull back into the apothecarion chamber, only to draw up face-to-face with the grim form of Brother-Sergeant Centurius.

‘T-This…’ he stammered. ‘This isn’t w-what you…’

Marco’s protestations died in his throat. He realised that it did not matter what he had thought before.

Centurius raised one hand, the Animus Malorum gripped firmly in his outstretched gauntlet. The disembodied skull’s eyes now shimmered with a malignant, ethereal radiance.

‘Serve,’ the revenant sergeant intoned. ‘Serve or die.’

‘No!’ Marco cried, bringing his pistol up. He opened fire, the bright plasma flare briefly illuminating the bonework upon Centurius’s armour. But the shots passed through the legionnaire, blasting impotently into the wall beyond and splattering super-heated matter in wide bursts down to the floor.

‘No!’ he cried again. ‘Erices did not speak for all of us in this!’

Centurius seemed to consider this for a moment, before unsheathing his chainsword. ‘Indeed. Your captain would have given his life selflessly and unconditionally in the service of the Emperor. But your sacrifice was hollow. Expected. Commanded. For that, your soul is forfeit.’

Marco faltered, his vision swimming. The legionnaire was no more than a metre away from him.

‘The debt is too great, and the tally is rising. With each passing decade it is rising.’

A cold numbness crept into his fingers, and the pistol fell from his grip. He could hear nothing but his brothers’ death-agonies over the vox-link, before it crackled into a frightful silence.

‘Not for you, the immortal servitude of the Legion. You will pay what is owed.’

The abyss beckoned. Marco felt it gaping beneath him, shot through with the howling, tormented souls of all those who had been found wanting in their final moments of service to the Emperor.

The Animus Malorum. It was all that he could see.

Then Centurius touched the unearthly relic upon Marco’s forehead, and the Techmarine knew that he was undone.

THE DARK HOLLOWS OF MEMORY

David Annandale

This deep into the vaults, he could touch the silence. Gosta treasured those moments when he knew that the absence of sound was the true state of the world, and not limited to his perception of it. When the silence inside and outside his head were the same, he could begin to hear.

He had been deaf for over a half-century now. He had memories of sounds, but they were distant, fading abstractions, free of regret. He regarded his condition as an advantage to his calling as a scribe. It was his armour against distraction. Blessed with adamantine concentration, he was able to navigate the holdings of the Librarium with an ease and to a degree that was the envy of his fellows. Few of them ever ventured down to the level where he now stood. The memories here were so ancient, their arrangement so arcane, that any quest that led here was doomed to futility. Not so for Gosta. There was an order in these depths. Still, he could only understand the vaguest contours of the pattern, and he knew he would die long before he could master it. The challenge and the duty enthralled him, though. And to learn the pattern, to be guided by the Librarium, he would descend to the levels of true silence, and listen.

The Imperium’s memory had a physical form. It inhabited vast houses. The Great Librarium of Mnemosyne was one of the largest. Above ground, it was a colossus, its squat, domed tower rivalling the height of the spires of the Cathedral of Saint Charteris. The two giants rose from the centre of Arkio, Mnemosyne’s capital. They faced each other from either end of Monument Way, a graveless cemetery where memory was fashioned out of stone and iron. As monolithic as the Librarium’s silhouette was, what reared to the heavens was a mere hint of its true size. Its vaults descended for kilometres beneath the earth. It was a repository of records from a dozen sectors, going back thousands of years. Its collections were growing all the time. It required an army of scribes just to keep on top of the influx of new memories. It needed a second to handle the requests for the disinterring of old ones: the books, scrolls, ledgers, maps, edicts, records and thousands upon thousands of other physical traces of the Imperium’s thoughts.

Gosta had come looking for a very old one, and he had found it one level up. It had taken him three hours to make the journey, and he took the opportunity to descend a bit further, to listen to the silence with special attention. It was calling him today. He had thought he felt a tug when he had woken in the dormitorium midway towards the surface. Now he was sure. He stood at the entrance to the vaulted archive. The darkness between the stacks was so huge that the lumen globes were as weak as candles. In the gloom, a secret was waiting. It was reaching out for him, filling him with premonition. It had been here for millennia, forgotten, its memory inert. But something was coming and soon. Imminence began to crawl down his spine.

He didn’t understand what was happening to him. Beyond the question of skill, he had always taken pride in his intuitive sense of where to look for the most deeply buried memories. This was different. He wasn’t looking for this secret. It was pulling him. The curiosity he had felt earlier had become something strange, powerful and disturbing. He prayed that he was feeling the touch of the Emperor’s will, guiding him on a destined path. Instead, the prayers felt hollow.

Mouth dry, Gosta stepped inside the hall. The globes seemed to dim as he walked forward. Shelves twenty metres high disappeared into the gloom. The tops off their ladders were invisible. The nearest servitors were three levels up. Anything Gosta wanted he would have to climb to get himself. If anything wanted him there would be no one to hear his cry.

He was frightened by the imminence. He was also mesmerized. The secret must be tremendous for it to matter so much now, after being hidden deep in the archival strata for an age. The call overcame his resistance. He walked deeper into the dark. The globes flickered. The more the light failed, the more clearly he knew where he must go. The secret was buried in time and night. He would find it in a recess at the edge of all knowing.

Lights out. He was surrounded by the truth of dark and silence. He felt the stone beneath his feet. He felt something touch his heart with a clawtip of cold stone. It was the truth of memory’s night reaching out for him. He took another step.

The ornate band that clasped his left wrist vibrated. The dim light returned. The call vanished. Gosta blinked. Premonition remained, an anxiety gnawing at his chest. But now he had an immediate duty to answer. He was being summoned to the surface. It was time to join in a great act of worship. Winter was here.

Hatia Keremon, Imperial Commander of Mnemosyne, stood in her box at the rear of the cathedral. Before her, thousands of the faithful of Arkio filled the pews. More than a third of the congregation was made up of scribes from the Librarium. The more senior ones, the ones who controlled the access to the lower vaults, sat in the front rows. At the far end of the nave, in a pulpit suspended above the altar by an iron framework, Cardinal Reinhard presided over the most important ceremony of the year. The Rite of Endurance sought the Emperor’s strength and guidance for the months ahead. The blank season had come. It was not the cold and the damp that tried the citizens of Mnemosyne’s inhabited northern archipelago. What wore at the spirit was the endless limbo that came with them. The evening was still clear when Keremon had arrived at the cathedral. The muffled tolling of the bells audible over Reinhard’s sermon told her that the she would step out into a very different night when she left.

Reinhard had already been speaking for an hour. He would carry on for at least that long again. Keremon did not begrudge him the time. The Rite was the one day that the cardinal was preeminent on Mnemosyne, when the people had the greatest need for spiritual strength. The rest of the year her grasp on the planet’s political reins was unchallenged, if unstated. Her greater clout was due to her dual position: the Imperial Commander of Mnemosyne was also, thanks to millennia of tradition, the High Curator of the Librarium. She did not, however, believe in antagonising the Ecclesiarchy needlessly. The cardinal, furthermore, was a vital tyrant of orthodoxy. Mnemosyne had a constant need for his teaching. Especially today.

Keremon’s legs were beginning to feel numb when Reinhard said, ‘The Emperor’s light is eternal.’ He was reaching the end of his exhortation. ‘Go forth with its strength. It will illuminate our path. Those who doubt this shall be lost. Extend them no pity.’

The doors of the cathedral swung open. The sound of the bells became deafening, their clamour both defiance and warning. Keremon took her cue. She descended from her box. She assumed her role as the planet’s secular power drawing force from the spiritual one, and led the congregation out into the cathedral’s square. It overlooked Monument Way. A few kilometres distant, the Librarium brooded, the lights from its narrow stained-glass windows adding a dull red glow to the night. Keremon advanced to the edge of the square and gazed up at the stars. Behind her, the people spread out and followed her example. It would be their last chance for months.

The temperature was dropping fast. The humidity was soaring. The first wisps of mist were snaking along the ground. Keremon waited. She waited for the skies to give the sign that was the mark of winter’s arrival and the reminder of light beyond the blankness to come.

The meteor shower began. Mnemosyne’s passage through the debris field began every year on this date. Keremon knew that there was no link between that event and the planet’s sudden descent into the cold season. Even so, the coincidence was trigger enough for awe. The Rite was the shield that prevented the awe from turning into dread. The streaks through the dark soon became several each minute. Keremon watched them, savouring the brief scars of light. When she felt strong enough, she looked down.

The fog was here. It had rolled in from Arkio’s bay, and was now moving past the Librarium. It was a wall of grey-white nothing. It was higher than almost all the city’s spires. Only the peaks of the Librarium and the cathedral would still be above it come morning. The fog would settle over the islands of Mnemosyne, shrouding the people, frustrating vision and purpose. It would not leave until the spring equinox. In a world turned into grey shapes and endless absence, it was easy to despair. The reaffirmation of faith was the only succour available to the majority of the population. The High Curator and her scribes were more fortunate. The Librarium’s demands and purpose were perpetual. It gave direction. Inside its walls, the preservation and resurrection of memory carried on.

As the fog drew nearer, Keremon turned to the sky once more to watch the shower for a last few minutes. She saw a streak that was much closer to the vertical than the others. It did not vanish. It was joined by another. Then there were several. There were murmurs of wonder from the crowd. Then the wonder turned into fear.

The shooting stars were drop pods.

The mortals made it too easy. Their defeat was a given, of course. The orbital defences went down before the cannons of the ship that had once been the Gladius-class frigate Grave Sentinel, but was now the Herald of Anguish. The Thunderhawk Iron Despair followed the drop pods, delivering a Rhino and a Predator to the field. As it descended, it encountered a squadron of aging Lightning fighters that the Mnemosyne gatekeepers sent to intercept. The engagement was brief. The flaming wreckage of the Imperial aircraft was already on the ground when the Despair released its cargo. There was a full company of the gatekeepers in the city. Its soldiers charged into the gathering fog to repel the invaders at the drop sites along Monument Way. They rushed to fight five squads of Space Marines and their heavy support. Within minutes, the Imperials were all dead. It would be long hours before any reinforcements could arrive.

Easy. Too easy. How could the mortals learn the lesson if they died so quickly?

Not that they mattered. It was the civilians and the planetary leadership who would feel the true benefit of Akror’s teaching. They, too, were being most cooperative. They fled, bleating, back into the cathedral. There they cowered, hemmed in, a concentrated mass waiting for his attention. Akror stood in the doorway with two squads of his brothers for a full minute before wading in. He let the congregation see what had come for them. He waited for the whimpering vermin to read the message his power armour bore. Black and crimson met, their intersection becoming the fusion of blood with ebony flame. That much, these fools could understand. They might also understand the surface meaning of the shrunken skulls that dangled from his belt, the bandolier of fingers that Luctus had draped over his pauldron. The deeper signification of the fetishes would be lost on the mortals. No matter. This was just the beginning of revelation.

It was time to begin the lesson in earnest. He began to walk forwards. He spoke, his helmet speaker sending his voice across the space of the cathedral. ‘I am Akror,’ he said, ‘captain of the Company of Misery.’ His brothers followed a few paces behind. ‘We have come to free you.’

He stopped at the rearmost pew. The humans who crouched behind it shrank further to the floor. He reached down and let his left hand hover back and forth over three of them, suggesting indecision. He saw their eyes widen with mortal fear and desperate hope. Good. They were taking in his teaching, even if they didn’t realize it yet. He snatched a preacher up by his robes and held the man aloft. ‘You don’t believe me,’ he said, addressing both the individual and the multitude. ‘But I do not lie.’ He brought the preacher closer. With his right hand he tore off the man’s nose. The preacher screamed, then began to gag on his own blood.

Akror paused, letting the shrieks and the writhing wash over the crowd. ‘This is liberation,’ he said, and went back to work. Through the splintering of bone and the tearing of muscle, he coaxed the ecclesiarch’s cries to new heights. ‘It is liberation from the lie of hope.’ He continued until the screams faded to moans and then to silence. Even then, the man’s limbs twitched for a few more seconds. ‘Look how hard freedom is,’ Akror said. ‘Seconds from death and his instinct is still to fight me, as if this time, in this final moment, he will pry himself from my grasp. What does this hope do for him? Nothing. I repeat: I do not lie. But this priest is lying. To himself.’ He tore the man’s head from his body. ‘And there: an end to his lies.’ He threw the body to the ground and crushed the head beneath his boot, continuing his slow march down the central aisle of the nave.

‘And what of this priest’s friends?’ He did not look back. ‘Are they learning what they should?’ Behind him, he heard Luctus and the others stop before the pew. ‘Are they convinced of the reality of luck? Are they telling themselves that they had just had a narrow escape? That what happened to the priest could have happened to them, but they were spared by the caprice of fate? Yes. I believe that is what they think. That is the lesson they have chosen to embrace. They are wrong to do so. They must be chastised. And freed.’

He kept walking, but stopped speaking. He listened to the sounds of his brothers reinforcing the sermon. There was the crunch and splash of blades sinking into bodies, then a dull roar. That was Skleeros turning his flamer on the entire length of the pew and the one beyond it. The roar ended, giving way to the crack of flames and agonizing, fading howls. Akror savoured the stench of burning flesh as it filtered in through his helmet’s grille.

The moans and the cries of the rest of the congregation began to grow again. The first intimations of the deep truth were sinking in. Akror knew that the process could be gradual. It had taken the company long enough. Centuries upon centuries, during which the Desolate Brotherhood had served the Emperor and clung to that wretched illusion. Centuries upon centuries of missions, each more brutalizing than the last. The Chapter punished endlessly for its loyalty, until, on Misery, the disaster that had dissolved hope away forever, revealing the truth of bone and agony beneath the lie.

Yes, the process took time. And time was at a premium. Akror could wish that Mnemosyne remain forever within the hands of the Company of Misery, but he would content himself with the impact this mission would have on its people and on the psyche of the Imperium. So he accelerated the lesson. He fired his bolter into the crowd. He pulled the trigger in short bursts, pivoting to spread the mass-reactive death to as wide an area as possible. The rounds were designed to kill armoured foes. Their effect on this weak prey was devastating. Heads and torsos vanished. Blood sprayed in great arcs. In between each burst, Akror resumed speaking. ‘Hope is a lie,’ he repeated. ‘We believed in it once. So we know how you think. You cling to the idea that if there is life, there is hope. Of course you do. We will pry that lie from your clutches.’

He used a sustained burst now, killing dozens. Halfway to the transept, he maglocked the bolter to his thigh and switched to his chainsword. Blade growling, he began to work his way up and down the rows, reducing the humans to slabs of bloody meat. ‘This is the supremacy of pain!’ he shouted. ‘The eternity of misery! There is no future. The past will be erased. There is only this present, this unending moment! This is the truth we will bring to the entire Imperium.’

Now he and his brothers slaughtered in earnest. As each victim fell, the remaining mortals were pushed closer to the full realization of the truth. Perhaps some already saw that suffering was the only reality before them. If they did, they would soon experience absolute proof.

As he sank the chainsword into an Administratum functionary’s ribcage, he voxed Xoren. ‘Have you taken the Librarium?’

‘We have, brother-captain.’

The answer was incomplete. ‘Is it burning?’

A hesitation. ‘No,’ Xoren admitted.

‘Why not?’

‘Some of the scribes managed to close the vault doors. They are adamantium. We cannot break through to the lower levels.’

Akror cursed and drove his whirring blade through the man’s heart and out of his back. ‘The scribes must have the keys,’ he said.

‘The locks appear to be based on a combinatory mechanism.’

‘Then torture the information out of the scribes.’ He should not have to explain the most obvious steps. Though he would punish ambition with extermination, he expected initiative, at the very least.

‘When they closed the door…’ Xoren began, then trailed off.

‘Yes?’

‘We killed them.’

‘All of them?’

‘They had defied us.’

The execution was natural. The deaths were inevitable. But the mistake was unforgiveable. The Librarium was the prize. It was why the Company of Misery had come to Mnemosyne. Akror would incinerate this portion of the Imperium’s memory. The archives were the means by which the Imperium told itself the tissue of lies it called its history. Arkor would take the falseness of memory and its distorting fictions and purge them from all thought. The narrative of the Imperium would fray. And before help could be sent, Mnemosyne would experience the unchanging now of pain. Its loss and its suffering would ripple out towards the rest of the galaxy. Failure to gain access to the vaults would render the attack on Mnemosyne pointless. Akror commanded fifty warriors – more than enough to smash any challenge the defence forces of Mnemosyne could muster. But they had to be gone before the Imperium responded with a full retaliation.

‘I believe there are more scribes,’ Xoren said, saving himself from execution.

‘What do you mean?’

‘There were too few here. This can’t have been all of them. They would not have been able to perform all the required duties for more than a few hours.’

Akror snapped off his chainsword. He raised his fist, catching the eyes of his brothers. ‘Stop,’ he ordered. The squad broke off from its butcher’s work. Akror scanned the mortals. Most of them were dead, but there were still several hundred huddling together. They were weeping in mad fear and despair. Akror held up his sword, revving it periodically. He returned to the nave and moved towards the transept and, beyond it, to the choir. He looked for the clothing of scribes.

Gosta watched from the gallery. High Curator Keremon had led as many scribes as could follow up the staircase of the cathedral’s north tower instead of racing blindly to the choir. There were a few dozen with her. She had signalled total stillness when the Traitor Space Marines entered the cathedral.

Gosta had followed Cardinal Reinhard’s sermon by reading his lips from the third row. The Traitors wore helmets, and so he did not know what their leader was saying. But he could tell that the monster was preaching. He gestured as the cardinal did, punctuating his words with sweeping arm gestures. When he started shooting and carving up the congregation, there was a continuity to the gestures. He was still preaching, Gosta knew. If he watched long enough, he might even grasp the nature of the sermon.

But even as the horror grew down below, Gosta still felt an acute presentiment. The imminent thing had not yet happened. The monsters were not the source of what had been calling to him from the Librarium’s night. There was still something coming. Gosta was terrified by what he was witnessing. He was also afraid of what he had yet to see.

He looked away.

Keremon was signalling. Time to move while the monsters were engrossed in their massacre. She took the scribes back into the tower, down the spiral steps, and kept on going past the ground level. Gosta stayed as close to her as he could. He focused on her determination, blotting out the terror of his fellows.

The stairs ended in the crypt. It extended the length of the cathedral, reliquaries and saints’ tombs marching off into a distance obscured by the dim lighting. In the centre of the eastern wall was a tunnel leading away from the cathedral, running under Monument Way.

‘Where are we going, High Curator?’ Gosta asked.

She was careful to face him so he could see her lips, but her eyes were on the rest of the scribes. She answered him, but she spoke to all. ‘We are going to the Librarium,’ she said. ‘If we hide here, we will be found, and die pointless deaths.’ She paused, listening, Gosta realized, to another question. ‘Perhaps they have attacked there,’ she said. ‘If so, all the more reason for us to go. Perhaps there is refuge to be found in the lower vaults of the Librarium. But if not, we are going where our duty lies. Do you think that there is anywhere in the city that is safe? If we are going to die, we shall do so with honour.’

Her speech did nothing to diminish the waves of fear coming from the crowd. Gosta did, though, find a certain comfort in having a purpose. Perhaps the others did too. They followed Keremon into the tunnel.

Where were they? Akror had carved his way through robed bodies before hearing from Xoren. Could he and his brothers have killed that many, though? He cast his eyes over the mounds of corpses. No, he thought. There were a great number of scribes here, but not great enough, even taking into account those Xoren had encountered. As the rest of the squad herded the remaining congregation into the choir, he saw no scribes. There had to be more.

His eye fell on the cardinal. The ecclesiarch was refusing to cower. His garb was torn and matted with blood. He had lost his mitre. His grey hair hung over his eyes, stuck to the gash in his forehead. The trappings of his authority were gone. He clung to his office through posture and pride alone. He stood in the front row of the choir and glared at the Company of Misery. There was hatred on his face. That was as it should be. There was also contempt.

For that, he would be punished. First, though, he would make himself useful.

Akror approached the choir. He loomed over the cardinal. The mortal looked up at and surprised him by having the temerity to speak. ‘I am Cardinal Reinhard of the Adeptus Ministorum. I am faithful, in body, heart and soul to the God-Emperor of Mankind, and I will not f–’

Akror backhanded him. He showed Reinhard what contempt meant. It did not lie in bellicose speeches. It lay in the disinterested infliction of pain. Akror was quite willing to break the cardinal’s body down one bone at a time with perfect skill and boredom. The fact that he desired information from Reinhard was the sole reason to pay attention to how he killed the man.

The ecclesiarch lay on the cathedral’s floor, stunned. Akror picked him up, noting the broken cheekbone. He held Reinhard as he had the preacher earlier and waited a few seconds for him to realize the ominous similarity. ‘Where are the scribes?’ Akror said.

The cardinal spat blood. ‘That is your–’

Akror crushed Reinhard’s left hand. He waited for the man’s scream to fade to a whimper, then asked again, ‘Where are the scribes?’

Reinhard’s defiance was weak this time, but it was still there. He shook his head.

The right hand. ‘Where are the scribes?’

Akror had to ask three more times. With each repetition, there was less of the cardinal left to break. In the end, he did not consciously surrender the information. It was the desperation in his pain that spoke. When Akror spoke the question, Reinhard’s eyes twitched upward, toward the gallery. Akror grunted and broke the cardinal in half. ‘With me,’ he shouted, and raced back down the nave towards the towers and the stairs.

The tunnel was unlit. The weak glow from the crypt reached in for the first ten metres. Then they were feeling their way forward in complete darkness. For a few minutes, Gosta moved through a deep void of stone. Despite the press of bodies, he was alone, and the premonition grew so strong that he almost cried out. The secret in the dark called to him again. He needed to return to the Librarium not to fight, not to hide, but to answer that call.

Uncertain light returned. The tunnel sloped upwards. A hundred metres more, and the scribes arrived at the surface, emerging from a stone vault partway down Monument Way.

Gosta was disoriented. Amber lumen globes perched on top of iron posts every fifteen metres, but the thick fog turned the light into a smeared glow. The nearest memorials were vague, hulking shapes in the stained night. They were commemorations of saints and battles. Now, though, shrouded by the blurring of winter, the official memories of the Imperium were indistinct. They were shadows and obstacles, and they taught nothing.

Keremon looked around, then pointed the way forward. Gosta had faith that she had a better sense of where she was than he did and started to follow. Not all the scribes did. A small cluster remained just inside the vault. They refused to move out into the fog. Keremon eyed them with contempt, and left them to their fate.

Deeper into the fog, moving between the shapes of night, the experience was more disturbing than the tunnel for Gosta. It had been a realm of simple darkness. He hadn’t expected to be able to see anything. In the winter blankness, his eyes strained against the barriers. His attempts to pierce the amber-tinted swirl failed, and claustrophobic bands tightened across his chest. In the tunnel, he had known where the boundaries were. Outside, he was vulnerable. The monsters could come for them from any direction. The monuments, stripped of meaning, loomed like sudden threats. He kept thinking that he should be able to see the Librarium by now, but all he saw was more fog, more shadows of stone and metal. More night.

He became aware of vibrations in the paving stones. At the same moment, Keremon looked back. She said nothing, but picked up speed. The other scribes began to run. The terror was rising again. The pulse in the surface of the road spiked as Gosta turned his head. He was in time to see a flash sear the fog. It came from the direction of the vault. It was followed moments later by the bright flickering of flame. Gosta ran faster.

He knew there were sounds to be heard, important and terrible ones. He kept glancing at the faces of his fellow scribes. He saw their terror evolve. The fear for their own lives was infused with horror. After a minute, more than a few ran with their hands covering their ears. He caught up to Keremon. ‘Please,’ he begged. ‘What is happening?’

She answered in stages, wasting little breath, turning her head his way as much as she could without falling. ‘The ones who hid. They were found. The Traitors want the keys to the lower vaults. They did not receive them. So they have no need, now, to hold back at all from torture.’

The looks on the other scribes’ faces told Gosta all he needed to know. The torture was not yet done. It must have been an art of the most horrific kind to last this long and be so audible.

The vibration in the paving stones became worse, heavier and constant. A vehicle was approaching.

Keremon turned off the central path of the Way. She took the scribes into the narrower routes where the monuments clustered closer together. There were no globe posts here. It was hard to see, the fog at times becoming a tangible part of the night itself, a faintly glowing darkness that coated Gosta’s flesh and sank into his lungs. Marble slabs like tomb markers made the footing treacherous. They were commemorations and exhortations. On this night, Gosta did not find them inspiring. He knew what most of them said, but they were illegible in the gloom, more memories being wiped by the winter fog. They were mere obstacles now, traps seeking to make him fall and die amidst the dumb and blind masses of the shrouded monuments.

There was no running here. The flight slowed. The vehicle could not follow them here, but the Traitors on foot would not be slowed. The vibrations grew stronger yet, then stopped. The vehicle was parallel with the scribes’ position. Gosta could just make out a hint of a great, squat mass off to the left, a shadow amongst shadows. Light stabbed from it, bouncing between the statuary and obelisks as it sought its prey. Keremon kept glancing back. That frightened Gosta even more. The other hunters must be getting closer.

He looked ahead, desperate for some hint that they were approaching the Librarium. It was a mountain. Where was it? Where was the light from its windows? He knew he was clutching to an illusion of hope, but the illusion gave him the strength to go forward.

Something very big loomed ahead. Gosta ran faster, jumping over slabs. His heart sank when he realized what it was: the great cenotaph in that marked the centre of Monument Way. It was a colossal dolmen. Its monolithic supports stood on either side of the central alley. The tens of thousands of names that marked its surface were invisible. The cenotaph was mute. It was shape only, an obstacle that might doom Mnemosyne’s curators of memory. Keremon hesitated for a moment, then headed right. It would take longer to go around the barrier in that direction. Gosta was conscious of the time lost, and the approach of the Traitors, but this was still better then venturing into the certain death trap of the alley.

He could feel the earth tremble again with the approach of ceramite boots. The hunters were almost here. He tried to move a bit faster yet. He felt no hope, only the desire to frustrate the Traitors for as long as possible.

As the scribes rounded the support, the imminence came for Gosta. He gasped. The event was close. It was in the fog with him. There would be no running from it. It was certain as death, and it was something greater and more terrible. If his premonitions had been the onrush of his own end assailing him, he was sure he would have already felt the fulfilment of prophecy. He had seen enough of the Traitors to know that he was already dead. They were too far from the Librarium.

He wondered why he felt regret. There would be no safety there. He was confusing a sense of purpose with the hope for salvation.

There was a new glow ahead. It wasn’t the amber of the globe posts. For a moment, Gosta let himself imagine that he was in reach of the Librarium after all. But what he saw was too close to the ground, and it wasn’t spread out like light from the stained glass. It was red. Keremon slowed, looked back again and resumed her run. No one was shooting at them from the glow.

Gosta’s mouth dried as they approached the pulsing, wavering light. It made him think of flame, but it seemed to be moving towards them. He had moved beyond premonition now. The thing he had been anticipating and fearing was before him. It came to meet them. He bit back a scream. The secret from the Librarium reached for him again, forbidden knowledge uncoiling to greet the dark arrival.

Brighter red, the pulsing more insistent, haloing massive shadows. Something deeper and harder than night was here. They surged out of the fog. There were five of them. They marched with the steady beat of a fatal machine. They were Adeptus Astartes, but Gosta had never heard of a Chapter with these markings. Their armour was black. The design of the aquila made it look as if it had been formed from bones. No, Gosta realized, he was wrong. Those were bones that had been worked into the ornamentation. And the glow did come from flames, and the flames rolled and spiralled around the limbs and frame of the Space Marines, and sometimes, sometimes, the flames even came from the crimson eyes of the helmets.

The scribes froze. Here were beings for which there was no accounting. There were no records of these warriors and no memories of them. They emerged from the winter void as if summoned into existence for the first time. Yet the scars on their armour said otherwise. The marks of centuries were upon them. They were ancient, yet torn from time. They were apparitions of the moment and their steps shook the ground with the weight of the infinite.

Behind the scribes were monsters. Before them were phantoms.

Gosta trembled. There was no point in running. These were not the same beings as the Traitors, but if the Imperium had no tales to tell of these Space Marines, were they a threat or salvation? If they had come to join in the slaughter then Gosta had had enough of running. He would live with his fear and pray for dignity as he met his end. There would be no struggling.

The phantoms crew closer. Their weapons were pointed forward. Still, they held their fire. Only a few metres away now, and they were not slowing. They did not acknowledge the presence of the scribes.

Keremon rushed to the left, calling out and waving her arms. The jerk of her sudden motion snapped Gosta out of his stunned state. He ran too, stumbled, fell and scrabbled against the ground, a whimper constricting his throat. A ceramite boot came down a hand’s breadth from his leg. He had a close view of the warrior’s flame as he rolled out of the way. There was no heat. The fire was a spectre too. Though it flickered and jumped like a true fire, there was something wrong with its colour and with its very being. The red was too close to the shade of blood. It was shot through with other elements that were not colours at all. Gosta was sure that the flame had a texture. He was seeing the very stuff of the real itself being altered, twisted and consumed. He lay where he was, trembling, watching the Space Marines march past, heading in the direction of the hunters.

Gosta stood and joined the huddle around Keremon. She was looking at the phantoms with a holy terror. Even during the worst of the massacre in the cathedral, the events had not paralyzed her. She was High Curator, but she was also Imperial Commander of Mnemosyne, and Gosta was familiar with her military record. She had lost her awe for war. Now, though, her eyes were wide. She was as stunned as any of them.

Her lips were moving. Gosta leaned forward to see what she was saying. She was not speaking to the others. She was murmuring something to herself. Her mouth shaped the same words over and over again. ‘The Damned,’ she was saying. ‘The Damned.’

Fog. Always the fog. Never ending, never clearing. It is the ghost of the world. Shapes of echoes form and dissolve. Everything passes. Time makes phantoms of the real. There is no permanence except war. It gives the enemy substance, a substance of treachery and corruption. It cannot be allowed to exist. The substance must be killed, the enemy made less than an echo.

Erase him.

Scratch him from time.

Fragile eddies in the fog. Dark grey in the lighter grey, the smudge of mortals. Ignore them. Seek the enemy. A billow in the fog, the wind of conflict, pushing towards the foe. There, ahead, the hard silhouette in crimson. The blood to be shed. The scar of the traitor in the grey.

The coordination of the attack. Words are not necessary. Were they ever? That knowledge, irrelevant, is gone. Only the knowledge of war matters. The one permanence.

Pull the trigger.

Shatter the outline.

Return all to the fog.

Akror had his prey in sight. Thirinos and Vassanos, in the Rhino Annunciation of Grief, had been stymied, unable to venture off the main alley, but it had driven the scribes onto more difficult terrain. The mortals, almost blind, their route blocked again and again by monuments, had slowed. Akror and the rest of the squad were gaining ground quickly. The scribes had run hard and long.

‘We could have saved them the effort,’ Luctus said. ‘If they want to be at the Librarium so badly, they could have just asked.’

Akror grunted. The mortals had fled with a purpose. He didn’t care that their destination was where he would have brought them. They would not arrive on any terms but his own. Most of them would never leave Monument Way. All he needed was the knowledge they held.

The scribes they had found hiding in the vault had been a disappointment. Skleeros had terrified them from their refuge by blasting it to rubble with his rocket launcher. Akror had moved in while the others hobbled the scribes by breaking their legs. It was not necessary for him to hurt them badly before they started speaking. He did anyway. And what they cried out to him was that the combination that would unlock the vault was known only to the senior scribes. Which none of them were.

They had not died well. They had died in the full revelation of misery.

The squad switched to thermal vision for the rest of the hunt. The fog was intense, but the scribes showed up clearly, first as a flare of bodily heat in the distance then resolving into individuals as Akror closed in. Their body language was expressive as they hit the cenotaph and tried to find their way around it quickly. Akror held the squad back from attacking just then. It amused him to see the mortals grasp at hope as if it were a frustrating mirage. They were learning. The truth was stabbing at them with harsh, short jabs, chipping away at the mortar of their beliefs. Another few minutes and they would come to realize an approximation of the truth.

Approximations were not sufficient, however. They had to know the reality of misery, and that came from experience, not belief. He would teach them. He would teach them to death. But first, they would give him the means to open the heart of the Librarium.

‘Take them,’ he said. ‘Don’t kill any until we’ve determined which ones have value.’

They rounded the cenotaph; there was sudden activity ahead. The scribes were rushing to the side, a roiling movement just beyond them, but no heat signature. He blinked. ‘What–’ he began.

There was a sound like bolter fire. Concentrated, heavy. But the shells that streamed from multiple weapons seemed to be born of the fog itself. They came in streaks of flame that killed without burning, and that lingered in the air like a ghost’s wound. They pounded into Plionos and Krakos, shattering pauldron and helmet, engulfing them in heatless, corrosive fire. The two had no chance to react. Their blood and bone erupted before them. They fell, and their annihilation was totalled. There would be nothing to salvage. They were gone as if they had never existed, their legacies reduced to the memories of their brothers.

The irony was not lost on Akror.

The barrage did not stop. It forced the squads back around the cenotaph. Luctus took enough hits to blast away his left pauldron and four more brothers of the Company of Misery fell. Akror and the others returned fire as they withdrew. Akror still couldn’t see a target. There was too much turbulence in the air, and nothing registered where he should be seeing the enemy. He turned off the thermal vision and saw a squad of Adeptus Astartes wrapped in uncanny fire.

They wore the Aquila – they were loyalists. Their nature confused him, mysteries and wonders here that he had thought were the province of the Gods of Chaos. Yet there was no such allegiance here.

He would drag the truth from them later. First, he had to regain the initiative.

Once on the other side of the cenotaph, he led the battered squads along its width to the main alley and linked up with the Annunciation of Grief.

‘Loyalists,’ he told Thirinos, who was manning the pintle-mounted, twin-linked bolters.

‘Who?’

‘No idea. Kill them and we’ll find out.’ He peered through the fog. His enhanced vision was no help against it. The cenotaph, still close, was a massive vagueness. ‘Normal vision only. They don’t show up on the thermal.’

‘How is this possible?’ Luctus said. ‘They’re alive, aren’t they?’

‘Are they?’ He wasn’t sure.

‘They’re burning.’

‘With warp fire, I’ll wager.’

Akror ordered a perimeter established around the Rhino. He couldn’t see more than a few metres but he could hear as well as ever, even though the sounds bounced off the monuments and surrounded him with echoes. He focused on the crunch of boots on stone. The loyalists had not split up. They were maintaining unit cohesion and closing in at the same steady but unhurried march as before.

He pointed to the passage beneath the cenotaph’s capstone. ‘Here they come,’ he said. His brothers had heard too, and were already moving into position.

The sounds of the march ceased. Silence. Nothing but the fog. The night seemed as empty as the Imperium’s history would be once Akror completed his mission. Again, he felt the grate of irony against his chest. He was fully aware of the value of symbolism. It underlay his mission on Mnemosyne. He resented the way the meanings of this battle were shifting at his expense. He would reclaim the narrative. He had come to turn all stories into mist, and he would do so yet.

There was just the small matter of the warriors with no story of their own to kill first.

The silence stretched long.

They must still be there, he thought. ‘Shoot the passageway,’ he ordered Thirinos. ‘Cover the–’

A rocked screamed out of the fog and slammed into the front of the Rhino. The explosion that engulfed Thirinos was both material and spectral. The air was rent by a second scream, coming from a chorus of disembodied voices. Convulsed, already dying, Thirinos sent rounds blind though the fireball. The second missile hit the pintle directly. The gun fell silent. The smoke and flames cleared. The choir of shrieks faded. Thirinos’s corpse slumped forward over the ruins of his weapon. The forward armour of the Rhino was damaged, but had held up to the blast. Inside the vehicle, Vassanos responded to the attack by urging the Annunciation forward. Skleeros had to leap to the side to avoid being crushed by the vehicle’s charge. Vassanos drove hard for the passage. The engine roared. Black smoke poured from the exhaust, staining the dull glow of the fog. The spikes on the front armour were hungry for the blood of the foe.

‘Teach them anguish.’ Akror shouted and ran with the Rhino. The Company of Misery closed with the challengers. ‘This planet is ours!’ Akror proclaimed to his brothers and his enemies. ‘Its destiny is pain. The only destiny is pain.’ Kill all hope, he thought.

The Annunciation of Grief hit one of the loyalists. He should have gone down. The impact might not have been enough to smash his armour, but it should have broken many bones. One of the spikes impaled his abdomen. The warrior was motionless for a second. Then he gripped the spike and pushed backward, removing himself from its two-metre length. Still holding the metal wedge, he back-pedaled along the alley’s surface, then launched himself upwards. He landed against the slope of the front armour. He pounded his fist against Vassanos’s viewing slit. Glassteel cracked.

The other loyalists marched against the warriors of the company. Bolters raged against each other. Akror felt several rounds punch against his torso and legs. A few struck his helmet. There was damage. He barely noticed. He had survived far worse when he had still served the Imperium. He had survived Misery itself. He knew the truth of pain because he experienced its eternity. The corrosion of that planet of revelation was with him still. It filled his blood with black flame. It propelled him forward with the zeal of a prophet, and the fury of a judge.

He and Luctus emptied their clips into the two loyalists before them. The phantoms never broke their stride. They had to be injured, but it was as if their flames devoured the bolter-rounds. Instinct told Arkor to back off, gain distance and keep firing. Rage would not permit it.

The red is close now, the very substance of treachery. Grasp it. Rend it. Is that damage? It is unimportant. Nothing is important while the enemy exists. Shade the mist with his blood.

Bolters maglocked, chainswords out. The snarl of the weapons turned into grinding whines as they clashed against each other. Akror blocked an overhand blow from his opponent. They rocked back and forth, locked in stalemate. Akror dropped his sword and sidestepped. The phantom went forward, his flank open. Akror struck, gouging deep. The loyalist straightened with the chainsword still in his side, turning his head towards Akror as though curious, and smashed him aside with both arms. Akror stumbled back.

The other loyalist had Luctus backed against the Rhino’s flank. They were trading blows with the chainswords. They struck at each other as if they were using rapiers. The hits were glancing.

It is done.

Something passed between the loyalists. Akror saw no signal. But his opponent was moving off. The other abandoned its duel with Luctus. He turned away, taking a solid blow to the arm from Akror’s battle-brother. The loyalist spun hard, throwing Luctus back against the Annunciation, then joined the first in a fast retreat. Fire bled from the wound.

Explosions rocked the transport. The blasts drowned the scream of the engine. Shrapnel burst out of the flank, cutting Luctus in half. Akror snarled and ran to the other side of the dead Rhino. Only Skleeros was still on his feet. ‘They have our measure, captain,’ he said.

Akror’s lips pulled back in a grimace of hate so hard that blood filled his mouth. He looked back. The enemy squad had reformed. A wall of phantoms was closing in on them. ‘They haven’t won,’ he told Skleeros. He moved fast into the maze of statuary to the north. Skleeros followed. They pounded the memorial slabs to dust. Akror began to turn east, then stopped and paused. He listened.

‘They are coming,’ Skleeros said.

The drumbeat of the enemy’s footsteps was steady.

‘Good,’ Akror said. He started running again, heading for the Librarium, where three full squads awaited. ‘This is not a retreat,’ he said. ‘This is a trap.’

Keremon saw nothing of the battle. As soon as it began, she had started forward once more. She would bring her charges safely to their goal. There, they would act as duty demanded. So would she. If that meant dying, then so be it. If their defiance was a futile gesture, then so be it. They would have worthy deaths, and on this first night of winter, that seemed a fine gift in its own right.

She looked back a few times. There was little to see in the dark and the fog. There was much to hear: the full-throated roar of the bolters, the teeth-rattling cry of the chainblades, the explosions. Once, the fog parted just enough for her to catch a glimpse of giants in black and bone. When she looked away, she carried with her the portrait of methodical, unrelenting war carried out by beings merciless as the grave.

She didn’t want to see more, but she braced herself to do so. She knew she hadn’t seen anything close to the all the horrors this night had embraced. She knew it was her responsibility to confront them. She was Imperial Commander and High Curator, and was being called upon to give her life to preserve her planet and the great work of memory of the Librarium.

There was, in truth, no greater honour.

Overshadowing the honour, though, was the fear. The Traitors brought the fear of death and defeat. The other Space Marines were even more troubling. She didn’t know what they were. Yet she did. She had heard the whispers during her service in the Imperial Guard, caught a few more since her ascension to Imperial commander. The whispers gave a name to these Space Marines. They gave rumours to the name, but no true memories. The darkness of the Damned shrouded awful secrets. Their mystery defied the great purpose of the Librarium of Mnemosyne and of its sister repositories in other systems.

There was, to her knowledge, no authorized record of these beings. No hint of who they were or might once have been.

But what if there was a memory? What if the secrets were revealed?

There was no time to contemplate those consequences. That was a mercy.

No time, too, to wonder what would happen when she brought the scribes to the Librarium. Time only to move as fast as possible, as safely as possible and as directly as possible through the fog, through winter, through the great shapes whose meaning was quickly being forgotten.

At last, the fog ahead was broken by an immense shadow. She put on a burst of speed. So did the scribes at her heels. The shadow became more solid. Slivers of light shone at regular intervals on its height. Closer. Another few moments and she would be able to make out the Librarium’s main entrance.

Closer. Clearer.

Keremon stumbled as the picture before her resolved itself. The Emperor protects, and he did now, thinning the fog just enough for her to see the tank. She crouched behind the last of the monuments. It was a bronze statue, five metres tall, of Sebastian Thor in the midst of furious judgement. Beside her Gosta whispered, ‘How do we get past that?’

‘We don’t,’ she mouthed. We wait, she thought. We pray.

The tank was just recognizable as a Predator. Its form had been altered with spikes like huge, curved claws. It was draped with the sanded flesh of the Traitors’ victims. Across its front armour was the body of a Space Marine. He had been coated in steel. His limbs were torn from his torso. His ribs surrounded a gaping hole, and within the hole was an eight-pointed star. The turret tracked back and forth. It was more and less than a machine of war. It was a feral beast, hungry for prey.

On either side of it, in a solid line, waited thirty more Traitors. Behind them, already returned, their captain marched.

Keremon began her prayers.

The tank’s cannon fired at the same moment as the monsters opened up with their bolters. Return fire started a second later, and then the phantoms stormed through the fog. Keremon saw them as a blur of great shadows and slithering flame rushing past only a few metres to her left. They moved fast, lightning carved from the night. The squad spread out, the reaching claws of talons.

The tank’s first shot went wide. The turret swung to the right. It boomed a second time. It struck one of the phantoms in the chest. Keremon winced at the glare of the explosion. When her vision cleared, the Space Marine was still there. His fire raged high. He took another step. Then the flames died, and he fell.

‘So you can die!’ Akror shouted. He was taunting. Keremon believed he was also shouting with relief.

The rest of the phantoms crossed the final metres that separated them from their foe. They advanced against withering fire. Keremon didn’t understand why they did not fall, but they did not, and their response began to take the Traitors down.

The tank fired again. The ground fountained where one of the Damned had been a moment before. The Space Marine had leapt, and now he landed on the turret. Standing in the hatch was a Traitor, operating the pintle-mounted combi-weapon. He hit the phantom with the double blow of bolter and flamer. The loyalist swung his chainsword through the storm and decapitated the Traitor. Smoke rising from his pockmarked armour, he fixed an explosive to the barrel of the cannon and was already locked in the next struggle when the world flared silver. Keremon squeezed her eyes shut against the pain of the brilliance. When, still dazzled, she looked again, the meltabomb had turned the gun to slag. The Predator was disarmed.

The fog roiled with the heat of battle. The scene before Keremon was a phantasmagoria from the mythic depths of humanity’s nightmares. Phantoms struggled against monsters. Fearsome gods tore each other apart in a world of fire and night and devouring limbo. The air was filled with the tumult of war. It was the sound of worlds ending and the shrieking birth of legends. The fury became more compact, like the closing of a dark, burning fist. The struggle clustered around the Predator. Then something blew the Librarium’s great iron doors off their hinges, and the battle moved inside.

The tumult was still huge, but the fog settled. As Keremon saw less and less of the battle, the new shape of her duty became clear. She stood up and faced the scribes. ‘Stay here,’ she said. ‘I will be inside the Librarium.’ When Gosta made as if to come with her, she shook her head. ‘You are more important to the full reach of the Librarium’s memories than I am. If I do not survive, it will fall to you to collate and record the traces of what transpired in there.’ She did not add, if Mnemosyne survives.

‘But why must you take this risk?’

A few minutes ago, she would have said to see if any of the other scribes had survived, and if there was any way she could fight the Traitors. But she already knew that everyone inside was dead, and that there was nothing she could do. It was the vision of the war itself that had revealed the nature of her real mission. ‘Because I am the High Curator,’ she said. ‘I must bear witness. At this moment, the Librarium is not the repository of memories. It is the site of their origin.’

She ran across the scarred pavement before the building, past the abandoned Predator and up the steps to the entrance. She stepped from the night and into the inferno.

Furnace of war. The fog of the world ablaze. So much treacherous red. The Emperor’s foes fight back with their own anger. Hurl it back at them, unleash the full scope of righteous wrath.

This space. Not just another interior that will pass into the fog. Long echoes here. The past refusing to vanish. Something is here. A memory, a record of a scar. A dream of what once was given a form that still lingers. It should not be here.

Ignore it for now.

Use the solidity of the past. Defeat the enemy’s numbers. Grind him into the muck of oblivion.

‘Who are they?’ Xoren said.

‘I am tired of that question,’ Akror answered. They were racing down an aisle barely wide enough for the two of them. One of the loyalists had been visible at the other end a moment before.

Under the huge dome of the Librarium was a single circular room that reached the entire height and width of the building. Radiating out from the centre were rows upon rows of record cabinets dozens of metres high. Along the walls were shelves of scrolls and tomes. The shelves rose even higher, stopping only at the dome itself. This was the palace of regimented memory. This was where the vast collections of the archive were catalogued and cross-referenced. As immense as the hall was, it was only the surface of the Librarium’s memory – the means that made it possible to find what was sought in the great depths below. In the centre, flush with the floor, were the adamantium doors to those depths.

The room was on fire. The cabinets and shelves blazed. The flames devoured dry parchment and vellum as if they were promethium. The smoke was as thick as the fog had been outside. The destruction of the Librarium was Akror’s goal, but his brothers had not set this fire. Two of the loyalists bore flamers, and had turned their plumes on the walls and aisle as soon as they had entered. From the touch of ghost-energy, fire had exploded around the room. The loyalists spread out along the rows, appearing and disappearing in the midst of destruction. The Company of Misery outnumbered them better than three-to-one, but there was no way to bring the greater force to bear. Akror had to send out smaller hunting parties. He could hear battle being joined throughout the Librarium. The dome echoed with the roar of flame and the stutter of bolters. The vox was alive with the shouts of his brothers. Shouts of frustration, shouts of anger, shouts of pain. Shouts that cut off. There were no shouts of triumph.

The cabinets to his right blew outward, smashed by the combined force of a frag grenade and the battering ram rush of the loyalist. He burst through with bolter firing. Xoren took the brunt of the blast, shells and blow. He fell. The phantom stood over him, firing point-blank into his helmet until it and his head were destroyed.

Akror emptied his own clip into the loyalist. The burning warrior ignored him until Xoren was dead. Then he turned on Akror. He was wounded. His armour was cracked and punctured in a dozen places. Akror was still not given the satisfaction of seeing his foe bleed. The loyalist’s warp fire burned higher, and brighter. Akror switched out bolter for chainsword. He moved a shade faster than the loyalist and dug his blade into the other’s breastplate while he was still raising his own sword over his head. Akror sawed down and forward. The bone aquila splintered. The sword cut through ceramite, carapace, flesh and dug into bone.

The loyalist faltered.

‘You are no phantom,’ Akror snarled. ‘You feel the truth of misery now, don’t you?’

Misery? Oh my brothers, does the wretch think to teach us anything about pain?

Anything about rage?

Gather the fog, the devouring fog, the burning fog. Consume everything. Take it all. Emperor, for You the gift of final wrath.

Keremon stayed low to the ground and made her way around the periphery of the great hall. The smoke clawed her lungs. She watched with horror as the superhuman war destroyed what she would have given her life to protect. Centuries upon centuries of cataloguing was disappearing in a storm of flame. The memories stored below her feet were falling back into the darkness of a great forgetting. Each passing second made her presence more vital. This terrible event was an incendiary memory in formation. It fell upon her to record it, and so she had to witness it to the fullest. She crawled past the spokes that were the rows of cabinets. Some were empty except for the spreading fire. Others were filled with the battles of giants. And now, down the end of this row, near the centre of the hall, she saw two figures in a tableau of extremity. There was a great flame there, but not the natural fire that was consuming the Librarium. It came from the phantom that grappled with the leader of the Traitors. Akror had buried his chainsword in the Space Marine’s chest. The phantom should have fallen. Instead, he seemed to grow with the rising intensity of his flame.

A fatal line was crossed. The two terrors were frozen for a moment. And then a nova of warp light burst from the centre of the phantom. A shock wave that was rage itself lifted Keremon from the ground and threw her into a wall. The blast filled the world. The end of witnessing had come.

It was dawn when Gosta recovered consciousness. The explosion had driven them all into oblivion, but not because of its physical force. There had been another power there, one he did not understand. Perhaps its power came from its destruction of all comprehension.

In the grey blankness, he sensed a heavy calm. He left the shelter of the statue. The other scribes followed. They crossed to the Librarium slowly. The fog was even thicker, and mixed with smoke. Gosta could barely see his own feet. He stopped moving and caught a glimpse of huge, black shapes passing before him. They shook the ground with their steps. The ghost of flame surrounded them, and warned him to draw no closer. Then they were gone, and he mounted the steps into the Librarium.

He found a world of smoke and ruin. A sob wracked him. He stood in the corpse of the building that had shaped his life. He moved with his fellows through charred wood and a falling snow of ash. Scattered around the room were the burned, smashed remains of the Traitors. At the centre of the room, he found Keremon.

The High Curator was still alive but badly burned. Her left arm was smashed. It hung loose and flexible as a rope. Her left eye was wide and looked as if it had been scoured blank by too great a sight. Her right eye blinked as he approached. She could see him and pointed to the vault door. ‘Go down,’ she begged. ‘Go and see.’

He did. The seal had been strong. The fire had not touched the archive. The work of cataloguing was destroyed, generations of labour that would have to begin again, but the memories themselves were still here. Mnemosyne was secure, her invaders destroyed. The mission of her citizens would continue. Gosta could tell what Keremon and the other scribes needed to know from the first level.

What he had to see for himself was much further down.

Though the tugging was gone, he had no trouble remembering the location. He was dropping with exhaustion, but he kept on going, deeper and deeper, until he was in the vaulted chamber once more. He approached the spot where the secret waited.

He reached into the recess on the shelf. The secret was gone. Something that was not true flame, but could burn when it chose, had come into these depths. He recoiled when his fingers touched the cinders of memory itself. He stumbled back, his heart pounding. The lumen globes dimmed again as the last traces of thought scattered into the air, then vanished.

Where the secret had been, there was now only a gap, a hollow absence, and the infinite, watchful dark.

From the Flames

Graeme Lyon

Around me, a world burns.

My entire Chapter fell upon this planet-ship, this Craftworld Idharae. We bring the Emperor’s wrath to the heathen eldar.

But that is not why the world burns.

‘Seoc, fall back! We cannot–’

Sergeant Aedd’s words are cut off as a spear longer than he is tall impales him. His power plant whines and Aedd, a warrior I have served with for four decades, disappears in atomic fire as his reactor is breached. My genhanced eyes shield me from the glare, and when vision returns, the spear’s wielder is striding towards me.

It is a daemon. It stands thrice my height, and is formed of burnished metal and living flames. Its face is set in a snarl of hatred, and where it walks fire rages and death beckons. The spear – still intact, despite the blast – thunders towards me, hurled with immense strength. The weapon misses by a hair’s breadth and I glimpse cracks on its haft where the explosion damaged it.

Dozens of my brothers have died in the minutes since this god of war appeared. It rampaged through our forces, invincible. I attack anyway. My chainsword roars and sparks fly as it strikes the daemon’s metal skin. It feels like striking a starship. I duck as the spear swings overhead and roll, firing my pistol. The bolts explode against it and my armour is splattered with molten metal. The daemon isn’t slowed.

One of my battle-brothers runs past me, pushing me down, and starts chopping at the daemon with a power axe. Molten blood flows as he growls, ‘Get away, Seoc. Alert the rest of the Chapter.’

The daemon casually backhands him and he is hurled aside, armour crumpled by the blow. The spear arcs towards me again. Desperately, I gun my jump pack.

I look up, granted a moment of respite from the carnage as my jump takes me towards the distant ceiling. A great glass dome stretches above me, the tranquil light of a purple nebula silhouetting the starships that carried us here. I activate my vox.

‘Seoc to the Eighth.’

There is no response.

‘Eighth, this is Seoc. Invaders, respond!’

Still nothing. Am I the last of my company? Have near a hundred noble warriors of Ogrys been killed? I try other channels. ‘Seoc to all Invaders. Requesting reinforcements.’ There is a burst of static and nothing more.

I reach the apex of my jump and look down. I must get out of this area. The other companies are elsewhere in this vast craft, and they must be warned about the daemon. I see an exit from the dome, a huge arch of sculpted bone. I land a hundred metres from it, the marble-like floor cracking beneath my boots. The daemon is behind me and only fire stands between me and relative safety.

I step forward and see shapes moving in the flames, large and bulky. Space Marines. Survivors? I call out.

‘Well met, brothers…’

I trail off as the figures step from the flames. They are Space Marines, but they are not my brothers. Hulking black shadows wreathed in witchfire, they are of sinister aspect, ebon armour decorated with arcane sigils made of what looks like bone. They are skull-helmed like Chaplains, and their bolters lift as they stride relentlessly forward.

As I see them, I feel a curious sensation. I am a Space Marine, and I know no fear. But as I look upon these apparitions, their armour cracked and broken with cold, pale flesh and bare bone showing between sundered plates, a shiver passes through me. As I gaze upon their infernal countenance, I realise that while the daemon behind me is a threat, these abominable Space Marines – so like me, yet so very different – are more dangerous by an order of magnitude.

Fingers squeeze triggers and I prepare to feel their rounds strike my battleplate, not knowing why this is happening, angry and confused. But the shots pass me, trailing flames. As adrenaline surges – I am still alive – I turn and see the daemon. It raises its spear and casts it towards us. I throw myself to the side, but the spectral Space Marines simply continue to walk. The spear passes through them as though they were mist, before arcing round and returning to its wielder’s burning claw.

Utterly silent, the dark warriors continue to fire. The creature roars and sweeps its spear around in a great arc, to no avail. The Space Marines loose more rounds, the flaming fury of their weapons equally ineffectual against this god of fire. Fire.

‘The fire!’ I exclaim. I open my vox to every channel, hoping that the silent figures will hear. ‘Fire,’ I say. ‘It is a creature of molten fury. Your flames cannot harm it.’

They hear. As if guided by a single will, they pivot and loose more shells, this time towards the glass dome. A barrage hits it and cracks spread across the surface. For a moment, the universe seems to hold its breath, then breath becomes irrelevant as the glass breaks and the air rushes from the chamber, taking bodies, eldar and Invaders alike, and other debris with it. In an instant, the fire is snuffed out and the spectral figures vanish. They came from the flames and now leave with them.

I grip a pillar, my gauntlets biting deep into the surface and holding me steady. I turn my attention to the war god. It has thrust its spear into the ground and has both claws wrapped around it. Its fire has extinguished and it seems diminished. I see again the cracks on the spear’s haft. I see vengeance.

I pull myself around to face my enemy and with a blink, I activate my jump pack. It pulls me towards the daemon, struggling to give me thrust against the air. I push the power past safety limits and it is enough. I barrel into the spear, and the impact shatters it.

For an instant, the daemon and I hang there. We lock eyes, and an eternity of hatred, war and unfathomable despair floods my senses. Then we are both pulled towards the breach. My vision blurs, the world spinning around me. I try to activate my jump pack again, but there is no response, and I black out.

When I awaken, I am in the void, surrounded by the floating bodies of Space Marines. Some may still be alive – their armour will sustain them as mine will until I can be rescued. I activate a distress beacon and spin myself around to look down at Idharae.

I see fire, and I think again of the spectres that appeared from the flames, and again, I feel that unfamiliar shiver. I steady myself and wait, watching as beneath me a world burns.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

David Annandale is the author of The Horus Heresy novel The Damnation of Pythos. He also writes the Yarrick series, consisting of the novella Chains of Golgotha and the novel Imperial Creed and The Pyres of Armageddon. For Space Marine Battles he has written The Death of Antagonis and Overfiend. He is a prolific writer of short fiction, including the novella Mephiston: Lord of Death and numerous short stories set in The Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 universes. David lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games.

Domiciled in the East Midlands, C Z Dunn is the author of the Space Marine Battles novel Pandorax, the novellas Crimson Dawn and Dark Vengeance and the audio dramas Trials of Azrael, Ascension of Balthasar, Terror Nihil, Bloodspire and Malediction, as well as several short stories.

L J Goulding has written many stories for Black Library, including ‘The Lords of Borsis’, ‘Kaldor Draigo: Knight of Titan’ and the Space Marine Battles audio drama Mortarion’s Heart for Warhammer 40,000, and ‘The Oberwald Ripper’ and ‘The Great Maw’ for Warhammer. He lives and works in Nottingham, UK.

Nick Kyme is the author of the Horus Heresy novels Deathfire and Vulkan Lives, the novellas Promethean Sun and Scorched Earth, and the audio drama Censure. His novella Feat of Iron was a New York Times bestseller in the Horus Heresy collection, The Primarchs. Nick is well known for his popular Salamanders novels, including Rebirth, the Space Marine Battles novel Damnos, and numerous short stories. He has also written fiction set in the world of Warhammer, most notably the Time of Legends novel The Great Betrayal. He lives and works in Nottingham, and has a rabbit.

Graeme Lyon is the author of the Space Marine Battles novella Armour of Faith and the Warhammer 40,000 short stories ‘The Carnac Campaign: Sky Hunter’, ‘From the Flames’ and ‘Kor’sarro Khan: Huntmaster’, along with the Warhammer tales ‘Bride of Khaine’ and ‘The Hunter’. He hails from East Kilbride in Scotland, but now lives and works in Nottingham.

Josh Reynolds is the author of the Blood Angels novel Deathstorm and the Warhammer 40,000 novellas Hunter’s Snare and Dante’s Canyon, along with the audio drama Master of the Hunt, all three featuring the White Scars. In the Warhammer World, he has written The End Times novels The Return of Nagash and The Lord of the End Times, the Gotrek & Felix tales Charnel Congress, Road of Skulls and The Serpent Queen, and the novels Neferata, Master of Death and Knight of the Blazing Sun. He lives and works in Northampton.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Votum Infernus published in 2013.
Remorseless published in 2013.
Ship of the Damned published in 2013.
Animus published in 2013.
Dark Hollows of Memory published in 2013.
From the Flames published in 2013.
This edition published by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

Flame and Damnation © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2015. Flame and Damnation, 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.
All Rights Reserved.

A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN: 978-1-78572-001-7

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise except as expressly permitted under license from the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.