Table Of Contents

THE CLEANSING

THE ENFORCER

The opening of the Great Rift has seen the number of human psykers across the galaxy increase dramatically. Yet as you’ll soon see, not all of them are loyal to the Emperor.

THE CLEANSING

Salamanders Epistolary Xubari watched a forest of exhaust stacks at the Gamma-3 refinery explode, the flames glowing bright against the dark sky. In fact, all of Feldros burned. The industrial planet was in the grips of full-scale revolt. Cities were aflame, lighting the polluted night sky a dull orange as if the heavens themselves smouldered. The populace had risen up by the thousands; cultists and traitor defence units threw themselves at the ruling dynasty’s forces. The Salamanders had hastened to Feldros as soon as the planet’s terrified plea for aid was sifted from the churning warp. The world fulfilled the sub-sector’s highest tithe of munitions and promethium, and the planet’s return to full production was vital to the supply of Indomitus Crusade battlegroups sweeping through the region.

The heat wash from the burning refinery was blistering, and it brought the reek of scorched metal and pollutants as another burst of autogun fire pattered against the Librarian’s draconic-green and midnight-blue plate. While his brothers fought in other war zones, Epistolary Xubari led his compact force through a smoke-filled warren of alleys behind the Gamma-3 refinery. The thunder of shotguns and the crack of lascarbines, fired by ragged bands of traitors, dogged their every step.

‘Workers, enforcers, traitors – yes. But not warriors,’ Xubari reminded himself.

‘They are flaws and impurities to be burned away, and I seek to scour the greatest impurity of all.’

Idolatrous images and runes of the Dark Gods were worn brazenly on defaced uniforms, held aloft on black banners or even carved into the flesh of frenzied cultists. Stories whispered by harrowed frontline survivors even told of witches and sorcerers: shadowmen casting black fire and terrorwrights shaping killing curses. The planet’s rulers dismissed such talk and branded its repetition as treachery. Nevertheless, such frightened tales continued, and their flames were fanned with every new insurrection.

The Salamanders had witnessed such unnatural powers, too. Xubari understood what the nobility of Feldros could never – should never – know. The Epistolary had fought against worshippers of the Dark Gods on scores of worlds and had seen sorcerers strip flesh, overturn tanks and tear open the fragile barrier keeping the warp at bay. As a

Librarian, Xubari knew where such power came from. He could recognise its evil spoor and track it down. There was sorcery on Feldros, and he meant to extinguish it. The strongest trail had led Xubari here, and, with two squads from the 3rd Company, he pushed through a maze of jumbled buildings.

‘We are nearing the source of the empyric emanations, Sergeant. I can feel it,’ he told the large warrior striding alongside him.

Beside Xubari, Sergeant Ko’val cracked the thin plascrete roadway with each heavy tread of his Mk X Gravis armour. Ko’val’s squad of Aggressors weathered a hail of shots.

The foetid township they pushed through sprawled at the refinery’s edges. They conserved the fuel of their flamestorm gauntlets, unleashing incendiary bursts only against large mobs that tore towards them. Otherwise, the Aggressors crushed the cultists with blows from their enormous powered fists. Broken bodies were sent flying from savage backhand swings, while others were smashed to pulp beneath piledriving punches.

Xubari swung his cupric-chased force axe in wide arcs. He fed only a portion of his psychic might into the psycho-crystalline matrix within the weapon. Most of his attention was focused on divining the nebulous thread of what Xubari thought of as ‘mindfire’: the corrupted pulsing energy that spoke of a psyker alloyed with unclean powers. It was diffuse and shifting, like greasy smoke, but Xubari knew they were getting closer.

Another Salamanders squad fought in the narrow alleyways to Xubari’s right. Deafening noise and actinic glares mixed with amplified roars; terrified screams were suddenly silenced. Sergeant Jurr’s Reivers savaged cultists attempting to outflank the Salamanders, protecting their less manoeuvrable brothers. The Reivers’ combat knives, glinting with a bronze sheen, slashed and decapitated. Their efficiency was terrifying, and before the Reivers’ skull-like faceplates and ruddy eye lenses, the cultists fled in panic.

‘There!’ Xubari snapped with a gasp as they came in sight of a circular fortified building. ‘Straight ahead. Sergeant, fire point incineration,’ he told Ko’val before he switched vox channels.

‘Sergeant Jurr, converge on our position. Compound breach imminent. Initiate rearguard, pattern Voltis-sigma, then follow us in,’ commanded the Librarian.

Xubari guessed the building was the township’s Enforcer precinct house, though any signifiers had been burned away and replaced with offensive scrawls. A desultory hail of small-arms fire sprayed from inside. Xubari was surer with every step he took that what – who – he searched for hid within.

THE ENFORCER

Jurr’s Reivers tore apart the cultists who tried to stop the Salamanders as they reached the precinct house, before following Xubari’s coded instruction. As one, five adamantine grapnels launched skywards, and the Reivers swiftly scaled the building’s walls. Ko’val’s Aggressors poured sheets of burning promethium towards the firing slits. They were rewarded with shrieks that then stifled as burning air entered the guards’ lungs. Xubari forged his will into a shimmering ball of flame before launching it forward with a sudden thrust of his armoured gauntlet towards the reinforced door. The psychic fireball exploded, vaporising the plasteel and shattering the surrounding stanchions. Epistolary Xubari led the Aggressors forward. Shimmering globules of liquid metal dripped as they crossed the threshold.

As Xubari stepped inside, his autosenses adjusted to the contrasting gloom and guttering flames still burning from the Aggressors’ attacks. The building was a charnel house. Sprays of gore and runnels of old blood spattered every surface. The guards’ burning bodies could not cover the stench of human waste, sweat and blood. Barred cells ringed the curving perimeter, dozens more on the floors above. Inside each, Xubari saw slumped people; they were barely alive. Within each, the Librarian sensed a spark of psychic potential. But Xubari barely spared a thought for them; the small crowd at the precinct house’s centre bound his attention. He now understood why the spoor of sorcery had seemed nebulous.

Almost fifty people stood crowded together. They stared at the Salamanders, many in fear and some weeping. They seemed drawn from every aspect of Feldrosi society. There were strongly built labourers who might have been refinery workers. Elderly nobles from the capital stood with stick-thin urchins wearing haggard faces and others in the faded uniforms of Feldrosi Riflemen. On the floor at their feet rested the remains of a man. His bones were broken, his skin bruised and ritually scarred. The man’s head had been ripped apart in bloody chunks, but Xubari recognised the sunken eye sockets of an Astropath.

‘YOU ARE NOT PERMITTED HERE,’ the crowd said.

Everyone at once had spoken, almost at once, as if each read from a single script. None shouted, and many voices were hoarse or shrill with fear, but the collective voice was loud.

From behind them, an Enforcer took two steps, idly kicking the Astropath’s broken legs away from him. No one else moved, but several of the crowd looked at the Enforcer nervously and expectantly. Xubari felt the heat of the mindfire radiating off each person in the crowd, but none more so than the Enforcer, the lawman acting as some kind of nexus of their power. It was a ferocious blaze that burned and consumed. Now he understood the psykers in the cells, the ruptured Astropath: the Enforcer and this crowd were gorging on them, draining the prisoners to fill an ever-emptying void in themselves. This crowd of psykers were not prisoners, but Xubari saw they were equally in thrall to the Enforcer. At least, their bodies were; their eyes betrayed each individual’s terror and guilt. The lawman swaggered in pristine carapace armour, a green mantle flecked with blood swathing his shoulders. Xubari’s eyes narrowed as he recognised it as an Astropath’s robe; now it was worn like a trophy.

‘THE PENALTY FOR TRESPASSING IS DEATH,’ said the crowd.

The Enforcer gazed hungrily at the Librarian, but kept the crowd between himself and the Salamanders.

‘As is the penalty for betraying the Emperor,’ replied Xubari, raising his bolt pistol and firing.

The shell detonated before it reached the Enforcer, and now the lawman willed his thralls to attack. Bolts of sizzling purple lightning flew from outstretched hands. Tear-streaked faces wailed, and empyric amplification turned the screams into psychosonic screeches. Black streams of fire spat from the thralls’ wide eyes. Every one of the crowd drew upon their dangerous powers, and coruscating energy arced towards the Salamanders.

Xubari fought against every warp-forged attack with iron-hard mental discipline. He bled the power from furious bolts and dove into his opponents’ minds to destroy curses even as they formed. He could not stop them all, and two Aggressors fell, their armour melted, ruptured or hideously altered.

Ko’val’s surviving Aggressors unleashed their full volcanic fury on the thrall-psykers. Torrents of burning promethium roared out and billowed over an invisible barrier that steamed and hissed. Xubari could see the Enforcer beyond the flames, both hands held before him, his face twisted in a snarl as he held back the flames’ heat. Warp-frost wreathed his form as he projected a billowing gale of icy wind before him. Other thralls added blasts of kinetic energy to the defence, keeping the Salamanders’ fiery attacks at bay.

Xubari backed towards the door and slammed his hands on either side of the broken doorway. With a crack, a spitting line of fire, soot and lightning leapt from each hand and tore its way around the curving inner wall on either side. They bypassed the desperate warding shields thrown forward by the psykers. When the two arcing lines of power met, they exploded in flame and ash. Psy-wrought fire engulfed many of the thralls. Those not killed instantly beat at flames that refused to go out. Their mouths gaped wide, but none screamed, and Xubari at last saw the full power the Enforcer held over them. These thrall-psykers were pawns. Though the Librarian regretted each of their deaths, he knew there was no safe way to let them live. Many thralls yet survived, manifesting attacks with greater desperation.

Over the tumult of psychic power and roaring flames, the shattering of glass from above was almost lost. The shards fell over the Astropath’s corpse, and Jurr’s Reivers landed with crushing force in the thralls’ midst.

‘The Enforcer!’ shouted Xubari into the vox.

‘Kill him, now!’

Five bolt shells punched into bodies that suddenly dove between the Reivers and the Enforcer. The psychic dominator threw his thralls’ lives away to shield him, and more died in every moment.

‘DIE, FILTH,’ said the psykers, their weakened voice drawn from terrified and exhausted survivors.

Several threw themselves at the Reivers, manic fear in their eyes as the Enforcer compelled them while he backed further away. The Enforcer thrust one hand towards Jurr’s squad while keeping his gaze fixed on the Aggressors. One of the Reivers jerked and fell as his finely wrought armour crumpled and crushed him.

With few psychic attacks to disperse now, Xubari ran forwards, his mind cleaving a path through the lawman’s psychic storm. The Librarian leapt for the Enforcer, bearing him to the ground and breaking the man’s ribs beneath his weight. He pressed his hands upon the man’s breastplate and poured his anger into the psychic puppeteer. The man thrashed and screamed as psychic fire first melted the armour onto his skin and then incinerated him from the inside. From his open mouth, flame jetted in a gale, playing harmlessly over Xubari’s Nocturne-forged ceramite.

With the Enforcer’s death, the remaining thrall-psykers died quickly. Smoke trailed up through the broken roof from their bodies. Xubari took a breath and nodded to Ko’val and Jurr. The roar of flame and the muffled bark of silenced bolts began as the two squads steadily made their way from cell to cell.

Xubari cast his gaze and his mind around the prison. How was this possible, he questioned, looking at the Enforcer’s empty charred armour. There were so many psykers here, and many were old. How have the Black Ships missed this potential for so long? Xubari felt a familiar heat begin to build, the tingle of mindfire. Not here, but it wasn’t far.

Ko’val and Jurr approached, silently confirming their task was completed with curt nods.

‘I fear these were not the last, brothers,’ Xubari told them.

‘There was never going to be only one, but I did not expect so many.’

‘The fires of battle ever temper us,’ replied Ko’val stoically.

Xubari nodded.

‘That they do, brother.’