Further tales of the Space Marines

INDOMITUS
An Ultramarines novel by Gav Thorpe

• DARK IMPERIUM •
by Guy Haley
Book 1 – DARK IMPERIUM
Book 2 – PLAGUE WAR

SPEAR OF THE EMPEROR
An Emperor’s Spears novel by Aaron Dembski-Bowden

BLOOD OF IAX
An Ultramarines novel by Robbie MacNiven

• MEPHISTON •
by Darius Hinks
Book 1 – BLOOD OF SANGUINIUS
Book 2 – THE REVENANT CRUSADE
Book 3 – CITY OF LIGHT

THE LONG VIGIL
A Deathwatch anthology by various authors

KNIGHTS OF MACRAGGE
An Ultramarines novel by Nick Kyme

THE DEVASTATION OF BAAL
A Blood Angels novel by Guy Haley

ASHES OF PROSPERO
A Space Wolves novel by Gav Thorpe

WAR OF SECRETS
A Dark Angels novel by Phil Kelly

OF HONOUR AND IRON
An Ultramarines novel by Ian St. Martin

APOCALYPSE
A Primaris Marines novel by Josh Reynolds

FIST OF THE IMPERIUM
An Imperial Fists novel by Andy Clark

Contents

Cover

Backlist

Title Page

Warhammer 40,000

Order of Battle

Part I

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Part II

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Part III

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Epilogue

About the Author

An Extract from ‘The Long Vigil’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

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

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

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

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

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

Order of Battle

Soul Drinkers Third Company

Command: Captain Quhya, Librarian Oxyath, Chaplain Visinah

I: Intercessor Squad Tiridates

II: Intercessor Squad Respendial

III: Intercessor Squad Phraates

IV: Intercessor Squad Utana

V: Intercessor Squad Naudar

VI: Hellblaster Squad Mihrab

VII: Hellblaster Squad Khosrau

VIII: Inceptor Squad Astyagon

IX: Inceptor Squad Karavad

X: Aggressor Squad Otanes

Imperial Navy

Assault Cruiser Suffering of Helostrix, Shipmistress Fyoda Bulgovash

Part I

PLANETFALL

Chapter One

When we prayed for deliverance, it was to an Emperor on Sacred Terra, light years removed in distance.
When the Emperor replied, it was in a voice of thunder.

– Father Balthan Eugenivov, The Keprian Vengeance

Who are we?

It was a thought that came often to him. He never sought it out. It always surfaced when he was fully focused. His mind was so filled by the sleep-taught mechanics of war, of wargear rites and tactical sermons, that a part of him was free to do as it pleased, and it always came back to that question.

Who are we?

He was Brother Cyvon. He was Adeptus Astartes. A Space Marine, as the Low Gothic tongue had it. He was Primaris. So were the other battle-brothers in the hold of the drop-ship. Intercessor Squad Phraates, of which Cyvon himself was a member. Squad Tiridates. Squad Respendial. Epistolary Oxyath, the Librarian, ranking officer in the cramped drop-ship. They were all Space Marines.

They were Soul Drinkers.

But what did that mean? Who were they?

‘Five minutes, praise be,’ came the klaxon-like voice of the servitor-pilot. The upper atmosphere was buffeting the sides of the drop-ship. The lights and readouts dotting the walls of the troop compartment turned from green to red.

Twenty-five Soul Drinkers were strapped into the grav-compensators. The Imperial Navy craft had been refitted to accept their huge frames, some approaching ten feet in their full Mark X Tacticus armour, their bolt rifles – barely portable to an unaugmented human – clamped above their heads. Oxyath’s face was covered by the heavy psi-weave hood that marked him out as a psyker, while the others wore their helmets in anticipation of hard vacuum, environmental hazards or worse. Their thoughts were all the same, for they had gone through the same regimes of sleep-taught combat drills and bloody live-fire training. That way there could be no doubt or hesitation of action when the doors opened and the battle-brothers spilled into the war zone. All the same, except for Brother Cyvon’s question.

Who are we?

The retro-jets on the vehicle’s underside screamed open. The craft was slammed from side to side as it plunged through the planetary winds. Suddenly, it didn’t matter who the Soul Drinkers were.

‘Through this we shall be delivered,’ said Oxyath, his voice transmitted into every battle-brother’s vox-bead. ‘We are born into war, here we are complete. Peace is a prison and war is our release. Fight cold, fight fast.’

‘Landing, thirty seconds,’ blared the servitor voice. ‘Brace, brace. Praise be.’

Cyvon felt the grav-restraints tighten and the vehicle change its orientation, throwing its nose into the air as the rear engines fought alongside the retros to slow the descent. Metal creaked and pinged. The warning runes projected onto his retinas flashed amber as they registered the forces hammering against the drop-ship’s sides.

With a crunch of stone and steel, the transport was down. The grav-restraints snaked open and the Soul Drinkers grabbed their bolt rifles from overhead. The front ramp swung forward, admitting a swirl of dust and grit. Oxyath grabbed his staff from its sheath beside him and was the first to jump out of the opening. Through the dust, Cyvon was aware of rocky desert stretching out around a fortified structure of sheer walls. Mountains rose from a smoggy horizon in one direction, while the distance swallowed stony wastes in the other.

‘Deploy, tight, full cover,’ came Sergeant Phraates’ order through Cyvon’s vox-bead. His Intercessor squad followed the Librarian out of the transport. They were led by Phraates, whose red-painted helmet stood out against the purple of the Soul Drinkers’ armour and the grimy dark fawn of the dust.

They moved with coordination, speed and precision that men could not achieve. It had been ground into their minds over years of hypnogogic battle-rites and training-ground drills. It was a reflex action for Cyvon to follow Brother Sasan out of the ship, watching the left side as Sasan covered the right, the barrel of his bolt rifle hovering precisely in the centre of his field of vision. He did not have to think to know that the rest of the squad was doing the same behind him, so no hidden sniper or lurking ambusher could take them by surprise.

He did not have to think, so the rest of his mind was free to think.

So this is Kepris, he thought.

The Keprian Reclamation was part of the Imperium’s grand work known as the Indomitus Crusade. Hundreds of wars, thousands of conflicts spread across the domains of man, all with the grander purpose of winning back what the Cicatrix Maledictum had taken.

The Great Rift. The catastrophic warp storm had ripped the Imperium in two. It was partly a stellar phenomenon, partly proof of vastly powerful enemies moving against humankind. In its wake, the Days of Blinding, to some the heralding of the end times, had settled over those worlds of the Imperium cut off from the authority of Terra. Some such worlds had fallen into anarchy and corruption. Others had starved or been overcome by environmental collapse. Still others had been seduced by dark powers that promised survival and prosperity in a time of disaster. They had died. They had suffered. They had turned traitor.

The Indomitus Crusade was the glorious, bloodstained process of winning back those worlds, and reknitting them into the fabric of the Imperium. Sometimes the flock returned with fanfare and gratitude, welcoming the crusade’s armies as liberators. Others had to be purged of their heretics before they could rejoin the Imperium. Yet others had to be conquered. Some, destroyed.

The Primaris Space Marines had been the reinforcements the Adeptus Astartes had needed to form the cutting edge of the crusade. They were the fruits of a grand experiment, the Ultima Founding. A concoction of the primarchs’ genetic material, preserved since the days when the Emperor still walked the galaxy, had been used to create a new breed of transhuman warriors in the laboratories of Belisarius Cawl. There were thousands of newly minted Space Marines to reinforce existing embattled Chapters, and even found entirely new ones composed solely of Primaris battle-brothers, thrown en masse into the Great Rift to win back humanity’s worlds.

Some of the Imperium’s wars burned brightly and ended swiftly. Others smouldered on for relentless years. Planets that were thought inviolably strong were lost to dark forces. Others were reclaimed from impossible odds by vast sacrifices of men and machines. Each war had many fronts, and each front could spread across multiple worlds. Battle groups and task forces drawn from every branch of the Imperium’s vast military were sent from one end of the Imperium to the other, touching every corner of mankind’s domain.

Amidst the bedlam, a planet was marked for reconquest. It was a psychological target, for it housed a collection of relics of the Imperial creed. To the Ecclesiarchy, whose preachers were lamenting the signs of the apocalypse, reclaiming such a sacred world and its treasures would provide a rare point of light in the overwhelming darkness of their sermons. With its deliverance, the confessors and cardinals could point not just to signs of the end of mankind, but to a sign of victory. That world was named Kepris.

The task of winning back Kepris fell to a newly founded Chapter of Space Marines. A Chapter bearing their name had won their laurels in the Age of Apostasy and countless campaigns before they succumbed to a fate that Imperial history had not recorded. The new Primaris were given the heraldry of that near-forgotten Chapter, and sent out to glorify their name once again.

They were the Soul Drinkers.

The clatter of impacts rang from the drop-ship’s hull as Cyvon jumped down from the ramp to the top of the structure’s outer wall.

‘Small-arms fire,’ came the servitor-pilot’s voice inside the drop-ship.

‘Thank the Throne!’ said Brother Sasan as Cyvon landed beside him. ‘Emperor save us from a cold landing zone!’

‘Cold and fast,’ voxed Librarian Oxyath. ‘We come down fighting.’

Cold and fast. It was partly a war cry, partly a principle of battle. The Soul Drinkers had inherited it from the lost Chapter that had borne their name. It meant the Soul Drinkers fought on the move, refusing to get tied down by the enemy. And while other Chapters revelled in mad butchery, like the Flesh Tearers or the Space Wolves, the Soul Drinkers remained aware and in control, despatching their enemies with a dispassionate precision. Little remained of the old Chapter’s history save that its brethren were fleet-based and specialised in boarding actions and rapid assaults. Their chosen way of war had been to attack swiftly and dissect the enemy up close in a rapid series of accurate strikes.

Kepris stank of propellant and rot. Through the gun smoke and dust, Cyvon could see that the walls surrounded a domed structure decorated with stone scrollwork and arched windows. The walls were swarming with figures aiming their guns up at the drop-ship or rushing to the turrets located at each corner, where heavier weapons were set up on mountings.

A crevasse ran along the ground either side of the dome, and its central portion had partially collapsed into the chasm, revealing the painted plaster and tarnished gilt within. Sections of the walls were in ruins. An Imperial aquila, painted on the remains of the dome, had been deliberately defaced with gunfire.

‘A shrine,’ said Cyvon.

‘Not any more, brother,’ replied Sasan. ‘Now, it’s a grave.’

Across the structure, the strike force’s other two drop-ships were swooping low, ready to make landfall. One of them was commanded by Captain Quhya, the other by First Sergeant Tiridates. Some way above them was the auxiliary lifter carrying the Soul Drinkers’ transport vehicles. Ideally the strike force would make its assault aboard Thunderhawk gunships backed up by Stormtalon ground-attack craft, but in the cauldron of the Indomitus Crusade no army had everything it needed.

This world had come into the gunsights of the Soul Drinkers Third Company. It would be enough.

The drop-ships dipped low over the shrine’s outer wall. Cyvon could make out more of the enemy now – they had no uniform and instead wore a jumble of civilian clothing and pieces of military fatigues. And there was something wrong with their faces.

‘This world has a greeting planned for us!’ said Sergeant Phraates over the squad vox. ‘Let us welcome it in turn!’

The rest of the squad – Sergeant Phraates, Arasmyn, Manuch and Pitamenes – dropped into close formation, covering every angle at bolter-point.

Cyvon’s bolt rifle was already in his hands and his finger over the trigger as his mind took in the battle he had suddenly joined. He automatically dissected angles of fire and routes through cover, the bloody mathematics of combat.

Autogun and laser fire streaked across the battlements. Shots rang off Cyvon’s armour. He swung instinctively into the cover of a bend in the battlements, snapping off two shots into the shape of an enemy looming through the dust kicked up by the drop-ships’ engines. He heard the thunk of the shells hitting the figure’s torso, and the wet crunch of the miniaturised warheads detonating inside.

The enemy wore a filthy orange boiler suit, that of a miner or factorum worker, with a bulky rebreather backpack trailing rubber hoses. It had an autogun in its hands. The bolter shells had ripped open the figure’s torso and it stumbled against the battlements, its brain not fully aware of the ruination done to its organs.

It wore a set of welder’s goggles. Beneath them, and beneath the grime covering the face, there was something very wrong.

The blood spattering the stone of the walls was the first Cyvon had shed on that world.

So this is Kepris, he thought.

A blue-white light lanced down from overhead and landed by the heavy weapons emplacements along the wall. It flared from the force weapon in Oxyath’s hands, illuminating the scene as the Soul Drinkers shot down the heretics rushing along the battlements to fight them. The Librarian swept the staff through an enemy trying to bring a heavy stubber to bear, and followed up with a thrust that impaled a second.

‘Draw in and move down to the interior!’ voxed Phraates. ‘By sections! Show them how the Primaris fight!’

Squad Phraates met up on the walls, by one of the stone staircases leading into the structure. The dust and smoke were thick enough to obscure the scene below but the gunfire and raised voices made it clear that the whole place was on alert, and swarming with foes.

‘Who are they?’ asked Cyvon. The nature of the enemy was as important to the outcome of a battle as Cyvon’s own. Knowing the capabilities of the foe was a weapon in its own right. The face of the enemy he had just killed rose to the surface of his mind unbidden, before he forced it down again.

‘They are dead, brother,’ replied Sasan. ‘What else matters?’

‘If your words were bullets, Sasan,’ growled Pitamenes, ‘this battle would be won.’

Cyvon followed Phraates, the sergeant distinguished by his red helmet with its white stripe of rank. Cyvon fell into formation covering the squad’s rear-right quadrant, the battle-rites drilled into them so thoroughly it was instinct that had each member taking his prescribed place. Phraates ran down the steps rapidly and the area between the walls and the shrine came into view. Several of the enemy were on the back of a flatbed vehicle with another heavy stubber mounted on it, and were firing the weapon up at the top of the far walls, where Captain Quhya’s drop-ship had disgorged its Soul Drinkers. Phraates leapt the rest of the way down to the rocky ground as the heretics began to turn, realising they were being assaulted from both sides.

Cyvon jumped, rolled to his feet, and fired as he ran. One shot blew the arm off the enemy trying to swing the stubber around. Another caught a trooper in the face as he charged at the Soul Drinkers, bayonet fixed to his lasgun. Two more rushed up behind him and Cyvon cracked the stock of his bolt rifle against the side of the first one’s head. He ducked and took the second man’s charge on his shoulder, straightening and throwing him over with his own momentum. A Space Marine was two or three heads taller than a man and the enemy fell far enough to crack his head loudly on the stone. Sasan shot the man through the throat to confirm the kill as Phraates leapt onto the vehicle and laid about him with his sword. A severed arm spun through the air, followed by a head, and the vehicle was suddenly denuded of the troopers who had crewed its gun.

Brother Arasmyn preferred to fight up close. He ran right at one of the enemy and slammed him against the side of the vehicle, then rammed his combat knife through the man’s neck. Pitamenes picked off another as the trooper ran for the cover of the half-collapsed shrine wall, and Manuch shot one more off the walls behind them.

‘Damned place is swarming with them,’ said Manuch.

‘You say that like a curse,’ said Sasan. ‘What good is a Space Marine with no heretics with which to blood himself?’

‘More talk,’ said Pitamenes grimly.

Heretics, Sasan had called them, and their eagerness to open fire on the Space Marines confirmed they were enemies of mankind. But Cyvon could not call them heretics without knowing why they fought, what drove them, what kind of madness had taken them over such that they were choosing the sure death of facing the Angels of Death in battle. He could ask who they were, but his battle-brothers would have given the same answer, in their own ways.

It did not matter.

Captain Quhya’s contingent were sweeping down off the walls on the other side of the shrine. Heretics caught in the crossfire between the two payloads of Soul Drinkers dived for cover even as bolt rifle shells found their mark and ripped wet, red holes through them. Cyvon snapped shots into the fleeing enemies as he backed against the bullet-riddled vehicle and caught a glimpse of the ruined finery inside the shrine. The walls had been painted and framed with golden scrollwork, dulled and defaced by the collapse and the intrusion of the desert winds.

He turned over one of the fallen heretics with his boot. The man’s arm and shoulder had been blasted off, laying open half his torso. He wore a scarf around his face to fend off the dust and wind. A burst of autogun shots chattered from inside the shrine, rattling off the side of the flatbed, and Cyvon ducked out of the line of fire.

He pulled the scarf aside. The face beneath had been scored down the middle with a deep knife wound, too neat and precisely placed to have been caused by shrapnel or an accident. It had been deliberately inflicted. The wound went down through the mouth, splitting the lips. The tongue that lolled from between them was split too, like a lizard’s. The nose was pared open down to the bone, revealing nasal cavities choked with scar tissue.

‘Press on!’ came Captain Quhya’s order over the vox. ‘Drive them into the interior and hit them from all sides!’

‘If these heretics want to make a last stand in there,’ said Sasan, ‘it would be rude to deny them.’

Sergeant Phraates jumped down off the flatbed. ‘Breach and purge!’ he ordered. ‘Manuch, cover the rear. The rest, full forward!’

Cyvon left the mutilated heretic where he had fallen. The other bodies bore the same mutilation. What would drive someone to deliberately damage themselves?

But these were thoughts for when the fighting was done. Cyvon ran after Brother Sasan and Sergeant Phraates, straight at the gap in the shrine wall where the crevasse had undermined its massive sandstone blocks.

Fire poured out at them. Phraates trusted in his armour, and autogun shells pinged off the purple-painted ceramite plates of his greaves and shoulder guard. Cyvon backed against the wall and Phraates charged past him, loosing off half a magazine of bolter shells into the shrine’s gloom. Cyvon swung in behind him, scanning across the interior, ready to fire.

The gloom receded. His enhanced eyesight cut through the darkness. The walls and dome had once been covered in painted angels, swooping down from sun-drenched heavens. Saints had gazed up at the firmament, holding the archaic weaponry of the Imperium’s endless wars, and gilded letters had spelled out prayers to the God-Emperor. Now, the images were almost lost behind damage and bullet scars where they had been most thoroughly defiled. An enormous circular chandelier of wood still hung lopsidedly from the sagging dome, covered in ancient candles and encrusted with wax.

The place was a wreck. The dark wood pews had been piled up into barricades, or used as fuel for a huge bonfire in the centre of the room beside the splintered remains of the preacher’s pulpit. The lit bonfire surrounded a blackened statue of the Emperor in gilded armour, from which the eyes had been struck. The eyes of the painted figures on the walls had been similarly gouged out.

Dozens of the heretics were sheltering among the ruined pews. Cyvon’s trigger finger tightened by instinct, spraying a volley of bolter shells across the room in a fan of fire. The heretics dived to the floor as Soul Drinkers burst in from every angle and criss-crossed the shrine with gunfire.

Hundreds of the enemy had barracked here. They had slept in the bedrolls scattered among the pews. Scores of them had already died in the time since the Soul Drinkers had landed. It had been less than a minute. They fell in the crossfire, shredded by shrapnel from the explosive rounds. In return, their weapons pinged and fizzed off the Soul Drinkers’ power armour, or scored furrows through the defaced murals as their panicked aim went wild. The Emperor’s statue was sprayed with blood, and bodies were draped over the altar and pulpit. The centre of the shrine was becoming a tangled swamp of gore and body parts.

It was less a gunfight than a dissection. The battle-drills of the Soul Drinkers were executed to perfection. Cyvon moved now without conscious decision, fighting by rote, knowing his battle-brothers would be following the same tactical patterns laid down hundreds or thousands of years ago and sleep-taught to the Primaris of the Soul Drinkers.

‘Onward!’ came Quhya’s order over the vox. The three jump pack-equipped battle-brothers of Inceptor Squad Astyagon rocketed across the shrine on columns of flaming exhaust, strafing the heretics with chains of fire from their assault bolters. Hellblaster Squad Khosrau swept into the shrine beside Squad Phraates and eroded the hard cover of the solid wooden pulpit with pulses of fire from their plasma incinerators. Liquid plasma washed over the heretics, burning away their flesh to leave blackened bone and melting anything they hid behind. Superheated air washed across the shrine, igniting the torn pages of discarded prayer books.

‘Follow, brethren, or be damned!’ ordered Sergeant Phraates. He led the way over the broken pews towards the heretics’ last stand, firing one-handed as he drew his chainsword. Cyvon snapped shots into the heretics taking cover behind the massive base of the Emperor’s statue and saw more skulls blown open. In the storm of fire, it was impossible to tell to whom the kills belonged.

‘Sweep the scum aside and purify this place!’ yelled Phraates, his voice ragged with the rush of battle.

The stench of death hit Cyvon in waves now, as if accentuated by the heat of the Hellblasters’ plasma fire. It hit harder than the chemicals of bolter propellant, even through the filter of his helmet.

It was coming from beneath. He could make out the steps beside the altar, leading to a lower level of catacombs or ritual chambers. Somewhere the heretics were dying to defend.

A team of heretics hauled a missile launcher on a pivoting stand up to what remained of the pulpit. Two fell immediately as the Inceptors finished their arc and riddled them with bolter fire that blew their upper torsos into crimson spray. The surviving two aimed the missile launcher across the shrine at the charging Squad Phraates.

‘You dare?’ snarled Pitamenes, stepping up onto one of the pews for a better shot at the weapons team. ‘These vermin would take the life of a Soul Drinker?’ He shot one of the heretics in the throat, blowing his head clean off.

Manuch dropped to one knee and fired a single bolt into the heretic aiming the missile launcher. The bolter detonated inside the man’s shoulder and his arm spun away in a spray of gore.

The launcher swung towards the sky as the heretic’s remaining hand contracted around the firing lever. A missile streaked straight upwards, and the dying man vanished in the billow of white exhaust.

The missile detonated against the dome in a thunderclap and a burst of orange flame. The roof cracked and sagged, and in a shower of debris the enormous wooden ring of the chandelier came loose. It seemed to fall in slow motion as its chains snapped and it plunged edge first towards the centre of the shrine.

Cyvon skidded against one of the pews to halt his advance before he ended up underneath the falling chandelier. It crunched into the floor just ahead of him and kept going, smashing through flagstones already half melted by the barrages of plasma and bolter fire.

The floor collapsed in a cascade of ancient broken stone, thousands of years of wear, combined with the undermining of the shrine by the crevasse, causing it to give way completely. The edge of the collapse rushed towards Cyvon faster than he could react and he felt the floor disintegrating beneath him. He saw Pitamenes beside him grabbing on to the stone and halting his fall as Cyvon plunged into the dark underside of the shrine.

Chunks of masonry cracked against his armour. He willed himself to keep hold of his bolter as debris rang off his helmet and bursts of white pain flashed across his vision.

He might have blacked out for a moment. Cyvon cursed the possibility, and ignored the complaints from his battered limbs as he rolled onto his front and got to his feet. His armour automatically dispensed anaesthetics, but he had already forgotten about the pain before they started working.

‘Report!’ came Phraates’ rough-edged voice, sounding distant through the vox.

‘Alive,’ said Cyvon. ‘I am alive.’

He took stock of his surroundings rapidly. He had come to rest in an arched tunnel of worked stone, now half choked by debris from the collapse. Overhead was a slice of an opening that looked up to the shrine’s dome, streaked with bolter fire. Ahead of him the passage opened up into a larger chamber lit by guttering candlelight.

This was the source of the stench. The odour of death surrounded him, so heavy it seemed the air was thick and sluggish with it.

He got to his feet, checking himself for injuries. Nothing of note. He cycled the action of his bolt rifle, and it gave a heavy, broken clunk.

Whether it was through random chance, or because he had been inattentive during his pre-battle wargear rites, the weapon had failed him. Cyvon shouldered the rifle and drew his combat blade. Its monomolecular edge shone in the faint candlelight. With his other hand he drew his bolt pistol. It had a shorter range and lower rate of fire than the rifle, but in these close confines it would suffice.

‘Unhurt,’ voxed Sasan. ‘Throne alive, something died down here.’

Cyvon heard voices from up ahead. Strident and defiant, someone ranting as if whipping a crowd into a frenzy of zeal. And he heard the crowd, too, their roar rising and falling with the speaker’s inflection.

He backed against the archway and glanced through to the larger chamber. The scene was lit by hundreds of candles oozing wax down the walls. Well over a hundred people kneeled before the far wall, on which shone an image from a projector above the archway. Each of the kneeling figures was stripped and hunched, and so malnourished their spines and ribs stood out vividly through their bruised and lesioned skin. Each figure’s wrists were manacled to an iron ring in the floor in front of them, forcing them into a kneeling position.

Forced to kneel. Forced to pray.

The stench was emanating from the congregation. Some of them had fresh wounds, as if they had just been flogged before being dragged down into the catacomb. Others had long-healed wounds and skin so grey and lifeless they might have been dead. The congregation was continually refreshed, perhaps as a punishment, perhaps as a sacred duty for the heretics above. Cyvon could not help but wonder how long they had been down here, chained in enforced prayer.

He levelled his pistol across the gloomy chamber. Niches in the walls still held scraps of bone and funeral shrouds. This had once been the catacomb where clergy had been buried beneath the altar to their Emperor. Now it was defiled by this mockery of worship.

Cyvon stepped carefully between the rows of worshippers. They did not acknowledge him. Their eyes were fixed on the projection. Their faces, like those of the heretics fighting above, were sliced down the centre from forehead to chin, opening up the nasal cavity and splitting the lips into an expression no unmutilated human face could wear. Their eyes were lidless, dry and speckled with dust.

Sasan entered the chamber from another archway. The purple of his armour was grey with grime and debris from the collapse. An acknowledgement rune flashed against Cyvon’s retina, projected by the auto-senses inside his helmet, and with a thought he returned the signal to his battle-brother.

A section of the ceiling had collapsed in a far corner of the room, brought down by the old subsidence of the shrine building. A sliver of movement flickered behind it – white fabric. Robes.

Cyvon broke into a run down the centre of the chamber, past the rows of worshippers. The other side of the collapsed stone came into view, and behind one of the blocks crouched a heretic, this one in layers of white vestments with a mask of stretched and tanned skin worn over his face. He had an autogun clutched in his hands.

‘Behold her vengeance!’ yelled the heretic, bringing up his gun to fire.

Cyvon was faster by far. Before the heretic could take aim, the Soul Drinker had pulled the trigger. His bolt pistol barked and the explosive round smacked into the centre of the heretic’s chest. The wall behind him was sprayed with the interior of his chest cavity as a second shot blew off his gun arm.

A weight slammed down from the ceiling onto Cyvon. He heard Sasan opening fire and more bolter shells thumping into flesh before they detonated. Cyvon rolled onto his back, trying to dislodge whoever had landed on him. He felt steel claws scrabbling at the neck joint of his armour, trying to wrench his helmet off.

Cyvon snapped his bolt pistol onto the magnetic clamp at his waist and grabbed a handful of the heretic grappling him. He threw the attacker over his shoulder to the floor in front of him, as if he were wrestling a sparring opponent to the ground.

The thing that hit the floor had been human once, but no longer. It still wore the tatters of a fine military uniform with threads of brocades clinging to the chest and medals pinned to the tattered front of a dark-red jacket. Its arms were reinforced with pistons and rods for strength, and for hands it had sets of steel claws.

The face was a horror. The skin was pared away from the central split, opening up the eyes into wide bloodshot orbs sitting in their deep, red sockets. The lips were peeled back and pinned to the cheeks, revealing a grimace of gore-flecked teeth.

One of the arms pistoned forwards. Cyvon caught it with his free hand before the claws found his throat. His other hand gripped the combat knife. He punched the blade forward into the attacker’s chest and felt it scrape between the ribs, but the enemy kept going.

The heretic should have been dead. Cyvon’s enhanced hearing could detect the hammering of its heart, driven by combat stimms. It struck again with a reinforced arm, with strength and speed that could crack ceramite. Cyvon pivoted to one side and the fist drove chunks from the stone wall behind him.

The heretic screamed.

In a flicker of the candlelight, Cyvon could see the dark-red flesh exposed by the deep furrow down the centre of the heretic’s face. He lunged with the combat knife, aiming for the vertical split. The knife sank into the heretic’s brain cavity, right between its eyes, up to the hilt.

Finally some key connection was severed, and the heretic fell limp. Cyvon flicked it off the blade and let it clatter to the floor. He drew his bolt pistol again and spun around to see Brother Sasan kick a similarly enhanced attacker away from him and pump two bolter shells into its chest.

The chamber was finally clear. Sasan looked around and, for the first time Cyvon could remember, seemed lost for words.

The projection showed an open square surrounded by looming city spires. Thousands of people crowded the square, facing a wooden stage that took up one end of the space. Banks of seating held thousands more on the other three sides. Banners hung around the square. Some, bearing the elaborate arms of aristocratic houses, were torn and defaced. Others, new and resplendent, had the image of an enthroned woman whose head was surrounded by a halo of sunbeams.

On the stage was gathered a group of priests. They wore masks of carved wood and metal, and their garb was similar to that of the robed heretic Cyvon had despatched. Behind them were several large steel cages with human shapes inside, crouching and pawing like animals.

Another group on the stage were hunched and emaciated, their tattered and stained uniforms hanging on starved frames. Most were in the remains of the black garb of the Administratum, while others wore the robes of Ecclesiarchy clerics. Armed heretics below the front of the stage trained their guns on this other group, even though the captives looked barely able to stand, let alone fight.

The crowd cheered as one of the priests stepped forward to a vox-caster microphone mounted on a lectern. The priest wore a mask carved into a snarling, catlike face, and the ivory of his robes was trimmed red. He held up a hand to quiet the crowd. He wore several fat rings that glinted in the lights trained on the stage.

‘I stand here as the Uppermost Hand of the prophetess,’ he began, ‘of the Voice of All. Through me, she speaks. And she pronounces death!’

‘Enough of this heresy,’ said Sasan, and strode to the back of the chamber, towards the projector.

‘Wait,’ said Cyvon. ‘We know nothing about this enemy.’

‘What do we need to know?’ asked Sasan, pausing beside the machine. ‘They took up arms against us. They defy the rule of the Imperium. They are the enemy. Or is this place not quite heretical enough for you, brother?’

‘Sergeant,’ voxed Cyvon. ‘Found something. A place of worship. A broadcast from a city, maybe Hollowmount. It might tell us something.’

‘Captain Quhya has ordered us to move in ten minutes, as soon as the transports make landfall,’ replied Phraates. ‘Cyvon, observe the broadcast until then. I should like to know what is waiting for us in the city. The rest of you, sweep for hostiles and regroup in the courtyard.’

Cyvon sent an acknowledgement rune as reply. Sasan left the projector alone and checked back through the doorway he had arrived through, hunting for any hidden enemies that had somehow survived the Soul Drinkers’ assault.

Cyvon continued to watch the broadcast as a bent old man in the black uniform of the Administratum was dragged from the gaggle of prisoners to centre stage. The chained congregation watched, too, their jaws lolling open, ignoring the dead heretics littering the chamber and several of their own number who had been caught in the crossfire and killed. Cyvon wondered who these people had been before they were brought down here and condemned to this forced observance of a heretic religion. Had they gone willingly? Was this a reward for the faithful, or a punishment?

He knew his fellow Space Marines would give him the same answer, so his questions went unasked.

They would all say the same thing. These people were the enemy. What did it matter?

Chapter Two

It was all around us. The heresy, the cruelty, the death and pain. It found purchase in the most righteous and the highest-born, and in the lowest filth of the gutters alike. We all looked into the eye of death, and the weak-willed called it master.

– Father Balthan Eugenivov, The Keprian Vengeance

What was transmitted into the fallen stronghold was also watched by millions across Kepris. In the cities that still held out against the Voice of All, the people shuddered as they watched the inevitable unfolding. In the places the prophet’s faithful held, citizens were ordered to gather for mass screenings. The faithful themselves celebrated as the broadcast reached their barracks and places of worship.

If there had ever been any doubt that Kepris had thrown off the cruel mantle of the Imperium, it was gone the moment the prisoners were dragged onto the stage that had been built in Sacerdotes’ Square.

Hollowmount’s faithful had found the prisoners huddling in the basement of the Granite Basilica, where they had hidden for months. They were starving and dehydrated. Even those who were young looked aged, haggard. The Hands of All had dragged them out of hiding into the streets. Some of the heretics were torn apart by the Thricefold before the Hands of All had got the condemned to relative safety, so they could be tried and executed publicly.

It had to be done that way, because that was what pleased the Voice of All.

Now the unbelievers were exhibited upon the stage like chattels ready to be sold. Once, the regiments of Kepris’ military had paraded here, in a celebration of their tyranny. Now the accused looked down not on regiments of troops loyal to them, but at the people of Hollowmount, the capital of Kepris. Those gathered to watch justice being done were the uprisen and unafraid, painted with the blood emblems taught to them by Yeceqath and baying for their deaths.

‘This day,’ said the Uppermost Hand into the vox-caster, ‘the seven hundredth after the tyrants were cast down, a hundred more have been rooted out. For their crimes, there is only one punishment. If we could inflict it a hundred times, it would be righteous. But it can be done only once. And it will be here, as the faithful watch on. Blessed by the hand of Yeceqath is the blade! The sentence uttered by the Voice of All! Thus always shall the tyrant be brought low!’

‘I wish… I wish to repent,’ said one of the prisoners. ‘When I die, I am judged. I would not be judged wanting by… by Her. Please.’ He had a faded Imperial aquila tattooed on his wrinkled and spotted brow. His Administratum uniform had badges of long service and commendation still clinging to the rags.

The Uppermost Hand scrutinised the old man. The wrinkled eyes were wet with tears. He was thoroughly broken. Worship of the Emperor was only ever a thin veneer of obedience and it had been stripped away by the revelation of true divinity. The Uppermost Hand held the microphone towards the prisoner.

‘Then repent,’ he said. ‘Give your last breath to Her, and pray with your last thought it will be enough.’

The prisoner took the microphone in his shaking hand.

‘You can’t… you can’t kill us!’ The prisoner’s voice was thin and weak with the deprivations of his long hiding. The crowd hissed and spat at his words. ‘Faith in the Emperor can never die! She is mad! This heresy will be punished! For the Emperor, let her be–’

The Uppermost Hand scowled, snatched the microphone back off the old man, and knocked him to the stage with a backhand swipe. The man crumpled, and another Hand of All hauled him back to his feet. The Uppermost Hand gestured for his weapon, a long, wicked blade with one of its edges serrated, and a servile rushed forward with it.

‘By the blasphemies they utter even now, we know them,’ said the Uppermost Hand. He raised the blade as his seconds rushed forward to hold the Administratum officer still. ‘Let it be done.’

The Uppermost Hand plunged the blade into the side of the old man’s neck. He pulled it halfway out, then forced it back in, sawing through muscle and bone. The old man’s head flopped to one side and blood fountained onto the stage.

The crowd roared. Everything they had suffered, everything they had fought against, had flowed from the wickedness of these condemned people. The authorities of the Imperium, the cruel and unwelcome hand of a distant tyranny that claimed its authority from a long-dead Emperor. The officials of the Imperium had been massacred in their thousands, in the basilicae and the forges, in the palaces and military barracks, chased down by the Hands of All and slain. Soon, there would be none left.

Because it pleased Yeceqath, the Voice of All, for it to be so.

‘Is this death punishment enough?’ demanded the Uppermost Hand. His mask, fashioned from leather and fabric into the visage of a fanged and maned creature, was spattered with the dead man’s blood.

‘No!’ replied the crowd, as if with one tremendous voice.

‘Bring forth the Thricefold!’ screamed the Uppermost Hand.

The Hands of All opened the cages behind the stage, and gripped the chains that held back the Thricefold. Sixteen of them had been gathered and brought to Sacerdotes’ Square for the occasion. These were the ones chosen by Yeceqath to know her truth, and nothing else. They were three times proven, three times blessed, three times changed. Their faces were split down the middle to the bone, exposing the sliver of brain. That sliver was exposed to the truth beaming from Yeceqath, filling them up and banishing the weaknesses of men.

The Thricefold bounded onto the stage, snarling and slavering, as the Hands of All struggled to restrain them by their chains. These Thricefold had sharpened lengths of bone talon instead of fingers. The prisoners shrieked and wept at the sight of them.

The Uppermost Hand gave the order with a simple gesture. The Hands of All released their chains.

The Thricefold pounced.

The crowd cheered.

What information had been gathered on Kepris had been out of date, since nothing had been heard from the planet since the Great Rift had cut it off from the rest of the Imperium. The map that Captain Quhya now consulted was generated from the scans taken of the planet’s surface by the Suffering of Helostrix, the Imperial Navy craft that had brought the Soul Drinkers to Kepris, but the ancient, temperamental technology had its limits. The cities and the structures in the neighbouring swathe of desert were there, but who might be found there, and what side they might be on, could only be guessed at until the Soul Drinkers had eyes on them.

The Soul Drinkers had made landfall far from likely centres of population, to give them time to establish a position and a battleplan before making significant contact with whoever now controlled Kepris. They were at the edge of the rocky desert, near where it gave way to the more habitable regions in which the planet’s cities had taken root. Hollowmount, the planetary capital, was the closest, the largest in a constellation of dense subhives housing the planet’s industrial capacity and population.

Across the desert, among the mountains and beyond, were the shrines. Long ago, when the Imperium was still young, a saint had come to Kepris and walked across these broken, hostile lands experiencing visions of the Emperor. This was in the period of history after the Horus Heresy and Scouring, when the masses of the Imperium deified the Emperor and His worship was spreading across the Imperium. Though most Space Marines stayed aloof from such worship, it was the Imperial creed that united the Imperium as much as its military or the rule of the High Lords of Terra. Thousands of saints, their lives and writings, made up its canon, and without the ever-presence of that religion there might be no Imperium at all.

Wherever this saint had experienced such a vision or paused on his pilgrimage, a holy site had been established, now commanded by a fortified shrine administered by the clergy of the Ecclesiarchy. Each such shrine housed relics of the visionary, who had become known to Imperial history by the name Saint Innokens, and these relics were what the Imperium considered worth saving on Kepris. It had lost worlds before, hundreds of them, to the madness of the Great Rift, but there were always more humans born and balls of rock to settle them on. Icons of the Imperial faith, however, could not be replaced.

The Third Company’s commanders and squad sergeants gathered around the hololith projected from Captain Quhya’s auspex scanner. It showed a grainy map of the surrounding areas, much of it speculative in regard to population centres and likely resistance.

‘Two objectives,’ said Quhya. ‘Firstly, the shrines. Yeceqath’s forces are laying siege to them. Several have already fallen but the planet’s own regiments and Ecclesiarchy militias are still holding most of them. The vox chatter we have picked up so far suggests the enemy are becoming more desperate, using shock troops to breach their defences. Something called the Thricefold, going by the executions from the broadcast. Most of the company will join the defences and secure the relics.’

‘What support do we have from the Suffering?’ asked Sergeant Phraates.

‘Captain Bulgovash can’t get into low enough orbit for long without running a gauntlet,’ replied Quhya. ‘Kepris’ cities still have their orbital defences. The same reason our air transports are of limited use. They are not armoured like Stormravens or Thunderhawks.’

‘So we fight with just bolter and blade,’ said Phraates. ‘No support from above.’

‘Beg not for a weapon you cannot grasp,’ retorted Chaplain Visinah. ‘Look to what fate has placed in your hand.’

‘Not your concern anyway, Phraates,’ said Quhya. ‘You’re going into the city. Second objective, hit Yeceqath’s power base. The broadcast in the shrine showed the cult holds Hollowmount. If we strike there we will force this cult to fight on two fronts. Find its leaders. Find their prophet, Yeceqath, if we can. Squads Tiridates, Respendial and Phraates, under Epistolary Oxyath, you head to Hollowmount. The rest of the company goes with me to the shrines. How do we fight, Soul Drinkers?’

‘Cold and fast!’ replied the assembled officers.

‘Move out, brothers,’ said Quhya.

Already the engines of the Impulsors were turning over, and the Soul Drinkers were going to war.

Hollowmount was wounded and bleeding. They had streamed out of the city as the violence had begun, before the gates were shut by the Hands of All. The refugees had set up camps outside the city as they tried to decide where to turn next – to one of the other cities, which were falling to the Voice of All one by one, or into the unforgiving desert and towards the distant shrines.

This much could be guessed at from the ruins of the camps stretching across the scrubland outside Hollowmount, and to the edge of the encroaching rock desert. Cyvon had seen enough war in the Indomitus Crusade to read the story of bloodshed from the tangled remnants of the tents and bivouacs, and the burned-out vehicles lining the road. Closer to the city were rows of severed heads and heaps of charred bones. He could almost hear the raised voices and gunshots as the cult massacred the refugees, hunting for fugitive Imperial personnel. From what he gathered from the scenes he had witnessed beneath the shrine, most of the Imperial officials in Hollowmount had been run to ground and killed, either on the spot or later in the staged trials and executions.

The Soul Drinkers’ column of three Impulsors swept down the road between the ruins of Hollowmount’s pain. The city had stained the horizon for many miles, and the bleached, desiccated look of the land around it suggested a gargantuan leech that had drained the earth of Kepris of all its vitality.

Hollowmount was a conical mass of concentric tiers reaching up to a pinnacle covered in spires. In an age past it had been built around a lattice of industrial forges and manufactoria supporting a mass of tenements and public districts. Generations since had filled out the voids to make Hollowmount a solid mountain of structures, expanded outwards with new districts budding off the exterior like malignant growths. Even from outside the city, the banners hanging from the towers – depicting a golden-haired woman enthroned, a multitude of bloody hands, a sword through the throat of a crowned skull – made it clear that the Imperial aquila had been torn down and new symbols put up in its place. Here and there some Imperial emblems remained, only so they could be defaced and mutilated.

Pillars of greasy smoke rose from charnel heaps. Wagons of corpses stood abandoned outside the gates. Hollowmount was bleeding, and it was haemorrhaging the last of its sanity.

The column of Impulsors crunched through the last of the camps and the gate into the city came into view. It was an enormous double gate of brass, held up by a pair of watchtowers bristling with guns. The Impulsors’ engines rose in pitch as they sped along the battered roadway towards them.

‘I heard you speaking with Captain Quhya,’ said Cyvon. His berth inside the Impulsor was next to Epistolary Oxyath and the two could speak in the relative privacy of the vox-net, their voices masked by the engine roar.

‘About what?’ asked Oxyath.

‘You told him this planet is infected.’

‘That is what I felt. Infected with madness.’

‘How did you feel it?’

‘It uses no mortal sense. I felt it like… like an old taste you can still detect on your tongue. Like a sound you recognise, but cannot place. An image you are sure you have seen before, not because of the detail but the timbre and colour of the memory.’ He shrugged. ‘You are not a psyker. I cannot make you understand.’

‘Can this world be saved?’

Oxyath sighed. ‘You have a talent for cutting to the heart of the matter, Brother Cyvon. To answer you, everything can be saved, but here the disease of its madness must be cut out completely. I can be no more certain than that.’

‘Chaplain Visinah calls them heretics and vermin, as if they were different creatures to us entirely. But these people were human.’ Cyvon looked through a vision slit in the vehicle’s side, where a heap of charred bodies still smouldered among the wreckage of the camp. ‘They are the enemy but they were human. They were not born like this. Something changed them.’

Oxyath smiled at that. His was not a face made for smiling, and it seemed to crack with the effort. ‘Visinah would have you nerve-scourged for such words.’

‘That is why I say them to you and not to him. Perhaps these people remembered who they once were. That would make them a lot closer to human than us.’

It was impossible not to see the Space Marines as different to humanity. Their size and strength alone set them apart. On primitive worlds, they were regarded as giants of myth returned from a forgotten age. Elsewhere, they were the Angels of Death, spoken of more as instruments of the Emperor’s will than men of flesh and bone. The cultists of Kepris were indeed closer to the citizenry of the Imperium than the Soul Drinkers, at least at first glance.

‘I sense still the old question weighs on you, brother,’ said Oxyath. ‘I do not need the psyker’s sight to know that. It troubles you that you do not know your time before the Adeptus Astartes.’

‘Do you?’

‘No. Like you, I was collected from some far-flung world by the Chaplain of some other Chapter – or perhaps in my case I was harvested from the psykers on the Black Ships of the Inquisition. Then we were turned into what we are. I consider myself born from the ministrations of Archmagos Cawl, and I advocate that you do the same.’

‘To know who we were would bring deeper understanding of who we are now. Why we fight, what we are defending.’

‘We have far more than most men are ever given, Brother Cyvon. We have a purpose. A mission. An enemy to face and the means to destroy them. Rejoice in it, and have faith.’

The gate was in full view now, twin towering slabs of bronze flanked by watchtowers and the battlements of the city wall.

‘They are closed,’ said Brother Sasan, watching through a vision slit. ‘Hollowmount does not welcome us. We shall have to make a door of our own.’ He turned to the rest of the squad. Even though he wore his helmet, Cyvon knew he was smiling. ‘Twenty-five brethren doing what an Astra Militarum column would fear!’

‘And we will!’ snapped Phraates. Even from behind the faceplate of his helmet, Cyvon could feel the glare the sergeant flashed at Sasan. ‘Break out the demo charges. Move fast, stay low. The enemy knows we are coming.’

‘Anything worth doing is done under fire,’ replied Sasan.

‘Movement on the watchtowers,’ said Cyvon. He could pick out the distant figures of men on the battlements, scurrying between gun emplacements. A pair of floodlights snapped on and swung around the devastation of the ruined camps, trying to focus on the speeding Impulsors.

Phraates’ Impulsor was in the middle of the three. Squad Tiridates had the honour of being the first to the breach, with Squad Respendial in the rear. The first shots from the watchtower fell far short of Tiridates’ vehicle, but it would be only seconds before they were in range.

The Soul Drinkers did not know the enemy. Their numbers, their firepower, even what they wanted on this world or how far they would go to get it. Cyvon felt the skin of his neck prickle with the sensation of anger mixed with frustration. They were fighting blind.

The Soul Drinkers would bring light to this place.

Tiridates’ Impulsor slewed to the side as gunfire sprayed off the roadway. Ballistic fire, multiple calibres, heavy stubbers and equivalent weapons of local manufacture. Shots rang off the front of Phraates’ vehicle and that Impulsor changed direction too, zigzagging across the road surface. A missile roared down and missed the column by a long way, impacting among the ruination of the razed camp and sending up a cloud of debris.

‘Move, perceive, execute!’ shouted Phraates over the engine. ‘We shall have no doubt, for we shall know no fear!’

Tiridates’ Impulsor skidded to the side, its thrusters keeping it from ripping into the road surface. The Intercessor squad leapt from the back, springing from opening hatches, with First Sergeant Tiridates himself sprinting for the base of the nearest watchtower. Fire poured down at them in a burning rain, and Cyvon’s sight of the battle-brothers was obscured by the bursts of debris and sparks.

Men would have died. They would have been ripped apart or, worse, would have baulked at the danger all around them and hesitated or run. Adeptus Astartes were not men. Squad Tiridates weathered the downpour, trusting in their armour and the certainty of their purpose, and reached the wall.

Phraates’ Impulsor slewed to a halt next. Cyvon followed Sasan out of the opening hatch and felt the auto fire crackling around him. Unsighted, imprecise. The Soul Drinkers had given no warning of their approach. Men were still scrambling onto the battlements, and sounds of dismay and alarm filtered down as the cultists saw for the first time they were facing not militia or Keprian regiments, but Space Marines. The Adeptus Astartes brought terror with them, and the first strike they made against the enemy sowed panic instead of shedding blood.

Every step closer the Soul Drinkers got to their enemy, the closer they were to victory. The safest place was eye to eye with the foe, because that was where a Space Marine could not lose.

If the gates had been open, if the defensive walls around Hollowmount had not been so well maintained, if there had been a viable approach from the air, the Soul Drinkers would have taken a much easier way in. But the only ingress was through one of the capital’s gates, and as soon as the lead Impulsor had reported the bronze portals closed, a direct assault had become the only way to access the city.

Cold and fast. Keep moving. Relent not.

Sergeant Tiridates slammed the first demolition charge onto the rockcrete of the watchtower. Squad Phraates was close behind and Sasan clamped his own charge onto the wall beside the gate, at the base of the tower. The demo charge was a disc-shaped device of ceramite that was packed with explosives, shaped to rip through whatever it was attached to. Cyvon crouched by Sasan as his squadmate turned the detonator handle.

One of the enemy on the walls was leaning clear of the battlements, trying to get a better shot at the Soul Drinkers far below. Cyvon sighted upwards, picking out the man’s central mass through the sights of his bolt rifle. His finger contracted on the trigger, the weapon barked once, and the gunman’s midriff exploded in a crimson spray. He toppled over and off the battlements, and seemed to fall for an unnaturally long time before the corpse slammed into Tiridates’ Impulsor.

The spray of blood clashed with the dusty purple of the Impulsor’s armour. The body, what remained of it, wore oil-stained overalls covered in strips of parchment pinned to the fabric. Each one was covered in writing.

Cyvon had seen similar before on the garb of Imperial pilgrims. They were prayers, but not to the Emperor. The dead man’s face had been pared apart and scarred with deliberate accuracy. The shattered autogun that landed nearby was a standard mark, probably manufactured in Hollowmount, a staple of Kepris’ home-grown regiments. The cult had emptied the armouries of the city’s regular military as they took over the city.

The weight of fire increased. Gun emplacements hammered heavy bolter and stubber rounds into the ground. Cyvon felt one ring off his shoulder guard, and another caught a battle-brother from Squad Respendial in the forearm as he fixed his own charge to the surface of the gate. Other Soul Drinkers were returning fire, but the enemy had the better position, shielded by the battlements and able to pick out their targets below.

Librarian Oxyath strode through the storm of bullets and raised his staff. Crackling power played around his hood like a frantic halo. ‘Have they not witnessed the Angels of Death?’ he said, his voice rising through the vox over the gunfire as if he spoke directly into the mind of every Soul Drinker. His pale face was illuminated purple by the energy fighting to escape his skull. ‘Do they not know that there are consequences to defying the Emperor’s will?’

He slammed the end of his staff into the ground. With a sound that cut through the gunfire, a bolt of purple lightning fell from the sky like a javelin and speared down through the battlements directly overhead.

An eruption of purple flame tore through the men on the wall. Their bodies were scattered into the air, split and torn. Red and orange burst a moment later as ammunition exploded. The air boomed as it was seared away and then rushed back to fill the vacuum, sucking the dust and debris onto the battlements before they were flung out again.

Even through his helmet’s filter, Cyvon could sense the greasy, metallic taste of the burned air. Chunks of smouldering rockcrete rained down. Body parts thumped to the dusty ground.

‘Our Epistolary loves to make an entrance,’ said Sasan over the vox. ‘And I believe he has given us our cue.’

‘Get clear!’ yelled Sergeant Tiridates. Phraates and his squad gathered around their Impulsor as the metallic pings from the demolition charges counted off. Three explosions boomed a moment later, strangely muted by the clamour of the lightning bolt that had just passed.

The charges ripped huge holes in the base of the watchtower and through the doors. The floors of the tower shifted as their supports were severed by the blast. Before the rubble had finished falling, Oxyath was out of cover and running for the opening.

‘Advance!’ shouted Phraates, brandishing his powerblade. ‘Cold and fast, and do not stop!’

The Soul Drinkers charged into the breaches. Tiridates and Respendial burst through the gate, Squad Phraates into the lowest floor of the watchtower. The confines were cramped, for they had been built for men significantly smaller than a Primaris Space Marine. Cyvon’s eyes adjusted rapidly to the gloom.

The lower level of the tower was an execution chamber, one wall scattered with bullet holes and the floor stained with the blood that had run off through a drain in the floor. The last thing the executed people of Hollowmount had seen here was a painting on the wall of a beautiful golden-haired woman on a throne, with the beams of the sun radiating from her.

It had been a grim and filthy place to die. It stank of heresy.

Survivors of Oxyath’s assault were hurrying down from the upper levels. Cyvon heard their booted feet and raised voices from above, and then behind a doorway to one side. He placed a burst of bolter fire through the door at chest height, and heard the familiar sound of bolt shells detonating inside flesh. The other members of the squad fired a volley, too, ripping through the wall and shredding the enemies beyond. A corpse tumbled through the splinters of the door and Cyvon could see its face was split open vertically. The white of its skull was visible through the pared-open forehead and the bone was carved with dense lettering. A few more shots from the squad shut down the movement visible through the holes in the wall.

The enemy had no idea what manner of judgement had descended on them. They had never faced a storm like the Soul Drinkers.

Sergeant Phraates charged straight at the back wall of the chamber and tore through into a mess hall beyond, where windows and doorways led to the other side of the wall. The strike force spread out and forced their way out of the watchtower onto the streets of Hollowmount, joining Respendial and Tiridates who were already outside.

The grand avenue leading to the gate was choked with barricades and fortifications, in anticipation of attack. From every post and lintel hung a gibbet, and in each was a corpse, bent over and bound. Hundreds of them festooned the fortifications around the gate, each with a wooden sign proclaiming the crime of the condemned inside.

IMPERIAL, read one.

KNELT TO THE EAGLE, read another.

DEFIED THE LADY, read a third, beneath a body speared through with metal spikes.

The city of Hollowmount rose around and above. Overhead, the lattice of the city’s industrial infrastructure supported tenement blocks and manufactoria, among them grand marble constructions of the city’s basilicae and places of worship. Banners hung everywhere, and scattered here and there were more clusters of gibbets or hanged bodies. Rings of elevated rails encircled enormous smoke-belching forges. A suspended tower clad in green marble was covered in golden aquilae that had been torn and defaced, with a forest of the dead in black Administratum uniforms dangling from the wings of the mutilated Imperial eagles.

It was an overwhelming mass of a city, stained with the marks of the horror that had come over it.

Every alarm in Hollowmount was ringing. Several industrial hauler vehicles burst onto the avenue three hundred yards away. Their ore hoppers were full of men, who leapt out and began taking up firing positions among the barricades and the low walls of the buildings lining the avenue. From this distance, Cyvon could pick out their jumble of uniforms and clothes – military uniforms, workers overalls, fine brocade and ruffs, penitents’ rags.

‘Every madman in the city is heading this way,’ said Brother Sasan.

‘Then we will go through every madman in this city,’ retorted Phraates, quick as ever to shut down any discouraging word from Sasan.

‘Taken under advisement, Phraates,’ said Sergeant Tiridates. His armour had the gold flashes of battle honours covering one shoulder guard, a concession to his status as First Sergeant. Oxyath outranked him, but the Librarian only invoked his authority when he had to. ‘I will not be held here,’ he growled. ‘We meet their fervour with brutality. They are no more than human. They will crumble.’

‘And there will be more,’ said Respendial. He went helmetless by habit, for he had the best eye of anyone in the company. His battered, shaven skull was the colour of varnished wood. ‘Ordinarily I would lengthen our reach and swap fire with these heretics, but not here. The more that arrive, the more we will be outgunned.’

‘For once, our brother-sergeant does not wish this battle to turn into a shooting contest,’ said Tiridates.

‘Nor I,’ said Phraates.

‘Then we charge,’ said Tiridates, with the finality of the First Sergeant’s authority.

More men were emerging from the streets leading into the avenue. They were armed with a mix of weapons looted from Kepris’ military, mostly autoguns but with a few heavy stubbers and missile launchers mixed among them. A cry went up from the northern side of the street, a baying and screaming that suggested something that had once been human but was no longer. The other heretics seemed to be keeping their distance from the source of the din as they hurried to firing positions among the barricades.

‘Onwards!’ yelled Tiridates, and vaulted the rockcrete barrier in front of him.

Cyvon followed Phraates in Tiridates’ wake. All three squads broke cover and ran as the first of the enemy’s fire fell among them. Cyvon fired on the move, and the ranging shots from his rifle burst near the closest heretics. The other Soul Drinkers did the same, and the heretics ducked the bursts of bolter shells exploding against the barricades or shrieking over their heads.

They were not the equal of Adeptus Astartes, but there were so many of them. Hundreds rushed into the avenue to face the invaders. Word of the Soul Drinkers’ arrival must have reached every corner of the city and everyone who was close enough, and had the means of transport, was streaming through the city to repel them.

The enemy trusted in their weight of fire to stop the invaders breaching their city, but the power armour and physiology of a Space Marine was something they had not planned for. The Soul Drinkers advanced through the fire, and autogun rounds pinged off their ceramite without even slowing them down. Cyvon felt the hot slugs cracking against his shoulder and greaves, ringing off his helmet, but the sleep-taught battle tactics took over and told him to ignore them. He kept up firing as he moved and the Soul Drinkers spread across the avenue in a solid, advancing line of purple armour that did not stop.

The Soul Drinkers would do here what they had done at the shrine: slam into the enemy with more force than they could bear, scatter them, force them to fight face to face and annihilate them. Soon the enemy would have to either break and flee, or fight the Soul Drinkers at a close range where a Space Marine’s strength and fury counted for the most.

The screams from the northern edge of the road hit a crescendo. From the grand marble mansions erupted a host of hundreds of what had once been men. They had the same split down their faces as the man Cyvon had killed at the watchtower, and they were armed not with guns or blades but with whatever had been grafted onto their bodies. They screeched and howled like animals. Going by their clothing they were drawn from every stratum of Hollowmount’s citizenry. Gang leathers leaped and scampered alongside ragged ballgowns. They bled and screamed as they ran right at the Soul Drinkers.

‘By squads, overlapping fire!’ ordered Tiridates. His squad paused and fired volley after volley of bolt shells into the approaching madmen as the other two squads ran past them. The bolter fire erupted among the first rank, ripping bodies apart, limbs from torsos, spraying the grey marble a dark red.

The new horde of enemies did not falter. They jumped over the bodies of their fallen. More streamed from the buildings as Squad Phraates took their turn as the execution detail. Cyvon crouched behind a length of barricade, sighted and fired half a magazine of shells at full-auto into the mob. He could feel the impact of the chain of explosions through the flesh and bone of the enemy.

And he realised, even as they died in their dozens, that the enemy would reach them before they ran out of bodies.

Cyvon let his hearts leap inside him. When the enemy were as crazed as these were, when they were driven by madness or zeal to close with the Soul Drinkers, it was a strength to revel in the glory of the coming fight. He let the feeling swell. For the glory of the Emperor. For the survival of mankind. For the extermination of the heretic. That was why he fought.

Phraates shouldered his bolter and took his power sword in both hands. It had a short, wide gladius blade, and its power field leapt into shimmering life. Cyvon grabbed his own combat blade with his left hand as he squeezed off shots with his right, and the shock wave of the bolter shells exploding buffeted him as he brought down a madman that jumped at him.

This one wore overalls sewn with panels of leather in dark blue and red. What could be seen of its skin was tattooed with the marks of some undercity gang brotherhood. The shots ripped its torso open and the body thumped wetly into the barricade.

Then, the enemy were on them. A heretic dived at Cyvon through the mist of blood left from the one before him. Cyvon met him with a thrust of his combat knife and its monomolecular edge punched right through the man’s gut. The enemy had the uniform of a city official, dark blue with a white sash. His fingers were long metal spikes. Cyvon twisted the knife, tore it free, and drove the stock of his bolt rifle into the enemy’s sundered face. The kill bought him a few steps forward. The Soul Drinkers would not stop until they were dead. The enemy wanted to swamp them with bodies and pin them in place. The Soul Drinkers would not let them.

A flash of purple light engulfed everything, leaving behind the afterimage of a bolt of lightning lancing down from the sagging web of the city above. Bodies tumbled all around. In the wake of his psychic assault, Epistolary Oxyath dived into the melee beside Cyvon, ripping through the closest enemy with his force staff. With a burst of sound deadened by the echo of his lightning, his psychic power discharged through the staff and slammed the enemy into the floor.

The heretics surged into the gap Oxyath had opened up. The press of them weighed down on Cyvon and he shoved them back to open up enough space for his combat blade. Iron talons raked at him and he fended off a vibrating industrial blade that stabbed out of the mass towards his throat.

‘They’re trying to slow us down,’ said Oxyath, his voice oddly calm in the melee. ‘Trap us like animals in the snare.’

The other heretics, the hundreds-strong crowd growing further down the street, levelled their weapons and opened fire. They did not care that the throng of maniacs would be caught in the storm as well. For every Soul Drinker that died, they would sacrifice a hundred of these deviants. And they did.

Autogun fire rattled off Cyvon’s shoulder and elbow guard. He felt ceramite cracking and flashes of pain as the storm of fire found flesh and nerve endings. He ducked behind the barricade and one of the madmen dived over him. This one had sickles in place of hands. It landed on top of him and he fought with the snarling, thrashing creature.

The Thricefold, he remembered. That is what they had been called by the Hand of All, as they ripped apart the prisoners on the stage. Thrice-blessed by the prophet. These ones had their faces opened up to the brain, and it was either combat stimms, mutation or some surgical alteration that kept them alive in such a state. He rammed his knife into the split and twisted the blade through the brain matter beyond. The Thricefold shuddered and spasmed as it died.

Sergeant Phraates stumbled against the barricade beside Cyvon, snarling in frustration. The armour of his left forearm was split open and bloody. His power sword smouldered with the blood crackling in its power field.

The Soul Drinkers could shelter from the fire, and weather it. But they wouldn’t be moving, and the enemy could close in on them, surrounding them from all sides as Hollowmount’s heretic population drained into the avenue. They could hold out for days like that, never sleeping, but not forever.

The realisation that they could die here forced its way into Cyvon’s brain. That the Soul Drinkers could lose.

Unless they broke out now.

As if to punctuate his thought, a missile streaked from the mass of statuary and desecrated shrines along the south side of the road. It impacted among the heretics’ vehicles and one of them cartwheeled into the air as its fuel tank exploded. The deep thunder of erupting fuel was followed by a chatter of gunfire from the same direction, and suddenly the heretics were in disarray, sprinting between cover to take up positions opposite this new threat.

The enemy’s gunfire faltered. Phraates stood clear of cover, his wounded arm hanging by his side. ‘Now!’ he yelled. ‘Cold and fast as your blades!’

The Soul Drinkers slammed into the heretics fighting them. Cyvon jumped to his feet and fired the last shells in his bolt rifle’s magazine into the two maniacs rushing at him, before pivoting on his back foot as another dived towards him talons first. He rammed the point of his knife into the back of the enemy’s head and felt the life go out of it before it slid off the blade.

He gave himself a half-second to get his bearings. The newcomers to the battle were more citizens of Hollowmount, fewer in number than the heretics massing down the road. He saw the marks of the Imperium on them. Some had painted the symbol of the aquila across their faces. Others had the trappings of the Imperial creed – chained books hanging from their belts, handmade shields painted with the image of the Emperor in golden armour, rosarius beads clutched in their hands. A few wore the robes of the clergy. Like the heretics, they were armed with a mix of looted weapons. One of them was reloading the missile launcher he had just fired.

Another man jumped up onto one of the barricades, ignoring the autogun fire spattering around him. He wore the uniform of the Imperium’s Naval aristocracy, black with dark-blue panels, a pelisse over one shoulder and the high, starched collar of a bridge officer. He carried a plasma gun and fired it one-handed as he moved with a grace and poise that suggested augmentations to his muscles and skeleton. His face was high and proud, with pale brown skin, thick dark hair and a cut of dashing handsomeness that helped explain why these Imperial loyalists would follow him into the fray.

What Cyvon noticed most keenly was the symbol the man wore around his neck. It was the stylised letter ‘I’, wrought in gold, with a ruby-eyed skull in the centre.

A symbol rarely worn openly, but one that carried immeasurable weight whenever it was displayed. Much like the Space Marines themselves, many knew of its significance even if few ever saw it in person. It was more than a badge of office. It was a key that opened every chamber in the Imperium and gave access to every level of power. Even more than that, it spoke of how the person carrying it occupied the highest stratum of the Imperium’s many power structures, a position that let them decide the fate of worlds. The Inquisitorial Rosette.

‘These people know this city,’ said Brother Sasan, who had found Cyvon through the melee. ‘They have what we don’t.’

‘Swing south!’ ordered Tiridates over the vox. ‘Their lives will buy us time! Spend it well!’

The man bearing the symbol of the Inquisition bounded through the volleys of fire, launching bolts of plasma at the heretics as he went. He slid into cover near where Phraates was sheltering.

‘Thought you could use a guide, good sirs!’ he said. Through the heat shimmer from his plasma gun, Cyvon could see the delicate scarring around his face from the implantation of high quality bionics. ‘I hate to see your grand entrance into Hollowmount ending in despair. Even the Adeptus Astartes cannot fare well against a whole city’s population, and believe me, that is what you will face if you stay here.’

‘Who is this that jests with me?’ growled Phraates.

‘Stheno of the Holy Orders of the Emperor’s Inquisition,’ the stranger replied with a flourish, and a finger touched to the rosette on his chest.

Phraates’ anger subsided as he recognised the symbol. Even a Space Marine had to respect it. ‘Strange days, these, to find an inquisitor in our midst. I am Sergeant Phraates of the Soul Drinkers.’

Confusion passed momentarily over Stheno’s face. ‘The Soul Drinkers? I know not that name. Newborn Angels of Death from the Ultima Founding, then?’

‘Is that a problem, inquisitor?’

The confusion was gone. ‘By no means, sergeant! Hollowmount is in dire need of the Adeptus Astartes’ brand of violence.’

‘And your solution to our situation?’

‘Yeceqath’s dogs haven’t taken the Weldworks,’ said Stheno. ‘The city’s loyalists have held on to it. It won’t be for long, but it’s better than here.’ Stheno broke off to fire a bolt of plasma into the torso of a charging madman. The blast caught the enemy full in the face and by the time he fell to his knees, his head and upper torso had burned away in the glowing liquid fire.

‘Tiridates!’ voxed Phraates, transmitting to all three squads to keep them aware of the situation. ‘We have an ally of a most inquisitive nature. He says he can find us a foothold in the city.’

‘Then follow him,’ grunted the First Sergeant. Across the barricades, Cyvon could see Tiridates slamming the skull of an enemy against a rockcrete wall. ‘I tire of killing these lackwits.’

Alert chimes sounded across the vox, and the Soul Drinkers reacted in subconsciously drilled unison. They fired into the manic assailants to buy a few seconds of time, and used it to break cover and head for the southern edge of the street. They vaulted the loyalists’ cover and joined them, turning to lend their own fire against the heretics.

The couple of hundred loyalists were losing the firefight, and several of them lay draped over the walls and statue bases, but even as their brethren fell the survivors looked at the Soul Drinkers as if they saw the face of the Emperor reflected in the Space Marines’ armour.

Cyvon knew the citizenry of the Imperium grew up with images of the noble and terrifying Space Marines all around them. They were the Emperor’s finest, the hands of Terra. When the Emperor raged, His anger took the form of the Space Marines. Most people went a lifetime without seeing a member of the Adeptus Astartes, but when they did see them, they were filled with awe at their presence and sheer stature. But he had still never before been looked on with the veneration he saw in the eyes of the loyalists of Hollowmount.

‘He answers!’ cried one of the loyalists’ leaders, an elderly man with straggling white hair and beard, wearing the grimy ivory-and-gold robes of the Imperial clergy. He carried an ornate crook rescued from some place of worship, and clutched an autopistol in his other hand. ‘We prayed, and He led us back from the edge of despair. He promised, and He delivers! The Angels of Death are come!’

Another loyalist, a woman in filthy work clothes carrying a well-worn lasgun, walked in a daze as gunfire continued to whicker and ping between the statues. She laid a hand on Cyvon’s arm, as if checking to see if he were real. Tears glimmered in her eyes as she looked up at him. He put a hand against her back and guided her behind one of the statues, out of the open.

‘It’s a little over a mile into the city,’ Stheno was saying. ‘The Weldworks are sealed against toxic leaks. We control the ways in and out. If anywhere in this filth-heap is safe, it’s there.’

‘What does the Inquisition want on Kepris?’ asked Epistolary Oxyath, who trailed a corona of purple electricity as he followed the rest of the force off the street.

‘The rightful rule of humanity,’ replied Stheno smoothly. ‘The glorification of the Emperor. The extermination of the blasphemer. What we all want, Lord Librarian.’

‘They’re closing in,’ voxed Sergeant Respendial. The enemy were winning the gunfight with the loyalists, and were vaulting the barricades ahead of them to advance.

‘Then we move,’ replied Sergeant Tiridates. ‘Brethren! We have our foothold! Move out!’

Part II

BREAKTHROUGH

Chapter Three

What deliverance could there be from such blasphemy?
The only answer is death.

– Father Balthan Eugenivov, The Keprian Vengeance

‘They started with the priests,’ said Father Eugenivov. In spite of the layers of grime and the scars of various skirmishes, he had maintained the air of an Imperial cleric. His Ecclesiarchy robes were overlaid with belts of ammo pouches and bandoliers. He leaned on his crook as he spoke, and in the gloom of the Weldworks he looked like the priest he had been. ‘They dragged us out from the cloisters in the Cathedral of the Sanguinary Fall. They cracked our heads open and heaped our brains into the aisle. Bodies… hanging from the statue of Blessed Sanguinius. They defiled every stone of that place.’ Eugenivov looked at Cyvon, and his face was suddenly full of apology and regret. ‘I… I hid,’ he said weakly.

As soon as he had seen the place, Cyvon had understood how the Imperial loyalists had held out there. The Weldworks was a network of forges and smelting-houses where ore and scrap were turned into raw materials for Hollowmount’s manufactoria. Huge doors served to cut off the Weldworks from the surrounding districts in case of spills and breaches. Now they had been used to seal its entrances from the Cult of Yeceqath. The cult had tried to force its way in, and in places the floor was littered with charred bones and heaps of slag where the forges had been emptied and the cultists buried in a flood of molten steel.

The loyalists were encamped in the cavernous, empty forges. They were empty of materials now and bivouacs and bunks had been set up in the gloomy, grime-caked corners of the Weldworks. One of the forges was a hospital, where the wounds from the battle by the gate were tended. A small furnace still burned, and was used to incinerate the dead so they would not decay and spread foulness. The scorched dark grey of the walls loomed down and turned the space into a single mass of shadow, broken only by the few lights salvaged by the loyalists. They prayed in every corner, for illumination both spiritual and literal.

Cyvon slid the action of his bolt rifle back into place. He had fixed the warped mechanism and replaced a broken component inside the housing, and now it clicked back into place as if the weapon were fresh from the armoury. The wargear rites were a reflex action to him, like sighting down the bolter’s barrel in battle. It calmed his mind to clean and maintain the weapon, for in a galaxy of perpetual change and conflict it was something constant that he could trust. ‘Go on,’ he said to the cleric.

Eugenivov nodded. ‘They attacked the seminary… The heretics burned down the House of the Pure. The offices of the Administratum…’ The old priest’s voice trailed off and he seemed to be looking at something far off that only he could see.

‘When did you first hear of Yeceqath?’

Eugenivov nodded. ‘Sorry. Yes, Yeceqath. The Voice of All. I had heard there was a… a mystic, I suppose. A prophet. She had a following in the city. The synod was about to discuss whether she was something to be dealt with when the uprising began. She had an army, and she had gathered it right under our noses. The governor, the city enforcers, no one knew. And she had the Thricefold…’

‘Those are the ones we fought. With the split faces. The madmen.’

‘Anyone who resisted,’ said Eugenivov, ‘they punished with the Thricefold. If you spoke out, you were dragged down by the mob, and if you fought them off the Thricefold would follow. She knew how to use fear. And enough fear will turn into belief.’

‘How many loyalists are there?’ asked Cyvon.

‘A few hundred,’ said Eugenivov. ‘We had more before we reached you at the gate. Every time we face the heretics, we lose souls we cannot replace.’

‘But no more,’ said Cyvon. ‘Now we are here.’

Eugenivov smiled at that. His weary eyes were wet with tears. ‘Yes. The Angels of Death. He has answered our prayers.’

Inquisitor Stheno and Epistolary Oxyath approached. The loyalists watched them in unashamed awe and adoration as they passed. ‘Cyvon here is the battle-brother who saw the executions at Sacerdotes’ Square,’ said Oxyath. ‘That was why we knew what was waiting for us at Hollowmount.’

Stheno raised an eyebrow. ‘Useful,’ he said. ‘I always prefer to know my enemy.’

‘I always prefer to kill them,’ replied Cyvon, ‘and learn of them from the history written of our victory.’ Cyvon had spoken out of turn, and to an inquisitor no less, but he had taken an instinctive dislike to this man who spoke to the Soul Drinkers as if he were born to be their lord and master. ‘Epistolary, when do we move out?’ he asked.

‘When, my brother, we have a plan of attack,’ said Oxyath. ‘House Yathe is well defended.’

‘Where?’ asked Cyvon.

‘The cult’s closest power base,’ replied Oxyath. ‘Deeper into the city, one point two miles north-west, accessible through ways the loyalists believe are safe.’

‘House Yathe was one of the first to put their money and power behind the cult,’ said Stheno, who seemed not to have taken offence at Cyvon’s earlier snipe. ‘The Uppermost Hand operates from their estate.’

‘The executioner,’ said Cyvon, remembering the bestial mask and the ivory robes, spattered with the blood of the Administratum prisoners who had been ripped apart by the Thricefold.

‘Quite so,’ said Stheno. ‘Your arrival allows us to cut off the head of the serpent, so to speak. The Space Marines descend and eliminate the Uppermost Hand, and the cult loses a leader and a mouthpiece. The cult will be afraid. They will run and make themselves vulnerable. First the Hand, then the other pillars of the cult as word of the Emperor’s avenging angels spreads. Finally the prophetess herself.’

‘And these people?’ asked Cyvon, indicating the loyalists watching them. ‘Will they go with us?’

‘If they wish to be used, then we shall use them,’ said Stheno. He knelt down by Cyvon, although Cyvon was almost as tall sitting as Stheno was standing. The inquisitor pointed at Cyvon’s bolt rifle. ‘Tell me, Brother Cyvon. What is this?’

Cyvon knew there was a trick in the question somewhere, but he thought better of trying to find it. ‘A Mark II Cawl-pattern Astartes bolt rifle,’ he said.

‘I see the same,’ said Stheno. ‘And I see much more. This weapon does not do what it does in a pretty manner, does it? It blasts bodies apart. It is an ugly thing. It has no ornamentation or airs. And yet we tend to it, and feed it ammunition when it needs it. Because without it, we will die. Brother Cyvon, what do I see?’

‘The Imperium,’ replied Cyvon.

Stheno turned to Oxyath. ‘Watch this one,’ he said.

‘House Yathe held against every loyalist attack in the first days of the cult,’ said Oxyath, who did not seem impressed by the inquisitor’s metaphors. ‘It has only been reinforced since. Yes, brother, these people will be with us, every gun and blade will have its use.’

‘I doubt I could hold them back if I wanted to,’ added Stheno. He turned to Eugenivov. ‘Is that not so, father?’

‘We will die on the barricades for the chance to get our hands on Yeceqath’s dogs,’ said Eugenivov. ’There will never be a better chance to get past those walls at last. We will be there.’

‘Once your First Sergeant has a plan of attack, we’ll move out,’ said Stheno to Cyvon. ‘We can break the back of this cult if we strike hard. The war is out there, for the shrines, but the victory can be here if we cut off the head. And from what your Librarian says, Brother Cyvon, you could be the best weapon we have.’

Stheno and Oxyath moved on, heading for the makeshift command post Tiridates had set up in an abandoned forge.

‘Who is Yeceqath?’ Cyvon asked the old priest.

‘That is a more complicated question than it seems,’ said Eugenivov. ‘She is the Voice of All. A prophet of the people’s will. She is the symbol they rally towards. The highest authority among them. But the true answer, brother, is that we do not know. I have never seen her, I have only heard her voice broadcast over the citywide vox.’

‘A mystery,’ said Cyvon.

‘To all but her most favoured servants.’

‘When the enemy represses knowledge of themselves, then that knowledge is dangerous to them,’ said Cyvon. ‘The inquisitor may be right. The fighting at the shrines will secure the relics, but the cult’s response depends on how badly we hurt them here.’

‘Yeceqath turns Emperor-fearing citizens into those Thricefold monsters,’ said Eugenivov. ’What she has done to us is a heresy beyond what I once thought possible.’

Brother Sasan approached through the gloom. Wondering eyes followed him from every corner. It seemed strange to Cyvon, almost comical, that Sasan of all people should be the object of veneration. Sasan clapped Cyvon on the shoulder guard. ‘If you clean your gun too much, you’ll wear it away.’

‘Speak too loosely, Brother Sasan,’ said Cyvon, ‘and these good people might start to think we are human after all.’

Sasan’s armour was patched up from the scars and nicks he had suffered in the firefight. In spite of his words, he had been busy with post-battle wargear rites, too. ‘Tiridates says we move out immediately. Should be a bracing run-out!’

‘My thanks for the warning,’ said Cyvon. ‘What do you think of this cult? Yeceqath, the Thricefold, the Voice of All?’

‘After careful consideration, Brother Cyvon, I find them eminently killable.’

And in the end, thought Cyvon, that was all a Space Marine really needed to know.

‘It may come to pass that none of us will live.’ Eugenivov knelt alongside the other loyalists. The city’s prayer books had been heaped up and burned outside the shrines and cathedrals, but Eugenivov had volumes committed to memory and chose his words from the sermons of saints. ‘For this, I do not despair. I do not demand restitution from my Emperor. Instead, I am grateful. I give the most exultant of thanks. For how often do we know the time and means of our death? And how often do we know it will be in combat against the Great Enemy, against the personification of heresy in the defence of humanity? And no less, alongside the Adeptus Astartes, the Angels of Death, who are the manifestation of His will. I am not sorrowful. I am not afraid, brothers and sisters. I am soon to die, and I am full of joy.’

The loyalists made the sign of the aquila as Eugenivov finished his sermon, and their minds turned to silent prayer.

The Weldworks was behind them. With Stheno’s guidance, the Soul Drinkers and the two hundred or so loyalists had made their way through abandoned manufactoria and mass-transit tunnels to the threshold of House Yathe. They were gathered a short run from the compound walls, among the ruins of a razed tenement district scattered with charred bones and heaps of scorched bodies. Across a stretch of ruins was the estate’s west wall. Above them was the soaring vaulted ceiling of Hollowmount’s many-layered structure, like a dark iron sky. Behind them was nothing, for they could not retreat from here. As soon as they played their hand, Hollowmount would know they were there, and there would be no flight back to the Weldworks now. They were too far from safety, too easily cut off from their foothold in the capital.

Cyvon knew Eugenivov was right. The loyal citizens of Hollowmount were probably going to die.

They would be avenged. Eugenivov’s sermon was correct, he told himself. This was a rare chance to die a good death, and to know those responsible would be punished. That vengeance was one more task the Soul Drinkers would accomplish at House Yathe.

The three squads of Soul Drinkers, plus Oxyath and the loyalists, were facing the walls of a noble house compound. The walls were thirteen feet high and patrolled by cult members in the customary mix of clothing, most of them masked, all of them armed. Within the walls were several grand buildings, their gilded cornices and red-tiled roofs in contrast to the industrial gloom of Hollowmount. Cyvon could see the top of a statue of a grandly dressed man, a scion of the Yathe family, with cables running from its torso to the nearest corner of each building. From the cables hung banners bearing the cult’s symbols. The enthroned woman, the skull crowned and impaled, a dozen hands arranged in a sunburst.

‘No noble bodies hanging,’ mused Cyvon as he watched from the ruins. ‘House Yathe gave up their home willingly.’

‘For such a crime,’ said Sasan beside him, ‘we shall administer justice.’

‘Make ready to execute,’ voxed Tiridates.

Inquisitor Stheno walked among the loyalists. ‘Now is your time,’ he said. ‘Father Eugenivov! Are their spirits ready?’

‘They are,’ said Eugenivov.

‘Then become the sword-thrust through the heart of the enemy!’ said Stheno. ‘For Kepris! For the Emperor! Attack!’

‘Onward, my brothers and sisters!’ cried Eugenivov, jumping to his feet and holding his autopistol in the air. ‘Onward! Hear the Emperor’s thunder! Charge!’

The loyalists burst from cover and ran at the walls. Two hundred men and women, armed with whatever they had scrounged from the armouries of the Keprian military and the Hollowmount enforcers, shielded by nothing more than faith.

‘They’ll buy us fifteen minutes,’ said Inquisitor Stheno. He had not joined the loyalists in their charge.

‘Then we will need no more,’ said Sergeant Tiridates. ‘Soul Drinkers, advance!’

Sergeant Respendial knelt beside a metal cover in the ground that was covered in a layer of ash and bones. The hatch squealed as he opened it, the sound concealed by the gunfire stuttering from the loyalists and the cultists on the walls, to reveal a black opening leading to the level of the city below. Respendial vaulted in, followed by the battle-brothers of his squad and Librarian Oxyath.

Squad Phraates followed. Phraates himself had his arm bandaged over a makeshift weld job on the armour of his forearm. He carried his bolt rifle with his other hand. Cyvon and Sasan were close behind him. A Space Marine’s vision was barely impeded by even total darkness, and Cyvon could see the sodden corpses choking the narrow tunnels and sewer conduits that ran beneath the street.

‘The cult purged this whole region,’ said Cyvon, taking note of the sheer volume of the dead. ‘They threw them down here when they were done.’

‘And these dead will also be avenged,’ said Phraates up ahead.

The tunnels led beneath the walls, skirting around the massive block foundations, and under the House Yathe compound. Some tunnels were blocked by stinking masses of congealed gore and fat. Others had collapsed. These were Hollowmount’s broken blood vessels. The city was bleeding to death.

‘Here,’ said Stheno from behind a rebreather, indicating a tunnel junction ahead. Sergeant Tiridates waved forward a pair of battle-brothers from his squad, who attached explosive charges to the ceiling. This part of the tunnel was shin-deep in blood, so foul and polluted it was only a Space Marine’s armour filters and third lung that made it fully breathable. Stheno’s breathing was laboured, even with the rebreather. The Soul Drinkers splashed away from the junction and took up position out of the blast zone.

‘We’re blasting our way in again,’ mused Sasan. ‘Praise the primarch who didn’t teach us subtlety.’

‘Would you rather knock on the door, Brother Sasan?’ growled Phraates.

The charges exploded, and a tremendous mass of rubble and earth poured into the sewer junction. Before the last of it had settled, Sergeant Respendial was on the move, leading his squad up towards the faltering light from above. ‘Guns up, brothers!’ voxed Respendial. ‘Now we are known! Now we are the message!’

The gunfire kicked in without hesitation. Bolt rifles and autoguns, voices raised in alarm. Squad Phraates followed Respendial up through the new breach and Cyvon saw they had emerged in the compound’s gardens. The hole had opened up beside a huge ornamental fountain a short distance from the statue he had glimpsed from outside the walls. The gardens were regimented raised flower beds and manicured ornamental hedges, punctuated by discarded equipment containers and the bodies of executed captives heaped up next to bullet-riddled walls. Heretics were rushing from the buildings and Cyvon saw the same mutilated faces and mixture of garb he had noted before, although many of the heretics here wore a heraldic uniform: that of House Yathe, he supposed, proving the noble house had thrown their lot in with the cult. An enormous glass conservatory rose to one side, with the main house to the other and a cluster of smaller guest houses towards the southern edge of the compound. Everything dripped with money and status, from the red-tiled roofs lifted from some bucolic vista to the gilded decorations on the eaves and the statues of House Yathe patriarchs dotted around the gardens.

The cultists were rushing to the rooftops and walls. Heavy stubber and multi-laser emplacements on the former were aimed down at the loyalists assaulting the latter, and suddenly the heretics were facing enemies from inside as well as without. The heretics grappled with the heavy weapons to turn them around, struggling to cope with the sudden escalation of the assault.

‘To the main house!’ ordered Tiridates. ‘Respendial, the east wing! Phraates, the side buildings! Move out, brethren! Break the back of this heretic church!’

‘To me!’ ordered Phraates, firing one-handed up at the rooftops as he yelled. ‘Three to a door, breach and purge! Mark your targets, expect every form of heresy!’

Gunfire streaked down at the Soul Drinkers. Cyvon took cover at the feet of the huge statue as one of its arms was shattered by chains of heavy stubber fire. Normal soldiers would be slowed down by such weight of fire, but the Soul Drinkers would not let it impede them.

‘Wait for the Librarian,’ said Sasan. ‘This performance needs its light show.’

Epistolary Oxyath jumped up onto a fallen statue. Multi-laser fire pinged and sizzled off his armour. He clenched his fist in a sharp, brutal gesture, and a section of the main house’s roof crumpled in on itself as if crushed by an invisible fist. Bodies caught in the warping of space vanished bloodily amidst the debris, before the whole mass of wreckage dropped into the building, shattering windows and blowing out walls as destruction ripped through the structure.

The side buildings were decorated with the severed heads of the cult’s victims. They stared down, slack-jawed and blank, from the eaves and window sills. Each house was an elegant cottage ornamented with carved scrollwork and murals of pastoral scenes. It was all discoloured with grime and blood. Bullet holes in the walls showed where impromptu firing squads had been set up.

One of the doors burst open. Cyvon saw dirty ivory-coloured robes trimmed with red, and a mask resembling an angry felid creature with a mane of carved wooden fur. He recognised the Uppermost Hand from the broadcast of the executions in Sacerdotes’ Square.

‘Target the Hand!’ ordered Phraates, firing up at more heretics on the rooftops. Cyvon snapped a bolt at the Hand and it flew just wide as the cultist spun around suddenly to face Phraates.

The heretic raised his hands, and Cyvon saw metal and glass glimmering on his fingers.

Twin lances of sizzling crimson energy leapt from the Uppermost Hand’s fingers. One seared just past Cyvon’s head. The other struck Sergeant Phraates.

It caught the sergeant in the side of the torso and sliced out of his shoulder guard. It lasted a split second, and left behind a glowing straight line incised through Phraates’ armour. Phraates toppled to one side, steadying himself against a low wall with his bandaged arm. His hand held on to his bolt rifle through instinct. From the deep glowing scorches on the wall behind the sergeant, Cyvon could tell the beam had seared right through vital organs and spine. Even if Phraates lived, it was an instantly disabling wound.

A second burst of shots from Cyvon impacted against a curved wall of blinding light that flashed into existence to meet them. Other shots burst against the energy barrier or ripped chunks out of the walls beside the Uppermost Hand, who ducked back into the building.

Brothers Arasmyn and Manuch ran to Phraates and tried to haul him back to his feet and get him into cover. He shrugged them off angrily but weakly. ‘After him,’ he ordered, his voice strained. ‘Kill him. Then come for me.’

Cyvon ran to the door frame and put his back against it. Sasan hit the wall on the other side, backed up by Brother Pitamenes. ‘Breach!’ yelled Sasan, and swung in through the open door.

Cyvon followed him in. Sasan covered the left side of the room, Cyvon the right, with Pitamenes watching for anything they might have missed.

What had once been an overtly luxurious bedchamber had been torn apart. Splintered furniture was heaped up against one wall, covered with the tatters of a tapestry torn from its mounting. The remains of a huge four-poster bed lay in fragments. In the centre of the floor was a metal hatch, wide enough for an Impulsor to drive through, in the process of mechanically closing.

Cyvon, acting on instinct, leapt into the closing hatchway. He put a hand on each side of the hatch and braced it, feeling the door’s motors straining as he pushed against them. The dense, gene-forged muscle fibres of a Space Marine bunched in his arms and shoulders. A Space Marine’s raw strength was one of the assets that made face-to-face battle his preferred environment, and Cyvon channelled it all into forcing the doors open.

The motors whined, then failed in sparks and smoke. The doors yielded against Cyvon’s hands. He put another burst of energy into pushing the doors apart and they screeched as he forced them wide enough open for two Soul Drinkers abreast.

‘Those were digital weapons the Uppermost Hand used,’ he said as Sasan dropped in beside him. Ahead of them was a steep staircase leading down a rockcrete shaft. There was no ornamentation here. The structure was hidden beneath the compound, another place for another purpose.

‘Quite the thing to pull out of one’s fundament,’ said Sasan. ‘Where the Throne did he get those?’

‘We can work that out once he’s ours,’ replied Cyvon.

‘I’ll cover your backs,’ said Pitamenes. He was a solid if unimaginative warrior, and Cyvon knew him well enough to be grateful he was with them. He could hear the rest of the squad, Arasmyn and Manuch, storming the guest houses overhead. Phraates was still giving orders. He couldn’t fight, but he could still lead. Cyvon doubted the sergeant would die, but every Soul Drinker out of the battle was worth dozens of the cultists.

Sasan snapped off his helmet and took in a breath. ‘Chemicals,’ he said.

‘Care to be more specific, brother?’ asked Pitamenes, who was walking backwards behind them, covering the hatch entrance.

‘Preservatives,’ said Sasan. ‘Coolants. Dried blood. And something strong and corrosive, for cleaning, perhaps. A laboratory?’

The stairway ended in a wider corridor of bare rockcrete walls. Pipework ran along the ceiling. Freezing vapour clung to the floor, and multiple doors led off in both directions. Through the steel double doors, Cyvon could see a room of operating tables with tiled floors and drains to draw off blood.

Pitamenes opened one of the other doors a crack. ‘Bodies,’ he said. Cyvon followed his gaze and saw he had opened a refrigerated room with dozens of corpses, wrapped in bloodstained plastic, hanging from rails in the ceiling.

A locker on the wall hung open. It had space for several autoguns, one of which was missing.

‘He knows this place and we do not,’ said Cyvon. ‘And we must assume he is not alone.’ He spoke over the vox, subvocalising so anyone listening in could not make out his words.

‘Just a man with a gun,’ said Pitamenes grimly.

‘He has a lot more,’ replied Cyvon.

‘He’ll need it,’ said Sasan as he opened another door, revealing shelves of metal canisters labelled as containing various chemicals, and another set of shelving full of knives and other medical implements arranged in racks. Cyvon recognised rib spreaders and miniature circular saws for cutting away brainpans and slicing through sternums, though much of it was beyond him.

The clattering of something metallic came from another direction. Cyvon automatically swung around to aim at the disturbance down his bolt rifle. It had come from behind one of the closed doors. Sasan was already backed up beside the door.

Cyvon kicked the door open and swung inside.

He emerged into an antiseptic hell. The chamber was wide, long and low, with the ceiling covered in polished steel hooks. From each hook hung a piece of a human body, dissected and pared apart with a surgeon’s precision. Whole quarters hung alongside neatly segmented hands and limbs. A dozen severed legs formed a dangling curtain. Heads hung upside down, with the skin of their faces flensed away to reveal the preserved musculature underneath.

Skins were stretched out on the walls as if to cure. The tattoos and brands of Imperial devotion covered some of them. Others were pale and veined, as if they had never seen sunlight, or were tanned by a life in the forges or out in the wastes. Cyvon crouched low, beneath the forest of body parts. Further into the room was a waist-high servitor consisting of a human torso on a small tracked unit, with long folding metal armatures instead of arms. They snipped and clacked as they tended to a partially dissected corpse. The servitor paused and turned a cluster of sensors grafted to the stump of its neck, as if looking around in annoyance at having its work interrupted.

Cyvon held up a hand as he heard something moving through the doorway up ahead, beyond a curtain of white plastic strips. It was wet and slithering, skin on the tiles.

Through the doorway lurched something resembling a human. Its posture was hunched, with its head hanging low on an elongated neck at waist level. One arm was longer than the other and ended in three oversized fingers. The other arm was withered and multijointed. Its shoulders and pelvis were lopsided and it limped unsteadily forward, leaving a glistening trail of saliva.

Its head turned up. Its face was split down the middle. One of its eyes rolled blindly under a whitish membrane. The mouth hung open and a long, spiny tongue slithered between its jaws.

Sasan was closest to the thing, and opened fire. Bolt shells thumped into its body and chunks of bloody matter sprayed from its back, but it showed no sign of registering pain. Its one good eye snapped to Sasan, and it darted at him with its jaws snapping.

Sasan met the charging thing with a backhand swipe that snapped its spindly neck. The creature hit the tiles with a wet smack. The servitor dutifully trundled towards it to clean up this new mess.

From beyond the doorway came a raised voice, then another, wordless moaning and screaming from a dozen distorted throats.

‘He’s ahead of us,’ said Cyvon. ‘Emptying the cages.’

‘Then we know where he is,’ said Sasan, and Cyvon could tell his battle-brother was smiling.

Cyvon ran at the doorway, Sasan beside him. Pitamenes shouldered his way through the hanging body parts behind them, aiming his bolt rifle behind them to keep up overwatch.

The thing that dived at Cyvon through the doorway had an immense fanged mouth taking up its whole torso. Its squat, elephantine legs supported an oversized fleshy sack of a body with a vestigial head perched on top, the eyes filmy and full of sorrow. Clawed hands raked at him. Cyvon met it with the barrel of his bolt rifle, hammering three rounds down its throat and forcing his weight against it to drive it sideways and away from him. His momentum took him through into the room behind it.

Glass tanks, like large aquaria, stood in rows of ten, running down the length of a huge refrigerated room. Each one had a clear lid that was open, or in the process of opening, to let out the thing that lay within. The tanks were full of clear fluid in which were suspended the results of the experimentation happening beneath House Yathe. Some were multiple bodies fused together, or parts from several sources welded into one abomination. Others were a single body distorted beyond humanity. They were slithering and lurching from their tanks, trailing cables and hoses. There must have been fifty or more of them in the room, all gibbering and hissing as they were forced awake.

Through a series of archways in the far wall, Cyvon glimpsed ivory robes fleeing. The Uppermost Hand, their quarry.

‘There!’ he shouted. He lined up a shot down the room, but his aim was spoiled by the two-headed mutant that loomed up at him. This creature was taller than a Space Marine and tottered on four multijointed legs. Cyvon shot it in the throat and one of its heads was thrown off its body in a spray of thin, sputtering blood. The other head, split down the middle to the greyish brain matter, howled in anger. Cyvon drove the butt of his bolt rifle into the opening in the mutant’s skull and the weapon crunched through the front of its cranium. He tore the gun out, taking clods of brain with it.

The mutant crashed to the floor but the Uppermost Hand was gone. He had fled into the industrial guts of the facility. Refrigerant pipes and generators filled the space beyond this room.

If there was another way out of the laboratory, he would escape. He had a whole city to hide in. If he lost himself in the tangle of Hollowmount, or other cultists linked up with him to get him to safety, the Soul Drinkers might never find him again.

Sasan was grappling with something that had the torso of a human, with bundles of tentacles for limbs. Pitamenes leapt onto one of the tanks and fired down at the throng approaching them. Blood sprayed across the floor and walls, and mingled with the fluid in the tanks.

A lumbering horror of distended flesh and grafted muscle absorbed half a magazine of Pitamenes’ fire before it fell. A cell door in the wall of the chamber burst open and something resembling a serpent made of human bodies slithered out. Its mouth was a fanged ring of contracting flesh. Dozens of hands ran along its flanks, propelling it along at inhuman speed.

There were too many of them.

Cyvon pivoted to shoot down a skeletally thin clawed thing that leapt at him, ducked low under a swinging fist and blasted a chest cavity open. They were all around him, a pressing wall of flesh, and every volley of fire opened up a smaller and smaller circle of freedom around him through the crowding mutants.

‘Whosoever shall stand against my brethren, I shall stand before him!’ boomed a voice heavy with authority. ‘And I shall cut from him his heretic’s heart!’

Cyvon recognised the voice of Sergeant Respendial. Three of his squad erupted into the room from the side, stammering out a volley of fire that withered away a dozen mutants. Brother Katanes charged past the sergeant and beheaded one of the mutants with a swing of his combat knife, firing into another before vaulting a tank and landing a short distance from Cyvon.

‘You kicked up an ungodly din down here, brothers!’ said Katanes. Cyvon knew him well: they had sparred on the Suffering of Helostrix on the journey to Kepris. Katanes had an exceptional feint and a talent for turning an opponent’s miss into a choking headlock.

‘He’s ahead,’ said Cyvon. ‘He’s running.’

‘Not for long. The Second Squad are here to show the Third how it’s done.’

Katanes fought back to back with Cyvon as the throng eased off enough for Sasan to link up with them. Respendial and the third of his squad, Meneduch, fired into the crowd.

The snake-thing lurched over them. It bit down even as bolter shells ripped into it. The abomination’s jaws closed on Meneduch, and Cyvon heard the crunch of fracturing ceramite. Respendial bellowed and dived at the blasphemy of flesh. His combat knife stabbed again and again into its squirming bulk, and malformed organs showered the tiles with gore.

‘Move!’ shouted Cyvon to his squadmates. ‘Cold and fast! Not one faltered step!’

The three Soul Drinkers in the centre of the room forged forward through the mutants. Their combined fire drove a bloody channel through the malformed bodies. When one of the mutants survived its wounds, Pitamenes executed it on the ground.

A creature of three fused human bodies opened its maw and vomited a hail of bony shards. One of them struck Pitamenes in the shoulder guard, and Cyvon heard him grunt as it punched through to the flesh.

Respendial and Meneduch were peppered with the shards. Meneduch toppled, a fang as long as a man’s forearm protruding from the eyepiece of his armour. Respendial was hit in the chest and thigh and dropped to one knee, still firing as he dragged Meneduch behind him.

Cyvon felt the familiar tightening in his stomachs. If the cult of Yeceqath took a Soul Drinker’s life on this planet, then the Chapter would have its retribution. No Chapter won its laurels leaving their dead unavenged.

Cyvon burst through into the chamber beyond. It was obscured with lengths of coolant piping and the bulky shapes of generators exuding clouds of frozen vapour. This was the source of the chill preserving the biological material in the lab. Cyvon swung left and Pitamenes and Sasan right, searching for signs of the Uppermost Hand. It was darker here, but a Space Marine’s enhanced vision peeled away the darkness and revealed the cover and hiding places in merciless clarity.

A stuttering burst of light issued from the back of the room. Cyvon dropped behind a generator as chunks of machinery were sliced away and clattered smouldering to the floor. Another lance of light carved through the room, cutting clean through coolant pipes and filling the lab with a sudden burst of icy white vapour. Cyvon forged on through the opaque cloud, knowing that if he could not see the Uppermost Hand, the heretic could not see him, either.

‘Breaking right!’ came Respendial’s voice from behind. It was strained, because the sergeant was carrying Meneduch with him. ‘Katanes, cover the rear! Choke this doorway with their dead!’

‘I’ve got him!’ shouted Pitamenes, and Cyvon heard his battle-brother firing a spray of bolter fire through the chamber. In answer, another streak of laser speared through the vapour-filled room.

A shape stumbled out of the vapour and crashed into Cyvon. It was Brother Pitamenes. He grabbed at Cyvon’s arm, then fell away, suddenly limp.

Pitamenes’ hand still clutched Cyvon’s forearm. His squadmate’s arm had been severed just above the elbow. The beam had continued through Pitamenes’ torso and out through his shoulder. The two halves of Pitamenes’ body rolled apart from one another and let out a flood of gore that steamed in the cold.

More gunfire. Cyvon let Pitamene’s arm drop and ran for the sound.

He erupted into an operating room lined with cogitators and green glowing screens. Auto-surgeon units clung to the ceiling with folded bunches of blade limbs. On a dissection slab lay the corpse of a human, apparently unaltered save for the deep incision that pared its face open from forehead to chin and a neat scorched wound over the left side of the chest.

Brother Sasan was crouched by another doorway. He fired a shot into the depths of the room. In response, a bolt of plasma ripped across the dissection room and bored through the wall. Sasan threw himself to the floor, out of the line of fire.

‘I pin him, you cut him down,’ voxed Sasan.

‘Understood,’ replied Cyvon. He could not see through the banks of cogitators and shelves of lab equipment, but judging from the source of the plasma bolt, he had a good idea of the enemy’s location.

‘Burn in the Emperor’s fire!’ yelled Sasan, and fired into the room. Bolter shells exploded everywhere, throwing shards of glass and chunks of metal against the walls and ceiling. One of the auto-surgeons was struck and came apart, showering the room with pieces of broken surgical blades.

Another bolt of plasma followed, ripping a second molten hole out of the wall above Sasan’s head.

Cyvon charged straight at the source of the plasma. He crashed through a bank of shelves and vaulted the lab bench beyond.

The Uppermost Hand was crouched against the back wall of the room. His robes were tattered and his face bloody from the minor wounds dealt him by the flying shrapnel. One hand was outstretched, displaying the ornate rings on each finger. He had at the very least a powerful laser and a plasma weapon, all miniaturised with technology the Imperium no longer possessed. Each one could slice a Space Marine in two, if the wielder had just a split second to bring them to bear.

Cyvon did not give the Uppermost Hand the luxury of that time.

He fired as he ran, and his shot blew off the Uppermost Hand’s arm at the elbow. The hand with its digital weapons vanished in a burst of red. Cyvon slammed into the stunned cultist and rammed him against the wall with a forearm across the throat.

Through the eyes of the mask, Cyvon could see the Uppermost Hand’s eyes widen in shock and terror. He pressed his forearm to cut off the man’s air and render him unconscious.

Cyvon heard a small metallic ping, easy to miss in the after-echo of the bolter fire and laser blasts, but too familiar for him to ignore.

The cultist had pulled the pin on a grenade with his remaining hand. Cyvon gauged the situation in a heartbeat. It was a fragmentation grenade. At zero range it could blast Cyvon’s armour apart.

Cyvon dropped the cultist and leapt backwards. He rolled over the dissection table, bringing the corpse on it down on top of him as he tipped the table onto its side to form a shield of polished steel.

‘Down!’ he yelled. Behind him, Sasan backed out of the plasma-spattered doorway.

The grenade exploded and the room was a sudden, deafening storm of shrapnel, reflected back and forth between the walls in a fraction of a second. The cogitator screens popped and shattered. Electronics burst into sparks. The scorched air rushed out and boomed back in again, throwing debris and shrapnel across the room in a flurry of steel and glass.

The sound echoed through the facility, dying down. Cyvon checked himself mentally for injuries. He had come through battered but unhurt. He got to his feet to see the dissection room completely wrecked, with the metal-clad walls scorched and pitted around where the Uppermost Hand had been. The dissection table was studded with shards of smouldering metal, but thankfully had held to protect Cyvon from the explosion.

‘Not much left to work with,’ said Brother Sasan, looking at the smoking stain that remained of the Uppermost Hand.

Sergeant Respendial struggled into the room with Brother Meneduch. ‘They’re barricaded out,’ said the sergeant. Meneduch coughed once, and Cyvon saw he was alive, though severely injured. The spike through his eyepiece was still there.

‘Brother Pitamenes has fallen,’ said Katanes from the doorway.

‘And for what?’ growled Respendial. ‘To kill one mutant in robes. Whatever he knew is lost to us. He wiped out all this place’s secrets along with himself.’

Cyvon looked down at the body at his feet – not the Uppermost Hand, but the corpse he had thrown off the dissection table as he had dived for cover. The dissection room had been the heart of the laboratory, with the vivisections and experiments watched over by cultists feeding the results into the cogitators. The machines were as wrecked as the rest of the chamber, but the body on the floor was intact.

‘It’s preserved,’ said Cyvon, kneeling by the body. It was a man with his face split deeply down the middle, the skin expertly peeled back from the wound by the precision blades of the auto-surgeons. ‘No decay. Minimal mutation. Chest wound right over the heart, laser burn. He died quickly.’

‘Brothers, I believe we have found the place the cult make their Thricefold,’ said Sasan. ‘At least where they perfected the method.’

‘What can you do with it?’ asked Respendial.

‘There is only one way to answer that, sergeant,’ replied Sasan.

Cyvon cradled the corpse’s head. The neck was intact. The brainstem, too. ‘I can try,’ he said.

Chapter Four

There comes a time in the life of every faithful soul when he is asked how far he will go to do what is righteous. There can only be one answer. As far as it is possible to go, and then beyond, unto destruction.

– Father Balthan Eugenivov, The Keprian Vengeance

The strike force would not wait there long. The heretics had withered against the Soul Drinkers’ onslaught, but there was no telling what reinforcements the cult could throw at them. They could hold out indefinitely but doing so would not help behead the cult. The Soul Drinkers had to finish with House Yathe, and be gone.

They gathered in the laboratory to clear out the bolter-riddled chamber full of experiment victims, recover their dead and minister to the wounded. Brother Meneduch lay on the floor of the dissection room with his helmet removed and a medicae patch over one eye. The remains of Brother Pitamenes were bundled up to be carried. They would not be left behind.

Sergeant Phraates was walking wounded, too. He could barely heft the weight of a bolter. His injuries had been patched up as best as was possible without an Apothecary, and he watched proceedings with a scowl, as if angry at his body for daring to have found itself in the path of the Uppermost Hand’s digital weaponry.

‘Hold him still,’ said Cyvon.

‘I have done this before, brother,’ said Sasan. ‘Remember?’

The body from the slab lay on the floor. It was not an ideal situation for the procedure, but the dissection table was ruined and there was no time to find a better location. As Sasan immobilised the corpse’s head with his hands, Cyvon used a miniaturised circular saw to cut a long line along the forehead. It was an implement he carried for just the purpose. The saw slid through bone as Cyvon followed the curve round the temple, and Sasan lifted the head so he could cut right around the back of the cranium.

Cyvon pulled the top of the skull away. With a liquid sucking noise the bone separated, revealing the dark crimson of brain matter.

The brain looked healthy. Cyvon had seen enough that he knew the signs of injury or the beginnings of decay. Lacking a handy medical implement, he took his combat knife and shaved off a sliver of cortex with the monomolecular tip of the knife.

‘Moment of truth, brother,’ said Sasan. ‘Let us hope this dead fool saw something.’

The omophagea was an organ in a Space Marine’s spinal cord that connected to the stomach via an implanted bundle of nerves. Through some alchemy long lost to human understanding, it could absorb genetic material and filter out information from recent changes to the DNA. It required fresh central nervous system matter to work. In some Space Marine Chapters the omophagea had ceased to function entirely, and in many others it could give only the vaguest and most superficial information. Other Chapters eschewed its use as obscene or too misleading to be useful. On occasion, however, an individual Space Marine could possess an unusually active omophagea, and his Chapter would accept its use. Brother Cyvon was one such individual. The gene-seed of the Sangprimus Portum contained within it a genetic echo that had surfaced in him, a relic of the primarchs and their astonishing power. To him, the results of the omophagea were not the vague snatches of emotions or thoughts from the recently deceased. To him, they were real.

Cyvon put the sliver of brain matter on his tongue, and swallowed it down.

He felt the tendrils of another being’s memories pulling at his consciousness.

There was pain. Cyvon’s body tensed with it. These were the very first impressions of the dead man’s last memories. Pain and panic. He felt the red line of agony down his face as a scalpel carved through his forehead, nose and jaw. He felt the ghosts of restraints around his wrists and ankles. He forced himself to take in a long, slow breath and reassert himself. The memories were not his, he told himself. He was not this man. This pain was not his…

He was lying on the slab in the dissection room. The auto-surgeon was clicking and whirring above him. Its scalpels were wet and red with his blood. He did not have the body of a Space Marine, but of a normal man. He felt its restrictions around him, like being held in chains. He tried to move and realised even these flawed limbs would not do what he commanded of them. He was paralysed.

His vision was fuzzy with the chemicals used to thin his blood and halt his movement, and he had to force his eyes to focus. His head lolled to the side, and he saw a woman.

She was handsome, not beautiful. Her sharp, angry face was crowned with a mass of unruly blonde hair tied into place. She wore a set of clothing resembling an ornate military uniform with brocade and epaulettes, and a set of medals on the chest.

‘Yathe,’ said a voice from the other side of the room. ‘We have yet to see results.’

The woman’s face was crossed by a mixture of fear and anger. ‘I cannot work miracles,’ she retorted. Her voice was the cut glass of an aristocrat. ‘I am not you.’

‘You are not,’ came the reply. There was something off about the voice. It was a man’s, but with a quality to it that was not human.

A figure walked into view. It was significantly taller than the woman, with elongated, inhuman proportions. It wore a set of armour of curved interlocking plates, coloured white and jade green with an intricate incised pattern of thorned vines twining and knotting together. A fat crimson gemstone was mounted in the middle of the breastplate. Its face was a horror. It seemed stretched and distorted, as if seen through a cruelly curved lens. The eyes were huge and black, the nose and mouth small, the cast of the features a picture of arrogance and cruelty, the black hair swept back. It carried a tall staff topped with the symbol of a crescent moon.

It was not alone. A second alien figure wore deep-green armour and an all-enclosing helm with triangular eyepieces and a pair of mandible-like lasers built into the faceplate. The rear of the helm curved up to form a high white crest. The armour gave the creature considerable bulk, matched by the size of the chain-toothed sword scabbarded at its side.

Xenos. Aeldari.

‘I know where it is,’ said Yathe. ‘The Ecclesiarchy calls it the Lyre of Innokens.’

‘Yet you do not have it,’ said the lead aeldari.

‘It is guarded,’ replied Yathe.

‘We were told you could command this world,’ replied the aeldari. ‘You cannot be untruthful to us, Yathe. Better beings than you have tried.’

‘I can have the cities,’ replied Yathe. She was fighting to keep her composure in the face of the sheer wrongness of the two aeldari standing before her. ‘The cult is already in place. They call me their prophet.’ She waved a hand at the body on the slab – the body through whose eyes Cyvon was watching. ‘I have an army of these. I can seize the cities whenever I want. Those who do not join me will flee or be killed. But the Lyre is not in the cities. It’s a relic of the Church, it’s in one of the shrines, and those are ruled by the Ecclesiarchy. They’re preachers and confessors. There’s no way I can sway them. I have to take it by force and that cannot happen overnight.’

‘They suffer,’ said the aeldari. He took a step closer to Yathe, looming over her. ‘I can hear their voices from across the webway. They beg for release. They plead for an end to the agony. Every second you delay, you will lose another part of them.’

‘I can’t just take it,’ said Yathe. She was shaking with anger. Even through the eyes of a dead man, skimming off the final memories, Cyvon could see the torment in her. ‘The whole Ecclesiarchy will mobilise. They have thousands of militia. I will have to hit all of the shrines at once so they cannot reinforce one another and strike back. If they get the chance they will move the Lyre off-world. Then I have to besiege them and starve them out. It could take… It could take months, years.’

‘Then do so,’ said the aeldari. ‘Time matters not to us as it does to you. The only thing that matters is this… this Lyre. But for your sake, and theirs, make haste.’

Yathe swallowed and bunched her fists. Cyvon saw she was a woman not used to begging from another. She was used to power, and here she had none. ‘I have given you my whole world,’ she said. ‘I have done all you ask. When the sieges…’

‘You have done nothing we ask,’ retorted the aeldari, cutting her off. ‘We do not hold the Lyre of Innokens.’

‘You don’t understand what you are demanding.’

‘The baseness of your language causes me pain,’ said the aeldari. ‘There is no more to say. I would be gone.’ He cast a scornful glance at the body on the slab, then turned to the heavily armoured aeldari beside him. The second xenos activated a device on its wrist and a shimmering light shone from just out of Cyvon’s field of view. The two walked into the light, and were gone. The light gate boomed closed and a furious silence fell in their absence.

Yathe let out a shuddering breath. She pulled a laspistol from her uniform holster and fired into one of the cogitator screens. It burst in a shower of sparks. She fired twice more, but the fury in her was not satisfied.

‘Would you judge me, too?’ she snapped at the subject on the table. ‘I have sacrificed more than you. All you lost was your life!’ She fired point-blank into the body’s chest, and the vision greyed out.

The last thing Cyvon saw was the fading image of Yathe turning away from him, holstering her laspistol and stalking out of the room, while he bled out on the table…

‘Aeldari,’ he said as his vision swam back to the present. The dissection room’s polished walls and cogitator banks were replaced with the ruination left by the frag grenade’s detonation.

‘I pray I did not hear you right, brother,’ said Sasan.

‘I must contact Captain Quhya,’ replied Cyvon.

He headed back out of the dissection room and through the laboratory strewn with mutated bodies. He saw in them the many experiments it had taken to perfect the Thricefold, and the countless lives the process had taken. It was not even for something as honestly evil as human greed. It was at the behest of a being that was not human.

The House Yathe compound above was a war zone. The other Soul Drinkers squads had hit the cultists hard and Cyvon could not see any of the heretics left alive. Bodies in robes and stained workers overalls covered the ground. Others lay on the rooftops where they had been shot down. The glass walls of the arboretum were all shattered and the main building was on fire.

The survivors of Hollowmount’s loyalists tended their wounded or sat in a shell-shocked daze. Far fewer of them had made it inside the compound than had attacked the walls. Cyvon saw Inquisitor Stheno moving among them, dispensing encouragement and confirmation that they had done the Emperor’s work. Father Eugenivov had survived, too, and prayed quietly with the most severely wounded to calm their souls in their last moments. A breach in the compound wall was choked with loyalist bodies.

‘Brother Cyvon!’ called Epistolary Oxyath. Cyvon guessed it was his mental lightning that had set the house on fire. ‘Was the blood shed here worth the spilling of it?’

‘I hope so,’ said Cyvon. ‘For this we lost a battle-brother and others are wounded.’

In the open air, Cyvon’s communicator was able to link up long distance with the strike force’s command vox-channel. He sent an alert signal, knowing it would flash a rune projected onto Captain Quhya’s retina.

‘Quhya,’ came the reply. There was static, but it was clear enough.

‘Brother Cyvon here.’

‘Brother, where is Sergeant Phraates?’

‘Wounded, alas. But we are victorious. The House Yathe compound has fallen and the Uppermost Hand is dead. But there is more. We have intelligence about who we really face on Kepris.’

The sounds of gunfire and raised voices could be heard over the vox. Wherever Quhya’s strike force was among the shrines of Kepris, they were fighting. ‘Can we act upon it, brother?’

‘I bring news of the xenos, captain,’ said Cyvon. ‘Yeceqath and her cult are in league with the aeldari.’

‘We know,’ replied Quhya, and Cyvon could hear screaming engines and stuttering heavy weapons fire behind his voice. ‘They have just arrived.’

After the House Yathe compound fell and as the Soul Drinkers made ready to leave, Father Eugenivov told Cyvon the tales. They had been passed down Kepris’ generations and the old preacher had relayed them so many times that telling them came to him as easily as breathing.

Saint Innokens, he explained, had wandered in the desert, and had died. The Emperor heard the prayer that formed from his final breath, and granted him life. So Innokens wandered on, following the increasingly vivid visions sent to him by the Emperor. His winding path across the desert ended within sight of the ocean, where Innokens finally succumbed to the exhaustion and deprivation of his pilgrimage, and died once more.

On the way he wrote down his visions, and they became a sacred book of the Imperial creed. Innokens had seen the galaxy ending a hundred times, and each version of the end times was rife with its own morals, allusions and prophecies so dense they defied understanding. That did not prevent generations of Imperial clerics spending a lifetime studying them, drawing what morsels of knowledge they could from the barrage of imagery that had coursed through the mind of Saint Innokens.

A shrine sprung up at each spot on Innokens’ pilgrimage. They ran from the northern edge of Kepris’ man-habitable regions to the edge of the equatorial ocean. Where Innokens found fresh water to sustain him, there was built the Station of Exalted Respite. The many Reposing Shrines were built where Innokens had recorded he found time and comfort to sleep. Among the biggest shrines were the Temple of the Breath Returned, where Innokens had died and been revived by the grace of the Emperor, and the Hall of the Grand Revelation, where Innokens had witnessed a vision of a terrible slash of darkness bisecting the galaxy and heralding its end. The Tomb of Innokens, meanwhile, was built to house his remains in the centre of the region defined by his pilgrimage, and became the halfway station for those pilgrims who sought to retrace his footsteps.

The shrines of Kepris were run and guarded by the Ecclesiarchy. Their clergy gathered faithful laypeople to maintain the shrines and serve as a militia to protect the pilgrims who walked the trail. Above all, they guarded the relics housed in the shrines, for the relics of Saint Innokens were among the most sacred objects in the sector. The handwritten records of his visions, the devotional icons and rosaria he carried to remind him of the presence of his Emperor, the stone from which fresh water sprung to sustain him, all were kept in void-locked sarcophagi and vigilantly guarded. Only pilgrims who had proven their devotion were permitted to file past the sacristy chambers to view the relics of Saint Innokens’ life.

That had been the story for thousands of years. Eugenivov was also familiar with the more recent history of the Trail of Saint Innokens, and it was far less inspiring. When the cult of Yeceqath, the Voice of All, had arisen in the cities, militia flocked to defend the shrines from this heretical threat. As the cultists in Kepris’ military mutinied and plundered the armouries, the clergy organised the militias and armed the pilgrims.

As the cities fell, the shrines held out. Columns of cultists rode out into the desert to find thousands of defenders holding the whole Trail of Saint Innokens. Unable to breach the temples, the cult besieged them instead, draining its manpower in the cities and pressing armies of citizens into service. The Temple of the Letting of Blood fell, and its defenders were staked out in the harsh desert sun to die over agonising days. A column of pilgrims heading for the Temple of Breath Returned was massacred. Thousands died on the barricades and at the gates, and thousands more faced disease and starvation as the cult tightened its noose.

They were looking for something. Whatever Yeceqath’s goals, she needed the shrines conquered and was willing to spend every life on Kepris to do it. And with time, she would win.

That was when the Soul Drinkers arrived.

Cyvon helped Sergeant Phraates up into the belly of the cargo hauler. The tracked vehicle was just large enough to hold six Space Marines, and the Weldworks had proven to contain enough of them to transport the whole strike force. The sergeant said nothing, but it was clear he bristled at needing help to do anything. His wounds were too severe for him to fight, a state antithetical to such a pure warrior as Phraates.

‘When will you return?’ asked Father Eugenivov. The old man was watching the Soul Drinkers embarking ready to depart, and there was a wetness in his eyes.

‘Soon,’ replied Cyvon. He had no idea if it was true or not. Every facet of war had been drilled into him during the conditioning and training of the Adeptus Astartes, but that had not included raising the morale of the Imperium’s bedraggled defenders. ‘The Emperor knows His own,’ he said, searching for words that might encourage the loyalists of Hollowmount. ‘He protects.’

‘Indeed, He sent you to us,’ said Eugenivov. ‘But you are gone so quickly.’

‘Finish what we started,’ said Cyvon.

Eugenivov nodded thoughtfully. ‘Yes. Yes, that is what He asks of us. He protects, and He expects in return. We are abandoned, for we must all fight alone in the end. But you have shown us how, my lord! You have shown us how.’

Cyvon didn’t know how to react. He was grateful when Father Eugenivov turned away and walked back towards what remained of his flock – the filthy, exhausted walking wounded who had returned to the Weldworks from the assault on the compound walls.

The loyalists would be without Inquisitor Stheno, too. The Inquisitorial operative was joining the strike force on their journey to link up with the larger Soul Drinkers force in the desert, where Captain Quhya was commanding the assault on the cult forces besieging Kepris’ shrines. Now Cyvon had an idea of what Yeceqath’s objective was on Kepris, he realised how fortunate it was that Quhya had taken the bulk of the Soul Drinkers’ strength to the Trail of Innokens.

Epistolary Oxyath climbed into the cargo hauler as Stheno approached. ‘Librarian,’ said Stheno. ‘Word from my contacts in the city archives. The woman Brother Cyvon saw is named Kalypsa Yathe. Younger daughter of House Yathe. It appears she is our Yeceqath.’

‘What about this Lyre?’ asked Oxyath.

‘A relic of Saint Innokens,’ replied Stheno, ‘kept at his tomb. Pilgrims found it recently in the desert ruins, the first new relic for millennia. Its discovery was thought of as quite the promising omen, ironically enough. As for what the xenos might want with it, that is another matter.’

‘Can your contacts tell us where it is from?’ said Oxyath. ‘What it can do?’

‘I doubt those contacts will survive much longer,’ said Stheno. ‘With the reprisals for the death of the Uppermost Hand, Hollowmount’s loyalists are all but gone.’

Cyvon looked behind him, to where one of the last gatherings of those loyalists heard the news from Father Eugenivov that the Angels of Death were departing and leaving them to the mercies of the Voice of All.

‘There aren’t enough of them left to defend the Weldworks,’ said Cyvon. ‘As soon as the cult learns we are gone, all these people are going to die.’

‘Are you minded to remain with them, to buy them a few more seconds of life?’ Stheno raised an eyebrow in amusement. ‘Is that really the best use of a Space Marine’s death?’

‘Merely an observation, inquisitor,’ said Cyvon.

‘Certainly not for a Soul Drinker,’ added Stheno. ‘Tell me, brothers, what manner of death befell those who once carried your name?’

‘We do not know,’ replied Oxyath. ‘History does not remember. The legacy of the Soul Drinkers is ours to forge.’

‘As I suspected,’ said Stheno slyly. ‘Evidently my sources are rather more reliable than yours. But then, I can search the places you cannot.’

‘What do you know?’ demanded Cyvon. Too late, Oxyath’s warning glance told him he should not take the inquisitor’s bait.

‘Suffice it to say,’ replied Stheno, ‘there are reasons the Soul Drinkers were forgotten.’

Cyvon swallowed his next words. An inquisitor could not be cowed or intimidated, even by a Space Marine. He watched as Stheno headed for the next vehicle in the column, feeling a sense of helplessness that was completely alien to him.

Cyvon climbed into the last seat of his squad’s hauler and slammed the rear hatch closed behind him. The engine growled and the vehicle began to move. It was unarmoured and slower than an Impulsor, forced to negotiate the difficult terrain, but it was well protected from the harsh environment of the desert and its industrial nature would make it inconspicuous as the column made its way through Hollowmount’s manufacturing hinterlands towards the Trail of Saint Innokens. Brother Sasan had to drive the vehicle, and had made his dislike of its crude handling well known.

‘What does he know?’ asked Cyvon, more to himself than to anyone else. ‘And how?’

‘The Inquisition know a great deal,’ replied Oxyath. ‘One might say it is what they do.’

‘Then why try to bait us so?’

‘The ordos seek every advantage, at every opportunity,’ said Oxyath. ‘He may just be reminding us of his superiority. An inquisitor has to be the supreme authority wherever he is. As to how, he has repositories of information at his command, and perhaps a way to contact an underling off-world.’

‘He’s just blowing incense up our fundaments,’ said Sasan from the driver’s seat. ‘He doesn’t know anything.’

Cyvon tried to force the questions out of his mind, as he had learned to do to make room for the battle-rites and tactical sermons of a Space Marine, but they would not go. They stuck in the surface of his mind like pieces of shrapnel. ‘What does he know?’ he said to himself.

‘Brother Cyvon,’ growled Phraates, ‘if your questions were bullets this city would be full of corpses. Stick to asking how we can break this enemy.’

‘Of course, brother-sergeant.’

‘The Principles of Siege and Counter-Siege,’ said Phraates. ‘Prime verses, from the preface. Begin, Brother Cyvon.’

‘The siege is the means by which the will of an enemy is broken, not his body,’ began Cyvon, the words spooling out of his memory as if a dam had broken and the sleep-taught doctrine was flooding his brain. ‘Instead, the target is his spirit. His surrender, not his death, is your goal. And yet death is at the same time the principal tool in the arsenal of he who seeks the reduction of the enemy by siege, and the means by which the besiegers shall themselves be broken…’

Cyvon recited the tactical sermon as the vehicle column snaked out of the Weldworks and towards the outermost foundries and factoria. Behind it, in billows of smoke and the stutter of gunfire, Hollowmount continued to bleed.

Part III

EXECUTION

Chapter Five

Looking back, it was inevitable that as our world’s suffering began in blood, so would our deliverance. Even now, however, I am startled by just how much blood there was.

– Father Balthan Eugenivov, The Keprian Vengeance

‘We have one advantage,’ said Captain Quhya. ‘We know what they want.’

The captain of the Third Company had set up a temporary command post in a trench a little more than a bolter shot from the walls of the Temple of the Thousand Tears. The trenches had been dug by the besieging cultists forces, and their corpses still littered the no-man’s-land between their defences and the temple. The Soul Drinkers had hit them so hard and so fast that the Hands of All had not had the time to direct the cultists against this new foe before Inceptor Squads Astyagon and Karavad had dropped into the middle of them from the sky. Quhya had led the rest of the Soul Drinkers into the suddenly disorganised enemy, and created a crossfire that cut down well over two thousand of them before the survivors fled into the desert.

The Thricefold had not fled. They had pulled down Brother Pharnaspes of Squad Karavad and butchered him. He was the first casualty among Quhya’s offensive. The strike force had already liberated the Chapel of Grateful Repose and the House of the Sixth Revelation. Thousands of cultists were dead, shredded by storms of bolter fire or butchered in the Soul Drinkers’ charges. The Temple of the Thousand Tears was the biggest engagement yet. If the cult had been the only enemy, the Soul Drinkers would have lifted the siege of each shrine in turn and made their victory inevitable. But they were not just facing the cult any more.

‘The Lyre of Innokens was buried with the saint,’ said Inquisitor Stheno. In spite of the heat of the region he still wore the aristocratic officer’s regalia, which he had somehow managed to keep clean. ‘It’s at his tomb.’

‘Then we must assume that is the aeldari’s objective, too,’ mused Quhya. On an ammo crate in front of him he had laid out the intelligence the Soul Drinkers had taken from the slaughtered cultists – religious tracts, icons of the enthroned prophet, written orders and hand-annotated maps of the Trail of Innokens. He picked up one of the maps that depicted the stretch of the trail including the tomb. ‘What do they want with this Lyre?’

‘Impossible to say,’ replied Stheno slickly. ‘The mind of the xenos is ever inscrutable. I came to Kepris to inspect its relics and I was hoping to study the Lyre myself when the cult’s uprising began. The Lyre is newly discovered, for one. It was assumed it had been uncovered after thousands of years under the desert, but recent events make me wonder. My sources suggest it may not be Imperial at all. Pre-Imperial, or xenos.’

‘Could it have been made by the aeldari?’ asked Quhya.

‘Again,’ said Stheno, ‘impossible to say.’

‘Where are the aeldari now?’ asked Epistolary Oxyath. His smaller force had made rapid progress from Hollowmount and linked up with Quhya’s force just after the siege of the temple had been broken.

‘Everywhere,’ replied Quhya. ‘Small forces of them are attacking pilgrims and shrines all along the trail. They strike, massacre and fade away. The last we heard was the largest force was bearing down on the Tomb of Innokens.’

‘Then they knew the location of the Lyre all along,’ said First Sergeant Tiridates. ‘Damn the perversity of the alien. Why not come and get it themselves before now?’

‘Because the aeldari are loath to risk one life of their own when thousands of human lives can be spent to do the same job,’ replied Stheno. ‘Have you fought them, First Sergeant?’

‘At Scaldfrost Glacier,’ replied Tiridates. ‘I bloodied my hands with a dozen of the pointy-eared filth.’

‘Did you speak to them as you killed them?’ asked Stheno. Most men would have wilted before the scowl that Tiridates gave the inquisitor, but Stheno just smirked at him.

‘No,’ said Tiridates. ‘I gave them not the chance to speak. From such honeyed words is heresy born.’

‘I know of the aeldari,’ continued Stheno. ‘Not just the way they fight and die. I know their mind, as much as a human can. They believe the galaxy revolves around them and the rest of its living things are there to be used as fodder and pawns for their own games. They despise dirtying their hands with work they could trick someone else into doing, and they hate doing so in the open. They are on Kepris because they have to be, because the objective they previously left in the care of Yeceqath and her cult is now judged beyond the cult’s means. The aeldari are forced to intercede directly.’

‘And what precipitated that decision,’ said Quhya, ‘would be us.’

‘Quite so.’ Stheno bowed his head slightly in deference to the captain’s insight. Quhya did not respond. ‘Your brethren have rendered the cult incapable of retrieving the Lyre of Innokens, in the minds of the aeldari at least. So they are here to get it themselves.’

‘And so is Yeceqath,’ said Oxyath. ‘The aeldari have some hold over her. She will want to take the Lyre for herself to bargain with them.’

‘Ah yes, as told by the battle-brother who put paid to the Uppermost Hand,’ said Stheno. ‘The one with the overactive omophagea.’

‘Brother Cyvon,’ voxed Captain Quhya. ‘Attend upon us.’

Cyvon had been with the rest of Squad Phraates, debriefing on the battle at House Yathe. Phraates was still able enough to demand explanations for each of their actions and evaluate the choices they had made in the thick of the fighting. Cyvon and Sasan had answered for the death of Pitamenes. They had not been found lacking, but a battle-brother had still fallen, and the victory at House Yathe had a bitter taste. He left his squad’s position in one of the trenches, sending an acknowledgement rune to Quhya.

‘Our rising star,’ said Sasan. ‘You’ll make Chapter Master yet.’

‘No time for levity, brother,’ said Manuch. Phraates’ annoyed grunt suggested Manuch spoke for both of them.

As Cyvon headed across the battlefield, he saw the militia and clergy who had survived the siege watching the Soul Drinkers from their fortifications. They had the same unashamed awe on their faces as the loyalists in Hollowmount. It was not just reverence, Cyvon understood now. It was fear, too. They might have been sent by the Emperor, but the Adeptus Astartes were still death incarnate. Death was death, no matter who it served.

‘I understand you saw the xenos in some poor wretch’s last memories,’ said Stheno as Cyvon approached.

Cyvon’s skin prickled at being singled out by Stheno. Whatever unsettling quality the man had, it had wormed its way into Cyvon’s mind and would not let go. It was rare that anything caused discomfort to a Space Marine, but Stheno did. Perhaps that was one of the qualities an inquisitor needed. ‘I did,’ said Cyvon. ‘Two of them. A leader and a warrior.’

‘A farseer,’ added Oxyath. The Librarian had been content to observe proceedings so far, but interjected now. ‘The aeldari hosts are led by their psykers. I, too, was at Scaldfrost Glacier, and I never perceived such psychic strength as the farseer that led the xenos there.’

‘In armour patterned with thorns,’ continued Cyvon. ‘The warrior was in heavier armour, with mandible blasters.’

‘Craftworld Biel-Tan,’ said Stheno.

‘Then the first reports were true,’ said Quhya. ‘The aeldari have sent the Swordwind.’

Stheno raised an eyebrow. ‘You know of it?’

‘By reputation,’ said Quhya. ‘A host of Aspect Warriors, all highly specialised, sent in huge numbers by the aeldari of Biel-Tan. Our Chapter faced Guardians and wraithbone constructs at the glacier but the Swordwind is something else entirely. The way the xenos have attacked swiftly then moved on is typical of Biel-Tan. The warrior our brother saw was an exarch of the Striking Scorpions aspect. Heavy close-combat troops.’

Tiridates grunted in appreciation. ‘Then we are in for a fight!’

‘Your First Sergeant is spoiling to split a lance with the alien,’ said Stheno to Quhya. ‘I hope his enthusiasm is infectious.’

‘Every Soul Drinker relishes the coming battle,’ retorted Tiridates. ‘It is where we can become what we were meant to be. In the face of the enemy, a Space Marine is truly the image of his Emperor!’

‘We move now,’ said Quhya, ignoring the exchange. ‘The Swordwind moves fast. We must be faster.’ He looked towards the militia on the walls, accompanied by weary-looking pilgrims as they worked to rebuild the breaches. ‘These people will have to do without us. There is only one objective on Kepris now.’ The captain switched to the all-squads vox-channel. ‘Battle-brethren! See to your wargear rites and embark on the transports. In five minutes, we leave this place.’

The Soul Drinkers headed for their Impulsors, still parked where Quhya’s attack had smashed into the cultist lines. Their respite was over.

Oxyath put an armoured hand on Cyvon’s shoulder. ‘I am wary that Yeceqath will be forgotten among the arrival of the aeldari,’ he said. ‘You think this also.’

It no longer surprised Cyvon when Oxyath correctly guessed what he was thinking. The Librarian was psychic, after all. ‘She is more dangerous than we think,’ said Cyvon. ‘She is no xenos or witch, but she raised this whole planet in rebellion. I know she anticipated the aeldari arriving in person. She has a plan.’

‘Then it will be foiled,’ said Oxyath.

Before Quhya’s five minutes were up, the Soul Drinkers had checked off the elements of their truncated battle-rites and crammed themselves into the close confines of the Impulsors. One of the vehicles was set apart for the wounded, for though they were limited in their ability to fight, they would not be left behind. They shared the troop compartment with the Soul Drinkers’ shrouded dead. The fallen were not left behind, either.

The Tomb of Innokens was at the centre of the trail of shrines. It was a hard ride, three hours at top speed, to the north-east to reach the tomb, plenty of time for the aeldari to strike. The engines of the Impulsors roared and the column moved off, watched by the bemused pilgrims, whose saviours departed as quickly as they had arrived.

Usually Cyvon’s mind was occupied with the principles of warfare that applied to the battle to come. Now, however, there was a question among them, one that would not leave him alone, though he had no answer.

What is the Lyre of Innokens?

‘From the sky!’ came the warning over the vox.

Squad Phraates’ Impulsor ripped to one side, suddenly on an evasive course. Cyvon was pressed into the side of the troop compartment as its thrusters tore up clods of desert ground.

A moment later, a shrieking barrage of energy bolts fell like a salvo of falling stars. Where they erupted against the ground, Cyvon’s auto-senses struggled to cope with the atomic glare.

The Impulsor ahead, carrying Intercessor Squad Naudar, was struck in the front of the hull and cartwheeled nose over tail, coming to rest on its roof. Explosions stuttered in a long, burning line as the shadow of a sleek, fast-moving fighter craft tore overhead.

Cyvon had the impression of an aircraft with a crescent-shaped body and a knife-like forward portion, wheeling and spiralling as it passed overhead.

‘Crimson Hunters!’ came the vox from Quhya’s vehicle overhead.

‘Slow down,’ said Epistolary Oxyath. With Sergeant Phraates wounded, his place in the Impulsor had been taken by the Librarian. He reached up and hauled open the Impulsor’s upper hatch as Brother Sasan in the driving seat reduced the vehicle’s speed. Sasan was the squad’s driver of choice. As much as they professed to dislike his quick tongue, they valued his reactions at the driving yoke. The rest of the column roared past them as they each took on their own evasive path, denying the fighter craft a neat line to aim at.

The Impulsor’s open back could allow five brethren to stand and fire out of the vehicle. Through the hatch, Cyvon could see the enemy aircraft banking and turning for another attack run. He glimpsed the shape of the Tomb of Innokens ahead of them, just over a mile away, surrounded by columns of smoke. The battle for the tomb had begun without the Soul Drinkers.

Oxyath stood up through the hatch on the back of the vehicle and raised his staff. Cyvon felt the air grow thick and time seemed to slow down as fingers of power flickered around Oxyath’s psychic hood. The sun shone off the approaching aircraft and Cyvon could make out its bright red colours. Its weapons flashed and twin bolts of burning energy shot past the Soul Drinkers vehicles.

Power coalesced around Oxyath and was echoed in the sky above. Purple forks of lightning punched down past the Crimson Hunter. The craft banked past them. The pilot’s reactions must have been well beyond the capacity of any human.

Even this pilot was not quick enough to dodge the second volley of lightning. A bolt of electricity sheared right through the root of one wing and the aircraft came apart. The severed wing spiralled away as the rest of the craft speared downwards.

The report of the lightning hit just before the Crimson Hunter crashed. It struck the ground two hundred yards from the Impulsor and burst into a fireball as the vehicle roared past it. The heat from the explosion hammered against the Impulsor and Cyvon felt it pulsing against him. His armour protected him from temperatures that would have incinerated unguarded flesh. Sasan killed the thrusters and the Impulsor slowed to a halt just before it plunged into the fighter’s burning wake. A wall of fire raged, cutting the Soul Drinkers column in two.

‘I thought these xenos were supposed to possess all the galaxy’s wisdom,’ voxed Sasan. ‘This one didn’t know that was coming.’

‘The aeldari do not attack piecemeal,’ said Oxyath. He leaned against the edge of the upper hatch; though he was loath to let it show, every use of his psychic power was exhausting to the Librarian. ‘They will follow up.’

‘Vehicles from north-east,’ came a vox from up ahead. Cyvon recognised the voice of Sergeant Khosrau, who led one of the Third Company’s Hellblaster squads. ‘Grav-tanks, fast-movers.’

‘Aspect Warriors,’ voxed Quhya. ‘The Swordwind comes! Keep moving, Soul Drinkers! They would pin us down here as the rest of them take the Tomb of Innokens. They will see we do not oblige our enemies so!’

Cyvon heard the grav-tank before he saw it. The strange rippling of its anti-grav units picked up above the roar of the flames from the crashed fighter craft. He stood up beside Oxyath, bolt rifle ready, as the rest of the squad gathered around him.

‘You heard the captain,’ voxed Sasan. ‘Hold on, brothers!’

The Impulsor took off again as the aeldari grav-tank rounded the crash site. It had similar sleek, crescent-shaped lines to the xenos aircraft, and was supported on a haze of heat shimmer from the oval-shaped anti-grav units mounted on the leading edges of its hull. Its turret swivelled to present its twin guns towards the Impulsor as Sasan drove straight at the flames, and plunged through them.

The glittering ruby rain of multi-laser fire streaked past the Impulsor. Some impacted against the rear armour, perilously close to the open back. Cyvon fired at the vehicle from the Impulsor’s open upper hatch and bolt shells exploded against the grav-tank’s front armour before the flames closed around them.

He trusted in his wargear. Scalding heat enveloped him. He welcomed the pain, for it was what proved he was a Space Marine: pain, panic, dread, all in the face of the enemy, all generated by his human brain but all tamed and quelled by the discipline of the Adeptus Astartes. The Impulsor cleared the ground as it rode out of the rut made by the crashed aircraft and then dipped, mere inches from colliding with the ground.

It reached full, reckless speed, trailing smoke. It passed Squad Naudar’s stricken Impulsor as the squad inside clambered out of the wreck and dragged their wounded with them. They set up to fire as the grav-tank rounded the flames again, and multi-laser beams stuttered among them.

Cyvon saw one of Squad Naudar fall, speared through by a las-bolt. Another was slammed against the upturned Impulsor’s hull, and though his armour held there was no telling what damage was wrought to the skeleton and muscles inside.

More fallen. More dead the Imperium could not readily replace. Kepris had taken too many of them already, and Cyvon knew by a grim soldier’s instinct that there would be more.

The ground around the Tomb of Innokens was rocky desert broken by spurs of stone, the remains of ancient volcanic vents. The Soul Drinkers column had to evade the terrain as well as the attacking aeldari. There was little high cover for the Impulsors to shelter behind, and no ravines or riverbeds to force the pursuit into single file. The two forces criss-crossed between the rocky spires as the Tomb of Innokens grew closer and the fighting on its walls became more distinct. Impacts and thruster blasts churned up tails of dust that turned the sunlight a dirty orange and the air thrummed with engine roar and gunfire.

Another tank scythed past behind Cyvon’s Impulsor. Its rear hatch swung open and several aeldari leaped out. They had bone-white armour and their tall helms were crowned with red mane-like plumes. They carried pistols and swords of bone. They emitted a terrible high screeching as they vaulted out of the tank, landing with inhuman athleticism in spite of its speed, and leapt into Squad Naudar.

Bolter fire mingled with the sound of blades against ceramite and flesh.

The Aspect Warriors of the Swordwind were trying to split up the Soul Drinkers column. They were succeeding.

The grav-tank up ahead swivelled its turret to fire at Squad Phraates’ Impulsor. Multi-laser beams thumped into the front armour. Cyvon could feel the heat of the laser blasts ripping overhead.

Oxyath held his staff in both hands. Cyvon could hear his laboured breathing and knew the Librarian did not have much psychic power left in him before he had to rest and recharge. If there was one thing the aeldari would not give them, it was rest.

‘Aim for the grav-units,’ voxed Oxyath. He stood clear of the top hatch once again, and Cyvon felt the lightning gathering in the air.

The rest of Squad Phraates stood up beside Cyvon so they could bring their bolters to bear. Cyvon’s bolter kicked in his hand and bolt impacts stammered along the rear of the grav-tank. The miniature explosions burst against the aeldari tank’s armour and one of the oval grav-units under the hull burst in a shower of sparks. Oxyath bellowed and unleashed another bolt of lightning into the front of the grav-tank’s curved hull. The vehicle slewed to one side, momentarily out of control, and the squad poured fire into its suddenly vulnerable underside.

One side of the tank lost lift and its nose pitched into the ground, digging up a plume of dirt. The aeldari inside jumped out, and Cyvon saw they were armoured in deep blue with white plumes that hid their faces behind a blank surface with a pair of triangular eyepieces. They brought their shuriken catapults to bear as Sasan swung the Impulsor around to describe a wide crescent around the disembarking enemy.

The aeldari were exceptional warriors. The Aspect Warriors were all the more so, each type specialised for its own form of war. But no aeldari could out-shoot a Space Marine.

Cyvon’s bolter coughed in his hands and a corresponding bloom of blood and sparks burst in the chest of the nearest aeldari. The alien fell back as the gun dropped from its hands. Two more fell to Squad Phraates’ bolt rifles. The aeldari returned fire and a fusillade of silvery discs studded the side of the Impulsor. Cyvon felt the impact as one of them hit his shoulder guard, but the ceramite held. He fired again, this shot finding another aeldari’s thigh. It fell, but he could not tell how badly wounded it was.

‘Keep going,’ said Oxyath, teeth gritted. ‘Do not let them separate us.’

Another grav-tank sped alongside the flank of the Soul Drinkers column. This one had a huge energy weapon mounted on the turret. Storm bolter fire from Squad Mihrab’s Impulsor hammered against the grav-tank’s hull, but the turret emitted a terrific blast of white-hot power, ripping through the air in a burst of heat radiation, and sheared off the front portion of the Impulsor’s thruster. The vehicle skidded to a halt, almost tipping on its side, as its storm bolter continued to chatter out chains of fire.

‘Squad Otanes, Khosrau!’ ordered Quhya over the vox. ‘Support the stricken! Chaplain Visinah, deliver them! The rest, we press on! We strike!’

Cyvon did not know if he could have made that choice. The Soul Drinkers could have ceased their advance and rallied around the squads forced to halt by the aeldari attack. But the force would never have reached the Tomb of Saint Innokens before the xenos took the shrine and the Lyre, and their purpose on Kepris would have been lost. Quhya had decided to split the force and trust those left behind would regroup and rejoin those who continued. Almost half the Third Company would fight off the aeldari in the desert, while the rest struck the tomb.

Quhya believed both parts of the Soul Drinkers force could win their respective battles. He had faith. Cyvon had to have it, too.

Two Impulsors peeled off from the advancing force to join the stragglers. The rest tore through the rocky desert towards the Tomb of Innokens. The tomb’s shape resolved into a pair of gatehouses in a fearsome defensive wall, surrounding a building crowned with golden minarets and spires hung with the banners of the Imperial creed. The bivouacs and makeshift barricades of the cultist besiegers scattered the desert in front of the temple, around the scorched breaches they had opened up in the walls.

Trails of dust marked the approach of rapid-moving vehicles at right angles to the Soul Drinkers’ approach. Aeldari grav-tanks, carrying payloads of Aspect Warriors. The Biel-Tan Swordwind was already there.

‘We’re going straight through the cultists,’ voxed Sasan from the driving seat.

‘Let us hope they aren’t expecting us,’ replied Cyvon.

‘We shall match their welcome with greetings of our own!’ said Sasan.

Ruby-coloured multi-laser fire streaked around the battlements. The return fire from the Imperial defenders barely registered. It was from autoguns and heavy stubbers manned by valiant but ill-trained militia and pilgrims. The tomb’s defenders were exhausted and depleted, armoured in nothing but their faith.

Doom and deliverance were approaching the faithful of Kepris at the same time. The doom would get there first.

‘Break column into line!’ voxed Quhya. ‘Inceptor squads, engage and sow bedlam! The rest, we crash through!’

Two of the column’s Impulsors sped off ahead. They skidded to a halt before the rest of the strike force as the cultists turned to face this new threat. Squads Karavad and Astyagon disembarked. The Inceptor squads hurtled off the ground on columns of exhaust from their jump packs, and immediately fire was pouring from their assault bolters into the cultists rushing to face them. They would be the spearhead that opened up the heretics’ defences for the rest of the Soul Drinkers to crush.

Even from a distance, Cyvon could see the ruin torn across the bodies of the cultists. Explosive bolts ripped bodies apart. Klaxons sounded in alarm and cultists hauled heavy weapons around to face the rear of their lines, but already the Inceptors were among them, riddling them with assault bolter fire at point-blank range.

Cyvon could hear the cries of panic, and the screams.

The Impulsors spread out and shot past the parked vehicles, whose heavy bolter turrets were hammering fire to support the Inceptors. Squad Phraates’ Impulsor was aimed for a bank of steel junk and scorched wreckage wrapped in razor wire. Cultists were rushing to man the barricade. Cyvon saw among the cultists the mingled clothing of rich and poor, and handmade masks aping the Uppermost Hand’s.

Crude banners hung from the barricades, depicting the enthroned Voice of All. Even by the standards of heresy, she was a false prophet. She didn’t even believe in herself.

The Impulsor slammed into the barricade surrounding the besiegers’ camp. Autogun fire pinged off the front armour as the vehicle rode up over the wreckage and crunched down on the other side, through tents and bivouacs, over trenches full of looted supplies and sheltering cultists.

‘Out!’ shouted Oxyath. The door swung open and Cyvon jumped out of the rear of the Impulsor. The dazed cultist that faced him, through the din of gunfire and screaming engines, wore the stained remnants of a Keprian military uniform. Those regiments, with their glorious histories and heraldry, had ceased to exist as cultists had mutinied and massacred those who defied them. This ex-soldier tried to bring his lasgun up but Cyvon didn’t even bother to fire his bolter. He smacked the stock of the weapon into the side of the cultist’s skull, and the man was dead before he crumpled to the ground.

Squad Phraates surrounded the Impulsor in a web of bolter fire. Cultists fell in the crossfire. The other squads were doing the same. Cyvon saw Captain Quhya behead one cultist with his power sword before he shot down another with his bolt pistol. Sergeant Tiridates charged into a knot of cultists manning a heavy bolter emplacement, and with a few strokes of his powerblade reduced them to smouldering ribbons of flesh.

Cyvon felt the change in the air before he heard the rumbling of the earth. Instinctively, he ducked into the shelter of the squad’s Impulsor. Brother Sasan slid into cover beside him, driven by the same instinct.

The ground beneath the cultist defences heaved up and fell with a tremendous roar. Cyvon’s stomachs turned as he was hauled up into the air and slammed down again in a storm of torn earth and tumbling wreckage. The Impulsor was thrown onto its side.

The cultists’ makeshift watchtowers fell. The Soul Drinkers fought to keep their footing. One of Squad Tiridates, Cyvon could not tell who it was, vanished into a fissure that tore open in the ground.

The walls around the Tomb of Innokens bowed and sagged. The land groaned as it settled again, the cultists’ defences wrecked and rearranged.

From a breach in the walls approached a figure Cyvon knew. It was the aeldari from the vision, the farseer of Biel-Tan. He was accompanied by a bodyguard of Aspect Warriors in deep-green armour with mandible blasters and chainswords. Striking Scorpions, Cyvon recalled, the heavy close-combat troops of the Swordwind.

‘The xenos show their hand,’ voxed Oxyath over the dull rumble of the settling earth. ‘Now, brethren. Now is the true battle for Kepris.’

The farseer swept his staff and the land sagged suddenly, forming a bowl-shaped depression into which Squad Phraates was thrown. Cyvon tumbled through the wreckage and fought to keep hold of his bolter. He rolled to his feet just as the Striking Scorpions charged in a shriek of chainblades.

One of the Scorpions singled out Cyvon. Cyvon was on his feet as the Scorpion’s mandibles lit up with emerald fire. Laser bolts peppered his shoulder and chestplate. White spears of pain flashed through him where they pierced the ceramite of his armour.

Cyvon bit down on the pain and raised the body of his bolt rifle in a guard, letting sleep-taught instinct take over. He had learned what the Imperium knew of the Aspect Warriors in the Chapter’s tactical sermons. Their mandibles forced open an opponent’s defences, leaving them vulnerable to disembowelment with the chainblade. That would not be Cyvon’s fate.

The chainsword chewed through the housing of Cyvon’s bolt rifle. The weapon’s components pinged off his armour.

The only safe place was face to face with the enemy, within the arc of the chainsword. He felt the weapon’s teeth biting through the ceramite of his armour’s backpack and shoulder guard as he reached for the Scorpion’s helmet. His fingers closed around the back of the helmet and though the Scorpion tried to twist away, Cyvon was stronger and wrenched its head down towards him.

Cyvon’s other hand forced the damaged bolt rifle into the gap between them. He fired it upwards and the bolt cracked into the lower edge of the Scorpion’s faceplate. The aeldari was thrown back onto the ground with its helm split wide open.

Cyvon saw the face beneath. From depictions and the descriptions of xenobiologists, an Imperial citizen might think the aeldari resembled humans – two eyes, a nose, a mouth. But in the flesh, they were utterly obscene. There was nothing about them that was not grossly alien. The huge dark eyes narrowed in hate and fear, and the mouth, too small and set in a flawless mask of an inhuman face, spat out an oath in the Aeldari tongue.

Cyvon fired down at the aeldari, but the damaged weapon’s action finally jammed. He used it instead to knock aside the chainblade the aeldari tried to sweep at his legs, and kicked the creature square in the chest. The aeldari was thrown against the Impulsor and Cyvon followed up with a straight punch to its face.

His fist crunched into bone. The unprotected face was shattered. He let the aeldari fall, dead, and took stock of his surroundings.

The Aspect Warriors of the Swordwind swept in from the walls of the tomb. The farseer’s force included Striking Scorpions and Howling Banshees, along with shuriken catapult-armed Dire Avengers, who had taken to the walls and were pouring volleys of silvery razor-sharp discs into the Soul Drinkers. Quhya was battling the Howling Banshees, whose charge was marked by a terrible shriek that could deafen and confuse an unprepared defender. The Scorpions had been halted by Squad Phraates, and the rest of the green-armoured aeldari were engaged with Intercessor squads, who had finished their butchery of the cultists to find themselves on the back foot against the aliens.

Epistolary Oxyath was running across the battlefield as psychic power spilled and sparked off his staff. Cyvon could see he was headed straight for the enemy farseer. The aeldari turned to face the charging Librarian and cast out a handful of silvery runes, each one a symbol of the Aeldari language. Circles and lines of multicoloured light sprang up around him, forming a shield that flickered into being just as Oxyath’s staff came down like a headsman’s axe.

The staff discharged its energy in a flash of purple light. The farseer’s psychic shield held, and as Oxyath reeled back from the impact he drew his plasma pistol to fight without needing to drain his dwindling psychic reserves.

The farseer was faster.

The xenos raised its own staff, head pointing down like a spear in the hands of a warrior despatching an enemy underfoot. With a burst of icy wind, the aeldari rose from the ground, striding into the air above Oxyath. The Librarian took aim with his pistol as the farseer brought the staff down, and Cyvon realised the Librarian was too late.

The staff plunged into the base of Oxyath’s throat. A split second later, the farseer’s psychic power channelled through the weapon in a flood of silver light.

The upper half of Oxyath’s body exploded. Cyvon’s auto-senses struggled to keep the sudden white glare from scorching his retinas. What remained of Oxyath toppled to the ground, as torn ceramite and shredded muscle and organs rained down around him.

The farseer landed deftly on the tortured ground.

‘Oxyath is down,’ gasped Cyvon into the vox. ‘I see him. The farseer. He is clear of the Tomb of Innokens. Captain, now is the time.’

‘Keep him in place,’ replied Quhya. ‘Bulgovash! Clear to fire, Brother Cyvon’s target!’

A new channel opened up over the vox. Cyvon heard the static of the vox change.

‘Brother Cyvon,’ came a voice he had only heard once or twice – that of Shipmistress Fyoda Bulgovash, commander of the spacecraft Suffering of Helostrix. ‘I can give you one shot! Name your target!’

The ship had brought the Soul Drinkers through the perils of the Great Rift and into orbit over Kepris, then swung away from the world to hide out of range of its planetary defence lasers. It had run the gauntlet through those defences now, to bring this fire to them. Cyvon knew the risk the ship was taking, and the damage it would be sustaining even now.

‘Fifty yards north,’ replied Cyvon. His hearts were hammering as the farseer turned to look at him. Cyvon had no gun to fire, and doubted a mundane weapon would do much against the aeldari witch.

‘That’s close to you, brother,’ said Shipmistress Bulgovash. The cut glass of her Naval aristocrat accent contrasted strangely with the chaos all around Cyvon and the Librarian’s blood spattered across the ground. ‘Minimum safe distance is one hundred and fifty…’

‘Fire,’ repeated Cyvon. ‘Fire now!’

He spotted Oxyath’s plasma pistol on the ground beside him. The Librarian had not had the chance to fire it. Cyvon snatched it up and felt the powercells humming in his hand as they charged up.

Cyvon ducked behind the Impulsor as he fired. A fat bolt of plasma tore through the air and flared bright against the farseer’s psychic shield. The farseer held up a hand against the glare of the impact and dropped out of sight, behind a bank of torn wreckage. Cyvon ran past the Impulsor and into the open, trying to find the target. He spotted the farseer behind the wreckage yelling orders in the sibilant Aeldari tongue to the Striking Scorpions.

Cyvon didn’t need to know the language to understand. He was telling them to close in on the Space Marine with the plasma pistol, and kill him.

‘Take cover, brethren!’ voxed Cyvon as Striking Scorpions turned towards him, and the whirring of their chainblades reached a crescendo.

The heavens tore open. Cyvon could not see the Suffering of Helostrix in the sky overhead, but he knew it was there. A blue-white spot grew above him like a second sun, and the rising growl of superheated air was like an animal’s roar before it pounced.

The spacecraft’s ventral cannon was a lance weapon, configured to bombard target cities with barrages of fire. Set to its lowest and most accurate setting, it could hit a target spot with about a hundred yards’ deviation.

The bolt of blue-white light lasted half a second, stuttering as it pulsed hundreds of times and discharged immense amounts of thermal radiation into the ground. The entire section of the battlefield and a length of the temple’s defensive wall was vaporised and thrown into the air as a fine column of dirt and ash. The world was first impossibly bright, then suddenly dark.

Chapter Six

The Emperor’s voice, like the fiery death of a star, like the cry of agony of the planet itself. The falling of the hammer of justice. The fury of the galaxy, to have such blasphemy in it.

– Father Balthan Eugenivov, The Keprian Vengeance

The sound hammered against Cyvon. Heat battered against him as a scalding wind pulsed across the battlefield. Even his auto-senses could not prevent the din from deafening him temporarily, and the only sound he could hear was the vox transmitted directly into his inner ear. The static was broken by Shipmistress Bulgovash’s voice.

‘Direct hit!’ she said, and she could not hide the righteous glee in her voice. ‘Captain Quhya, do we have effect on target?’

Captain Quhya struggled to reply in spite of the filters of his armour and the third lung of his Primaris physiology. The dust fell thick, like a blanket of solid mist. ‘We have effect,’ he coughed.

Cyvon fought to his feet and peered through the column of dirt the laser impact had thrown up. The shapes of the fallen wall section emerged through the gloom. And there was something else – a figure, stumbling through the darkness.

Lines of light flared around it. The figure was the farseer, protected from the laser blast by his psychic wards, but reeling and alone. The farseer was heading up the slope of the crater the laser had left, towards the breach in the wall and the temple beyond. Around him was nothing but scorched ground, the rocks of Kepris’ desert pulverised and glowing like embers in a fireplace. The Striking Scorpions were gone entirely, their corpses vaporised or blown far clear of the crater.

Cyvon raised the plasma pistol and fired. A bolt of plasma ripped just past the farseer and bloomed against the slope of the crater. Cyvon’s senses were swirling and his aim was off.

The farseer was swallowed by the billowing dust, and vanished.

‘He’s alive,’ gasped Cyvon. ‘He’s headed for the tomb. For the Lyre.’

‘Pulling up from low orbit!’ exclaimed Shipmistress Bulgovash. ‘Defence lasers are targeting from Hollowmount. Going silent and engaging the umbral fields!’ Her vox-channel cut off as the Suffering of Helostrix rose back into high orbit, away from the orbital weaponry in the cult-controlled cities of Kepris.

‘Advance, Soul Drinkers!’ ordered Quhya to all the squads. ‘Into the tomb! Cold and fast, the enemy falls back and we pursue!’

‘We have them!’ cried First Sergeant Tiridates. ‘The xenos turn tail and flee! Cut them down, my brothers! Trample them in the dirt!’

‘Squad-brothers, Oxyath is down,’ voxed Cyvon to the other members of Squad Phraates. With the sergeant wounded and the Librarian dead, they had no leader. ‘Through the breach to the tomb, and stay close. The aeldari are within. Our target is the farseer.’

The Tomb of Saint Innokens was a grand building tarnished by the cultists’ siege. Its four columns were topped with gilded minarets and a cluster of spires rose from its centre. Chunks of masonry toppled from its highest points and runnels of dust trickled down its walls, as the blast from orbit had shaken the fabric of the huge structure. A wide archway leading into the tomb had been barricaded with pews and debris, but it was nothing that could hold back a Space Marine.

The rest of Squad Phraates emerged from the dust behind Cyvon. Brother Sasan’s shoulder guards were studded with shuriken discs from the Dire Avengers on the walls. Brother Arasmyn’s armour was black with his blood against the purple, and an ugly chainblade wound ran from his shoulder deep across his torso, cutting through ceramite into flesh. Manuch’s bolt rifle hung in a wrecked mess from his shoulder, and he fought now with a bolt pistol in one hand and a combat knife in the other.

‘Oxyath is gone?’ said Sasan. ‘Did you see him?’

‘I saw him, brother,’ replied Cyvon. ‘He is lost. We shall be his revenge.’

The rest of the strike force were emerging from the chaos of the laser strike. Quhya and Tiridates ran across the wreckage, heading for another archway leading into the tomb. Cyvon could hear the purring of aeldari grav-tanks, and he knew the enemy were not done yet. Their counter-attack against the Soul Drinkers had been blunted, but that was not their main objective. They wanted what was inside the tomb, and they were within already.

Cyvon led the way through the arch. Inside the tomb was cool and dark, in sudden contrast to the desert outside. He emerged into the main nave, where the glass sarcophagus of Saint Innokens lay surrounded by rings of pews where pilgrims could sit and contemplate the dead saint. A pulpit loomed over the sarcophagus, from which a preacher could inspire the faithful with tales of the saint’s visions and sacrifices. Golden panels around the walls of the nave were engraved with illustrations of the revelations granted to Innokens by the Emperor – planets boiling away as stars exploded; hosts of daemons falling before the Emperor’s sword; the armies of mankind marching to a final, endless war. One panel showed a ragged scar across the galaxy, the omen that Innokens had claimed heralded its doom.

Knots of exhausted Imperial citizens were huddled among the pews for shelter from the battle outside. Many of them were wounded militia taken down from the walls to be treated, or to spend their last moments in this holy place. Others were the old or infirm, whose role in the fight had been to pray before the altar for deliverance from the heretics outside. They looked at Cyvon and the other Soul Drinkers with open-mouthed amazement.

‘Then these are the end times,’ said one, an old man with a heavily bandaged arm and the tattered robes of a pilgrim. ‘We are delivered, in our final moments. They are death, and they are among us!’

Hands reached out to touch Cyvon’s armour as he passed by the pilgrims. He approached the sarcophagus and saw the drawn, dried-out face of Saint Innokens. It was the colour of hard, polished wood, and spoke of a life of deprivation and self-denial. Innokens wore simple white funeral robes, and clutched a small battered book in his bony hands.

Cyvon turned to the old man who had spoken. ‘Where is the Lyre?’ he asked.

Before the man could reply, Cyvon spotted movement at the far side of the nave. A Space Marine’s peripheral vision was preternatural and he had an impression of black robes, loose bandages and long pale hair. An instinct told him to follow and he vaulted over the pew in front of him, leaving the old pilgrim confused in his wake.

The fugitive was running towards a side shrine leading off from the nave. As Cyvon ran, the sound of breaking stone and crunching wood flooded the nave as an aeldari grav-tank burst through the wall, riding on a shimmering field of anti-grav energy that pushed the debris ahead of it.

‘No quarter!’ yelled First Sergeant Tiridates, erupting into the nave opposite the aeldari intrusion. His Intercessor squad ran alongside him as Tiridates smashed heedlessly through the pews and scattered the pilgrims ahead of him. Stheno was in the first wave, too, carrying a plasma gun and firing as he sprinted. The rest of the strike force charged into the pews, mirrored by the Striking Scorpions and Howling Banshees that flooded in through the breach opened by the tank.

Bolter fire streaked across the nave. Shuriken catapults and multi-lasers fired back, filling the Tomb of Innokens with a deadly multicoloured hail. Cyvon was aware of Brother Manuch falling with a smoking hole in one power-armoured greave. A Howling Banshee somersaulted to the floor, an arm blown off by a bolter impact.

Shrapnel pinged off Cyvon’s armour. He kept going, leaving the battle to Quhya and Tiridates. Raw instinct told him his objective was fleeing to the back of the nave.

‘The reliquary!’ gasped Cyvon into the squad vox as he ran. ‘The Lyre, brothers! The Lyre!’

He skidded into the archway as a burst of multi-laser fire ripped into the wall behind him. Ahead was a door of studded bronze, with the image of Saint Innokens surrounded by warrior angels cast in deep relief. The door was swinging closed and Cyvon grabbed the edge of it to keep it from slamming shut all the way.

Beside the door was a locking unit inside a carved wooden box. The box had been forced open and the mechanism inside smouldered and sparked. The fugitive had got inside, and from the dust that swirled in the draught from the door’s movement, they had been the only person to do so in a long time.

Cyvon slipped through the door and into darkness. His sight adjusted to show a tight spiral staircase heading downwards. Automated guns, in ornate bronze casings with lens-eyed skulls as aiming units, hung in their mountings on the ceiling. Either they had failed from centuries of neglect, or the fugitive had a way of shutting them down as well as opening the door. The sounds of gunfire were dulled beyond the door and already it felt like the fight for the Tomb of Innokens was being fought miles away.

Inquisitor Stheno arrived in the doorway, for he too had recognised the real objective in the Tomb of Innokens did not lie with the aeldari. ‘This place was void-sealed,’ he said, glancing at the broken lock. Such technology was rare and used only to protect the most valuable secrets from scanners and intruders. The inquisitor probably had plenty of his own secrets he kept behind such a barrier. ‘What is down here? Who breached it?’

The reply did not come from Cyvon, but from below. He heard voices raised in song, in layers of overlapping music that seemed to wrap around him and immerse him in their sound. The music carried with it something that was not human, a quality that slid around inside his head and would not let itself be absorbed by his conscious mind.

Cyvon followed the sound down the steps and emerged into a huge vaulted chamber, the ceiling almost lost in gloom, the only light cast in pools around relics presented like exhibits in a museum. The air was cold and bone dry, the better to preserve these ancient objects from the cruelty of time.

He saw a skull plated in gold, with the Imperial aquila picked out on its forehead in diamonds and rubies. A dog-eared book held in a glass case, on a red velvet cushion. A set of tattered Ecclesiarchy robes, scorched and discoloured, on a turned wooden stand. The vault was divided by fluted columns and carved wooden screens, forming separate chambers of relics.

SKULL OF SAINT INNOKENS AT THE CROSSROADS, read a brass plaque on the gilded skull’s platform. No explanation was given as to how that particular skull differed from the one on Saint Innokens’ corpse in the shrine above, nor how it came to be removed from him.

BOOK OF DIVERSE PRAYERS, RECOVERED FROM THE RESTING PLACE AT THE DRY RIVER, read the plaque on the tattered pamphlet’s display case. The book was open to a page with faded words scrawled in a tormented hand.

Relics of Saint Innokens’ life and his wanderings in the stony desert of Kepris. Writings, bones, implements of his survival. A canteen with the saint’s name scratched onto it with the point of a knife. A set of rosarius beads, well smoothed by worrying hands. A stained shawl in which Innokens had wrapped himself in the chill night. Hundreds of such items, the most mundane of them radiating holiness.

Cyvon caught movement by one of the pillars and glimpsed the pilgrim he had chased inside – a woman, her blonde hair tangled and wild, her face streaked with grime.

Beyond her, on a quilted velvet platform, was the Lyre of Innokens.

It was an elegant curl of smooth and polished bone with several oval gemstones set along its length, similar to those Cyvon had seen worn on the armour of the Swordwind’s aeldari. Silver wires ran between its two extremities forming the strings of an instrument. It had silver fittings to allow the instrument to be tuned, but they looked like later additions to the slender core of bone. The music Cyvon had followed emanated from the Lyre, and it grew in volume as if the relic knew he had noticed it.

The woman had not been so ragged when Cyvon had last seen her, in the memory of a dead man. The handsome, sharp face, however, was unmistakeable. Beneath the pilgrim’s robes she wore the colours of House Yathe.

‘You will not take this from me!’ yelled Kalypsa Yathe – Yeceqath, the false prophetess, the Voice of All – as she raised her hand.

Cyvon was ready this time. The digital weapons on Yathe’s fingers launched crimson lances of superheated light that scored right through the column beside Cyvon. The laser fire ripped over his head and the Skull of Saint Innokens at the Crossroads clattered to the flagstones of the vault floor, sliced in two by the beam.

Perhaps the digital weapons were a relic of House Yathe. Perhaps they had been gifted to her by the aeldari to help her achieve her goal, before they had decided to achieve that goal themselves. Either way, if her Uppermost Hand had possessed them, Cyvon knew the Voice of All would definitely have kept some for herself.

Cyvon heard voices raised in song. The sound seemed to come from everywhere at once but he knew it was from the Lyre of Innokens, responding to Yathe’s touch as she grabbed it. She might have the relic in hand, but now she was trapped.

When Cyvon looked up, Yathe and the Lyre of Innokens were gone. He heard her footsteps receding further into the vault. He could see no end to the chamber, and there were plenty of places for the Voice of All to hide.

He ran in pursuit of her. Stheno yelled at him to wait, but Cyvon ignored the inquisitor. If he lost Kalypsa Yathe here he might never find her again. She and the aeldari might take everything they wanted from Kepris. They would win.

Some of the relics were huge – an elaborate pipe organ almost as high as the vault ceiling, an ornate carriage in which the saint’s body had been transported to the tomb – and further divided the vaults into sections dedicated to particular phases of the saint’s life. One section was full of trappings from Innokens’ training in the schola progenium, and later the seminaries of the Adeptus Ministorum, with instructional books well thumbed with study and an ornamented cane that had once mortified the future Saint Innokens’ flesh. Another section was from his pilgrimages across the pathways of space, long before it was sundered by the Great Rift, when it was possible for a pilgrim to travel from one side of the galaxy to the other. A stained voidsuit hung beside a recreation of a cramped cabin with a bookcase of holy works and a prayer cushion in front of a tiny painted icon of the Emperor.

Cyvon sought the fleeing Yathe through all of this cluttered holiness. When he could not see her, he followed the music. Yathe might have the advantage with so much cover to hide behind, but she could not silence the Lyre of Innokens.

The song led past a pair of enormous hanging tapestries depicting Innokens’ suffering in the desert. Cyvon tore one of them down from its mountings on the ceiling and saw beyond it a larger section of the vault dominated by a summit of stone. It was the shorn-off peak of a mountaintop, with a temple built at the apex. Twin obelisks flanked a huge aquila wrought from bone with an altar in front of it. Kalypsa Yathe was struggling up the slope with the Lyre of Innokens in her hand.

THE PAGAN ZENITH, read a plaque on a pillar near the peak of stone. SANCTIFIED BY THE SAINT. It must have been cut from some mountain and brought down to the vault, probably during the tomb’s construction, as a symbol of Innokens’ power to turn the profane into the holy.

Yathe reached the altar and leaned against it, out of breath. Cyvon drew Oxyath’s plasma pistol, ready to put a bolt of liquid fire right through her torso.

With a sudden crack, the ceiling of the vault gave way. Just beyond the peak a torrent of rubble and dust poured down from the shrine above. Yathe dived into the cover of the altar and was lost in the billow of dust, spoiling Cyvon’s aim. He ducked behind the pillar with the bronze plaque as chunks of masonry and shattered pews tumbled past him.

From the newly opened hole in the vault ceiling descended the farseer, held aloft by his psychic power. Beside him was the Striking Scorpion exarch who had accompanied him when he spoke with Yathe at the laboratory, as Cyvon had seen in the dead man’s memories. A little of the farseer’s customary majesty had been rubbed away by the Soul Drinkers’ refusal to be defeated. His robes were still grimy and scorched from the orbital blast that had nearly killed him.

When Yathe opened the void-sealed vault, the Lyre of Innokens’ song had suddenly become audible to whatever sensors the aeldari possessed to search for it. They knew where it was, and the farseer had blasted a new way into the vault to claim the relic in person.

Kalypsa Yathe stood up from the rubble surrounding the altar as the dust cleared around her. ‘Give them back!’ she yelled at the farseer. ‘You gave your word!’ She held up the Lyre of Innokens, and its music rose in volume. ‘All who have died, all I have given up, was for you. You gave your word. Give my people back to me and this will be yours. You have won, farseer! You have won!’

The deal she had made, to hand over the Lyre in return for her people, was about to be concluded.

‘Yeceqath, the Voice of All,’ said the farseer, with a hint of mockery in the way he pronounced the name of the false prophet. ‘I will not say your achievements have been unimpressive. You almost fulfilled your vow to us. But then you faltered, and we were forced to intercede on your behalf. Aeldari lives were lost because of your failure. And still, you claim we owe you something.’

‘You gave your word,’ repeated Yathe. ‘If you want this, you will keep your promise. The Lyre is not on Kepris any more. It is in my hands. The power is mine. Give them back.’

Cyvon stepped out from the pillar, plasma pistol thrumming in his hand.

‘Behind you,’ said the farseer.

Cyvon fired. The bolt of plasma ripped up through the swirling dust, right towards the farseer’s heart. The Striking Scorpion reacted even faster than Cyvon had expected, diving in front of the farseer to take the full impact on his shoulder. The plasma blew his shoulder guard open and threw him back a step as the farseer conjured a shimmering shield of light in front of him. Where the farseer’s unarmoured body would have been bored through, the Scorpion’s heavy armour had just enough bulk to absorb the worst of the impact.

The Striking Scorpion spoke a few words in the Aeldari tongue and retreated behind the psychic shield, his chainsword drawn.

Cyvon cursed inwardly. His one shot had not missed, but it had failed to take out the farseer, the greatest threat on Kepris. The farseer rose again, past the ribs of the vault’s ceiling, lost among the pillars. His bodyguard went with him, trailing smoke and ashes from his burning wound.

‘You brought the Emperor’s angels down upon us!’ scolded the farseer. Cyvon could not judge where his voice was coming from, much less take aim at him. ‘Kalypsa Yathe, you have cost my people blood when you assured us the only dead would be human! Your failure forced us to intercede, and now I myself am endangered!’

Yathe had run behind one of the obelisks when the shot was fired. She had the instincts of a survivor.

Cyvon’s thoughts were racing. He could not beat the farseer, if it came to that. The xenos witch had killed Oxyath, the most potent weapon the Third Company had. The Striking Scorpion was one of the Biel-Tan Swordwind’s best warriors, trusted by the farseer to protect him. Cyvon doubted he could face the exarch either.

But they were not the objective here. They were not what had driven Kepris to bloody heresy, profaned the Trail of Innokens, or brought the Soul Drinkers to the planet. Cyvon could not defeat the aeldari alone, but perhaps he did not have to.

He ran from the cover of the pillar and sprinted through the rubble, charging up the slope towards the altar. He reached a fold in the rock and slid into it, knowing that Yathe would not be content to let him charge at her.

Digital lasers duly shot over his head, scorching deep into the rock underfoot. Cyvon felt their heat.

Cyvon had no idea of the capabilities of the alien-made digital weapons. Perhaps Yathe was out of ammunition. Perhaps she could go on firing forever.

‘You come to my world!’ she yelled down at him. ‘You kill my faithful!’ She fired again, and the laser sliced off a chunk of rock from just above Cyvon’s head. ‘The Adeptus Astartes, the heroes of the Imperium! Where was the Imperium when the xenos took House Yathe? When they stole my family?’

Her anger was her weakness. Yathe had spent her life having everything her own way, and now it was all out of her control. That made her rash. That made her weak.

Cyvon broke from cover and ran. Yathe ducked back behind the obelisk, as he had known she would, so he did not risk a shot that would miss and leave him vulnerable as the plasma pistol’s coils recharged. Instead he ran straight at the altar. The mountain peak was steep and his muscles strained to propel his armoured weight upwards.

He heard several high pops and raw heat tore at Cyvon. He dived to the ground and rolled aside as a barrage of melta-blasts ripped through the rock. One of Yathe’s digital weapons was a miniaturised meltagun, designed to chew through armour and vaporise the flesh inside.

Superheated stone boiled and burst. Cyvon’s senses flared red with sudden pain as a shard of rock drove deep into his right knee, through armour and the joint.

It was just pain. The wound would heal. He kept going.

The altar was just above him. His leg threatened to buckle under him. His armour flooded his system with painkillers and his footsteps sounded distant. His vision swam as if he were looking up at the mountaintop through a veil of rippling water.

He reached the altar and stumbled against it. His leg could support him no more. Muscle fibres had parted and the lower limb hung useless.

Yathe was standing in front of him, staring at him past the obelisk. She raised her hand but Cyvon fired first. The plasma pistol roared in his hand and the bolt of plasma slammed against her.

A strobe of intense light flared up around Kalypsa Yathe. The hemispherical power field surrounding her held firm. The plasma energy rebounded off her in coruscating fingers of yellow light.

That House Yathe’s heirlooms included a personal power field came as no surprise to Cyvon. In hindsight, he should have expected it.

Yathe rose off the ground. Fingers of blue energy earthed into the rock. She threw off the pilgrim’s ragged cloak and Cyvon saw the technology she had grafted onto her body. Her forearms had the implanted claws he had seen on the Thricefold. A long, elegant scabbard hung from her waist, and Cyvon guessed it was not of human construction.

He had to close in. That was where he was most dangerous, where his strengths were magnified.

Yathe dived at him. In his debilitated state, she was faster. He was barely able to turn aside before her right hand slammed into his shoulder guard and buckled the ceramite. Cyvon felt the bone inside crackling and dislocating. The painkiller haze, and the shock running up and down his nervous system, dampened the pain, but he was aware of the injury all the same. It was a strange, distant feeling to know his body was breaking inside.

His mind split again between sensing what was around him and dissecting it according to his training. One side of him saw Kalypsa Yathe raising her right hand once more as claws slid from her forearm. The other side dispassionately considered the options open to him.

Block, and he might lose his arm. Move, and the claws would still catch him, but he would have less control over where.

Close in, he thought. Always close in.

The claws plunged into his side. The ceramite was torn apart, laying open skin and muscle. Splinters of Cyvon’s fused ribcage were ripped free, exposing the organs normally protected by a Space Marine’s internal breastplate.

So long as he was still alive. Cyvon did not need those parts to fight. He had redundant organs inside him, three lungs and two hearts. If he had blocked and lost the arm, it would have been over.

He swung at Yathe with his free hand, but Yathe drifted backwards out of his arc and avoided the crushing blow. She switched hands, passing the Lyre of Innokens into her right and drawing her sword with her left. A long, glowing blade slid from the scabbard and Cyvon knew instinctively it would go through his armour like it wasn’t there.

Yathe had another weakness: the pride of an aristocrat who believed she was owed everything. Who craved control and authority. Who wanted to be perfect, and raged against everything that said she was not.

The kind of opponent who wanted to end this with a single, neat killing blow.

Cyvon tilted his torso, to present the ruptured side of his breastplate to his opponent. He saw the smile curl the edge of her lips as she drew back the sword.

She lunged, and Cyvon was too late to turn it aside. The blade speared into his chest, through bone and organ, and out through his back, impaling him right through the backpack of his armour.

Kalypsa Yathe had been so intent on despatching her Adeptus Astartes opponent with an educated kill-stroke that she had neglected to defend her flanks.

Cyvon, meanwhile, had two hearts, and only one of them had been run through.

He swung a left hook at Yathe’s side. His fist crunched into her ribs. All her augmentations and alien weaponry could not compete with the raw strength of a Space Marine. She seemed to deflate as she gasped out all the breath in her ruptured lungs.

Cyvon felt the buzzing of the plasma pistol in his other hand. It changed pitch, and he knew it was recharged. He aimed the weapon right at the Voice of All.

‘Prophet by word,’ said Cyvon. ‘Traitor by deed.’

He pulled the trigger, and Kalypsa Yathe’s head and shoulders vanished in a burst of liquid fire.

Sudden, complete silence fell. Even the rumble of battle in the Tomb of Innokens overhead seemed to come from a different world entirely.

Cyvon dropped to one knee and the remains of Kalypsa Yathe slumped onto him. He let them slide off onto the stone, and caught the Lyre of Innokens as it fell from her lifeless hand.

Cyvon began to drag himself down the slope. He heard and felt the energies of the farseer behind him as the xenos descended to claim its prize, not from Kalypsa Yathe, but from the wounded Soul Drinker.

‘Brother!’ came a shout from down the slope. Cyvon saw Inquisitor Stheno crouching by the entrance to the chamber. ‘Bring the Lyre! Quickly, we can leave this place!’

‘This is why you were on Kepris,’ replied Cyvon groggily. ‘To get the Lyre.’

‘Of course!’ spat Stheno, as if no one had ever asked a more stupid question. ‘An artefact like this in an inquisitor’s hands! You have seen what they were willing to do to get it – think what I could do? I could forge a weapon, learn their strategies! Their secrets will be mine!’

Cyvon glanced back up the slope. The farseer was watching, still behind a curtain of protective energy. The Striking Scorpion dropped down and alighted beside the altar. His armour smoked from the plasma burn, but the wound seemed to have had no effect on the aeldari warrior’s poise. The farseer said something in the Aeldari language and the exarch stalked towards Cyvon, chainsword held in both hands.

Cyvon had no chance of survival if the Striking Scorpion tried to take the Lyre from him by force.

The clatter of armoured feet on the floor reached Cyvon’s hearing. His squad was rushing towards the summit with bolters drawn, led by Brother Sasan.

‘Fire!’ yelled Sasan. ‘The flying one!’

Bolter fire shredded the air above Cyvon. Impacts burst against the farseer’s psychic shield, which flickered and flared with the effort of protecting the aeldari. The exarch looked back to its master, torn between butchering Cyvon and protecting the farseer. A burst of bolter fire spattered against the rocks around it and with superhuman grace and speed, the exarch vaulted into cover before any of the shells found their mark.

It was a momentary distraction, and it would not last long.

‘Quickly!’ shouted Stheno.

Cyvon could dive down the slope and be at Stheno’s side in a few seconds.

The farseer drifted into the cover of one of the pillars. Bolter fire chewed through the ancient stone as the survivors of Squad Phraates found their own cover and kept up the fire. The air turned heavy and thrumming as the farseer readied his psychic powers to deal with this new threat. He might heave up the earth as he had outside the tomb, or crush them with whatever power the alien’s witchcraft could muster. In a few seconds, it would all be over.

Cyvon stood proud of cover, tottering on his good leg. He felt the blood oozing from his chest wound, and the stuttering of his wounded heart. ‘This is what you want,’ he said, holding up the Lyre in the farseer’s direction. ‘And you will not stop until you get it.’

Kepris had been torn apart by the aeldari need for the Lyre of Innokens. Whatever world it went to next, in the custody of the Inquisition or not, they would try to find it again. And they would succeed. It might take them a thousand years, but they would find it. The aeldari were patient. They would make war for it. They would manipulate ignorant humans into committing genocide against their own. They would carve a path of blood and broken lives, as long as the Lyre was at the end of it.

‘No more of your people will die for this,’ said Cyvon. ‘And no more of mine.’

He swung the Lyre into the air.

‘No!’ yelled Stheno.

Cyvon smashed the Lyre into the rocks. It shattered into a thousand shards of bone. The gemstones burst and released a tremendous crescendo of sound, like a million voices raised in ecstatic song.

The thunder of their music battered against Cyvon, and then was gone.

Cyvon dropped to his knees, crunching the fragments of the broken Lyre. ‘It is over,’ he said. ‘There is nothing on this world for you.’

The Striking Scorpion exarch loomed up from cover with his chainblade whirring, eye-lenses fixed on Cyvon.

The farseer gave a small gesture and muttered a few syllables. The exarch looked back at Cyvon, who could only guess at the expression behind the warrior’s faceplate. Hatred, maybe. Disappointment. Disgust. Then the exarch rose into the air, buoyed up by the farseer’s powers, and both of them drew back towards the hole in the ceiling. Bolter fire followed them, flaring against the psychic shield, but not enough to break through it.

‘They benefit you nothing now,’ continued Cyvon. ‘Let them go. Give them back.’

The farseer and the exarch rose into the grimy darkness, and were gone.

Cyvon fell to the ground and slid a little way down the slope. His strength was gone, and his body shut down to preserve what remained.

Epilogue

Many things happened that were beyond our sight. But should heresy return – when it returned – it would find it had stoked a fire in the souls of Kepris that would burn away its lies.

– Father Balthan Eugenivov, The Keprian Vengeance

The parade was the grandest thing Hollowmount had seen for many generations. The old Great Houses of the city had taken their primacy for granted and had fallen out of the habit of making shows of wealth and power. Now, they took to the streets not just to show they still ruled the city, but to express their devotion to the people who now ruled the planet.

Hundreds of troops from Kepris’ noble houses marched from the gate, where the Soul Drinkers had first breached the city, towards Sacerdotes’ Square. Each column of brightly uniformed troops was led by the aristocrats themselves in the regalia of the Imperium’s military nobility, beneath the banners of their houses.

The parade was led by the new planetary governor of Kepris. Lord Krieghund Jarulek had been appointed from the Administratum as a solid, schola progenium-educated leader who could be relied upon to rebuild the organs of Imperial authority and purge what remained of Yeceqath’s cult. He was accompanied by hundreds of functionaries from the Administratum, Ecclesiarchy clergy and officers of the Adeptus Arbites, who would replace the Imperial officials lost to Yeceqath’s purge.

The bodies had been cleared from the city. Loyalists no longer hung from gibbets and nooses all over Hollowmount. New bodies piled up in the basements of courthouses and Imperial basilicae, or were buried in mass graves outside the city: the bodies of the remaining cult faithful. Their extermination had been Lord Jarulek’s first decree. Most of the cult had already dissolved away with the death of Yeceqath and the defeats at the hands of the Soul Drinkers. It would take a long time for the last vestiges to be rooted out, but it would happen.

‘A return to normal, brother,’ said Sasan. Along with the rest of Squad Phraates, he was forming an honour guard marking the path of the procession. It was Sasan who had dragged Cyvon from the vault beneath the Tomb of Innokens. Minutes later the aeldari had enacted a wholesale withdrawal from Kepris through the webway portals they had used to invade it. The Biel-Tan Swordwind had departed the battle at the Tomb of Innokens, leaving the Soul Drinkers to consolidate their hold on the temple against a counter-attack that never came. No one had seen the farseer since he and his exarch bodyguard had departed the reliquary vault without the Lyre of Innokens.

‘A lot of people died for the cause of normality,’ replied Cyvon. A few yards away from him, the members of House Yathe were processing past. The aristocrats carried themselves admirably, given they had recently been the captives of the aeldari. Their xenos captors had set them free with no explanation, and dumped them out of one of their portals just before the last aeldari left Kepris. They had stumbled through the desert until a band of pilgrim refugees found them and led them to the nearest shrine. The knowledge that Yeceqath had once been among these aristocrats’ number was kept to a very select few among the new Imperial leadership, who knew to watch them closely. House Yathe would toe the Imperial line closer than anyone else on Kepris. ‘Kepris was a normal world,’ continued Cyvon, ‘and heresy bloomed so quickly it had taken over before anyone could respond. I wonder if “normality” is what mankind needs.’

‘Take care, brother,’ said Sasan with a smile. ‘Think too deeply and the Inquisition will haul you away.’

‘Speaking of which…’ Cyvon saw that the parade was ended by representatives of the Keprian military, whose officer corps had been entirely replaced with Imperial Guard veterans from nearby conflicts. Among them, in an officer’s greatcoat, was Inquisitor Stheno. He looked like any other career soldier now. But Cyvon knew he would be at the heart of everything that happened on Kepris.

Stheno turned to the squad of Soul Drinkers lining the road. Sergeant Phraates’ wounds were so severe that no one could say when he would fight again, and it would take the labours of the Chapter’s Apothecaries and significant bionics to get him back to the battlefield. For now, he had been patched up well enough to stand to attention. Cyvon’s leg was braced to allow him to do the same, and alongside him and the sergeant stood Sasan, Manuch and Arasmyn, who had all acquitted themselves admirably in the battle at the Tomb of Innokens. Stheno singled out Cyvon from the squad, and the squad’s vox-net chirped into life. That Stheno had the means to hack into the Soul Drinkers’ communications came as no surprise at all.

‘So the Soul Drinkers have made an enemy of the Inquisition,’ said Stheno. ‘Again.’

‘What are we?’ responded Cyvon. ‘Who were the Soul Drinkers?’

But Stheno marched on, and the parade passed them by.

The citizens of Hollowmount cheered the new rulers of Kepris, just as they had cheered the mass executions Yeceqath had ordered in Sacerdotes’ Square. Part of Cyvon kept watching, scanning the crowd for threats, falling into the patterns sleep-taught into him during his transformation into a Primaris Space Marine.

The other part kept asking.

Who are we?

About the Author

Ben Counter has two Horus Heresy novels to his name – Galaxy in Flames and Battle for the Abyss. He is the author of the Soul Drinkers series and The Grey Knights Omnibus. For Space Marine Battles, he has written The World Engine and Malodrax, and has turned his attention to the Space Wolves with the novella Arjac Rockfist: Anvil of Fenris as well as a number of short stories. He is a fanatical painter of miniatures, a pursuit that has won him his most prized possession: a prestigious Golden Demon award. He lives in Portsmouth, England.

An extract from ‘Messiah Complex’ by Steve Parker,
from the Warhammer 40,000 anthology The Long Vigil.

Voss grabbed the big mutant by the shoulder and yanked him back hard. He hit the ground with a grunt. Rounds ripped the air where he’d been standing and stitched the walls of the habs across the avenue, biting chunks out of the brick and plaster. On the other side of the street, Striggo of the Carcharadons, black eyes bright with the sudden promise of bloodshed, knocked his bolter’s safety off and glanced over at Voss for a cue to engage.

‘Omni!’ he called out over the noise of the approaching orks.

Voss didn’t answer. He was busy barking at the mutant. ‘Keep your damned head down! You die before you lead us to the target, you get nothing.’

For a moment, the mutant – a large, tattooed thug by the name of Culcaven – blinked all six of the bug-like eyes that studded his flat, noseless face. He was stunned by the physical power of the Space Marine. He couldn’t remember the last time another person had knocked him over. He had always been proud of his strength, but in that moment he felt as powerless as an infant. Shaking it off, he shoved himself to his feet and scrambled into the cover of the hab wall behind Voss. He was breathing hard. Combat wasn’t new to him, but xenos were. He’d heard tales of orks, told to frighten even mutant children. He’d never imagined they would one day storm his people’s underground home. If Sapho the Witch had told Zenezeca, having seen the invasion in her visions, then Zenezeca – so-called saviour of the people of Jura, the City Under the City – had not deigned to share that foreknowledge.

‘This is just the first of them,’ Voss called over at Striggo. He tugged a grenade from his combat webbing. ‘Outriders.’

Striggo leaned briefly out of cover. Just a split second. The orks answered with a hail of fire that tore into the corner of the wall.

‘I count sixteen,’ he told Voss. Through that ugly, razor-lined mouth of his, with its triangular teeth and ragged, scarred lips, sixteen came out as part word, part hiss. No wonder Ghost had nicknamed him Lips. Not that the Carcharadon seemed to care.

‘They’ll be here in real numbers within minutes,’ said Voss, mostly to himself. To Culcaven, he added, ‘How far to Zenezeca’s compound?’

‘Still have to cross two districts.’

‘How many minutes at a run?’

‘For me? Forty if I go all out.’

Voss cursed. He’d be waist-deep in orks before he got within striking distance of the Mechanicus renegade. And Zenezeca’s forces, the mutant gangs for whom he’d risen to messiah status, wouldn’t just let two Space Marines get close. Intel said they were well armed and capable. The tech-priest had unified the mutant gangs down here and turned them into his personal army.

According to the briefing, he’d had over three hundred years to do it.

‘Prophet was right this time,’ Voss muttered. ‘Whole operation is another mess on a knife’s edge.’

Sigma should have sent them in with bikes or a speeder. Perhaps his psyker hadn’t foreseen the ork invasion any more than the locals had. An infested space hulk had broken from the warp and crashed into Cyrria’s only moon while the Saint Nevarre was still in transit. By the time the inquisitor’s ship had reached orbit above the capital, the planet below was a warzone.

Right now, Prophet was somewhere above ground, up in a Stormraven, designation Vampire, waiting for Voss to mark the target in case he and Striggo weren’t able to secure Zenezeca before the tech-priest made his run to the evacuation fields.

Voss pulled the pin on his grenade and leaned out from cover.

Let’s hope it works as well as it’s supposed to, he thought.

Mad-eyed greenskins were surging towards his position, their massive bodies clad in crude armour plate, stubbers barking, axes waving.

Voss tossed the grenade. There was a sharp crack. A reddish cloud filled the alley, wall to wall. There was a pause the length of one long breath, then the howls and screams started. Weapons clattered to the ground. Orks dropped to their knees. Green hands pressed hard on eyes being eaten away by a powerful bioacid adapted from tyranid samples.

The grenade type was nothing Voss had seen before, but working under the Ordo Xenos, he was getting used to that. Sigma had added it to the mission loadout without any explanation beyond what it was expected to do. According to the inquisitor, it attacked the sensitive tissues first – eyes, nasal membrane, gums – before it went to work on the lungs, eating them away quickly from the inside out.

The red mist dispersed, leaving a carpet of twitching green bodies. Voss allowed himself the briefest moment to appreciate the weapon’s effectiveness, then he grabbed Culcaven and shoved him out in front.

‘Move!’

Striggo took point, the mutant running between him and Voss. They’d have gone a lot faster without the mutant, but there were no maps of this place, and since this vast cavern had originally been carved out from exhausted rad mines, the background radiation made scans and even vox-comms an impossibility.

No maps. No contact with Vampire or Prophet.

We could have used seismic, thought Voss. Mapped it that way.

That was an oversight. Whose oversight, though, he didn’t take the time to consider. Around him as he ran, ugly, ramshackle tenements gave way to larger, better constructed hab-blocks interspersed with small processing facilities. Gas lamps and electric lumens still lit the empty streets. Light glowed in hab windows and spilled into the narrow alleys from doorways left open in the rush to flee.

According to the pre-drop briefing – which had been notably scant on details – Zenezeca had fled here after Al Rashaq vanished. Fled here or crashed here – that wasn’t known.

Al Rashaq, thought Voss, and he snarled as he thought of the mess they’d faced on Tychonis. According to Scholar on his mysterious return, in the seconds before he’d been marched off and isolated, Al Rashaq had been a Mechanicus black site – one they’d tried to hide from the greater Imperium. The Martian Priesthood had made it disappear when the Inquisition started getting close. That was three hundred years ago. It seemed like Sigma and the Ordo Xenos were closing in on it again. He and Striggo wouldn’t have been sent here otherwise.

Zenezeca, being a witness to the existence of the site, would have known he was being hunted by the Inquisition and the Adeptus Mechanicus both. No wonder he’d chosen to come down here where Imperial eyes never looked. According to Culcaven, for as long as any still living remembered, their mechanical messiah had been promising his mutant devotees a city of their own one day, a place in daylight where they could live without persecution. As his power base as the head of the underworld here on Cyrria had strengthened, along with his subsequent influence on the ruling class above ground, the mutants of Jura had gone from fearing him to adoring him. He was the healer, the fixer. He amputated vestigial limbs, grafted over secondary mouths and eyes, installed mechanical arms and legs, saved many from illness… He had even managed to make some of them passable enough that they could infiltrate the society above.

To the mutants – the secret, illegal offspring of those men and women who had been forced to work in the planet’s rad-mines since the Imperium had taken this world – Zenezeca was not just some renegade tech-priest. He was the only cure for pain and misery and despair they had ever known.

He was hope.

He was their messiah.

‘We need a vehicle,’ Voss told Culcaven as they ran. ‘If the orks reach Zenezeca’s sanctum before we do, he’ll run early.’

‘Look around you, m’lord Space Marine,’ gasped Culcaven between pounding footfalls. ‘Every single vehicle in Jura is being used to get our people to the rendezvous points for exodus.’

Culcaven had already told them as much as he knew. From the gathering points at the cavern-city’s easternmost edge, and from Zenezeca’s compound at the city’s centre, the mutants would surge aboveground and launch their assault on the Cyrrian Guard forces overseeing the evacuation fields. Zenezeca was planning on hijacking a warp-capable transport in order to get his people off-world and away. Just one would do it, but he’d have to slaughter a lot of troopers and Naval personnel to succeed.

On his own, Zenezeca could easily have bought his way off Cyrria. Strange that a tech-priest, usually so sentiment-free, would risk his own escape for these subhumans.

Striggo stopped at a junction up ahead, back to the wall, and dipped out to check for hostiles.

‘Clear. Which way, mutant?’

Culcaven barrelled past him, out into the middle of the junction, then turned right, calling over his shoulder, ‘This way! Through the market streets and into the manufacturing zone!’

There was a sharp screech of brakes. Culcaven dived, hitting the ground hard on his belly. A flatbed halftrack had come charging out of an alleyway on the left. The driver had swerved just in time to avoid Culcaven, missing him by inches.

The halftrack halted and sat idling noisily. Striggo looked over at Voss.

‘The Emperor provides.’

The Imperial Fist nodded. As one, they raised their bolters and stalked towards it.

Back then…

The boy, Maximmion, thumbed the switch and the welding gun’s flame vanished. The edges of the plate with which he’d just patched the pipe still glowed hot orange, but the glow was dimming.

‘Done here,’ he said to the boy on his right.

His brother, his twin, didn’t answer. Not at first. He was still intent on his own work. Then his repairs were finished too, and he turned to Maximmion and nodded.

His name was Kassus. Apart from the dark scar on his left cheek, the permanent mark of a tech-priest’s electro-whip, he and Maximmion looked identical. When he smiled over at his brother, Maximmion felt he was looking at himself smiling in a mirror.

‘We need to get out,’ Kassus said, tapping the timer on his wrist. ‘Two minutes.’

It would be enough. Repairs like this were their life now. At eight years old, their small bodies could fit down pipes and ducts that none of the adult slaves could fit into. Maximmion guessed that was why the tech-priests had paid his parents for the two boys, though he’d never know the meagre price they’d fetched. Both he and Kassus had shown above-average aptitude for technical work in the tests. They’d been put to work almost immediately. That had been two years ago. They had been just six years old.

‘Race you back to the hatch,’ said Maximmion.

Without waiting for an answer, he pushed his brother against the wall and ran past him at a half-crouch. The pipe was too narrow to run upright.

Kassus laughed and gave chase.

One minute thirty. Still plenty of time.

Morten, a listless adult slave who was often assigned to aid the boys, would be at the hatch, jaw slack as always, waiting to seal it up as soon as they were both out.

Kassus caught up to his twin, and they tussled a moment as they ran, but Maximmion was very slightly stronger, and he pulled ahead again.

One minute.

That the tech-priests had kept the twins together was something both felt must be a blessing of the Omnissiah Himself. There were other children here at the factorum, brothers and sisters, who had been split up on day one and sent off to work in entirely different sections of the complex.

Maximmion didn’t know that the decision had been made based on data gathered over long millennia about the marginally greater efficiency of identical twins set to work as teams.

Forty seconds.

Maximmion was still in the lead. He laughed as he ran, sure he’d maintain it.

The work was grim, and their life of slavery and punishment even more so, but there were always moments each day for play. He and Kassus made the best of the life their parents had sold them into.

Twenty seconds. The last bend.

Maximmion was running so fast he had to push himself off the far wall of the bend as he came around it. Just up ahead, barely five yards away, lumen-light marked the hatch.

He heard Kassus pound after him, rounding the bend just behind him. Maximmion put on a last burst of speed, but a sudden scream stopped him dead. He whirled, almost toppling over, and saw Kassus on the floor of the pipe holding his ankle.

Maximmion immediately started back towards him.

‘No!’ shouted Kassus. ‘Fifteen seconds! Just get out!’

Maximmion wasn’t hearing him. He reached Kassus, grabbed his left arm with both hands, and began pulling him backwards towards the hatch, shouting, ‘Morten! Morten! Shut off the steam! We need help!’

Even as he shouted himself hoarse, he knew it was too late, but he wouldn’t stop. He grunted and pulled harder.

Suddenly, Kassus lashed out with his good leg and kicked him away. Maximmion staggered and landed on his back, sprawling, looking up to see Morten’s face creased in anger, his big hands reaching down into the pipe.

‘No,’ shouted Maximmion, but he could do nothing. Morten hauled him out and tossed him onto the metal floor.

Maximmion hit his head hard. Blobs of white light flickered in his vision. He tried to get up, but his body wasn’t moving fast enough.

Dimly, he saw Morten throw the hatch cover into place just as the flow of superheated steam blasted down the pipe. He thought he heard a scream suddenly cut off.

It could have been his own. It could have been his brother’s. He’d never know.

Darkness swallowed him and he hit the floor again hard. He wasn’t conscious enough to feel it.

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A Black Library Publication

First published in Great Britain in 2020.
This eBook edition published in 2020 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

Produced by Games Workshop in Nottingham.
Cover illustration by Grant Griffin.

Traitor by Deed © Copyright Games Workshop Limited 2020. Traitor by Deed, GW, Games Workshop, Black Library, The Horus Heresy, The Horus Heresy Eye logo, Space Marine, 40K, Warhammer, Warhammer 40,000, the ‘Aquila’ Double-headed Eagle logo, and all associated logos, illustrations, images, names, creatures, races, vehicles, locations, weapons, characters, and the distinctive likenesses thereof, are either ® or TM, and/or © Games Workshop Limited, variably registered around the world.
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ISBN: 978-1-80026-414-4

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Dedicated to the memory of Richard Counter.

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