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Cover

The Labyrinth of Lost Souls – Graham McNeill

About the Author

An Extract from ‘Swords of Calth’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

The Labyrinth of Lost Souls

by Graham McNeill

‘You must be ready to burn yourself in your own flame. How can you rise anew if you have not first become ashes?’

You chose this. All of it.

An explosion of pain and fire. Mercifully short.

Then blackness, infinite.

I sink, an exhausted swimmer drowning within sight of land. The blackness drags me down, and the ocean welcomes me into its embrace. Voices swirl in the darkness, whispers without source.

Lay down your burdens… You have already given more than enough… Time to die…

I try to shut out the voices, but they are all around me. I scream, but dark water rushes into my throat, pouring into my lungs and filling me with ice. The urge to simply let go is overwhelming, the pain of struggling too much to bear.

But the struggle is all I have.

I have memory and awareness, but I have no shape or form. As a disembodied spirit, I am dead and yet unborn.

Who am I?

Spots of light glow behind the darkness, extending and connecting and glowing like broken shards of a mirror. Each shows a different reality, glimmers of life I do not know. It is a story, vividly told, but fading. Are these my deeds?

The light of the shards begins to fade, time reversing each one from polished glass back to the sand from which it was wrought. If this is my life, then it will go unremembered, for even in the fleeting moments I saw them, I saw the death that surrounded me. I am a locus for violence. I was wrought to bring death, but too often it haunted my steps like a stalking shadow.

I am a death-bringer, this much I know.

The light is extinguished, and I am again in utter darkness. A darkness that is not simply the absence of light, but a state of being that denies that light could ever exist. A time when the first mortals were gifted with the awareness of death.

A curse laid upon them in ancient times, from one immortal being…

I know you…

And then, just as suddenly as the darkness enfolds me with numbness, I feel something. I feel… cold. I feel wetness against my skin.

I have a body!

I have flesh, bone and blood. I feel the fluids of life surging around my body, roaring like a thunderous river. My blood is hot and urgent, afire in a way that sears my veins with every circuit, as though freighted with an electric charge. It ignites my organs, shock-burning them with explosions of sensation and pain.

I will not die here!

With my new-found awareness of my body, I kick to the surface of this ocean as a searing fire burns in my chest. I feel the hammer blows of a double heartbeat, so close together it is like one bellowing scream. The darkness tries to pull me back, unwilling to relinquish its prize, but the furnace within me burns away its shadowed tendrils.

I swim up through the darkness towards the light of a distant star. It grows with every stroke until it is almost too bright to look upon. Yet I cannot look away. It is my beacon to life, and I dare not even blink or the darkness will claim me once more.

And then I break the surface, drawing a vast, sucking breath of air.

The light blinds me, a searing globe of fire. The ocean of death is behind me. A memory or a vision, I do not know. My eyes burn.

Air inflates my lungs, the tissue within slow to respond. I try to take shallow gasps, but my body’s demands overwhelm my conscious thoughts. Huge, shuddering, body-quaking breaths heave through me, my oxygen-starved systems fighting to restore life to my frame.

Where am I?

Awareness of my body slips over me like a corpse-shroud being pulled slowly back to reveal what lies beneath. And with each revealed limb, fresh pain stabs home. The agony of this rebirth is beyond imagining, and I cannot help but scream like a wounded animal caught in a tightening snare.

The fire in the back of my eyes fades enough that I can begin to dimly perceive my surroundings. Somewhere cramped, hard walls to either side of me, cold iron below and above. I try to move, but bolts of agonising pain detonate within my chest and skull, blinding me again and drawing another howl of raw anguish from my parched throat.

My fists clench, my teeth grind together. I force myself to take shallower breaths, controlling my reaction to the pain by sheer force of will. My body fights me. My metabolism is running too fast, consuming itself in an act of unthinking self-cannibalism.

I need to get out, to get up.

The box I lie within, is it a coffin? Does whoever put me in here believe I am dead? Perhaps I was, but I am alive! More than alive, I am vital!

I kick out. My heel strikes iron, but I feel it buckle. A door?

Again, again, again. I kick and kick, the iron bending and twisting with each impact. I sense weakness and concentrate my energies, until whatever lock secures it breaks. Cold air surges into my confinement, at once both sterile and awash with chemicals. I struggle like a wriggling newborn fighting to emerge from its cocoon.

And then I am out.

I fall to the ground, unable to bear my weight on unsteady legs. I lie curled in a foetal position, my body sopping with reeking chemicals that sting my eyes and nose. My lungs heave up a torrent of frothed chemicals and a slew of thin cables. I tear them from my throat, invasive fronds that flicker with light.

Pushing myself onto my haunches, I sit with my back to the wall, blinking in the too-bright light. I lift my arm to shade my eyes, and see its entire length is ravaged by red tracks of sutures. From wrist to elbow, from elbow to shoulder. Across my chest in layered strips. All down my legs and groin. I reach up to find my skull is shaven and likewise seamed with scars.

My naked body has been split from heel to crown. My skin is a zippered bag enclosing a collection of meat and bone and blood. I feel I could pull any part of my body and the canvas of my flesh would unravel and my every organ would spill out in a tidal wash of red.

The roaring in my ears begins to subside, and I hear a confusing, overwhelming rush of sounds. I cannot separate them, just a cacophony of noise: perhaps shouting voices and alarms intermixed.

My earlier suspicion that this place is a prison or a place of torture gains credence as I see the blurred outlines of hulking figures moving towards me. I cannot tell what they are, but the gleam of steel in their hands and the death-mask faces tell me they are hostile.

Rough hands take hold of my shoulders. Light gleams on a blade as it stabs for my neck.

I roar as the furnace in my chest explodes with power. My legs unhinge like coiled springs and I surge to my feet. My fists are wrecking balls as I smash the figures back. One goes down, its white robes now red with blood. I seize another by its arms and tear them from the sockets of its shoulders.

The figure collapses without a sound, and I crash into a previously unseen slab table bearing instruments of excruciation: flensing blades, bone-saws and tools of incision that look like hooked, disembowelling swords. Scraps of wet meat lie in offering bowls, each still fresh with the blood of the bodies from which they were excised.

I snatch a blade with a moulded metal grip, too small for my stitched hands, but good enough.

A prescient sense of danger whips me around.

Just in time, as a buzzing whine slashes past my ear. A winged thing swoops down from the ceiling. It regards me with baleful yellow eyes, screeching as its fanged jaw works up and down in fury. A coiled tail whips beneath its body, droplets of venom oozing from the tip of a stinger needle. I hurl one of the bowls containing the denuded organs at it. Despite the pain in my eyes and the dazzling brightness, my aim is true, and it falls from the air with an ululating screech.

I vault the slab, hammering my heel down on the thing before it can recover. It explodes in a greasy mess of black bone and brain matter, its whipping tail still trying to stab me. I hear another screech, and duck as another of the vile flying things darts towards me. Its speed is astonishing, but my hand snaps out and seizes it by its tail. I swing it like a mace and smash it to splinters on the slab.

My vision is still blurred and filled with blistering light, but I begin to see more of my surroundings. A dark, cavernous space, lit by crimson flames in basket-sconces, dark arches bordered by carvings of intertwined serpents. And looming over all, a leering skull icon, a god of death presiding over its temple to agony.

Venting gas gathers around my ankles, billowing up through the wire-grilled floor. I smell the caustic stink of it, taste the acrid reek of its composite elements in the back of my throat. Images flash in my mind: strange alchemical names I do not recognise, diagrams of molecular bonds I do not know.

What I do know, on a base, instinctual level, is that this gas is designed to incapacitate me. I feel something in my throat constrict, a biological transformation, flesh reshaping itself to protect me. My body rallies to my defence with a speed my captors have clearly not expected.

I sprint for the nearest arch, barrelling past a pale figure with a bladed fist. I spring from the mist before he can raise it and crack his hard skull. He falls, one of his red eyes cracked and flickering with a daemonic light. I hear more voices behind me, garbled and meaningless, a clipped tongue my brain cannot process. Too many explosions of light are firing in my skull, connections reforging themselves in an electrical firestorm of rebirth.

Beyond the torture chamber, the tunnels are a strange mix of steel and stone, vaulted rooms filled with flashing red lights and screeching wails of the damned. I push through them, neither knowing nor caring where I go.

Out, just out.

I see skeletal remains set in the walls, crude shrines to death and the cruel god of the temple to agony. They leer at me with the promise of pain and suffering. I put my fist through every one I see, relishing the sound of cracking bone and buckling iron.

My flesh is limned with light, but I cannot tell if it is the fire in my blood or the fire in my eyes. I have caged lightning in my body, and it burns me from within. The pain is almost unbearable, but I must endure it if I am to escape this abode of the damned.

My bones are like ingots of molten metal in the raw meat of my limbs.

Volcanic light smoulders behind my eyes, and the fire of a sun burns in my chest.

I do not know how much more of this I can stand.

Where am I?

Am I underground, deep within a mountain? The staleness of the air feels wrong; it is old, like it has passed through countless lungs before mine. I taste the age of this place in every breath, laced with the hot undercurrent of beaten metal.

A vision flashes into the forefront of my mind. A memory?

No, not exactly.

A story? Perhaps, though I do not remember how I know it. It is an old story, one first set down in a different age of the world: a tale of a warrior lost within a great labyrinth where dwelt an invincible monster. Only by slaying that monster could the warrior escape and defeat his enemies.

I kneel and place my palm on the iron floor. I feel the thrumming of the mountain’s volcanic heart, a pulsing heartbeat of something vast and ancient.

This is where I must go, to the heart of the labyrinth.

To slay the beast and win my freedom.

I hear them hunting me.

Daemonic figures, hulking and plated in brazen metal. They shout and taunt, their voices echoing from the walls and from fang-mouthed carvings in the walls. They repeat the same name, over and over.

Is it the name of their god?

They cannot catch me, for this labyrinth is expansive and filled with shadows as I make my way to its centre. I fear the light filling me will reveal me, but it seems only I can see it. I see tribal markings, barely visible beyond the glow of the fire in my limbs, inked onto my skin. Did I possess these before my torture or are they new? I cannot say. A winged creature with two heads, rendered monstrous by the bleeding sutures, sits on one shoulder, and I see a silver disc embedded into the flesh of my wrist. It pulses with a light of its own, and I see strange, cuneiform script moving across its surface.

Numbers and letters I cannot yet recognise.

There is relevance to them, something I feel I should know, but every time I think I grasp what they might represent, the meaning slips away from me like smoke. Until now, the light within the silver band has been a pulsing amber colour, but now it flashes bright red. I do not know for sure what it signifies, but my prey-instinct tells me this implant will help my captors locate me. I lift it to my mouth and rip the disc from my wrist with a tearing bite. The taste of blood in my mouth is like a concentrated shot of adrenaline; it focuses my thoughts, hones them to a razor’s edge.

I crush the disc under my heel and press both palms to the walls. The heat and rumble of the beast’s lair is stronger now.

I am close.

I follow the thread of heat and noise ever onwards, moving at speed where I can, with stealth where I have to, and with violence when confronted. My captors are strong, but I am stronger. Their armour may be proof against many things, but against my strength it is useless.

I leave a string of writhing bodies behind me, groaning and incapacitated. I lose the blade I took from the temple of agony, wedged in the armour of one of my pursuers. Others are closing in, and my fists are bloody by the time I reach the beast’s lair.

A wide and cavernous forge of dark iron and blue-hot flames. At its far end, a giant furnace bellows with the power of daemonic fire. Towers wreathed in streamers of coruscating light pulse in time with the heartbeat of this place. More of the death-masked thrall-things toil here, robed in red and gold, multi-limbed with clawed hands and spark-torches that flicker with an evil light in the chamber’s infernal glow.

I see the master of this forge of the damned, a hulking monster of steel and fire. Its armour is a mix of blue and red that blends together in the electric light thrown out from the towers surrounding its forge. It squats before its furnace, surrounded by rivers of molten metal, a giant hammer held in one mighty fist. Hooked chains hang from the high ceiling, some bearing the chassis of wrecked vehicles or damaged suits of armour, others awaiting a fresh machine carcass.

Something in the shape and hue of the armour triggers a flash of recognition, but it is gone before I can process it. A symbol on one shoulder sends a shudder of melancholy through me, a sense of loss that finds only an aching absence within me.

The beast rises and my resolve falters for an instant as I see it is twice my height and half again as broad. It speaks in a voice that grates with its utter inhumanity, the same cursed name that has dogged my every step. I sense confusion in its voice, as though it cannot believe I have come this far.

It steps towards me, its clawed footsteps like peals of thunder.

Again it speaks, but I can barely hear it over the roaring in my skull. The fire within me is all-consuming, my chest a star on the verge of supernova. Whatever happens here, I will not survive this confrontation.

I wrench a sputtering flame torch from one of the thralls and charge towards the beast.

A clawed arm reaches for me. I duck and roll between its legs.

I lash the flame torch across the back of its legs, fusing a knot of cables and pistons. Oily black blood squirts from a ruptured feed line. Sparks fly as I play the flame over exposed wires and gears.

Faster than I thought possible, the beast swivels around and swats me aside with its mighty fist. The blow is ferocious, but I sense not as powerful as it could have been.

Am I so important to my captors that they wish to capture me alive? Who am I? What do I mean to them that they so desire me to live?

My chest burns with the trauma of impact, but the overheating furnace in my chest is the greater threat. I fear it will consume me before I can take this daemon down.

It stomps towards me, dropping its hammer as a series of mechanical limbs unfold from its back. Each is tipped with a grasping claw or crackling spike. They reach for me, but I am too fast, slashing with my makeshift weapon.

My body is consuming me, but in the time I have left, my strength is beyond anything I can comprehend. I leap into the air and swing on one of the empty chains, using my momentum to hammer my feet into the carven plate at the centre of the beast. It rocks back on its clawed feet, staggered by the blow.

I give it no chance to recover and swing around to its back.

The plates of its body are hot to the touch. I take the slack of the chain and hammer the hook down against the metal of its back. Its clawed arms bend back to prise me from its body, but I will not be shaken loose.

Another blow from the hook. Another. Another. Metal deforms under the impact, and I beat the metal until I can wedge the hook deep within the beast’s body.

Finally, I am flung from the thing’s back. I land before the blazing fire of its forge-furnace, feeling its heat burn my skin. Arcs of blue lightning dance over my limbs, tracing the line of my scars.

The beast thrashes on the hook, desperate as a landed fish as yet more of my armoured pursuers enter its lair. Five warriors in armour like the damaged suits hung on the chains above.

They spread out around me. Among them is the white-armoured figure I downed in the temple of agony. His one glitching eye flickers red, and he advances with a long, needle-tipped dagger. The others are wary of me.

Or is it the forge-furnace I stand before…?

The realisation hits me. This is the beating heart of their domain.

I turn from the warriors and hammer my fists against the walls of the furnace. If I can destroy it, this entire abode of the damned will die. The power burning inside me gives me strength enough to destroy metal, and I feel the bones within my fists harden to steel.

One, two, three. Metal plates shatter, the thunder of my blows driven by a power I do not understand. I will never know this power again. Two of the warriors come at me from the sides, and I try to shrug them off.

I will not be stopped!

But they are strong and resilient. I scream against them, but they drag me away from the forge-furnace. With one last surge of fire, my body fills with power, an automatic reaction to danger.

I throw them aside as another draws a long blade of crackling yellow energy. He speaks, his voice cold and hard-edged. I sense its threat, and believe utterly his will to back the words up with lethal violence. Of all my pursuers, he alone appears to have no qualms about killing me.

But even he now hesitates. He barks something – a command?

The two giants hurl themselves at me once more, seeking to pin my arms and drag me away. Singly, I could best them, but together they are simpatico in a way that magnifies their power tenfold. I bellow in fury, fighting against their strength to reach the forge-furnace again. The heat is ferocious, burning my skin and blistering the paint on their armour. It bubbles up on their arms in blue blisters, peeling away from the edges of their shoulders in flakes of green.

My pace falters at the sight, meaning hovering just beyond my grasp.

Their weight and strength bear me to my knees, and I am powerless to resist as they finally drag me from my goal. I scream and rage, thrashing like a madman in their grasp.

The executioner stands over me, sword raised as a warrior steps in front of me.

I do not know him, but I almost wish I did. His bearing is regal, noble even. His armour is elaborate to the point of ceremonial, trimmed in gold and hung with waxen seals. He bears a long staff, held high and obscured by the swirling fumes. His face is hidden behind a golden visor, but his bearing communicates a burden that weighs heavily upon his soul.

A burden of honour I could respect, were he not my enemy.

One of the big warriors grips my neck and forces my head to look at him. He speaks, but I hear nothing over the cataclysmic roaring in my skull.

The sun within me nears its final death throes. My jaw cracks wide as it threatens to spill out.

And then I see what he bears upon the staff.

A battle standard, a billowing rectangle of midnight blue, bordered by deepest jade. At its heart is an ivory symbol set amid a field of stars. Gripping that symbol, a stylised U, is a silver gauntlet emblazoned with a skull. Above it sits a starburst with an ancient numeral set upon it.

I know these symbols… They take my breath away.

In the time it takes to blink, the warrior in white steps in and rams the needle-like spear tip at his gauntlet into my chest. I feel it pump some noxious brew directly into the heart of the exploding sun behind my ribcage.

It should hurt, it should be a mortal wound, but I barely feel it. My attention is fixed upon the scrollwork below the symbol on the banner-bearer’s flag. Words are written there, slowly coming into focus as whatever brew now flows around my body begins to still the raging heat that threatens to consume me.

I know these words…

The lettering is archaic, each High Gothic letter crafted by calligraphers of exquisite skill. The upper starburst bears the number four. The lower scroll bears a single word, a word that throws wide the shutters of my memory.

Ultramarines…

The fleeting scraps of memory that faded in the dark ocean of my waking now blaze like mercury-bright contrails across my mind.

The executioner sees the change in me and speaks. And this time I understand him, his words penetrate the searing corona of fire wreathing my mind. I hear his words, and I understand them. I know he is not my enemy.

He is my staunchest defender.

He is my champion.

And had I not returned to my senses, he would have been my killer.

‘Do you know who I am?’ he asks.

‘You are Petronius Nero,’ I reply.

He nods and lowers his sword, satisfied with my answer.

The others, I know them too; they are the Swords of Calth. Holding me down are Livius Hadrianus and Brutus Cyprian, battle-brothers of such incredible courage and strength that they were able to contain my raging madness without killing me.

Apothecary Selenus kneels before me, the needle tip of his narthecium red with my blood.

‘Look at me,’ he says. ‘You are aboard the Vae Victus, an Adeptus Astartes strike cruiser of the Ultramarines. You have awoken from crossing the Rubicon Primaris. Your body is still rebuilding itself from the many surgeries to effect such transformation. It is no small thing you have done, and every man who returns from that undiscovered country does so in his own way.’

‘I thought I was dying,’ I say between painful gasps.

‘You literally were,’ replies Selenus. ‘The Belisarian Furnace implanted in your chest was locked into a cycle of rampant hyperactivity. It triggered your aggressor response and filled you with enough combat stimms that I think you’d have given Lord Guilliman a run for his money in a fighting cage.’

‘I… I thought you all daemons… that this place was some profane lair of evil.’

Selenus grunted. ‘Well, good to know you’ll be up for the fight when the Indomitus Crusade comes up against such foes. And while Techmarine Harkus is certainly not the most welcoming of souls, I don’t think he quite counts as daemonic.’

I look over to see Ancient Peleus, bearer of the Fourth Company standard, helping the forge-thralls free Techmarine Harkus from the chain I hammered through the upper carapace of his sarcophagus. A notoriously bad-tempered warrior, his interment within a Dreadnought chassis had done nothing to soften his rough edges.

Only time will tell how much ire Harkus will direct my way for the damage I have done to him and his forge.

Peleus still holds the company banner, and my heart fills with pride at the sight of the Chapter symbol.

‘The outer casing of the plasma drive is a testament to how much that belief fuelled your strength,’ continued Selenus, ‘but it was destroying you. Perhaps Cawl has some work yet to do on the Revitaliser’s functionality. We’re just lucky we were able to stop you before you destroyed the ship…’

I nod to the warriors either side of me and say, ‘You can let me go now.’

Hadrianus and Cyprian release me, and I push myself upright. The fire in my chest smoulders like a banked hearth. Its heat is still there, ready to surge back to life, but I will need to learn how to control it.

I have seen, first-hand, how deadly it can be if allowed to blaze unchecked.

‘Thank you,’ I tell them. ‘Thank you for bringing me back.’

These warriors are my brothers.

And I am Uriel Ventris, captain of the Fourth Company of Ultramarines.

I am Primaris.

About the Author

Graham McNeill has written many Horus Heresy novels, including The Crimson King, Vengeful Spirit and his New York Times bestsellers A Thousand Sons and the novella The Reflection Crack’d, which featured in The Primarchs anthology. Graham’s Ultramarines series, featuring Captain Uriel Ventris, is now six novels long, and has close links to his Iron Warriors stories, the novel Storm of Iron being a perennial favourite with Black Library fans. He has also written the Forges of Mars trilogy, featuring the Adeptus Mechanicus. For Warhammer, he has written the Warhammer Chronicles trilogy The Legend of Sigmar, the second volume of which won the 2010 David Gemmell Legend Award.

An extract from Swords of Calth.

Before she was inducted into the Astra Militarum, Corporal Elia Vivaro used to believe war was waged in black and white. Devotionals of heroic troopers in distant warzones were always grainy and monochrome, bleached of colour by distance or distortion. The soldiers’ uniforms were grey, ochre, olive drab or urban camo. That made sense; a bright uniform would get you killed.

But since coming to Sycorax, she’d learned war was fought in hideous technicolour.

Lying on her back with the breath punched out of her and her left arm singing with pain, she watched humming emerald beams flash overhead. Return fire from the company flashed back in bolts of ruby light. Her ears were ringing, the hard thump thump thump of mass-reactives barely registering. Beneath the booming reports of the heavy bolter, she thought she heard the thudding echoes of autocannons.

Ours or theirs?

Imperial, of course. This enemy didn’t use hard rounds. They used inhuman xenotech that flayed the skin from your bones and left their targets a screaming mess of ruptured red meat and disassembled bone. Impossible technologies not even the all-knowing Cult Mechanicus could fathom.

The patch of sky she could see through the billowing, tar-black fog of fire and smoke was a perfect blue.

Surely too beautiful a sky to die under.

Elia pushed herself up onto one elbow, the one not singing in pain. Fuel from the wrecked Hellhounds turned the day into a hellish sunset, painting the shattered walls on either side of her in flickering patterns of orange and yellow. Their crews lay beside the burning vehicles, bodies char-black and bloated, exposed ribs brilliant white.

They had only just made the turn when the ambushers had struck.

A pair of tall, rust-bronze war machines stalked from the burning ruins on four clicking spindle limbs and fired beams of white-green energy at the lead Demolisher. They peeled away its frontal glacis and blew the Leman Russ apart from the inside, lofting its bombardment turret twenty metres into the air. Simultaneously, the rearguard Eradicator was swarmed with a host of drone-like creatures that flew out of the smoke to fasten themselves to its hull like limpets. They reduced it to a skeletal wreck in seconds. The vehicle’s magazine of subatomic shells exploded before they devoured it entirely, and now Elia’s rad-meter was chirruping madly.

Radiation from the wreck of the Eradicator was the least of her worries just then.

Who’s in command now?

She’d seen Captain Mosar turn to issue their convoy a punch-through order from the cupola of his Chimera. Before he could speak, his body had come apart in a flurry of green light and unravelling skin and bone. Lieutenant Rheman died moments later as another of the flitting drone things flew at his head and exploded with a pop that seemed altogether too small to kill a man. He lay on his back a few metres away, looking for all the world like he was sleeping. The only mark on him was a leaking red hole in his forehead.

The red blood was so vivid against the black of her skin, so bright it looked fake, like something you might see in a theatrica. She didn’t think it was hers. She didn’t feel like she’d been shot, but knew that sometimes shock delayed pain. Only yesterday – or was it the day before? – Trooper Maslow had wandered around with his arm flayed back to perforated bone and twitching sinews, but hadn’t seemed to notice he’d been hit until Commissar Vartan yelled at him to take cover. Her breath tasted of engine fumes and smashed rockcrete. Veils of dust and smoke hung in the air, coating the rubble and the wrecked tanks and shaken troopers in layers of chalky dust.

Hands fumbled with Elia’s flak jacket and she felt herself being dragged out of the road. Her rescuer pulled her behind a makeshift barricade of smashed machinery and slabs of a coffered floor that must have fallen from somewhere above. Sound roared in her ears, a deafening cacophony of gunfire, explosions and screams.

A yelling face appeared in front of her. A trooper with blue-polarised goggles and wearing the dust-caked uniform of a 161st Caen Pioneer and Construction Battalion vox-bearer. She knew her, but the ringing in her head made it impossible to think straight. She couldn’t place her name.

The other woman shouted again, her voice muffled by a dust-mask rebreather.

‘Are you hurt? Elia, are you hurt? I saw you thrown from the Chimera!’

‘Kyra?’ she said, dazed and trying to struggle to her feet. ‘Kyra Vance!’

Kyra gave her a strange look and hauled Elia down and pushed her back into the piled rubble. Hissing shots pulped the brickwork above her head. Dissolved molecules of aerosolised mortar caught in the back of her throat. She spat the sour taste of clay from her mouth, her saliva red with blood.

‘Imperator! Are you trying to get killed?’ asked Kyra.

Elia shook her head, and drew in a hot, sucking breath as sense returned to her and reality crashed back in. ‘Situation?’ she said.

‘All six vehicles wrecked. At least twenty dead. Enemy above and either side of us.’

‘Twenty, shit,’ said Elia, easing out to the edge of the toppled slab to re-establish some situational awareness. Even a cursory glance told her it wasn’t good. The remains of the company were strung out along the burning line of the convoy, hunched in whatever cover they could find and firing up at the structures around them.

A missile streaked through the window of a fire-blackened warehouse and exploded inside. A portion of the modular outer wall fell into the street in a rain of girders and stone. A pair of bodies armoured in the same rust-bronze plates as the war machines came with it. Impossibly, one of the figures began to rise, its broken arms and legs limned with green light, but a volley of las-fire cut it down before Elia could get a good look at it.

‘Where’s my rifle?’ she said.

‘I don’t know,’ said Kyra, leaning back to scoop up a dead man’s lasgun. She pressed it into her hands. ‘Use this one.’

Elia checked the powercell, worked the charging lever, and shouldered the rifle. She snapped off a couple of shots over the rubble into the smoke. Couldn’t tell if she was hitting anything. Didn’t matter. She just wanted to fight back, feel like she was doing something.

‘I saw Mosar and Rheman go down, so who’s in charge?’ asked Elia.

‘If those officers are dead, it’s you,’ said Kyra, flinching as something exploded overhead.

They pressed themselves deeper into the heaped rubble as pulverised chunks of rockcrete tumbled from the upper floors, and more grey dust billowed. Elia’s eyes were red and burning from the smoke, and she wiped a bloody, sweat-streaked hand over her face to clear the stinging grit. The vox-bead crackled in her ear, lousy with static bleed from other company networks. Nothing but chopped words, half-heard orders and calls for help. She reached up to key her helmet mic, but the stalk was snapped midway along its length.

‘Damn it,’ she hissed, rolling onto her back and slapping Kyra’s shoulder. ‘Where’s your vox-caster? My mic’s broken.’

‘Still strapped down inside the Chimera,’ said Kyra.

‘What the hell use is it in there?’ demanded Elia.

‘It was either leave it or die,’ snapped Kyra, still firing over the lip of the rubble.

‘Damn it,’ said Elia again.

Across the street, a trooper skidded into cover behind a slumped wall upon which the face of an Imperial saint had been painted. The trooper was a recklessly brave soldier named Vigo Tengger, a rear-echelon schematics draughter, but one who’d earned a brace of medals in every campaign in which the regiment had served. Elia didn’t recognise the saint, but given the industriousness of Port Setebos, she guessed it was likely one who extolled the virtue and noble rewards of silent devotion to hard work. An explosive round sailed from Vigo’s grenade launcher with a metallic cough and another section of warehouse wall tumbled into the street, along with more of the bronzed enemy warriors.

The relentless thump thump thump of the heavy bolter punched through the prefabbed wall-skins, the fire-teams walking their shots around the perimeter. Elia had never loved a weapon more right now. If anything would keep the enemy’s heads down while they regrouped and got clear of this trap, then it was a heavy bolter.

She heard more shouts and the clatter of ammo boxes. Across the street, Commissar Vartan was directing the company’s heavy weapons teams’ fields of fire. Spectral light reflected from the bronze skull on his peaked cap and breastplate. Crackling blue energies enveloped the gleaming silver of his sword blade. Vartan was the most courageous man she’d ever met, fearless in the face of the foe, and with an unrelenting faith in the Emperor.

The heavy, chugging bark of autocannons joined the heavy bolter, their echoes amplified by the enclosing walls of the shattered warehouses to either side. Their company were pioneers, builders and engineers for the Caen Regiment, but they were still, first and foremost, soldiers of the Astra Militarum.

Solid slugs from the autocannons swept the width of the street. Smacking impacts of brass on stone, hard las ricochets zipping into the sky. Petrochemical fog made it hard to see if the gunners were hitting anything.

Doesn’t matter, so long as it keeps the enemy’s heads down long enough for us to escape.

Vartan looked across the street, beckoned urgently for her to join him.

‘Shit, is he serious?’ said Kyra. ‘He wants to advance?’

‘We need to link up, regroup and move out as one.’

‘The street’s a kill-box,’ said Kyra, as another blast of fizzing green bolts stabbed down it. A wrecked Chimera exploded to help make her point. Crackling powercell overloads lit it from within and fire-trails streaked from its burning interior.

A burst of autocannon shells strafed the upper levels of the warehouses, demolishing more and more of their structure with every explosive impact.

‘We can make it. We’ve got cover, so let’s not waste it,’ said Elia. ‘On three, ready?’

Kyra nodded, biting her lip. Green bolts zipped down the street, neon bright. Any one of them might have their names on it.

‘One,’ said Elia.

‘Two,’ said Kyra.

‘Three!’ snapped Elia.

They burst from the shelter of the rubble and ran into the street as the autocannons opened up again. Kyra led the way, zigging and zagging as streaking bursts of fire twitched the smoke. Elia had never run so fast, her gaze fixed on the exact location she’d skid into cover, just behind a projecting spur of brickwork. She kept low, lasgun held tight to her chest. A buzzing green burst of energy chewed up the ground beside her. She jinked to the side. Kept going, head down, shoulders pumping.

‘Movement! End of the street!’ yelled a gunner’s voice.

Halfway across the street, Elia risked a glance to her left. Something metallic gleamed in the smoke, and her pace faltered.

‘Shit…’

The war machines that had taken out the Demolisher stalked from the ruins once again, glowing green machine eyes sweeping the street. Tall and slender, with bulbous, overhanging carapaces, they were borne on clawed legs that looked far too thin to bear their weight. Marching through the fire ahead of them were ranks of the rust-bronze-armoured warriors advancing in lockstep with lambent-barrelled rifles.

Except they weren’t armoured, the bronze was the metal of their bodies.

Necrons, that’s what we call them…

An apt name, wrought to conjure humankind’s primal fear of death. Their bodies were hunched, thin and skeletal, their gaunt, expressionless faces freakishly elongated skulls of bare metal. The same green corpse-light that powered their weapons burned in each hollow eye socket, and every one of them had a mockery of a human skull crudely painted across their lifeless, death-mask faces.

In the centre of their line was a drifting mass of spiralling dark energy. It swirled around an arch-spined thing like overlapping tornadoes contained by a fearsome gravity at its heart. It threw off arcing traceries of jade lightning, its hunched-over body swathed in tattered, purple robes. It carried a bladed staff that flickered as it cut the very fabric of reality.

The aliens raised their weapons in perfect unison, but before they could shoot, the impossibly deep rumble of a powerful engine-reactor filled the street. Elia turned as a mud-streaked behemoth reared up to crest the debris behind her, crushing rubble to powder beneath its armoured bulk.

It was a battle tank, but not one of the Astra Militarum. Its blue-painted flanks were more massive than anything Elia had seen. Its eagle-stamped tracks churned the broken ground, throwing up stonework and dust as the driver brought it to a grinding halt. Elia had watched enough devotionals to recognise this type of vehicle, but to see one bearing down on her like a vast transit train all but pinned her to the spot.

Land Raider, Hellfire variant.

The twin lascannons on its side-mounts thrummed with building power.

Godhammer-pattern…

The front assault ramp, emblazoned with an ivory ultima, slammed down with a booming clang like the glorious peal of a prayer bell. Shapes moved within its red-lit interior, hulking and brutish; surely too enormous to be human. They burst from within, ten warriors in cobalt-blue armour, their edges trimmed in green.

Adeptus Astartes… Space Marines, the Angels of Death…

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This eBook edition published in 2021 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd, Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK.

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Cover illustration by Anna Lakisova.

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