More Warhammer 40,000 from Black Library

• DAWN OF FIRE •

Book 1: AVENGING SON

Guy Haley

Book 2: THE GATE OF BONES

Andy Clark

• DARK IMPERIUM •

Guy Haley

Book 1: DARK IMPERIUM

Book 2: PLAGUE WAR

Book 3: GODBLIGHT

• MEPHISTON •

Darius Hinks

Book 1: BLOOD OF SANGUINIUS

Book 2: REVENANT CRUSADE

Book 3: CITY OF LIGHT

DARKNESS IN THE BLOOD

Guy Haley

SPEAR OF THE EMPEROR

Aaron Dembski-Bowden

SILENT HUNTERS

Edoardo Albert

LEGACY OF DORN

Mike Lee

TRAITOR BY DEED

Ben Counter

SONS OF SANGUINIUS

A Blood Angels omnibus by various authors

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

The Empty Place

The Phalangite Ascendancy

Disgraced

The First Primaris

The Last Planet

Legacy of Posul

The Wolves of Raukos

The Sins of My Brothers

Patience Kills

Bless the Curse

Living Relics

Iron Watch

Son of the Storm World

About the Authors

An Extract from ‘Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son’

A Black Library Publication

eBook license

It is the 41st millennium. 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 will of the gods, and master of a million worlds by the might of His inexhaustible armies. He is a rotting carcass writhing invisibly with power from the Dark Age of Technology. He is the Carrion Lord of the Imperium for whom a thousand souls are sacrificed every day, so that He may never truly die.

Yet even in His deathless state, the Emperor continues His eternal vigilance. Mighty battlefleets cross the daemon-infested miasma of the warp, the only route between distant stars, their way lit by the Astronomican, the psychic manifestation of the Emperor’s will. Vast armies give battle in His name on uncounted worlds. Greatest amongst His soldiers are the Adeptus Astartes, the Space Marines, bio-engineered super-warriors. Their comrades in arms are legion: the Astra Militarum and countless planetary defence forces, the ever-vigilant Inquisition and the tech-priests of the Adeptus Mechanicus to name only a few. But for all their multitudes, they are barely enough to hold off the ever-present threat from aliens, heretics, mutants – and worse.

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. These are the tales of those times. Forget the power of technology and science, for so much has been forgotten, never to be re-learned. Forget the promise of progress and understanding, for in the grim dark future there is only war. There is no peace amongst the stars, only an eternity of carnage and slaughter, and the laughter of thirsting gods.

THE EMPTY PLACE

GRAHAM MCNEILL

Uniquely resilient against the predations of Chaos thanks to a ritual that sees their recruits possessed, then purged, none have gone as far as the Exorcists in their wars against the Daemon. Now, in the wake of the Cicatrix Maledictum, these Sons of Dorn stand to hold the denizens of the warp at bay.

Daemones non operantur nisi per artem.

– Grimoire Purgatus

Sight is the last of my senses they mutilate.

I have been all but deafened with endless chanting designed to break my will, suffered red-hot chains of fire at my neck, choked on the cloying reek of noxious incenses, and had vials of their physiker’s poisons forced down my throat.

I have endured it all without breaking, spat my fury back in their masked faces.

But now they come for my eyes.

Their brutal alchemies are still slowing me, and heavy chains bind my wrists, neck and ankles to the iron frame of an excruciation throne. Mute servitors with dead faces and blood-red eyes drill into my immobile skull, and I tense my jaw as steel anchors extend into my parietal and sphenoid bones.

I grit my teeth. I have known worse pain. What is to come will be much worse.

I have known pain every day since I was deemed worthy for ascension and they gave my flesh to another. I accept it. I use it. Pain is part of who I am. Every time the doomed, weeping serfs fix my warplate to my scarified flesh, I know pain will come.

Blood flows down the side of my head. I taste its metallic tang as it runs into my mouth.

I relish it, feel its ancient potency.

The blood is the power, the strength, and the source.

A mask of black iron is fitted over my face. Whirring clamps extend, peeling my eyelids back and slitting them from my head with a buzz of blades. I barely notice the pain. A gag of frozen iron is pressed into my mouth, burning my gums and forcing my jaw apart – so wide I feel the skin at the corners of my mouth split.

The servitors step back, and I hear recitations: dogmatic scripture from a book, its nature familiar to me from a long-ago ritual. The words are relayed into the room via a winged cherub augmitter hanging upside down on a cable by its ankle. It sways gently from a flaking roof girder next to a slowly rotating ceiling fan with only a single blade remaining.

Wait… Are they praying for me?

Do they think to purge my soul before they mutilate me?

Wild laughter bubbles up a throat made raw and bloody by vile recitations, but all that emerges from my split maw is a retching, hacking death rattle.

My lidless eyes scan the room. The walls are tiled in pale ceramic, pitted with old blood.

The floor is a fine metal grille, its mesh dripping with rust and clotted blood. This last detail, together with the heavy, bovine reek of fear, tells me I am in an abattoir’s kill-chamber: a place where beasts and men have been driven towards hooded figures with knives whetted for their murder.

A cell. A place they think safe enough to cage me.

Then, bright light; blinding. Something moves within it.

A figure enters the room, robed in black and wearing the onyx death mask of a chirurgeon. His back and arms are scaffolded in clicking, ratcheting instruments of surgical steel. The stuttering light of the only remaining lumen gleams from innumerable blades and needles.

He is attended by acolytes in similar robes, their faces likewise hidden like cowards. Each bears a guttering candle and whispers something just below the threshold of hearing, but which buzzes in my ear like a trapped insect.

The chirurgeon looks at me through his glossy mask with eyes of pale blue that seem almost pitying. He steps close and runs a leather-gloved hand over my shaven scalp.

The servitors have already torn out my killing implants, the wounds still wet, but his touch is gentle, as though concerned he not cause any suffering beyond that which he has been ordered to inflict.

‘So rare to capture one of your kind alive,’ he says.

His eyes roam across my naked flesh: the web of ash-rubbed scars, the tattooed symbols of excoriation culled from blood-soaked tomes, the ritual tally marks of death. I have paid in blood for each of these signs, mine and that of my enemies.

I want to spew hate at him, to curse him and his deluded kind, but the iron gag keeps me silent. For now. When they remove it, as I know they must, I must fight the urge to spit my venom and tell him of all the murderous ruin I will visit upon him and his followers.

His acolytes spread out, three to either side, still whispering their useless catechisms. I cannot make out the words, but I feel them against my skin like tiny, rasping needles, probing and pricking me like an electric current.

Their words make my eyes itch, and I wish I could blink.

The quality of the light changes, and I turn my eyes past the chirurgeon to the rusted bronze eagle on the wall. Shock-pulses from the bombardments above have set it askew, but the chirurgeon cares little for the blasphemy. The lumen sways from side to side as the pulses fade, and light plays over the eagle’s face.

A face in light, a hooded eye in darkness, then reversed.

The instruments of the chirurgeon’s trade unfold from his arms, each like the curling stinger of a jungle-devil, gleaming with threat and dripping with the promise of agony.

Another seismic rumble trembles the chamber walls. Closer this time. This deep in the building, I cannot tell to which faction the guns belong. Dust drifts from the ceiling, stirred into patterns of significance by the lone blade of the fan. Some of it settles upon my eyes in a gritty film.

Two more detonations close by. The entire building shudders.

One of the acolytes stumbles, and I feel his robes brush the ends of my fingertips.

I don’t waste my chance.

I seize him, curling my fingers around his robe and pulling him in close.

He struggles against my grip, but it’s already too late. I have barely a handspan of travel in my wrist, but piston my fingertips like a blade into his solar plexus. The impact sends waves of shock-trauma through his chest to shatter his ribs. Bone fragments drive up through his lungs and into his heart.

He drops, choking for breath, tearing at his throat and coughing blood. The others pull back in alarm, but the chirurgeon only smiles. He bends over me, his blue eyes meeting my drug-dilated black ones.

‘Kill them all, it won’t matter,’ he says. ‘He will get what he needs from you.’

One of his scorpion-tail devices arcs up behind his shoulder. A fat droplet forms at its tip. I smell its acrid, counterseptic stink.

The tail stabs down, so fast I cannot follow.

Needle-sharp metal pierces my right eye, hot enough to vaporise the fluid within. It snaps back and my remaining eye sees the pierced orb plucked from my skull, trailing an arc of blood and a neatly severed frond of optic tissue.

Slivers of viscous fluid spill down my cheek.

‘Now we can begin,’ says the chirurgeon.

The words are spoken, the offerings made.

Blood and the foetid leavings of corpses.

The veil is weak here, worn thin by acts of intentional cruelty.

My form is formless: knotted, twisted-up screeds of violence and murder-lust. I am hate engraved on immaterial bones, a fury older than time.

Limbs unfold, foetal-soft, hardening as the bland physics of realspace effects its change.

I feel it tear, this wall that seals the way between worlds. So very thin: new-grown skin on the blade’s hard edge, but anathema to my kind.

I rip through it like a newborn clawing at its birth-caul as it fights its way out of its mother’s bloody belly, raw and screaming.

I pour through, my energies inimical to this world.

My form is dark. Smoking. Blood-hunger as a burning pattern of horror etched in the air.

I am the carrion-eaters over a slaughter-field, the murderer’s blood-fugue, the thirst of life-taking that dwells in all mortal hearts.

I need form no poisoned skin, no scales of armour; no horns to gouge, nor teeth to rend. A host body has been prepared for me, ripe to violate and make mine. His flesh is cut with the marks that turn the lock of his soul and leave it wide open.

No hapless warlock this, woefully unequipped to face the consequences of his foolishness. This is a willing host, one who has been made ready by men with understanding of such things. I can taste the power of his flesh, the strength of his heart.

Oh, the slaughters I will reap with such a form!

His fear invigorates me. He is willing perhaps, but unprepared for what his assent truly means. I will abuse the meat of his flesh, and in time I will grind his bones down to powder. And if he is not dead when I am done with him, I will discard his husked skin-sac like offal.

Even then, he will know no respite.

His mind will be broken, his flesh ruined.

His kin will shun him, will hate him for my sins.

They will burn him and salt his ashes.

And I will watch from beyond the veil for his soul when it is sent screaming over that numinous threshold for one last horror.

Such a wretched soul will be a frail, wasted thing, barely worth the attention of a Neverborn prince such as I.

But I will devour it just the same.

For hate’s sake, for spite.

He resists me now, but I tear my way inside.

Finally understanding the inescapable truth of what he has invited into his flesh, his body rebels. He cannot resist, and I pour my essence into him.

The screams of agony are delicious, rarefied, for his kind do not scream easily.

His flesh is mine now.

I am left in the light of the swaying lumen, raging, my vision steeped in red.

They will not leave me too long; the bloody noose around this city is tightening, and they cannot afford to wait to split me open and study my inner workings. They are right, it is rare to capture a being like me alive, for we are uniquely new and mighty beyond anything they have faced before.

My flesh is old and yet new, empowered by mystic arts unknown to them.

I am a worthy prize indeed. A prize worthy, perhaps, of powerful eyes.

As if my captor has been summoned by the thought, the door grates open on rusted wheels. I can taste the stale blood of tens of thousands of animals on the rollers. I can almost feel their blind, bowel-emptying terror as they are dragged in. A fitting place for what they intend, I think.

Two acolytes in bloodstained robes and pewter masks enter. They circle behind me, careful to keep their distance.

I have already shown them how dangerous I am.

I lose sight of them on my blinded side, then feel metalled hands on my skull, unshackling the iron gag wedged in my stretched jaw. I close my mouth, and the pain is blinding, my jawbone cracking as if fused and now splitting like bones on a pyre.

The acolytes back away, and my attention turns to the one they serve.

He enters the kill-chamber, and I confess I am disappointed at how ordinary he looks. Most of his kind I have killed were garbed in the panoply of death to better evoke the terror of their masters, bedecked in useless finery, and ludicrously ill-suited for the battlefield.

This one has none of that, and I am immediately wary.

He wears only a simple hessian robe, secured at the waist with a frayed cord that might once have been ivory, but is now a washed-out ochre. Droplets of blood stain its weave, but beyond that, he might have stepped from any backwater temple.

His skull is tonsured, his face bland, almost androgynous, and doughy with an unhealthy pallor common to those who rarely venture from within their walls of stone. But his eyes tell a different story: they are utterly white, icy and without mercy.

An acolyte moves a seat into position, and he gathers his robe to sit opposite me. He pauses to brush some dust from his shoulders. A pointless gesture, as the approaching bombardments will just shake more loose from the slaughter floors above.

He laces his fingers together and clears his throat.

I speak before he can.

‘You are going to die here,’ I say, my throat raw from the poisons I have ingested.

He nods. ‘That is entirely possible. Your cohorts are tearing this city apart to find us.’

‘It won’t be a good death,’ I add. ‘Your kind never dies well. It’s always messy. Lots of screaming. Lots of blood. It’ll probably be me that does it. I owe you a death, a painful one.’

‘Is this supposed to frighten me?’

‘Yes.’

‘It does not. Oh, you are new and impressive, yes, but I have faced things far more terrible than you. Things of blood, of fire and of corruption. I am still here, and they are not.’

‘You have not faced anything like me or my kin.’

‘No,’ admitted the man. ‘Which is why I am here. Your flesh is valuable.’

I almost laugh, but blood bubbles up from the ruin of my lungs.

‘You think to carve secrets from my bones, is that it?’

‘Something like that,’ he agrees. ‘My chirurgeon is very skilled. He has dismantled many of your brethren over the years. But, you…? You, I think, will be different. You are special.’

‘More than you know.’

‘Exactly my point,’ he says, leaning in. ‘But I am getting ahead of myself. My name is–’

‘Serdai Tymon,’ I say, and am rewarded with a fractional raise of his eyebrow. ‘I’m curious, is Serdai a name or a title?’

‘Neither,’ he says, recovering quickly. ‘And you are Merrin Dragomir, First Blade of the Sons of Balthasar. I’m curious, is that a sect within your ranks or a martial warrior lodge?’

He thinks to show that his knowledge is the equal of mine, but it is a poor gambit.

‘I know you know me,’ I say. ‘I would already be dead if you did not. On this world, in this conflict, there are few who do not know and fear the name of Dragomir. I hear your soldiers say a prayer each night to be spared the teeth of my blade.’

‘Some of the lesser troops I command in this theatre are given to dark superstitions, it’s true,’ admits Tymon. ‘And not without reason. It is a time of omens and portents, and none of them good for you.’

I look past him to the gently swaying cherub, noting the play of light across its features. Its carved mouth is forever open in an oval, the mesh of the augmitter glinting between its lips.

Tymon sees what I am looking at and says, ‘It reminds you of something?’

‘Yes.’

‘What?’

‘A tarot, one of the old ones. A bloody card I took from a dead priest on Martaus Station.’

‘A cartomancer?’

‘I suppose, though he would not have named himself so.’

‘I presume the card was the Phoenician Sailor, sometimes called the Hanged Man?’

I nod. ‘Strung from the branch of a crooked black tree, an enigmatic smile on his lips.’

‘Did you kill him? The dead priest, I mean.’

‘Yes, I split him from neck to groin with one blow.’

‘You understand the significance of that card, yes?’

‘I have been told it represents ultimate surrender, sacrifice or being suspended in time.’

He smiles and crosses his legs, lacing his hands over one knee. ‘In the most general of terms, that is correct – the Hanged Man is said to indicate that some aspect of your life is causing distress. You feel as though you are trapped in a situation or frame of mind that is not to your benefit. But, more importantly, it reveals that you have the power to release yourself.’

His voice becomes more animated, and I sense he enjoys imparting knowledge, but not for the pleasure of instructing students, more for the opportunity to display his own intelligence.

‘The solution may be as simple as walking away from the situation or simply changing your perspective on it,’ he continues. ‘The card may also signify that you are facing a great dilemma and are unsure of which path to take.’

His voice flows with rhythmic cadence, an almost hypnotic quality to it, but there is power here too. I sense psychic fingers probing at the edge of my awareness like a thief testing the tumblers of a lock. My cauterised mind is a necessarily blunt instrument, but even I can register this soft attempt at intrusion. To feel his presence stalking my mind so overtly, looking for a way in, is surely a sign that time is his enemy here.

‘When the Hanged Man appears in your reading, you may feel events are not turning out the way you planned. To escape your current predicament, you have to step outside yourself and look at your situation from a different angle. Stop trying to control everything and just let them be. Do that, and the correct course of action will become clear to you in time.’

He thinks he is cleverer than me.

By most measures of such things, he is correct, but I am not without my wiles.

I lock my one good eye with his and say, ‘But in a spiritual context, the Hanged Man reversed indicates that you have lost your way spiritually. You may seek gratification by shallow means instead of connecting to your higher self. Inverted, the Hanged Man is a powerful indicator of old, dogmatic beliefs no longer fit for purpose. Now would be a good time for you to explore fresh spiritual choices. Engaging with a new path may lift you out of a malaise and leave you with a renewed connection to your higher consciousness.’

He laughs at my clumsy riposte, but I see through the falsehood as I feel the pressure at the back of my mind increasing. It is like a Hades breaching drill slowly grinding up through the bedrock of a fortress.

‘The minds of warriors are so often underestimated,’ he says. ‘I look at your kind and see only mindless devotion, unthinking slavery to dogmatic, outmoded beliefs. But not you. Your flesh is cut with the ancient markings of the Ruinous Powers. Your scars speak of knowledge shunned by most.’

‘Knowledge is power,’ I say.

‘Guard it well,’ he finishes.

He sits back and regards me with new eyes.

‘Yes, Merrin Dragomir, First Blade of the Sons of Balthasar. I think you will be perfect.’

This flesh is strong – stronger than any I have used before.

Its bones are iron, the beating engines at its core burning like the hearts of stars.

Its body is powered by muscles of corded steel; its every faculty is keener, every boon enhanced.

I race to explore this host, finding ever more ways in which it is beyond any being whose skin and bone I have previously taken for myself. Vitality surges like currents of galvanism wrought by the death of worlds.

His fear is delicious, a sweetmeat I drink down like an elixir.

All the sweeter because he tries to fight it. But no amount of training or discipline can gird a human soul for so profound a violation as this. To be prisoner in your own body, enslaved to the will of another and helpless as atrocities are wrought with your form.

His is a mind pressed against its imprisoning walls of bone, trapped and with no escape.

I take command of the body’s autonomic functions first. Breath, heartbeat, digestion, pupillary response, and – most importantly – the fight-or-flight response. His every nerve is screaming at him to escape, but such a feat is impossible when his own flesh is the prison.

What is left of his consciousness still holds on to sanity in the face of my hijacking of his flesh. Most minds would have already been driven into an abyss of depthless madness by this violation, but his remains intact for now.

But wait, it is more than that…

It is resisting.

Daring him to keep fighting, I shut down his lungs, quelling the body’s natural cycle of inhalation and exhalation.

His mind spasms as grey walls of oxygen starvation close in.

He thinks to fight me, but I am a being of the warp; I have no physical constraints on my existence. The limitations and endurances of mortal flesh…? Those I know all too well.

I know when it will bend, and when it will break. I know all the secret places to hurt it.

Every wrinkle and fold of mortal brains – the hidden places to press to cause terror, shame, hate, disgust – these are my dwelling places. I know where mortals hide their jealousies, their pride, their fear, and all the thousands of other levers to their behaviour.

His lungs shudder, fighting to supply the needs of his flesh. I violently crush them, and his spine arches in a parabola of pain. Secondary organs activate, driven by the calamitous drop in oxygen in his bloodstream. I clamp down on them too.

The double rhythm of his hearts picks up tempo, bloody music to my senses.

I coil myself around his brainstem, squeezing up through the narrow cleft in his skull to the seat of consciousness. The human mind is a thing of dark beauty, an organ of such dizzying complexity that it seems a travesty for evolutionary biology to have bestowed it on such unworthy creatures.

A tapestry of memories unfold around me.

I see a life of violence, boys becoming men far before childhood’s end.

He has killed his enemies, and, yes, his friends too. And, oh, won’t that be a thread to pull on later…? I see him surrounded, ten men, tall oaks to his sapling’s youth.

Axes rise and fall, spears thrust, and teeth rip meat from the bone.

His enemies lie dead around him, but they have killed him too.

Blood flows from a score of wounds, nine of them fatal.

He lies dying, looking up into the unforgiving sky as golden light engulfs the mountains.

Angels in brass and bone descend, black warplate and cruel death masks.

I see giants in pale armour, haloed in fire, lift me/him from his world of rock and blood. I feel his/my pain as flesh is reshaped, grown and moulded into something godlike.

A life flashes past me in an instant, instruction in the ways of war.

I expect this. This is the body of a killer, not a scholar.

He uses those skills well, fighting in the name of his master, but I feel no pleasure in the acts of death, none of the brotherhood centuries of war normally breeds in his kind.

His flesh is new, beyond even that of one ripe from the flesh-smiths. I have not felt one like him from the inside before.

Ah, the slaughters I will wreak, the violations upon those he once swore to protect. I will turn his mighty hand upon his brothers. I can feel them beyond this space, the ones who summoned me from beyond the veil.

I rebuild his lungs, filling them with air, and the grey void retreats as his starving brain is fed its life-giving nutrients.

I look out from behind eyes that see the world in the hues of mortals.

So bland, so limited.

Power floods my limbs and I try to stand, but something prevents me.

My flesh is restrained! Wrists chained to a throne, ankles bound with thick fetters!

The sight of them triggers a recent memory, of this vessel walking within these walls, and willingly allowing himself to be chained. Allowing one of his death-masked holy men to paint his flesh with inks and pain, cut sacred geometries into his chest and arms with their knives.

Now I become aware of the silent, hovering skulls surrounding me, eyes of gemlike blue unblinking. Twenty at least, likely more behind me.

What is this place?

Bare metal walls of stone and iron.

A cage for a wild beast…

The door opens, and more of the slack-faced servitors enter. Instantly I feel a thickening of the air. My old scars flare in recognition.

As the red sorcerers are wont to say, like attracts like.

My mouth fills with blood and saliva as I chew the inside of my cheek raw.

I know what they are bringing, and my gut churns with anticipation. A bilious flavour of rotten meat, dank mould and sickening sweetness assaults my senses. It is too much, and thick, oily sweat forms on my back like a layer of frost.

Blood weeps from the folds of my eyes, and a grainy curtain of static descends like a veil of scratching, biting insects. I feel them buzzing at the edge of my skull, searching for a way in. I grit my teeth and a wash of blood spills between the broken splinters left in my gums.

Then I see him.

A mewling, chained thing that was once mortal, with Astartes bulk and transhuman scale to its twisted limbs. It is tongueless and eyeless, its flesh scarred like mine, though its skin is the colour of old blood, bruised and burned from within. I recognise the deep scarification of its flesh, remembering those same markings being cut deep into the meat of my body.

Acolytes with chain-mesh gloves help it walk, for its bones are fused with the infernal heat smouldering at its core, its steps shuffling and pained like an old man at the end of his life.

Its arms are locked to its chest with heavy chains of smoking iron secured with a rune-etched padlock that seems to writhe and twist. Clawed and molten hands hold a hook-edged sword, aimed point down, like a sepulchral carving atop a great hero’s tomb.

But this is no ordinary sword, this is a blade that has spilled the blood of millions.

Quillons wrought in the form of ebony-tipped raptor claws. A slowly pulsing eye of onyx for its pommel atop a bone-handled hilt. Dark smoke issues from the furnace-red heart of the eye, redolent with the gag-inducing reek of burned blood and hair.

It is a holy weapon, its existence long suspected, but never confirmed. To see it in the flesh is to know the awesome powers my enemies command. The augurs spoke of it, and the seers whose minds did not immediately disintegrate spoke of nightmares in which the sword appeared over this sector’s warzones, the great eye of its pommel sweeping over the ruins in search of…

A bearer…

It takes every ounce of my strength to tear my gaze from the weapon, but when I am able to focus on Serdai Tymon, I see wonder in his eyes, and, yes, not a little fear.

This weapon terrifies him, as well it should.

Blood weeps from the corners of his eyes too, for this blade will kill those who revere it as quickly as it will those who hate it.

‘Evermaw the Nethersworn, the Thane of Thorns, Obsidian Thirster…’

The acolytes drone an endless list of names and titles; some I recognise, most I do not. I tune them out after the first twenty or so.

In this sector, the legends know it simply as the Reaper of Ash.

To speak that name aloud is a death sentence, but to fight the enemy, I need to know the enemy. To resist the enemy is to walk as the enemy for a time, and I have walked farther and deeper into the dark forest than most.

Serdai Tymon stands on unsteady legs. His skin ought to be pale with fear, but instead it is florid, ruddy with blood as it rises to the surface of his flesh in recognition of its kin.

He produces a key of weeping iron that whispers obscenities.

A susurration of desert voices, borne from forgotten cities long ago laid waste and hidden beneath the sand.

Buried secrets bubbling to the surface to cause anguish.

The wail of the innocent dead carried through the shattered streets of violated cities.

Ash from a thousand dead worlds crying out in the immaterial depths.

Serdai Tymon handles the key with his bare hands, and the skin flakes away from muscle and bone like cinders from a fire. Soon, the whiteness beneath is revealed, but before the meat of his marrow rots to bonemeal ready for a plague garden, he slots the key in the padlock.

It is swallowed by the keyhole, snatched from his dying grip then expelled as gobbets of molten metal. They smoulder on Tymon’s robes, but these are the least of his cares, as the corruption he willingly embraced by handling the key travels rapidly along his arm.

His face is alight with rapture as he sinks to his knees.

‘In my death are you reborn in new flesh…’ he whispers as tendrils of inky-black necrosis creep up his neck and across his cheek. Soon even these are succumbing to the dissolution of ash.

It gives me paltry satisfaction to see him dying in agony, for the rasping clatter of falling metal announces a greater threat. Sloughing off the chains that bound its arms, the eyeless thing flexes its shoulders, the joints cracking and splitting with the sound of grinding metal and glass. A blue light sparks to life in its empty eye sockets, and the sword is brought up in its leathery, desiccated hands. Molten light spreads through the blade, reddening its edge, and the stink of stagnant oceans of blood awash with corpses fills the kill-chamber.

The acolytes turn away, averting their gaze as if it is unseemly for them to witness this dark rebirth.

The thing lurches towards me, and I tense every muscle in my enhanced frame.

The chains binding me are strong, but Tymon was right; he had never seen a warrior quite like me. I have the steel within, a power beyond that of my more ancient brethren.

I could break these chains in a heartbeat.

But not yet…

The thing with the corpse-light eyes draws back the sword, and the onyx pommel-stone pulses in time with my rising heartbeat. I ready myself for the pain I know is coming.

The creature thrusts the blade deep into my chest.

White-hot fire surges through me, blinding in its agony.

Catastrophic volumes of blood pour from me as the eyeless thing twists the blade.

A wild and primal howl of violation rips up from the very depths of my soul.

And the Reaper of Ash within the blade shrieks in triumph as it pours into me.

At the first signs of movement from my new flesh, the empty eyes of the servo-skulls flicker from blue to red. They dart like fireflies, and I hear the hiss of graving lasers. The skulls are cutting patterns into the walls and the cold iron of the chains holding me down.

Sudden pain races from my extremities as powerful hexagrammics take shape in the metal.

Wide with fury, my eyes dart around this enclosed space, and everywhere I look they burn as I see more hateful symbols, wards and runes inimical to my kind.

They burn! Oh, how they burn!

I do not understand what is happening! Why speak the words and make the blood sacrifices to bring me here only to inflict such agonies? I will exact a fearsome toll in blood and suffering for this insult.

I thrash against the restraints, tearing the flesh of this body. Blood flows to my feet and pours from my wrists. I slam my head back against the metal uprights of the throne. I feel cracks in the bone of my new skull.

Smoke fills my newborn lungs, spiteful incenses of sandalwood, elderling and cerewort. I start to choke, feeling it burn from the inside. I recoil from its hideous flavours.

The ivory death mask of the angel clad in brass and bone swims out of the fog. Others are with him, chanting a nonsensical doggerel that chafes at my new skin, and uncoils a black snake of disgust in my belly. Iron gauntlets seize my jaw, forcing it open and locking it in place with a bridle of cold iron that scars my flesh.

I scream and rage and thrash at this latest indignity.

Boiling fluids are forced down my throat, clear and glittering with rare elements.

More voices join the first, each with words from an ancient book that stab me with knives of ice. I howl in fury and pain, desperately clinging to this vessel, digging metaphysical claws deep into the meat of its psyche.

They may drag me out, but I will tear Merrin Dragomir with me.

As a fresh-blooded neophyte, the masters of the Exorcists Chapter set a daemon within my flesh and let it hollow me out. I accepted this fate, embraced it willingly, for it made me a deadlier weapon in the fight against the Ruinous Powers.

Forever would I be proof against the temptations of the Neverborn, and never again could my body play host to one of the infernal denizens of the warp.

The daemon lord understands the magnitude of its peril almost instantaneously.

It has abandoned the cold prison of the blade for the warmth of my flesh, but now it sees my body has been made proof against its kind.

My flesh rejects it.

The pain of my wounding ignites the organic furnace within me. It roars to life and a flood of combat stimms are released into my bloodstream. My limbs swell with power as the steel within snaps taut.

The links of the chains binding me stretch and shatter.

Perhaps they might restrain a conventional Astartes, but I am not a conventional Astartes.

I am Primaris.

My arms are free, and moments later my ankles are loose. I reach up and tear the iron frame from my head, grunting as the bone anchors buried in my skull tear loose; new scars earned in the war against the most ancient enemy of mankind.

I hurl the iron skull-cage at the ashen figure of Serdai Tymon, and his body explodes into lifeless dust, the empty robes falling to the kill-chamber’s floor.

Taking hold of the blade buried within my chest, I kick the stiff-limbed and eyeless thing back, all but breaking it in two. Viscous, yellow fluid pumps from its mouth, and squirming intestinal loops spill from its ruptured abdomen. The stink is that of an exhumed corpse.

Wrenching the hooked blade from my chest, I bite back the agony of the tearing barbs worked along its length, for they do not willingly release their grip upon my flesh. My blood soaks my chest and coats the blade, already turning to dark smoke on its diabolical metal.

In my hands I hold a weapon of blasphemous iron, brazen metal turned in the forges of the damned and cursed with a thousand spells of binding. Blood wells from deep gashes in my palms where I grasp the blade, and the weapon’s heat chars the skin there black.

Quickly I reverse it to hold it by the hilt, a length of ossified bone which now sprouts weeping barbs that pierce the meat of my hands for spite’s sake.

I block the pain and set about me with the weapon of my enemies.

Serdai Tymon is dead, and with a brutal economy of slashing cuts I ensure his acolytes follow him into death. There must be no living hosts left.

I feel the Reaper of Ash desperately scrambling to remain in my flesh like a drowning man struggling for the surface of a turbulent ocean. But my flesh is barren soil to its kind, my soul naught but ash and dust within which no seed can bloom, no dark root gain a foothold.

Even the cold horror of its imprisoning blade is better than my hostile form.

Before it can flee, I turn and swing the sword with all my might across the iron back of the excruciation throne. Without the daemonic essence within it, the ten-thousand-year-old steel shatters like glass as the ravages of millennia of corruption are visited upon it all at once.

Broken shards of unclean metal fly from the impact, and like the daemon the blade once bore, they too now revert to ashes.

A raging storm billows around me as the daemon lord’s essence begins to dissipate. The winds of the warp buffet me, hurling me around the cell. I slam into the walls, but my bones are like iron and do not break. Vorpal claws tear at me, drawing blood from a dozen wounds. The Reaper of Ash tries to drink it down as it rages against inevitable dissolution, but even my blood is poison to it.

A raging cyclone of dark energies fights to coalesce: twisting, nightmare forms with too many angles, ten thousand eyes, clicking teeth and inconstant lives that cannot find form.

The daemon is fighting to hold its essence in this world.

In one form or another, it has existed in realspace for millennia, but now its time is over.

I rise to my feet, shoulders back and head held high before the Reaper of Ash. Blood fills my mouth and I spit into the smoky hurricane filling the cell.

‘I am Merrin Dragomir, First Blade of the Sons of Balthasar, proud warrior of the Exorcists, holy servant of the God-Emperor of Mankind. And I cast you back to the warp!’

The hurricane of dark energies flies towards me, a dark miasma of claws, teeth and rage. It fades like a keening whisper lost in a storm before it reaches me. Motes of blackened ash surround me, slowly sifting through the mesh floor of the cell.

A cell that was never really my prison, merely a ruse to ensnare a monster.

It is done.

Water blessed by Imperial saints fills my belly, burning like metal from a forge-cauldron.

I feel my grip slipping. I have not had time to fully embed my consciousness within him; my claws of filth and degradation tear loose from his mind, but they will leave deep scars.

If I cannot have this vessel, then no one will! I burn and rage in a frenzy of spiteful devastation. I slip farther, and feel the veil calling to me.

NO! I WILL NOT GO!

The body around me thrashes in undreamed agonies, burning from within as I wreak what harm I can. The immaterium pulls at me, jealous of my time beyond its reach.

I WILL HAVE THIS FLESH!

I WILL KILL HIM FIRST!

I feel the colours, and hear the roar of the great, raging ocean behind the veil. The realm beyond is cold and empty, desolate and tasteless. This meat flesh is warm and succulent. I feel it, I taste it. I can wreak harm with it.

I WILL NOT GO!

But I cannot hold on, and the bilious black snake in my belly surges upwards, pushing me ahead of it in a burning, caustic tide. I cannot move this body, and I cannot close his mouth even though I fracture his jawbone all along its length as I try.

I am dragged out of the vault of his skull, driven up and out of his flesh.

I have nowhere to go.

I spill from Dragomir’s mouth in a froth of stinking matter.

Without flesh I am formless.

Enclosed by hateful wards of power, I cannot long exist here.

The veil opens up like a wound, pulling me back, but before the walls of the wasteland close in on me I see the broken thing I have left behind.

His flesh was powerful, awesomely so, but I have laid waste to him.

A mind on the very brink of insanity, a body shattered.

And within his mortal shell of flesh…?

Nothing.

Only a barren, forsaken void where none of my kind can ever take hold.

But neither will it know joy or love. Nevermore will he know brotherhood or light.

I may be banished now, but I can one day return to this realm.

But Merrin Dragomir’s soul will always be a broken, ruined thing.

Forever an empty place.

THE PHALANGITE ASCENDANCY

BEN COUNTER

Created in the Second Founding by the Imperial Fists, the history of the Soul Drinkers is one marked by tragedy after tragedy. Their destruction and redemption is shrouded in mystery, redacted by the Holy Ordos of the Inquisition. Now, they are reborn, their name and heraldry bestowed upon a fresh founding of Primaris Space Marines… but will this new Chapter meet the same fate as their forebears?

The glass shattered beneath Brother Cyvon as he plunged right through the glazed roof. The marble floor rushed at him and slammed hard into his right side. Stone and ceramite cracked. Red pain rang through his head as his skull hammered around inside his helmet.

Blackness throbbed in front of his eyes. White lines of static flickered where his armour’s auto-senses had been jarred out of alignment. His ears rang with a high tone.

He rolled onto his back, automatically checking his armaments as he had been sleep-taught over his years of training. His bolt rifle was still mag-clamped to his thigh and his bolt pistol was in its holster on the other side. He still had the brace of frag and krak grenades and the monomolecular combat knife in its sheath. Distorted readiness runes were projected against his retina, ticking off his vital systems.

All functional, except the helmet’s visuals. The eye-lenses were cracked and the image unfocused. He snapped off his helmet and fixed it by its mag-clamp to his waist.

He had landed in a magnificent marble-floored hall with wood-panelled walls, trimmed with gilded leafwork. The ceiling was leaded glass, a section missing where he had fallen through it. The cold, wet wind blew in from outside, where the storm was growing above the acropolis of Skagengrad.

‘Cyvon here,’ he subvocalised over the squad’s vox. ‘I’m separated. Came down in the palace complex somewhere.’

‘Brother!’ came the reply. Through the static of the storm and the strained vox distance, Cyvon recognised Sergeant Phraates’ voice. ‘We are in the administrative sector. I’m reading you three miles away.’

‘The others?’ asked Cyvon.

‘Alive. Brother Pitamenes landed badly, too,’ came the reply. ‘But much closer. We are cutting our way to him as we advance on the objective. His leg is broken but he still fights.’

His squadmates lived, then. The Naval landing craft had not become a tomb. ‘Was it a lightning strike?’

‘Either that or a missile from the city,’ said Phraates. ‘It matters not. Our task is the same. Behead the serpent.’

‘Behead the serpent,’ agreed Cyvon. ‘I shall rejoin you as soon as I can.’

‘You are too far away, brother,’ replied Phraates. ‘We are moving on Skagengrad’s parliament building even now. We cannot spare the time to reach you.’

Cyvon understood. The Soul Drinkers’ mission on Theophanos Minoris was the elimination of the small group of enfranchised citizens who made up its parliament and organs of government. With the leadership gone, the planet would soon submit to the rule of an imposed governor instead of requiring pacification through a drawn-out war. Thus the Soul Drinkers strike force deployed over the acropolis of the capital would achieve in hours what an Astra Militarum force might only accomplish with many years and untold losses.

The parliament had to fall. Squad Phraates was one of the units tasked with making that happen. They could not risk failure to secure one man, even a Space Marine, especially one who could look after himself.

‘What are your orders, brother-sergeant?’ asked Cyvon.

‘Make your way to the parliament building,’ said Phraates, his voice almost lost in the white noise of static. ‘By then the parliament will have fallen and this planet’s rebellion with it. You will find it governed only by corpses. But you will join us in the harrying of the survivors.’

‘Acknowledged,’ replied Cyvon. ‘I will see the serpent beheaded yet.’

Phraates’ reply was inaudible. The electrical storm over the city’s acropolis was fierce enough to knock out the squad’s landing craft, and it was interfering with their comms. Until he could reacquire contact, Cyvon was totally cut off, with most of Skagengrad’s palace district between him and his battle-brethren.

The palace was a grand monument to the high birth and virtue of the same ancient families who had rejected the Imperium during their time isolated by the Cicatrix Maledictum. They had massacred the Imperial envoys sent to bring them back into the fold. Orbital scans had shown the palace to be huge and complex, each wing built by a new family to outdo the last.

The direction he needed to go was through a set of huge, carved wooden double doors flanked by a pair of statues in the extravagant multilayered regalia of Theophanos Minoris’ nobility. Pictures hung on the walls, some monumental portraits dripping with arrogance, others idealised landscapes of the planet’s wilderness. Cyvon’s fall had sent him crashing through the roof of the palace’s gallery wing, a vast repository of works they had collected over thousands of years.

He heard voices from beyond the doors. He took his bolt rifle in his hands, checking its action. It was undamaged. He backed up against the doors and leaned against them, the weight of Space Marine and armour forcing them open a crack.

He saw a statue hall beyond, populated by a host of lords and ladies carved from marble. A band of a dozen people were assembling crates around them and rigging pulleys and ropes from hooks on the vaulted ceiling, ready to transport the statuary.

Even with the Angels of Death themselves descending on Skagengrad, the nobility had their people protecting their artwork rather than fleeing the city or even manning the barricades in hopeless defence.

The people were clothed in stained rags cut and bunched to resemble the extravagant cut of noble garb. Their faces were cut deeply around the eyes and mouth, fresh bloody wounds mimicking the painted faces of a masquerade ball. Beauty marks were drilled into cheeks and jawbones. Forearms had been flayed and the flaps of skin gathered to resemble lace cuffs. They carried lasguns and shotguns looted from the armouries of Skagengrad’s enforcers.

Intel on Theophanos Minoris had not been exhaustive, but even so Cyvon had not expected to see its inhabitants so far gone. The Soul Drinkers had expected loyal militia used by the ruling class as suicide troops and human shields. Dedicated, but still human in their behaviour. These souls, mutilated to ape their rulers, were something else entirely. It was no mundane rebellion that had wrenched the planet from the Imperial light.

Sleep-taught movements thrummed through Cyvon’s body. He knew exactly how to kill them. A trio of shots from his bolter would take down three, with a second volley finishing off any of those first targets who did not go down. Then charge, rattling off bolt rifle shots from the hip, scattering them. Once among them, they were as good as dead. The stock of his bolter and the edge of his combat knife would shatter skulls. Ribcages would collapse under his fists and greaves. If any of them got a shot off, he had faith in his armour.

+Who is this? His mind is bright and fierce.+

Cyvon tensed as the voice wormed into his brain. It was a painful, violating voice, an intruder in his head. His hearts beat faster as he recoiled inwardly.

+Not so blunt and brutal as the others I taste over my city. No, this one is keener. Seeking. Questioning.+

‘Who are you?’ hissed Cyvon.

+Is that not the same question you ask yourself?+

‘My brethren are hunting you down, witch!’

+Enough of this. Vermin! Loyal tools of your betters! Die for me!+

Twenty-four eyes turned towards him. The devotees were suddenly aware of Cyvon in the gloom of the doorway.

He let the old instincts take over. His bolter was up and his finger tightened on the trigger. Explosive bolts crackled across the statue chamber on streaks of micro-rocket propellant. Explosions burst among the devotees, and three of them fell in wet, red eruptions as the bolts detonated inside them.

‘Iconoclast!’ yelled one of the devotees, who had tattered green silk pinned to his flesh with steel needles. ‘Bring it down! Protect the beautiful!’

Return fire stuttered as the devotees scattered for cover. Cyvon dived behind the base of an equestrian statue. Las-fire and autogun rounds cracked and pinged off marble, and the statue’s head and sword arm were blown off.

‘Watch your fire!’ screamed the one who had given the order. ‘Their beauty is inviolate! Inviolate!’

Nine of them left, he thought rapidly. If he gave them the chance, if he was unlucky, if the witch who had spoken to him could give them strength, they could hurt him.

Cyvon put his shoulder against the statue and pushed. Nerve-fibre bundles, as strong as steel wire and wrapped around his own enhanced musculature, bunched and flexed. The statue shifted. Cyvon planted his back foot and rammed it forwards. The block gouged deep into the hardwood floor as it moved. Cyvon shoved the statue towards the source of the heaviest fire, letting it topple forwards so the mounted figure shattered against the crated statues.

The devotees scrambled to get away from him. He had closed the gap to a long stride. The only advantage the enemy had had was distance, and now that was gone.

One devotee dived behind a life-sized obsidian bull. The devotees might have been loath to damage the statuary, but Cyvon did not share their reluctance. He slammed his fist into the side of the bull and the obsidian shattered like glass, cascading onto the devotee. One shard, as sharp as broken glass, sheared into the man’s midriff and pinned him to the floor. He looked down at his transfixed body, numb with shock.

Cyvon did him the indelicate mercy of putting a bolter round through his throat before the pain hit him.

Another devotee was scrabbling across the floor, trying to keep low out of Cyvon’s firing line. A pair of bolter shots ripped through their body, blasting wooden splinters back up through their torso.

Seven left.

Fire stuttered in his direction, crimson las-bolts. Cyvon raised his left arm, putting the layered ceramite of his shoulder guard between his head and the shooter. He slammed into a devotee in a fanciful tailcoat tailored from tanned and embroidered skin, and let his weight carry them both into the side of an inscribed granite slab. Stone cracked under the impact. Cyvon felt the man’s ribcage crunching flat.

Autogun fire ricocheted off his armour’s back-mounted power pack. Cyvon whirled and fired a wide arc of shots, two of them catching another devotee in the face and shoulder. The man spun around in a spray of gore that spattered across the face of a white marble figure of a woman.

Five left.

One of the devotees yelled and ran at Cyvon. He cracked the back of his gauntlet against their face before they could get close enough to lunge with the bayonet at the end of their lasgun. Their head snapped to the side at an unsurvivable angle. The last knot of the enemy were sheltering among the half-wrapped statues, trying to choose between standing and firing or fleeing further into the chamber.

One hand rattled off the last rounds in his bolt rifle’s magazine. They punched through the shoulder and chest of one devotee holding a hefty Naval shotgun, blasting out the back of his torso. With the other hand Cyvon drew his combat knife, in the same motion slicing through the upper arm of another foe. Cyvon vaulted a robed statue lying on its side and tore the blade all the way through the upper chest and out, then lunged with it, point first like a duellist with a rapier, at the throat of another. The point punched up under their jaw and into the base of their brain, and their limbs flopped dead before he pulled out the blade.

The last devotee was running to find a hiding place among the statues crowding the far end of the chamber. Cyvon hurled the combat knife at them. The blade punched through one shoulder blade and through the side of their chest, pinning them to the statue of a crowned figure waving a sculpted flag.

Cyvon ran to the last body, pulled out his knife, and willed his hearts to slow down. He heard no more breathing, no guns being cocked or footsteps on the floorboards. There were no more enemies in the chamber, just the smell of bolter propellant and torn bodies.

+Impressive,+ came the intruder voice again. +Such a show of entirely unnecessary brutality. Is there anything more Imperial than the sound of a ceramite gauntlet on flesh?+

‘You are talkative for someone whose allies are being wiped out,’ said Cyvon. ‘My brethren are busy culling. The parliament is falling, if it has not already.’

+Quite the assumption to suppose I care about those perfumed inbreds.+ If the reply had been spoken aloud, it would have been with a smirk. +But this is good, Brother… Cyvon? Yes, Cyvon. Fight back! Scorn and defy me! There is far too much dull stoicism among your kind.+

‘These chattels did not last long,’ retorted Cyvon. ‘Do you believe you will fare better? I will find you, witch!’

+I do not doubt it, Brother Cyvon. I am not trying to hide.+

Cyvon flicked through the channels of the vox-net again. He could not raise his squad, or Captain Quhya’s command channel. He was still cut off. The storm rumbled and strobed outside, filling the airwaves with howling static.

Cyvon reloaded his bolt rifle and headed for the next doorway. The mission’s briefings had included the layout of the palace and he recalled he was somewhere in the southern wings. He had to head through the centre of the galleries to link up with the rest of the strike force. Cyvon had no knowledge of what was waiting for him in the galleries, except for a powerful psyker somewhere nearby who was definitely aware Cyvon was there.

The next chamber was high-ceilinged to accommodate the gargantuan canvases hanging on its walls. Reclining couches and a pair of dormant valet-servitors provided comfort for the city’s rulers to wallow in the glory of their art. The air was heavy with perfume, mingling with the shell propellant and blood from the statue room.

The closest canvas was a battle scene with armoured cavalry slamming into a host of reptilian xenos savages. The banners of Theophanos Minoris’ old noble houses flew from the cavalry’s lances. Aliens were crushed beneath the hooves of their gene-cultured warhorses. A lance skewered another through the throat, its purple blood a bright sash of colour to draw the eye.

+The Battle of Krixus,+ came the psyker’s voice. +Note the features of First Satrap Corondela, on the lead horse. Note the scars on his face. The painter included the marks earned in battle but omitted the ones he got from too many dalliances in the pleasure-houses.+

‘You are something of an expert,’ said Cyvon. He had no great wish to carry on a cultured conversation with the witch, but the more they spoke, the more he would learn about his enemy.

+Of course. I was the keeper of these galleries. Before, that is.+

Cyvon could hear gunfire from elsewhere in the acropolis. The Soul Drinkers were attacking and the aristocrats holding the parliament building were resisting. There was no way of knowing how the fight was proceeding.

He swept the galleries leading off to east and west down the sights of his bolt rifle. More paintings, some shrouded in white sheeting ready for transport. He wondered with an idle thought what it all might be worth. On one world they might buy a city, a continent, but on another they might be worth no more than the timber in their frames. Or perhaps there was some planet across the Imperium where the treasures of Skagengrad were a legend, a fountain of cultural power. With countless worlds, some forgotten for centuries, it was impossible to tell.

A Space Marine’s areas of expertise did not include art. Nevertheless, Cyvon could not deny the craftsmanship all around him, nor the fact that men and women had lived and died furnishing the planet’s rulers with such grandeur. Even as his memorised battle-rites had him noting escape routes and angles of attack, the magnitude of the art and what it meant became lodged in his mind.

+What do you see, brother?+

The psyker was reading his mind. His thoughts would betray him. The witch knew more about Cyvon with every second.

+When I saw it, my transformation was total. I could never go back. To think that millions have walked these halls and not seen what I have. Can you see it, Brother Cyvon?+

The portraits were of battles and coronations, weddings and debates. Cyvon recognised the architecture of the parliament chambers from the intelligence briefings on the mission, and the symbols of the noble houses everywhere.

‘I am not here to appreciate your curation skills, witch,’ said Cyvon. ‘You are a heretic, and you will die.’

+Spoken like a soldier!+ came the voice, calculated to infuriate with its mocking lilt. +But come now, Brother Cyvon. You can’t pretend you’re not curious.+

The flare of anger Cyvon felt was not at the voice’s tone, but at the fact it was right.

+It is fascinating to see the spark of your mind, brother! A burning that leaps from one thought to the next! A rare specimen we have here, I think. And to find that brain in the head of a Space Marine, no less!+

Cyvon cursed himself inwardly. His thoughts had been unguarded and the psyker had read them as clearly as if Cyvon had yelled them out loud.

He remembered Librarian Oxyath, a battle psyker of the Soul Drinkers lost on Kepris. Oxyath would have known how to shield his mind and render it a fortress impenetrable to the witch. Cyvon had no psychic power of his own, no such weapons and defences to bring to bear.

Hurriedly, Cyvon banished the name of Oxyath from his mind. He did not want the enemy psyker getting hold of the memory. He recalled, instead, the lessons he had learned about protecting his mind from the arts of a witch. One way was absolute contempt – the armour of hatred, a shield of denial that could blunt a witch’s mental assault. But this witch would expect such a crude response, and would mock Cyvon for it even as it failed.

He needed another way, and the lesson came to him from his tutelage as a novitiate. It was Oxyath who had told him that a mind could be blanked out with a flood of thoughts the enemy psyker could not use. Mental chaff to jam the psychic airwaves and deafen the witch, a sandstorm to spoil its aim.

Cyvon’s mind went back to the vast repository in the back of his memory, neatly filed away according to the sleep-taught battle-rites of a Primaris Space Marine. The tactical sermons, the wargear rites, the Battles Exemplar, the Codex Astartes itself, all the masses of information crammed into a Space Marine’s head.

A Space Marine exists only in battle, came one memory, a preface to the Codex. When not on the battlefield, he prepares for it. When victory is won, he learns from it. He exists only in battle, and he fights it every moment until he dies.

Cyvon charged forward through the nearest doors, shouldering them open. He burst into a chamber lined with more paintings, these ones sedate portraits of glowering aristocrats arranged to loom down over viewers as if passing judgement.

Close the gap to your enemy, and you close off every chance he has to defeat you. More words, this time attributed to Rogal Dorn, the primarch of the old Chapter after whom the Soul Drinkers were named. Cyvon needed a foe to close with. He needed to fight.

He heard raised voices through an archway to his right. He ran through it, bolt rifle in one hand and combat knife drawn in the other. He burst into the chamber to see a grand fountain in the form of an armoured knight mounted on a horse, the water pouring from the three-barrelled rifle in the knight’s hands.

Two brute-mutants had just entered through a set of doors to the outside, soaked from the rainstorm. They were grossly deformed abhumans with asymmetrical, hugely muscled bodies, and faces as lumpen and savage as the knuckles of a balled fist.

They must have been called to the gallery to face the enemy murdering his way through the devotees there. Even so, they were caught by surprise as Cyvon rushed right at them. One of them fired, its shotgun barking and sending hot chains of shrapnel across the fountain chamber.

It was a poor choice of tool for the job. Hundreds of pellets rained against Cyvon’s armour. Some tattooed a hot pattern across his unprotected face, but the collar of his chestplate shielded him from the worst and the rest pinged harmlessly off the ceramite.

The other brute-mutant shrugged the heavy stubber off its shoulder and groped for the trigger with its oversized fingers. Cyvon slammed into it before it could fire, throwing both of them back into the fountain pool.

Cold and fast. That is how a Soul Drinker fights. A rare fragment of the old Chapter came to mind, forgotten to Imperial history. It was the sole lesson they had passed down to their new Primaris incarnation.

Cold and fast, and show no mercy.

Cyvon let the sleep-taught lessons flood through him. Fighting styles and pressure points. The anatomy of humans and abhumans, the best ways to cripple and kill. He saw illuminated scripts describing every joint and muscle. He rolled through the shallow pool, striking out behind him to slice through the mutant’s hamstring. It bellowed wordlessly as the leg it was trying to stand on buckled under it. Cyvon rolled onto his back and fired a tight group of three bolter shots into the top of its head and huge, meaty shoulders.

The bolts burst inside the mutant’s chest cavity, blowing its ribcage apart. The propellant loads and projectile properties of the mass-reactive bolt-rounds flickered through Cyvon’s mind. The equations of ruination against muscle and bone. The mathematics of violence.

The second brute had shouldered its shotgun and pulled out a massive length of steel with chunks of rockcrete clinging to either end. It waded into the pool now reddening with the fallen mutant’s blood and swung the weapon down at Cyvon. The improvised club hammered hard into Cyvon’s side.

The armour held. His body shuddered with a dull upwelling of pain. He had left himself open. A calculated risk.

The images of his own physiology ran through his mind. The inner breastplate of fused ribs and the black carapace interfacing between his body and his armour, the twin hearts and third lung, the dense bone and enhanced musculature. It hurt, but he was not injured.

Cyvon came up firing. A bolt slammed into the mutant’s hip and blew the joint apart, but the mutant barrelled onwards with a bellow. It was either inhumanly tough or too stupid to realise the severity of the wound. Only a kill-shot would do.

Cyvon rolled to his feet, ducked low and powered up within the brute-mutant’s guard. His mind whirled with fighting styles now, duelling, wrestling, ways of mutilating the body of another living creature with hundreds of weapons and thousands of techniques. He stamped down on the mutant’s front leg, snapping the fibula and tibia beneath his sabaton.

The mutant pitched forward and Cyvon grabbed it by the throat, using its momentum to power it forward and slam its head into the flank of the marble horse. The stone cracked as the front of the mutant’s skull caved in.

The body slid into the filthy water, now a dark wine red with the two mutants’ blood. The mutant’s last breath rattled out of it as its brains leaked through its ruined forehead into the fountain pool.

The immediate threat was gone, but Cyvon had to keep going. He ticked off ways in and out, methods of approach, cover and firing points. A stray shot had blown out one of the window panes by the entrance doors, and the rain blew in from the storm. Cyvon recalculated the environmental factors in battle: water and mud underfoot, high winds affecting projectile flight, the thunder and roar that might hide a foe’s footsteps or the cocking of a gun.

He had to keep thinking, filling up his mind with noise. He charged through a door sprayed with the dead mutants’ blood, calculating in his mind how an ambusher might dive at him or skulk by the door frame, or how a tripwire might be stretched at shin height to detonate a hidden grenade.

‘There you are,’ said the psyker.

It was the same voice, but not in his head. It was spoken out loud.

Cyvon was yanked off his feet. The chamber whirled around him and he got an impression of fluted columns and a domed ceiling painted with angels battling daemons. Works of art standing discarded or in heaps. And a man, slender and unassuming, in a long grey coat with the silver piping of a high-ranking servant to the nobility.

Cyvon slammed against the wall back first. He was held in place as if his limbs were cemented into the stone. The pressure against him was so heavy he had to fight to draw breath.

The psyker had one hand held out in Cyvon’s direction, a smirk on his face. With his other hand he made a series of gestures that forced Cyvon’s fingers open and sent the bolt rifle and knife clattering away from him, across the chamber floor.

‘You almost got the better of me, Brother Cyvon,’ said the psyker. His face was delicate and pale. He had high cheekbones, a thin mouth and a long, straight nose on which perched a pair of small round spectacles. His straw-coloured hair was cut short, revealing a set of three small neural input jacks on his temple. He was devoid of ornamentation or weaponry. In any other situation, Cyvon would have barely registered his existence. The psyker tilted his head, examining the Space Marine caught in his mental web. ‘I was deafened to your thoughts. Your location, even. But fate led you right to me. And you made quite the commotion outside. I didn’t need to be psychic to know you were coming.’

‘And now you’ve got me,’ replied Cyvon. Speaking was about the only thing he could do. ‘You could crush me right now. Burst my hearts. Tear my brain out. But you haven’t. So I am forced to wonder, what do you want from me?’

‘Not everyone has a pet Space Marine,’ replied the psyker with a smirk. ‘But, quite right. You are good for more than dying. I have seen your mind, brother. Sharp, inquisitive. But so strangely unformed. Taken whole but unsullied and filled with all the ways of war. Beneath all the lore of violence, a blank slate. Brother Cyvon has not yet been born. The galaxy has not impressed your true self onto your mind.’

‘And what shall I call my vanquisher?’ replied Cyvon. Alongside the anger at being blindsided and the hatred of this heretic witch, there was a very human annoyance at the psyker’s mocking voice. ‘What name will enter history as the man who talked a Soul Drinker to death?’

‘A reasonable request,’ replied the psyker. ‘My name is Dwynen Kesseoth. I studied the history of Imperial art my whole life so I could serve the nobles of the acropolis watching over their prettiest things. It was the highest station I could hope to attain. But then, things changed.’

‘You surprise me,’ said Cyvon. ‘I had thought this was all business as usual.’

‘Humour ill becomes an Angel of Death,’ said Kesseoth. ‘But by all means, do try to match wits. Let us see just how sharp you are. My powers awoke at the same time as my decision to rip this sorry little world out of the Imperium’s grasp. The catalyst for that change was something I saw here.’

Kesseoth gestured again and after a few moments, one of the gallery’s monumental paintings drifted through the door. It was the scene of the charging nobles Cyvon had seen before, The Battle of Krixus.

‘Do you see it, brother?’ asked Kesseoth. Cyvon saw genuine curiosity on the man’s face, and hope. Kesseoth wanted Cyvon to come to the same conclusion he had, to validate the madness that had awoken in him.

It was an opportunity. If he kept Kesseoth talking, if he played the mad witch’s game, Cyvon would buy more seconds to find a way to strike back. Kesseoth’s attention was wavering between Cyvon and the painting, and Cyvon felt he had the use of his right hand, but his gun and knife were too far away to use.

Cyvon stared at the painting, trying to pick out the detail that had sparked such a revelation in Kesseoth.

‘You see it,’ said Kesseoth. ‘Tell me.’

The lead figure, the satrap on his charger, was not the detail he wanted. It was too obvious. The reptilian aliens were sketchy and inconsistent, the best estimate of a painter working without a model. First-hand knowledge of the xenos was unbecoming of the average Imperial citizen, so the aliens were abstracted figures of inhumanity and savagery. The sky above Krixus was darkness streaked with red.

In the background, almost merging with the darkness, were the suggestion of spears and serried ranks. A few muted bursts of gunfire. Curls of deep red paint, indicating the plumes on dozens of helmets.

‘There,’ said Cyvon, ‘behind the cavalry. ‘The citizen-soldiers. The people.’

Kesseoth smiled. The light behind his eyes was real. ‘And?’ he prompted.

‘They were the ones who actually won the battle.’

‘Krixus was won by the ranks of riflemen driving the xenos into the sea. The high-born cavalry were a detail. A sideshow. Without the nameless infantry, there was no victory. And when I realised that, I understood.’ Kesseoth’s face was that of someone beholding a holy vision, ecstatic. ‘The people. The masses. The low-born. Everything the nobles have is taken from the people. The victory at Krixus, every battle won. Every credit and coin, every thread of finery, every foundation of every city. All created from the blood and toil of the people. All stolen by their betters, painted over, and paraded as the triumph of those who did not win it.’

‘So you rebelled,’ said Cyvon. He flexed his fingers, eking out a little more movement from the tiny shred of freedom Kesseoth had given him.

‘My mind awoke,’ Kesseoth was saying. ‘I knew what I had to do. And now I had the power to do it. I wept that violence was the only way this world could be freed, but there was no other path.’

‘The people suffer under you just as they do under the high-born,’ replied Cyvon. Engaging Kesseoth in debate could win him a few more moments. His right hand could reach a little further, almost enough. ‘They are dying for you like they did for that syphilitic fop. You threw them in front of me to die.’

‘I did not say my way was perfect, brother,’ said Kesseoth with a shrug. ‘I must work with what I have.’

‘Let us suppose you somehow survive the Soul Drinkers descending on this palace to kill you,’ retorted Cyvon, ‘and you are the glorious liberator of Theophanos Minoris. What then? Do you truly believe the Imperium will let this world defy it? Will you move on to the next planet as a prophet of freedom, without the fury of Terra falling on you?’

‘Of course not,’ replied Kesseoth. ‘I am no fool. I will be stopped eventually, and this rebellion crushed. But how could I have such a revelation, and do nothing? It is better to die in a futile gesture, than continue to exist in a system of such misery. And the Imperium will bleed before it kills me.’

Cyvon’s fingers found the palm-sized metal capsule mag-clamped to the waist of his armour. He did not have his bolt rifle or knife, but he was not unarmed.

His thumb pulled out the pin on the frag grenade. The fuse ticked off three seconds.

Kesseoth clenched his fist. Telekinetic bonds crushed in around Cyvon. Ceramite cracked.

‘The bleeding,’ said Kesseoth, ‘will start with you.’

The grenade blast hammered against Cyvon’s back. He was deaf and blind for a moment, his body wrenched by the concussive explosion. Hot points of pain flared against his back as superheated shrapnel found a way between the plates of his armour.

The noise, the fury, the pain were his entire world, for the split second it took for the detonation to expend its energy and fill the chamber with fire.

His senses stuttered back. Cyvon had been thrown clear across the chamber, against the far wall and down to the floor. His armour had held, though the power source in his backpack was shattered.

Dwynen Kesseoth lay on the floor beneath Cyvon, pinned by the weight of a Space Marine and his wargear. The Battle of Krixus lay next to him, reduced to tatters of canvas in a splintered frame.

Kesseoth was alive. His face, pocked with sizzling shrapnel wounds, contorted as he brought his mind to bear. The explosion had broken his concentration, but a moment longer and he would grab Cyvon in a psychic fist again. This time Kesseoth would not pause to debate.

Cyvon did not give him that moment. He drew back his fist, and powered it into Kesseoth’s face.

Muscle fibre bundles contracted. His hearts pumped over-oxygenated blood through his body. The immense strength of a Space Marine slammed into Kesseoth’s skull, and the bone gave way.

Blood spattered over Cyvon. He could taste it, metallic and hot. He pulled his fist out of the gory mess, and all that remained of Kesseoth’s powerful brain dripped onto the chamber floor.

The central tower, its supports weakened by the intensity of the fire, collapsed into the flaming shell of the main parliament building. The bodies of the planet’s aristocratic ruling assembly, those not already consumed by the fire, were crushed beneath it where they had fallen in the debating chamber. The bolt rifles of the Soul Drinkers had cut them down in minutes, even as their household troops rushed to mount a spirited but pointless defence.

‘Quite the show you put on,’ said the Inquisitorial representative. Captain Quhya of the Soul Drinkers Second Company had not asked her name. If the Inquisition had wanted him to know, he would know it. The representative, a slender woman with cropped dark hair wearing an ornamented voidsuit, savoured the sight of the burning acropolis a few moments longer. ‘A blunt instrument the Adeptus Astartes may be, but there is beauty to be found in their wake. Do you have eyes on the galleries?’

‘There is some damage,’ said Quhya. ‘The motivating force behind the rebellion was a witch who was based there. In eliminating it, some of the artworks were lost. Most of the collection is intact.’

‘It was perhaps wishful thinking they would be recovered spotless,’ said the representative. Her face was patterned with silver circuitry and her eyes were likewise silver, without iris or pupil, so it was difficult to read her expression. ‘Even so, my masters will remember your service in recovering the collection.’

‘We did not do this as a favour to your masters,’ replied Quhya sternly. ‘Theophanos Minoris was under the sway of heretics. We delivered it back to the light of the Imperium.’

‘And mended your ill reputation with the Holy Ordos of the Inquisition at the same time,’ replied the representative smoothly. ‘The Emperor’s will reigns here once more and the Inquisition has possession of a priceless trove of the Imperium’s history. Everyone wins, captain. Except for the heretics. But of course, we would not dream of leaving your valour here unrewarded.’

The representative was accompanied by an entourage of servitors, gilt-cased bipedal machines that appeared largely decorative. One of them strode forward carrying a rolled-up canvas in its articulated hands.

‘Compliments of the ordos,’ said the representative.

Quhya took the canvas and let it unroll. It was a painting. It depicted two figures with the musculature and surgical scars of Space Marines, duelling with short swords in a sand-strewn arena. One figure was already wounded, first blood having been drawn, and so the duel was captured in its closing moments. Banks of seating were full of Space Marines in various liveries watching the contest, with the banners of several Chapters hanging behind them. The black gauntlet of the Imperial Fists and the crusader’s cross of the Black Templars were instantly recognisable. They were all Chapters that named Rogal Dorn as their primarch, as the Soul Drinkers did in honour of the Chapter whose name and colours they wore. That Dorn was their primarch was one of the only certain facts that remained about the first, forgotten Soul Drinkers.

‘The Feast of Blades,’ mused Quhya.

‘Well over a thousand years old,’ said the representative. ‘Entitled The Phalangite Ascendancy. The sons of Dorn only hold the Feast of Blades once every hundred years or so, and rarer still were the times an artist was there to record it. This event was on the Phalanx itself, making the painting a true rarity. We thought it a fitting gift to show our appreciation.’

Quhya’s eye was drawn to a group of onlookers in the stand. They were just outlines, their details blank canvas where they had been cut out of the picture and the hole patched up. One of the banners had been obliterated in the same way.

Something else caught his attention about one of the two unarmoured Space Marines, the wounded one. He had a tattoo on his pectoral, over the distorted skin covering the panels of the subcutaneous black carapace. It read ‘Frigidarum celeres’.

Cold and fast.

‘This one was a Soul Drinker,’ said Quhya. ‘But his brethren were cut out of the canvas. Whoever obliterated them missed the motto of the old Chapter.’ He looked up at the Inquisitorial representative. ‘The Soul Drinkers were not forgotten. They were deliberately erased.’

‘So it seems, captain. Most curious.’

‘Only the Inquisition would have the power to remove a Space Marine Chapter from history.’

‘An intriguing theory,’ said the representative, her expression unchanging. ‘Alas, I do not have the liberty of time with which to discuss your conclusions. My retinue is collecting the artworks ready for transport. I should oversee them. Theirs are not the most delicate of hands. Victory be with you, captain. The Emperor protects.’

The representative drifted off towards the palace district’s galleries, attended by her gilded servitors. Quhya made to call after her and demand answers, but swallowed back the words. He would get no answer.

If the Inquisition wanted him to know more, he would know it.

Cyvon threw another corpse onto the fire. The bodies not destroyed in the parliament’s collapse had been gathered up for disposal on this pyre. The dead would be cleansed of their sin and their charred bones would lie there as a reminder of the Imperium’s revenge.

With Dwynen Kesseoth dead, the storm had subsided. The thin drizzle of rain was not enough to dampen the bonfire of bodies.

Kesseoth’s body lay at Cyvon’s feet. With the head obliterated, it looked like just another dead flunky of Theophanos Minoris’ nobility. And in the grand scheme of the galaxy, Kesseoth was nothing. Just another rogue witch, another rebel. They rose with grim regularity across the Imperium, and were put down by instruments of Imperial wrath like the Soul Drinkers.

He picked up the psyker’s limp body. Something fell from the bloody tatters of Kesseoth’s coat. Cyvon threw the body into the fire, and Dwynen Kesseoth ceased to exist.

Cyvon bent to pick up the object that had fallen. It was a book, bound with leather and held shut with a gold clasp. It was tiny in Cyvon’s enormous gauntlet. He opened the clasp and the book fell open to a page covered in cramped writing, stained with drops of wayward ink. The energy of the scrawl spoke of passion and devotion.

Kesseoth’s philosophy, written down as it formed in his mutating mind. He had gone mad as the psychic powers awoke in him, and poured that madness onto these pages.

Cyvon moved to throw the book into the fire after Kesseoth’s body. There was no need to keep such a repository of heresy. It was better off ashes.

But as he held it, his wrist shuddered and the impulse to cast it into the fire died out. It did not need to vanish into the flames just yet. Automatically, with a well-tested motion, he checked the action and load of his bolt rifle, the book slipping into an ammo pouch as he confirmed his ammo count.

The thoughts of the book, of Kesseoth, drained from his memory. There was plenty more to do on Theophanos Minoris before the Soul Drinkers would be done with it, and he could not be distracted by idle ruminations. Closing the clasp on the ammo pouch, Brother Cyvon turned away from the fire with a blank mind.

DISGRACED

CHRIS FORRESTER

On the battlefield, clad in gore-splattered armour, chainsword in hand; this is the home of the Angel’s second sons. Sanguinius’ legacy is a blessing, not a curse, for the Flesh Tearers embrace being that which all of the Chapters of the Blood truly are – monsters. Where others hide amidst finery and culture, Gabriel Seth’s Chapter embody the rage that burns at the heart of every son of Sanguinius.

Hunger veined the hybrid’s cancerous yellow eyes.

Harox met its glare, driving his chainblade deeper into its chest. He felt its hunger like the hot kiss of an open flame, an insatiable need the Flesh Tearer found uncomfortably familiar. He wrenched his blade from its abdomen, his second stroke detaching its head. His father’s Rage thrashed against the bonds shackling it in his soul, a beast demanding release.

‘Sanguinius, armour me against the weakness of my flesh,’ he whispered, bisecting a second hybrid. The prayer strengthened his resolve to hold the beast at bay. It would not consume him today. ‘And the darkness of my soul.’

‘Harox.’ Cadmus’ growl ripped through his reverie. ‘The creature has not come.’

Harox scanned the battlefield for their target. Hybrids and purestrains swarmed the open area, once a convergence point for civilian haulers to cross Galen Bridge. Its frame of plastek overnight quarters and sheet-metal taverns was little more than a chain of rubble hillocks. The Administratum office was a flame-gutted ruin, and thoroughfares were littered with the dead. Fallen Flesh Tearers lay cold amongst them, knots of crimson and ash amid the khaki of the Militarum, and the amethyst and azure of the cult.

Only the barbican, and its attendant Arbites facility, still stood.

His bolt pistol kicked hard, shot selector on full-automatic. Mass-reactives obliterated bulbous craniums and sinewy torsos. An aberrant vanished in crimson clouds, shredded by bolter fire. Harox nodded his thanks to Gathas, driving his blade into a three-armed fiend with fingers tipped by curved claws. He searched again, seeing his brothers carve bloody swathes into the xenos, supported by fire from the barbican’s remaining garrison.

He could not see the nexos.

‘Sergeant Torvun,’ he voxed the Militarum liaison, mustering the calm he had spent three centuries practising. ‘Have your augurs detected the creature’s Chimera?’

‘No, lord.’

Harox roared, irked by its cowardice, as a genestealer’s claws gouged his breastplate. His blade slashed upwards, severing its forearms. The downswing disembowelled it. A second fiend leapt at him. Chainteeth chewed through mottled flesh and carnelian chitin.

Their kin closed, hissing curses in broken Gothic.

‘We should withdraw,’ Cadmus said, voice clotted by anger. His power maul pulped a hybrid’s skull, cranial matter sizzling on its spiked head. ‘Rearm for the next attack.’

Wrath stained Harox’s laughter.

‘You suggest we flee?’ Bullets sparked against his crimson plate, blunted nails and rivets clinking from it like rain. A las-bolt pierced the ribbing beneath his cuisse, bleaching his humour with fury. ‘These wretches may be cannon fodder, but their deaths will be the snare that entraps their nexos.’

‘Holding the bridge is our mission, brother,’ Zuren remarked, chainaxes thick with gore. Cadmus and Tyon fought beside him. ‘And there is no guarantee it will come.’

Harox roared, tearing the head from a hybrid in steel-grey Militarum carapace. He crashed into the xenos, ribbons of tainted blood and aerosolised meat trailing his chainsword’s arcs. Severed limbs tumbled free. Organs slapped wetly onto plascrete. His hearts howled, Sanguinius’ wrath a white heat pounding through them.

Xenos shrieks swelled the agony rising in his skull.

‘Zuren puts it kindly,’ Cadmus spat. ‘This is our penance for your actions, sergeant. You risk compounding our dishonour pursuing this self-appointed mission.’

‘Blame me again, brother, and I will kill you,’ Harox snarled, beheading a purple-faced abomination with a whip of corded muscle. ‘The new breed required education in what being a Flesh Tearer means, and eliminating the tainted wretch orchestrating these attacks will satisfy our penance.’

‘A most exuberant education it was, brother-sergeant,’ Tyon said. His bolter spat death in flashes of gold. ‘Two barely survived, and one will never fight again. It is a wonder they have not made you First Captain.’

Rage smeared his vision with black brushstrokes. It blended with the vitae misting his optics, deepening it to a rich burgundy. He hacked another creature apart, his angel’s teeth bared. A part of him longed to immerse itself in the adrenal rush of killing, to dispense with restraint and surrender himself to the beast within, to do what he was born to do. Kill.

‘You do not speak here, boy.’ The words scraped from his throat, emerging as the throaty snarls of a starved predator. ‘Your birth and gene-template earned your elevation to First Company, so do not presume wearing the white skull gives you a right to judge me.’

The younger Flesh Tearer fell silent.

‘Words born in your black hearts,’ Cadmus snapped. Harox hacked through a clutch of neophytes in oil-stained overalls. Their blood splashed his visor, its tainted salt-iron tang curdling his thirst. ‘They do not change the fact our brother is right.’

‘You dare–’

‘The Primaris lord over us like they are Blood Angels,’ Zuren snarled, cutting Harox short. He alone shared Harox’s opinion on Tyon, the only survivors of the original First Company left in their squad, and came to his defence. ‘The Saviours of the Blood. Their preening arrogance sickens me.’

‘Dumah epitomised their arrogance,’ Gathas said. ‘The voidborn cur assigned us this duty to hoard our glory for his own kind.’

Dumah.

Rage boiled through his veins at the mention of the Primaris Chaplain’s name. He stood in judgement over Harox’s efforts to instruct the new breed. Reassignment from the vanguard and menial duties had been his penance, but Dumah twice-salted the wound by bestowing their vanguard position on his Primaris brothers and sending Harox’s squad to defend the bridge.

The Flesh Tearer powered into a pack of chittering hybrids. Claws raked his helm and plastron, splitting ceramite and flesh. Ruby droplets spilled from the shorn plate. Harox fought without skill or finesse. He hacked creatures apart, tore hunched spines free and slashed traitorous throats. Red and black washed his vision.

He was an angel of wrath and ruin.

Claws punched through his side. Blood seeped from his golden armour. He snarled, dismembering the creature foolish enough to strike him. Deranged traitors charged, unholy faith and neuroslave implants robbing them of hesitancy and fear. He dragged his blade through the press of bodies, glittering tendrils of disruptive energy scorching corrupted flesh. Wrath seared his veins clean of grace or sympathy, fuelling every strike.

His warriors slaughtered at his side, their armour stained crimson and black. Their encarmine blades ripped through a phalanx of cowled Mechanicum magi and battle-servitors, voxmitters blaring grating bursts of scrapcode. Angelus bolters shredded beastmen and mutant slaves in streams of bloodshard rounds.

‘For the Emperor!’ he roared, fist splitting the breastplate of a mutant Astartes. Black blood and unnatural organs spilled from its ruined chest. ‘For the Imperium!’

Bolters barked at the farthest end of the armourium, drawing his attention. Armoured warriors blasted apart dishevelled crew and Traitor Army, the red of their warplate darkened by old smoke and dried gore. His heart soared to see the Blood Angels unbowed before the horrors stalking the Vengeful Spirit.

Another Space Marine charged him, the XVI’s sea-green ceramite encrusted with bile and old blood. He blocked the crackling face of its thunder hammer, his free hand punching through the traitor’s abdominal plating. The traitor punched back, gurgling an oath to Horus through a mouth rapidly filling with blood. He ignored the feeble strike.

His blade split the legionary in two.

‘Harox.’

His head snapped round.

A Sanguinary Guard stalked towards him. His armour was clotted red and ash black; painted, not matted by smoke and gore. There was no trace of gold and its artistry had been unseated by craters and gashes. Sparks cascaded from torn cables and lubricant oozed onto white armour sealant. The ruby teardrop of his Legion was not borne aloft on angelic pinions, instead powering a savage sawblade.

‘Harox,’ the warrior said again.

A dark corner of his mind supplied the warrior’s name.

Zuren, of the Flesh Tearers.

He saw no sign of Fifth Company’s heraldic devices, nor the flensing knife used by Amit’s warriors. He tensed, suspicion blending with rage and adrenaline, flooding his tired limbs with fresh energy. Something was not right.

‘Harox,’ Zuren said, anger and caution blended into an approximation of quiescence. ‘The enemy are slain, and we have Primaris reinforcements.’

His head turned to the Blood Angels.

Their IX Legion livery was gone. Their armour colours matched Zuren’s and the heraldic device of the Flesh Tearers marked their pauldrons and poleyns. Taller and broader than Zuren, they picked their way through the fallen, confirming their deaths with brutal parsimony. Their armour was of an unfamiliar mark and their weapons were cruder and more utilitarian than anything used by his Legion.

Even the other Sanguinary Guard now bore the Flesh Tearers’ livery, their static-laced whines pawing at his ears. Chainweapons vented red mist and scraps of flesh, their warplate no better than Zuren’s. They regarded him questioningly as much as they regarded the taller warriors with distrust and dislike. He hated the tension crackling between his sons.

Not sons. Brothers.

Strands of awareness cobwebbed his mind, and his eyes began to perceive the flame-gutted Administratum office, and the hillocks of plastek and corrugated metal. The smell of oil and incense faded, leaving behind the aromas of spilled innards and evacuated bowels. Two hulking aberrants were dead at his feet. An overturned Goliath burned beside him.

No Dark Mechanicum, mutant slaves or Traitor Space Marines.

Clarity shivered down his spine, the sensation a little too like fear. This was not the Siege of Terra, nor was he aboard the Vengeful Spirit.

He was not Sanguinius.

Harox mustered his resolve, armouring his mind and soul. Blood trickled from his nose and his skull flushed with pain, hard and hot, as he shackled it again. The beast demanded its release, but there was a confidence to its atavistic snarls. It tasted freedom, tasted blood and glorious slaughter. It knew it would be free again.

Harox knew it too.

The Flesh Tearer shifted his attention to the world beyond the bone arena of his skull. His retinal feed was a static-speared litany of buckled and breached armour plates, areas patched by sealant-foam islands of pale grey amid the orange and yellow. Pain bleached his nerves white hot and his Larraman cells worked to clot the wounds still bleeding. Biological augments flooded his bloodstream with synthetic stimulants to keep him conscious.

His battleplate’s pharmacopoeia reacted far slower.

Neither that nor the wounds mattered to him.

His brothers stood in a tight knot, watching him with naked suspicion. Cadmus, Zuren and Gathas, their signum runes pulsing verdant green where Tyon’s was gunmetal grey. Harox spotted him scant seconds later, torn in half from crown to pelvis. The Flesh Tearer prayed to Sanguinius that Tyon would find peace at his side, revolted that all he could picture was lapping the rich Astartes blood from the plascrete before xenos taint defiled it.

‘Are you afflicted?’ Zuren asked quietly. Cadmus hefted his power maul and Gathas’ bolter crunched against his pauldron. Harox did not blame them. ‘Was it the Rage?’

‘No, though I was close,’ Harox said. ‘The xenos employed witchery in a vain effort to confound me. I resisted long enough to bring the wretch responsible down.’

It shamed him to deceive them, the lie damaging his honour far beyond the wreckage Dumah’s vindictiveness made of it. He met their flickering, forest-green optics and forced his breathing to remain even. Muted vox-clicks passed between them, their weapons still raised. He pulled off his helm, fixing them with a steady glare.

‘If you feel I am a danger, then kill me.’

The beast shrieked, demanding he strike them down and anyone else that crossed his path. He wrestled it into submission, forcing his facial muscles to remain completely still. Even the slightest twinge could give away the battle taking place inside his skull. He was ready to die, willing to die, if it meant the beast remained in its cage.

For now.

As if sensing this, the beast relinquished its efforts to overwhelm him, skulking back into the deepest recesses of his mind. It lurked there, at the edge of his awareness, like predators of Ancient Terra torn between their hunger and their fear of fire. It wanted freedom too much to risk death beforehand. Harox smiled at its very-human weakness.

Silence accrued seconds until a full minute had passed.

They lowered their weapons.

Harox smiled thinly and replaced his helm. Though the beast remained quiet, lurking at the edge of his conscious mind, he knew it would consume him before long. He vowed to spend what coherence remained to him proving their trust was warranted.

Sergeant Torvun’s tired voice buzzed in his ears.

‘Lord, we are reconfiguring our defences per your instruction,’ she said, with a hint of pride. ‘I have ordered runners to distribute fresh ammunition to all new positions.’

‘Good.’

She paused for a moment, words quivering on the tip of her tongue.

‘Are you certain these tactics will draw it out?’

Harox bit back his instinctive response, certain it would be misconstrued as a threat. He took a deep breath, quashing the beast’s furious brand of scorn, and chose his words with deliberate care. He admired her bravery, daring to question an Astartes.

‘This creature is driven by the imperative coded into its genes. It craves knowledge the way you crave food, wine and the warm embrace of your kind. It knows no other drive, and we present an unforeseen factor, something it cannot resist.’

‘It resisted this time.’

He smiled, as did the beast. This human was brave.

‘It did,’ he admitted, still irked by the creature’s cowardice. ‘Though it was unlikely it would reveal itself after only one assault was stopped. Two will force its hand.’

‘I understand, lord.’

Harox watched the Intercessors prowling amongst the dead. Blood wept from slashed throats and skewered hearts. A hand grasped weakly for the blade that ended its owner’s life. Harox blinked, unsure whether he had seen sea-green ceramite or the mutated flesh of an aberrant. Another thought presented itself, one he did not like.

‘Did you request reinforcements from my Chapter?’

‘No, lord,’ she said at once. ‘Nor did the command staff.’

He strangled a low snarl and closed the link.

‘Why are they here?’ Zuren asked. Anger rippled in his voice.

‘Dumah?’ Gathas suggested.

A lieutenant detached himself from the squads, his armour freshly painted in the Flesh Tearers’ livery. His bolt rifle was slung, a power sword sheathed at his waist. The green blood droplet on his pauldron marked him as Fourth Company. The scent of lapping powders and unguents clung stubbornly to the wargear. He removed his helm, exposing a youthful face reworked by Sanguinius’ gene-seed, marred only by a scar down one cheek.

‘Veteran Sergeant Harox.’

The stiff formality in his voice needled Harox’s ire. The Flesh Tearers had never prized formality, save in their most private traditions and rituals. Harox had met many amongst the Blood who used such decorum as a shield to hide their savagery, but this warrior sounded more like one of Guilliman’s sons than a son of the Blood.

‘Yes.’

‘I am Tanthius of the Fourth Company.’ He offered his hand in greeting. Harox gripped his vambrace after a moment of hesitation. ‘My warriors and I are honoured to serve beside veterans of the First Company.’

‘Why are you here?’

Tanthius bristled.

‘Chaplain Dumah is launching his assault against the brood nest,’ the lieutenant said hotly, cementing Harox’s first impression. The Flesh Tearer scowled. Guilliman’s influence was clear in these former Unnumbered Sons. ‘He assigned me this command to ensure the enemy cannot escape over the bridge or undermine the planet’s industrial capacity.’

Harox growled, fingers curling involuntarily.

‘Dumah!’ Zuren spat on their squad’s private channel. Harox felt his rage like heated brands against his flesh. Apoplectic roars issued from the beast’s fanged maw at this latest outrage. ‘He assigns us this wretched duty, then twists the knife further by sending his own breed to play nursemaid.’

Grunts of agreement snapped from Cadmus and Gathas.

‘That sort of underhanded game is more in keeping with an Angel Encarmine than a Flesh Tearer,’ Cadmus snapped. ‘If this is what our Chapter will become, then I weep for the legacy of Sanguinius and the future of the Blood.’

‘Enough!’ Harox barked, with more severity than he intended and a resolve he did not feel. He wanted to beat Dumah’s face bloody. ‘Whining will change nothing.’

Tanthius motioned for them to follow him.

Harox fell in beside him, matching the other Flesh Tearer’s pace and stride. The soft purr of Mk X Tacticus battleplate itched his teeth. The beast pounded at Harox’s mental defences, clad in plate as black as its rage and daubed with red saltires. He wrested it back into its cage, blood running from his nose again.

In one hand Tanthius clutched a small, circular hololithic projector. Galen Bridge and the cliff-sided manufactoria on its farthest side were rendered in chips of cerulean light. Harox’s mind churned the lieutenant’s words.

‘You seem preoccupied with its industrial capacity,’ he said slowly. The words thickened on Harox’s tongue, discoloured by bile and a bleak, bitter humour. ‘Why should we lower ourselves to consider such factors?’

‘The Technicarum needs raw materials to replenish our armoury,’ Tanthius said. ‘This world will provide all we need and more, as long as they have the capacity.’

Harox envisioned himself tearing the lieutenant’s arm from its socket.

Tanthius led them towards the Arbites detention facility. A two-storey building, it was surrounded by a perimeter wall topped with Tarantula sentry guns and curls of razor wire. The barbican towered over it, its reinforced plasteel gates buckled by battle cannon shells and man-portable missiles. Its turrets and revetments were similarly damaged.

‘We are Flesh Tearers,’ Harox growled. ‘We are blades forged of the Angel’s pure wrath, to be cast into the hearts of his enemies. It demeans his legacy to squander our fury preserving industrial infrastructure, because some Militarum strategos considers it a priority objective.’

Tanthius laughed and Harox’s blood boiled.

The Flesh Tearers strode between staggered wrecks of dirtcycles that were formed into dragon’s teeth outside the gates. A quick sign from Tanthius split the Intercessors into combat squads, each one dragging rubble and more wrecked bikes into the gaps to form improvised defensive barricades across the front of the building.

Harox kept his own warriors close.

‘It amuses you to dishonour our father’s legacy?’ Harox asked, his voice a dangerous whisper. Visions of unrestrained violence painted his thoughts a deep crimson. The beast urging him to submit, promising Tanthius’ death as the first of many. ‘The Great Angel–’

‘Would understand this will help us prosecute mankind’s foes,’ Tanthius said, pushing open the facility’s door. ‘The Great Rift has isolated us from Cretacia and from every world oathed to supply the Chapter with the raw materials and victuals necessary to continue our role in fighting the Emperor’s wars.’

Harox made to protest, but Tanthius cut him off.

‘Focusing on the defence of the bridge when we could be on the attack is distasteful,’ he agreed, entering the bunker. Harox followed him, the rest of his squad close behind. ‘But we must place purpose above our feelings. After all, why else are we here, if not to save it? If destruction were our goal, we could have obliterated this world from orbit. But that would mean we could tithe nothing from its rulers. No new warriors or materiel.’

Harox said nothing.

The Flesh Tearer replaced his bolt pistol magazines and his chainsword’s teeth-track. Militarum runners scurried around him, bearing cartridges filled with additional supplies. Their hearts’ heavy beats and the scent of copper on their breath filled Harox’s mouth with saliva. His fangs snagged on his lip.

Harox forced himself to look away, distracted by the weak rumble of plasma engines beneath his feet. He drew in deep breaths, the taste of recycled air and molten metal bitter on his tongue. Inane muttering circled his hearing, the voices of demented souls and ravenous warp beasts given purchase in the material realm. Sketched outlines of fang and talon caressed his warriors’ souls, promising glorious slaughter.

They twitched and snarled in response, their panting sawing through their sloped visors. They exuded revulsion at the hunched, mewling creatures that skittered around them, grasping at their battered plate with emaciated fingers. Squeezing his blade’s activation bar, he stalked towards the wraiths. Monomolecular teeth sliced through empty air. He would slaughter every cursed heretic and daemon aboard the Vengeful Spirit.

‘No,’ he muttered, forcing himself to see what was truly before him. The Militarum runners stared at him, urine staining their fatigues with expanding moss-green ovals. Tanthius watched him impassively. ‘I will not fall to my father’s curse.’

The words sounded hollow, especially to him.

‘Killing the nexos orchestrating these assaults will minimise the threat to the bridge,’ Harox said, using the distraction to anchor himself in the present. The promise of the nexos’ death helped his focus. ‘It will disrupt the local forces and weaken their command structure.’

Tanthius appeared to consider it.

‘No,’ he said, after several moments. ‘One needless death has already occurred in pursuit of that objective. The Codex supports the logic, but with greater numbers than we can currently muster. We hold here, and counter-attack when necessary.’

Harox snarled at the implicit insult against his command. No son of Cretacia ever died needlessly in the Emperor’s service. Tanthius’ raised hand forestalled his retort.

‘Purpose before feelings, brother,’ Tanthius said, ripe with unintended condescension. ‘We cannot abandon our duty to satiate our bloodlust. If we show restraint now, the xenos will blunt themselves on our wrath, and it will preserve our brothers’ lives for the real fight.’

Tanthius left without waiting for a response, barking orders to his men.

Harox made to follow. Zuren and Cadmus restrained him.

‘Ignore his words,’ Zuren said, his own voice trembling. Cadmus and Gathas grunted their agreement. ‘Reserve your wrath for the enemy, brother, as we will reserve ours. Hold it for but a handful of minutes and we will prove what Flesh Tearers are capable of.’

Harox relented, breathing hard. Black claws sliced his vision with emerald fire and iron bulkheads. They were right; it would do no good to let his anger overwhelm him. Harox forced his breathing into an even pattern and led his warriors from the facility.

They did not have to wait long.

The Intercessors opened fire, bolts ploughing into the hissing tide of claw, chitin and mottled flesh. Hybrids disappeared in clouds of bloody mist, every squeeze of his trigger rewarded with the hot rush of serotonin. The fiends still advanced, their fear overridden by their patriarch’s will, brandishing autoguns and serrated blades of dark jade.

Return fire snapped against the Flesh Tearers’ battleplate, penetrating weak points or battle-damage. A bullet sliced through Harox’s damaged pauldron, lodging in his shoulder. He bit back a snarl, dismissing the alert runes bleaching his vision. Suppressants squirted into his system, the pain melting away. Harox opened fire, eviscerating hybrids with every shot.

Irritation gnawed at him. The nexos had not appeared.

Goliath Rockgrinders chewed through rubble and corpses, clearing paths for the cultists’ advance. Achilles Ridgerunners harassed the Flesh Tearers with heavy stubbers and mortars. An Intercessor vanished in a crimson puff of smoke and ceramite. Harox’s bolts atomised an Achilles’ gunner above the waist. Kaleidoscopic beams of concentrated energy sliced from the barbican’s lascannon emplacements, detonating engine blocks in brilliant swirls of flame.

A Leman Russ fired its battle cannon.

Three Intercessors and Gathas were blasted from their feet. Two of the Primaris Marines stood back up and resumed firing, their battleplate cracked and scorched. One’s shoulder had been reduced to a nub of stringy tissue and loose cables. His bolt pistol spat death as heavy bolter rounds stitched the barricades, pulping two more Intercessors. A lascannon sheared through the tank’s reinforced glacis, discharging its magazine in a rippling series of explosions.

Gathas’ signum-rune fizzled grey.

Harox’s roar reverberated in his helm. Anger seared his veins like boiling oil. He surged over the barricade, the musk of scorched flesh and fyceline drawing him closer to the enemy. Hybrids bore down on him, a chittering storm of chitin and claw. He would bathe in their blood before the day was out. Cadmus and Zuren came to his side, cutting hybrids apart with merciless precision as they paced forward.

‘Sergeant, hold position.’

Harox laughed, the sound barbed like his chainblade’s snarl. He dragged his sword through the press of tainted humanity, lives harvested in pained shrieks and spatters of dark blood. Blades gouged his battleplate, sliced through fibre-bundles and cabling, drawing rivulets of blood. Harox’s chainsword punched through a hybrid’s chest, wrenched free to bifurcate another. Its halves slipped greasily aside.

‘We are wrath,’ he howled, carving apart another. ‘We are fury!’

‘Do not break cover, brother, not yet!’

‘Join us, Tanthius,’ Harox implored, backhanding a hybrid. Claws sheared his thigh-plate free, tearing through servo-muscles. ‘We can break this assault here. Join us. Fight like sons of the Great Angel!’

Tanthius ignored him.

Harox scourged Tanthius for his cowardice, but the words disappeared amid Zuren’s howling. Hatred thickened the Flesh Tearer’s voice, the names of dead warriors weaved into guttural roars. Zuren pressed ahead of Harox and Cadmus, chainaxes clearing a path. Harox cut and carved to keep it open, battle fury obscuring rational thought in black mist.

‘Lord Harox!’ Torvun’s joy anchored him in the moment, self-identity and control reasserting itself sluggishly. The beast howled, thwarted. ‘We’ve sighted the Chimera.’

His eyes scanned until he saw it.

The Chimera trundled to a stop, las-fire panging against its dozer blade. A lithe hybrid in azure robes and steel-grey carapace emerged, escorted by five muscled abominants, their bodies twisted by supernumerary limbs and polycephalic growths. It touched a fallen hybrid’s forehead, tendrils of psychic power snaking from its eyes.

‘Kill it!’ Harox roared.

Las-beams sheared through the Chimera’s hull. Its fuel tank ruptured, roiling flame and superheated shrapnel consuming two abominants. The survivors clustered around the nexos, shielding it. Harox cut down a purestrain genestealer and met its stare. An ugly leer coiled along its lipless mouth, the expression radiating pomposity.

‘Kill it!’ he screamed.

‘It has moved beyond the range of our weapons, lord,’ Torvun said. ‘As has your squad. We can reacquire it if we advance–’

‘No!’ Tanthius roared. ‘It is not time! Hold position.’

‘Aye, Lord Tanthius,’ Torvun acknowledged glumly.

Harox bellowed a wordless cry of frustration, fighting his way towards Cadmus, who was locked in a ferocious struggle with a clawed fiend, more genestealer than human. Zuren ranged ahead, hurling himself at the nexos’ hulking guards. Harox lost sight of him, splitting the hissing acolyte pinning Cadmus from clavicle to pelvis. Incensed moans erupted from the nearest cultists. Such acolytes were revered as their social elite and avatars of their vile deity. He decapitated a second hissing acolyte, tilting his blade to block a third’s wild swipe.

Zuren’s life ended in a flatline whine.

Harox’s chainsword cut the air, drawing an inviolable circle around him in crimson spray and corpses. Cadmus was at his back, power maul pulverising vein-tonsured skulls and whipcord musculature. They fought like warriors of legend, each serving as the other’s shield and anchor point. Harox decapitated a wretch in jewelled Ministorum robes, noting a coiled wyrm set within the eyes of the aquila tattooed on its forehead like a prized jewel.

‘Harox.’ Cadmus’ voice was thick with rage. ‘The creature… has not fled?’

Harox saw the smirking traitor moving to another corpse. Red light gleamed from its armoured cowling, a neural connector worming one nostril. Madness burned in its eyes, the Imperial Palace aflame under the guns of Titans and traitorous sons alike.

‘It’s here,’ he snarled, banishing Sanguinius’ memories of the Siege. The Rage could have him. He wanted the nexos. ‘We kill it together.’

The Flesh Tearers charged the nexos’ bodyguards, chins tucked into their shoulders. Bones snapped and skulls shattered, acolytes and lesser hybrids battered or bludgeoned aside. The two surviving abominants moved to meet them, pushing through their kin. Blood framed their lips, the scent hot and vital. Zuren’s chainaxe had carved deep grooves into one’s chest, the exposed musculature gleaming wetly. It ambled with obvious difficulty, dragging a powered hammer in three muscled arms, its anvil-like head slick with Zuren’s blood.

Harox greeted it with a savage headbutt and a thunderous jab that shattered its cheek, while Cadmus hurled himself at the second. He launched a blistering series of strikes at its throat and arms, blood spraying his visor. It blocked with its hammer, slowed by its wounds and exertions fighting Zuren. Chainteeth skidded along its haft, several snapping free. Brute force blended defence into attack, forcing Harox to duck under the hammer’s wide swing for his head. He weaved aside from two overarm blows, deflecting a third. He hacked and slashed at the creature where he could, avoiding strikes that would buckle a Land Raider’s hull, waiting for the creature to err. When it overreached itself, a well-placed kick pulverised its knee and Harox dragged his chainsword through its densely muscled neck.

A strangled roar turned him to Cadmus.

The Flesh Tearer was on his knees, blood sheeting down his ruined armour. The abominant’s claws had severed his right arm and opened him from throat to groin. It cradled Cadmus’ head in a six-fingered hand, the other raised to strike.

‘Kill it, brother,’ Cadmus gurgled. ‘For the Angel.’

His signum-rune flickered grey.

Harox howled and threw himself at the abominant. It swung talons slick with blood at his head. He ducked beneath the first blow, parrying two more. Harox drove for its legs and lower abdomen, avoiding the clumsy swipes of its claws, devastating strikes shearing through muscle and spilling loops of intestine onto the plascrete.

The creature would die screaming, its master soon after.

The abominant collapsed to its knees, its legs whittled to bone and diced meat, too weak to support its immense bulk. Harox grinned, fury exacerbating his confidence. He whirled around its cumbersome bulk like a dervish, drawing blood and pained grunts as he hacked at its arms and torso. It fought feebly, its strength neutralised by his speed and any thoughts of attack abandoned for defence. Harox slowed, needing to savour the kill.

Its talons licked out lightning quick, biting into his chest.

Harox howled.

The abominant dragged its talons deeper, gnawing through a wordless grunt as its own pain tolerance was tested, to pierce his primary heart. Harox screamed again, the pain like a white-hot knife plunged into his chest and slowly twisted. His secondary heart beat a rapid tattoo against his ribs, compensating for its damaged twin.

Blood filled his mouth.

Harox curled his fingers around the fiend’s throat, squeezing until its windpipe crunched. He rammed his chainsword into its muscled chest, the gnashing teeth chewing its thundering heart to ribbons. Channelling every ounce of fury, he dragged himself back to his feet, savouring the pained look in the traitor’s eyes. His were little more than pools of liquid black as he wrenched the blade through its chest and severed its head.

Bullets clinked against his ruined breastplate.

Harox charged the nexos, barrelling it to the ground. Ribs snapped and muscles tore. His fingers pressed against the creature’s throat, its hisses fading into ragged, breathless gasps. The nexos slashed a curved dagger at his neck, drawing rivulets of blood from his cheek. Its autopistol clicked empty. Harox throttled the creature, blood leaking between his bared fangs. The nexos’ life slipped away on the fading curl of its last, rattling breath.

Heaving air through his blood-slick mouth, Harox cast its carcass aside. Crimson armour thudded against the bulkhead and he pushed himself unsteadily to his feet. Bolters fired many decks distant, bellowed commands fading into the heady rush of blood roaring through his veins. He breathed in the cloying musk of sulphur and decayed meat. It clung to the air, a depraved incense that stoked his fury to even greater heights.

Liquid black eyes drank in the infernal pastiche of the Vengeful Spirit’s Avenue of Glory and Lament, the gold-leaf names of the Luna Wolves fallen during the Great Crusade scorched almost beyond legibility by black tongues of acidic burns. The Warmaster’s slitted eye glared from the strategium’s double doors, daring him to approach. His every step threaded fractures through the interlocked human and xenos skulls that formed the deck beneath him, the unholy runes branded into their foreheads twisting his gut.

The Angel pushed open the doors and stepped inside.

THE FIRST PRIMARIS

AARON DEMBSKI-BOWDEN

Guardians of Elara’s Veil, the Emperor’s Spears stand on the knife’s edge of destruction, beset by new dangers. Bloodied but unbroken, they keep their oaths where their comrades of the Star Scorpions and Celestial Lions have faltered. In a galaxy split by the Great Rift, this war-ravaged Chapter persists, far from the God-Emperor’s light.

Deacon Vectragos had brought Bellona with him aboard the Hex. Braziers burned in a chamber of black iron, held in the outstretched hands of maidens and warriors forged from the same dark metal as the chamber itself. Every iron statue was fashioned blind, either eyeless or blindfolded, in keeping with some Bellonan custom I couldn’t guess. Grey smoke curled from the braziers, breathed into scrubber-grilles high upon the arched walls. Humming ventilator engines set a quiet, mismatched rumble with the distant grind of the Hex’s plasma drives.

Vectragos’ personal workshop was vast enough that it should have been spacious. The reality was that he dwelled within a junkyard, cramped by the scattered detritus of half-finished projects. When I’d first arrived, I’d moved along the wide passages between crates marked with serial numbers and stamped with the Imperial aquila; between dismantled engine blocks; between unmade power convertors. If there was order here, I was as blind to it as the statues. I’d followed the spindly, towering figure of Vectragos as he ghosted a path through the chaos.

‘Sit,’ he’d commanded me, gesturing not to a medicae throne, but to a plain enginseer’s workbench, covered in schematics and component parts.

I sat, after clearing a space to do so.

The deacon’s duty was to pull the truth from my skull, and he did so with relish. His drills bored down into bone, unlocking internal seals beneath the skin of my face, then he inserted sterilised and thrice-blessed forceps into my eye socket. It took no small amount of strength. I felt the bones of my face creaking. My new bionic lacked the finesse of my previous, artisan-crafted terminus-eye, but it was far more durable.

I grunted something wordless as my cheekbone creaked with the pressure. Vectragos ignored me.

After three clicks, my left eye came free with a crunch.

‘Ah,’ he said, breathy with satisfaction.

With the vision that remained, I saw the freed orb clutched in the forceps, trailing a cluster of slender cords wrapped in thin metal wire. Together, this cable-trail mimicked the function of natural optic nerves.

The forceps, clasped in Vectragos’ eight-fingered claw, jerked back. The cords came uncoupled with a snap. The red-stained half of my vision immediately went black, and I grunted again.

‘Is there pain?’ he asked, his tone a bland impression of concern.

‘Not exactly.’

Vectragos gave a scrappage-abort blurt from the vocaliser sutured at his throat. ‘Vague response. Imprecise data.’

‘It’s difficult to tell. It’s a pressure, then an absence. Not painful, just cold.’

‘Unrelated data,’ he replied.

You asked, I thought.

He treated my eye with the delicacy of a jewel, first spraying it with a mist of sacred incense, then connecting its cable feeds to the clanking machine at his side. I watched, one-eyed, as everything I’d ever seen streamed into the cogitator’s data-spools in a fall of fractured binary.

‘I have studied Vadhán’s ascension post-surgery,’ he said.

I nodded.

‘Extensively,’ he added.

‘I see,’ I replied. Most of his too-long face was taken up by the seven mismatched eye-lenses that gleamed in the depths of his hood, but there was an air of excitement about him. A human excitement, no less. Excitement at the promise of revelation. This twelve-feet tall archpriest, with a body of cyborged components and mechadendrite limbs, was like a child anticipating a nameday gift.

‘This lore…’ he started to say, then choked up with emotion. Or whatever passed for emotion in his clockwork heart.

‘My master hopes it will be useful.’

The deacon watched the spillage of data, the vocaliser in his throat clicking and ticking. I couldn’t tell if the sounds were approval, disapproval, or whether he was simply cataloguing what I’d seen. He’d already reviewed the data before the surgery and taken it in several transferral spurts so far, but here – at last – was the promised final exloading of information.

‘Many Spears will not be tempted by the Calgarian Rites,’ he said, ‘and the risks preclude mass-transition. With all factors balanced, the enhancement in terms of efficiency is ultimately negligible. But the choice, even with the dangers, will galvanise morale.’

‘Good. As it should be. My master was lucky to have survived.’

He looked down at me then, abandoning all interest in the priceless data. Lowering his hood, he revealed a surprisingly human head, riven with circuitry and a seven-eyed face, each eye a gleaming emerald lens set in a polished brass focusing array. He also revealed a smile: a smirk of at least forty metal teeth in an unnaturally wide jaw. The arched column of his spine forced him to lean forward at all times, adding a predatory leer to his commanding posture. Several of his multi-tooled limbs uncurled from beneath his robes and clicked in time with something clattering within his internal mechanics.

‘Are you laughing at me, deacon?’

‘Oh, yes.’ Three of his delicate limb-tips caressed the metal sections of my face. ‘You mentioned luck. Such blasphemy! Luck is but a balm for the deluded. You bring your blasphemous talk of fortune here, to this sacred temple of Martian ingenuity?’

‘It’s an expression. And a slip of the tongue.’

He tittered, and one of his hands toyed with the compression settings on the augmetic tools jutting from a separate bionic wrist. Vectragos withdrew his touches from my face a moment later.

‘Forgive me. I merely tease.’ He reflected on this confession as a secondary limb reached up to scratch the back of his head. ‘It passes the time.’

Up close, he smelled of gun smoke and overworked engines, of khordyte, fyceline, promethium: the chemical scents of warfare. It was, in its own way, as holy as Kartash’s pious reek had been.

‘Here.’ He disconnected my bionic eye from the cogitator and, with alarming speed, he jabbed it back into the socket. I let out a sharp breath as it clicked home, abrupt as a stab.

‘Throne of the God-Emperor,’ I hissed. I had to blink several times to get my eyes back in alignment.

Vectragos paid no heed to my discomfort. He leaned in closer, examining the bionic eye in its augmetic socket.

‘You are a costly creature, aren’t you, Anuradha?’

‘All helots are,’ I said, with a flush of pride.

‘Indeed.’ He made the word last almost three seconds. ‘But the eye Owyn grafted into your skull is a cheap trinket. If circumstances arise, I will replace it with something closer to your original specifications.’

‘That would be–’

‘Don’t move,’ he replied, ‘don’t talk.’

A flash of scorching light flared from one of his fingertip multi-tools. Heat briefly stabbed at my temple.

‘Ah, shi–’

‘There was a fluid bubble at the cusp of the second articulated axis.’ Vectragos withdrew again. ‘A droplet of sacred unguent from my cleansing spray.’

‘Th–’

‘You may leave, little thrall. This has been an educational exchange.’

I cleared my throat. ‘I’m a helot, not just a thrall.’

‘Such pride in the minutiae!’

‘Do I refer to you as a mere “priest”, when you’re a deacon?’

Vectragos raised his hood and curled several of his arms back inside his robes. ‘I will be sure to bear your exalted station in mind during future exchanges, Anuradha.’

Truly, he could be an irritating soul. ‘I have something I wished to discuss, deacon, if you’ll allow it.’

He steepled the fingers of four hands together. Again, he gave me that forty-teeth smile; I could see it in the shadows of his hood.

‘Indeed.’

I slipped from the workbench and gestured to the cogitator now containing a significant portion of my memory, siphoned over the course of several sessions.

‘With this lore… Could you perform the Calgarian Rites on Serivahn?’

Vectragos hesitated. Every one of his eye-lenses dilated with mechanical focus, the irises narrowing, the lenses themselves glowing from within. It was like being fixed by seven fine-beam torches.

‘In… deed?’ he said quietly. This time it was a question, not a judgement weighted by sarcasm. Vectragos gazed at me with an unreadable emotion playing over his machine-changed features. Only from the reluctance in his posture and the softness in his tone did I realise he was leering down at me with something resembling sympathy.

‘You have surprised me with this question, Anuradha of the Mentors.’

Of the Mentors no longer, I thought, but said no such thing.

‘Tell me, thrall – helot – do you have some special regard for Captain Serivahn of the Vargantes?’

‘I respect him, deacon. Is it possible? Can you do it?’ Even as I asked the question, I wondered if Serivahn had already come here and asked it himself.

‘First let me riposte with a question of my own,’ said the tech-priest. ‘Why do you ask this? Do you think his life is one of torment? Or of shame? Do you believe he can’t look upon his pure-formed brethren without plunging into an un-warrior-like bitterness?’

‘No,’ I answered at once. ‘Throne, no. No shame at all. It pains me that he suffers, yes. I know his worth, but he could become the warrior he was meant to be.’

Vectragos nodded, still speaking in that softened tone. ‘Indeed. Let me show you something.’

He turned from me, moving on his strange mechanical tendrils along one of the avenues through the messy workshop. We came to another table, this one for the multi-layered projection of hololithic imagery. Vectragos tapped in a runic keycode and ignited the shimmering blue surface.

‘Serivahn of the Vargantes,’ he said. The projection table’s machine-spirit responded with a cranking of internal gears, and several dozen overlapping images of Serivahn’s bio-medicae record flashed into being. Some were scans, others were picts, several were observed notations and image-feeds of the captain in motion or bound into restraint thrones.

As Vectragos began sorting through the images, a servo-skull drifted over from elsewhere in the workshop, like a pet wanting its master’s attention. The deacon idly waved it away.

‘Here, Anuradha,’ he said, bringing one of Serivahn’s internal scans to the forefront. He laid it alongside a pict of the captain’s bare torso. Both images showed a horrendous mangling of muscle. Interface ports showed along his chest, spine and shoulders, dark metal sockets that would never accept power armour input feeds.

I winced at the extensive malformations I’d only seen hinted at before. Vectragos caught the expression, and waggled a finger in my direction.

‘With your master, the Calgarian Rites offered an opportunity to repair and enhance what was already present in his physiology. With Serivahn, what is wrong cannot be mended, and what is wrong cannot be enhanced. This is not damage to be repaired. They are not wounds to be healed. And this is not a perfect template to be improved upon. Do you follow?’

I looked at the scans. In that dark chamber, they were bright enough to make my eyes water. Well, one of them. The human eye I still had.

‘No,’ I admitted reluctantly.

Vectragos seemed to anticipate that, for he showed no irritation. ‘Imagine a child is born with a degree of cognitive deficiency, due to a flaw in the gestation process. What you have, at the birth, is not a template that you can graft improvements upon. The child was merely born that way. It is flawed in comparison to the expected template, aye, but it is a difference to be managed. It is not a wrong to be righted.’

‘But you could try.’

‘Try what? And how?’ The deacon steepled twenty of his fingers again in that double-pyramid gesture. ‘You can heavily cyborg such a flawed child. You can drive cognitive enhancers into its skull. But you are still missing the point, Anuradha. Not only would that technology almost certainly be rejected by the flawed template you are working with, it would also leave you with next to nothing of the initial child. If you desired a child to match the expected genetic template, the only route would be to breed another to replace it. Serivahn is like that. I cannot repair him, because he is not broken or wounded. He is flawed from the expected template, aye. Deeply flawed. Too flawed for the Calgarian Rites to fix, for they are based on amendments to the pure template. He is, in effect, a new template. Lesser, aye, perhaps. But not broken.’

He paused for a moment, overlapping Vadhán’s internal scans with Serivahn’s own. The differences between the two warriors’ forms was beyond brutal.

‘Here, Anuradha of the Mentors. Do you see now?’

‘I think so.’ My heart sank. I’d been so certain this would help, somehow.

‘I have offered him almost complete body mechanisation many times in the past. He refuses it. He would not, in his own words, become a Bellonan machine with a man’s mind. He wishes to remain a Spear, a Space Marine, even with his flaws. You patronise him,’ Vectragos observed, not unkindly. ‘Serivahn of the Vargantes would not approve of that.’

‘I do no such thing,’ I said, narrowing my eyes.

‘Indeed? Not maliciously. Not intentionally. But yes, definitely. I have done the same myself in the past, Anuradha.’

Triggered by some unknown stimulus, a hololithic image beamed out from one of Vectragos’ eye-lenses. It overlaid the chamber, painting silhouettes of blue light over the scene. I watched the ghost performing from the deacon’s memory.

It was Serivahn, standing near where I stood now. He was robed in his uniform, with his ruined arm curled close to his chest and leaning against the table to take the strain from his twisted legs. His voice came forth not from the spectre of the man himself, but an audio-relayer in Vectragos’ throat.

‘You’d turn me into a construct, aye? A thing of iron and oil instead of bone and blood.’ The curving air-serpent tattoos inked around his temples and cheekbones danced in the light of the brazier fires. ‘I have nothing to prove, Vectragos. I have the Hex. I earned her, and now I do my duty aboard her.’

‘You misunderstand my offer,’ came the deacon’s memory-voice. ‘Cybernetics are guaranteed to fail. This is so. But the transplantation of your entire mind into a war-automata may breed results.’

Serivahn’s tone dipped into a gravely amused drawl. ‘Results I don’t want.’

‘You would be able to fight alongside your brothers.’

Pain flashed over his crooked features, hidden but not hidden fast enough. Serivahn snorted as he limped around the chamber, careful not to touch any of the ongoing works. He came to a halt in front of a magmic cradle, plunging in a stoking rod to stir the forge’s embers.

‘As a machine? As an embarrassing simulacra of a Dreadnought? You’d have me embrace death just to feign life?’

‘I would have you fight as a warrior,’ Vectragos pressed. I was surprised at the care in his voice. The concern. Bellona and Nemeton were twinned in the night sky, and their populations had waged war together, back to back, for centuries. ‘My skitarii soldiers are no less warriors for their augmentations. Nor are my battle-automata.’

Serivahn pointedly focused on stoking the flames, avoiding eye contact. ‘I am a Spear,’ he said. ‘The answer is no.’

‘Very well.’

Serivahn’s mismatched jaw clicked as he forced a half-smile. ‘Ask me again if I’m ever sentenced to entombment in a Dreadnought’s coffin, though?’

‘As you wi–’

The memory vanished. My eyes stung in the soothing darkness.

‘As you have witnessed,’ said Vectragos, ‘the First Primaris is content, after a fashion.’

‘Very well. I understand.’ I offered the priest a bow. ‘Thank you for your time, Deacon Vectragos.’

He waved my gratitude aside. ‘The question does you credit, Anuradha of the Mentors.’ He hesitated, before his cheeks – practically the only visible human component of his features – crinkled in what was probably a smile.

‘Deacon? Something amuses you?’

‘Have you chosen a tribe? Your face remains bare of ink, and – as I am sure you have been informed – it lends you a childish cast.’

‘Not yet,’ I said. ‘I was thinking of appealing to the Arakanii for a place among them.’

‘Indeed. A cannibalistic thrall? Imagine that! And with a little luck it might irritate Morcant. Irritating the battleguard is always a worthy endeavour.’

I pressed my palm to my heart, feigning offence, and looked at the foundry around us both.

‘Talk of fortune, here in this sacred temple of Martian ingenuity?’

Vectragos chuckled. It sounded like a Thryxian carnosaur clearing its throat.

‘I never actually made the pilgrimage to Mars,’ the deacon observed. ‘Perhaps one day? If Mars still exists by the time the Great Rift heals, that is. But what of my question? I desire a sincere answer, if you please. We Bellonans place little value on the notion of tribes, but we respect its importance to our barbaric cousins from Nemeton. The Spears especially get very emotional about the whole thing.’

My eyes were still blinking a little out of alignment. I held them closed for a few seconds, hoping it would harmonise them when I opened them once more.

It didn’t.

‘Serivahn offered to induct me into the Vargantes,’ I admitted. I started to excuse myself, citing that I had best return to my duties readying Vadhán for the upcoming battle, but Vectragos’ eye-lenses gleamed with inner light again.

‘That also surprises me,’ he said, tittering with the sound of clanking machinery in his chest and throat. ‘Am I given to understand the good captain has forgiven you for detonating a vortex grenade on his precious warship?’

I took a breath. ‘You’re as bad as Lord Brêac.’

‘I aspire to be,’ said the spindly deacon. ‘Brêac of the Vargantes is an inspiration in that regard. Now go about your business, little helot. And inform Vadhán that he is to report to me for adjustments to his armour before shipboard dawn.’

I said that I would. ‘However, deacon, he doesn’t like that name.’

Vectragos was already rooting through a pile of detritus, looking for the Emperor alone knew what. He spoke without interrupting his rummaging hunt, without even looking back over at me.

‘Indeed. Then please also inform him that his preferences have no bearing on the reality of the situation, and that he will have to get used to it. Off you go.’

I bowed again, which he ignored, and off I went.

THE LAST PLANET

EDOARDO ALBERT

Beyond the galaxy’s edge, amidst the empty space past the Imperium’s borders, monsters lurk in the void. It is here that the Carcharodons Astra hunt, returning only when called upon to carve a bloody wake through Mankind’s enemies, or to replenish their numbers by taking their fill from a loyal world in brutal tithe.

Tangata Manu, Chaplain to the Carcharodon Astra, sat upon his heels, resting in the Void within as his eyes, open and black, looked levelly upon the Void without. The sand, growing cold now as it gave up its small daytime store of heat, was gritty beneath his knees. The brief winds of twilight had settled into the quiet dark as the tired sun sank beneath the low horizon.

The sand stretched away to distant, worn hills. But even as he watched, the night shadows swallowed the distance and the Void came down from the sky.

He knelt upon the sand of a planet circling a star so far from the galactic centre that it looked out upon the Void – the ‘Last Planet’, as it was known, before the endless dive into the deep. Upon his knees, beneath the dome of night, Tangata Manu watched a memory, fleeting as the stars in the face of the Void, of a boy knifing down, down, down into an ocean abyss. He let the memory go, dropping into the Void within. It was a ghost, a recollection of a life so long gone as to leave no trace save in the ghosts of dead memories.

The last grains of the sand that Tangata Manu held in his cupped hands trickled through his fingers and slid, coarse and cold, over his naked thighs, returning to the still sea of the planet.

The star had no name. It appeared in no Imperial atlas. But the Carcharodons knew its place, a lonely oasis of light amid the wastes where they wandered, hunting monsters that dwelled in the dark but swam towards the light; for to the wanderers the planet was a reliquary, the secret place where they kept those relics too precious to accompany them into battle. The relics too precious to lose.

The sand gone, Tangata Manu stood, rising like a wave from where he had sat, without movement, for three days and three nights, undertaking the desert retreat that formed part of the spiritual exercises laid down for the Chapter by the Forgotten One. Muscles, held still for too long, creaked but his bones moved smoothly as the Chaplain turned and started walking, barefoot, across the cold sand. The night was chill on his skin: for the retreat he wore only a thin tunic, going weaponless into the desert. As he marched back he passed the scavenged remains of the sand spider that, feeling the track of his feet, had risen from the sand to claim him for its meal three days prior.

The Chaplain had broken the creature apart with his hands and left it as a waymarker for his return. Now, only the carapace remained, chitinous and spiky, its soft interior sucked dry by other creatures that burrowed beneath the sand. What life there was on this silent planet burrowed underground, where some trace of its long-lost lakes remained.

As he walked through a silence made more absolute by the hissing sand slides set off by his walking feet, Tangata Manu looked up at the Void. During this part of its orbital cycle, the Last Planet’s northern hemisphere was oriented away from the galaxy: looking up revealed a sky devoid of stars. But it was not the blankness of a polluted world’s night sky, for the black was deep, deep beyond any imagining, a well reaching down into time. It was a void so absolute that it exposed the soul of any who contemplated it; gazing upon it, Tangata Manu, centuries-old servant of the Carcharodons, felt himself reduced to something less than nothing. Before the Void, he was an abstraction, an imaginary figure upon an unreal page, a nightdream of himself.

The Chaplain might have smiled.

The Void was astringent, abrasive. It cleansed the mind of the accretions of life and left it naked. It was why the Forgotten One had laid it upon his followers that they should return to the Void, spending three days and three nights in contemplation of it, every forty years of their service.

As Tangata Manu neared the range of low hills which separated him from the chapel that housed the Chapter reliquaries, he realised that he could not recall how many times he had gone into the Void on retreat. He let the thought pass, and the desire to know the answer. It would serve no purpose to engage the mental exercises required to retrieve those memories.

The Void within was the mirror of the Void without.

He set himself within the still silence and marched through the hours of dark, back to the chapel and its collection of relics: scrimshaw Talismans; helms of Mk II and Mk III armour; the broken power staff of Manoa Fau, the first Librarian of the Chapter; archeotech of lost use but latent power; and, most sacred of all, the Void Glass that was given to the keeping of the Forgotten One by the Emperor Himself.

But as the Chaplain made his way through the hills, he saw a dim halo slowly appear above the final ridge: there was light coming from beyond. Ordinarily, the only illumination in the chapel at night was the single flame of the sanctuary lamp. Tangata Manu paused, his feet still on the gritty rock, and listened, searching the silence for some indication of the source of the light. The Chaplain reached out with his enhanced sense, and found that it was no longer silent. Carrying faintly over the rocks were the distant sounds of life.

He had left another Carcharodon Astra at the shrine chapel, honour guard of the Chapter’s relics, for the Rule stated that the relics must never be left unguarded. But these were not sounds that any Carcharodon would make. Inhuman, abhuman and unhuman cries, faint as the beat of insect wings, came to him, carried on the last ripples of the percussive sounds of combat.

The chapel was under attack.

Tangata Manu began to run.

He had no weapons. The Rule was that, on retreat, a Carcharodon went unarmed into the desert. Tangata Manu let the vain regret pass through his mind, conscious of it but dismissing it. The thin sand layer over the rocks beneath his bare feet was gritty, slipping under him as he ran, climbing the exhausted, worn-down hills.

The sounds came clearer as he approached, then died to single words and phrases, too distant to distinguish but whose rhythm suggested Low Gothic. What had been merely a hint of light now glowed over the final ridge of the hills.

Sliding down onto the cold rock, Tangata Manu crawled to the ridge, cresting it in a defile so that even in the night he would not present a shadow.

Below, at the foot of the hills, was the sand-smoothed stone of the Carcharodons chapel, which had stood there so long that the carvings on the tympanum had been eroded to nubs. It was a sight almost as familiar to him as his armour. But behind the chapel squatted something huge, spiked and potent: a stripped-down merchant clipper, the sand beneath its landing lights melted to glass by its downblast, its armaments – heavy bolters and multi-lasers – trained upon the chapel. Search lumens pinned the building in a cross light.

The clipper’s cargo doors were agape, its interior dark shadow behind the glare. But the Chaplain could see shapes moving in ordered groups around the chapel, their formations telling of well-trained kill teams searching for targets, while a stream of bearers were carrying the contents of the reliquaries to the ship.

The kill teams had taken up defensive positions, but Tangata Manu could see among their ranks inhuman forms ranging farther afield. Silhouettes he identified as belonging to savage xenos: kroot, vespids and even an aeldari. Some were setting up a perimeter while the humans among them had installed a heavy bolter just outside the chapel, with some of the ancient statues from within torn down and used as cover.

Lying in the sand in front of the chapel, the remains of Brother Irae Tatu were visible. His battle armour was split apart, the edges seared by multiple laser strikes, and one leg had been removed by heavy bolter shells. Standing over the dead battle-brother was the man who was clearly in command. He was dressed in robes of luminescent silk that, even in the still air of this dead world, shimmered, finding movement where nothing stirred. He held in his hand a blade that struck sparks as it cut the air: a monomolecular sword.

The man twitched the blade and the helmet of Brother Irae rolled free of his body. His head was still inside it. Then the man looked up at the distant hills. Although Tangata Manu knew he was invisible, the figure seemed somehow to sense him across the dark. He held up his hand. Behind and about him, Tangata Manu saw the kill teams begin to pull back towards the clipper.

They had got all they had come for: they had ransacked the Chapter’s reliquaries, taking all they wanted, and now they were preparing to withdraw.

There was nothing that Tangata Manu could do to stop them. He had no weapons and no armour.

He stood up. On bare feet, with only a thin tunic to cover him, he started walking down towards the lights. The sand crunched under his tread. Marching out of darkness, he was a moving shadow that even the searching eyes of the perimeter squads missed. But Tangata Manu saw the leader pause as he was turning back to his ship, then turn round, looking squarely through the night to the Chaplain.

Walking into the outer reaches of the halo of light, Tangata Manu raised his hands, palms empty and outwards, to the level of his shoulders and continued on towards the watching man.

The leader raised his blade and pointed into the dark. ‘My dogs, you have missed the scent.’

At his words, the kill teams of mercenaries swivelled, suddenly all aware of the Carcharodon walking towards them.

Tangata Manu heard the simultaneous sound of bolters cycling, lasguns and splinter rifles charging. He was targeted by at least twenty mercenaries, not to mention the heavy weapon blisters on the clipper, which rotated towards him; but only one weapon mattered.

‘Hold.’

The leader held up his free hand. The silence was underlaid by the hum of the weapons, poised to fire.

Striding unarmed and unarmoured into such a concentration of fire, Tangata Manu knew he would be eviscerated within seconds should the leader give the order. He walked on, hands still raised, coming into the light.

The leader kept his hand high, restraining the fingers poised on many triggers.

‘Hold.’

Tangata Manu passed through the outer perimeter of guards, towards the waiting man, his hands held open and empty as sign of his surrender.

‘Hold.’

The leader raised the monomolecular blade he was carrying and levelled it at the approaching Chaplain.

Tangata Manu walked steadily closer, his gaze black and fixed upon the waiting man, until the tip of the sword was all but touching his chest.

There, he stopped.

It would take but a single lunge for the man to drive the sword through his body.

The Carcharodon and the leader faced each other over the length of the levelled blade. The latter’s face was one of indeterminate age: the man whose dark eyes looked out from it could have been forty or four hundred. The calm with which he regarded the Space Marine suggested the upper estimate was closer to the truth. A rich man, then, one with access to the rejuvenat treatments of the upper echelons of Imperial society.

The man’s lips twitched into a smile. He sketched the tip of the sword – with all the precise control of a master – over Tangata Manu’s tunic.

‘A little underdressed for a Space Marine,’ he said. The sword tip cut through the fabric and touched his flesh. ‘Allow me to introduce myself.’ The man scored a line with his blade, carving a sigil upon Tangata Manu’s chest. ‘Zhu Lanshang, at your service.’

‘Then return that which you have stolen and leave this planet.’

Zhu Lanshang smiled. ‘For all their undoubted abilities, I have always found the Adeptus Astartes depressingly literal-minded.’

‘I have always found rogue traders all too predictably venal.’

‘You are a quick study.’ Zhu Lanshang pushed the blade a little deeper. Tangata Manu did not flinch. In truth, the sword was so sharp that he barely felt it – should the rogue trader choose, it would kill him before he knew he was dead.

‘If you would kill me, then do so,’ he said.

‘Kill you?’ Zhu Lanshang smiled. ‘My client would pay dearly for a live Space Marine – you are far too valuable for this “venal” merchant to throw away. But I do not recognise you – what Chapter do you belong to?’

‘The Carcharodon Astra.’

Zhu Lanshang shook his head. ‘Never heard of them.’ With his free hand, the trader gestured towards the chapel. ‘Given your location, I think it more likely that I have come upon the treasure hoard of some renegade Chapter intent upon hiding their riches far from those who might make better use of them. At least, that is what I shall tell the client who suggested I search this sector. It seems his intelligence was better than I gave him credit for – I felt sure that I was embarked upon a fruitless journey into the wastes.’

The trader stepped back, lowering his sword, but it remained ready at his side, the air itself hissing as it cut the faint breeze rising with the approach of dawn. He signalled and an incubus, flanked by a squad of kroot, approached. Zhu Lanshang turned to the impassive drukhari, his face hidden by his helmet.

‘If our guest does anything untoward, remove his head with that extremely large klaive I have hired you to wield.’ The trader looked to the kroot. ‘I know I don’t have to tell you to make sure our guest does not outlive his welcome.’ Looking back at Tangata Manu, Zhu Lanshang gestured at the kroot. ‘They are strange creatures, willing to serve for the most meagre of rewards so long as I give them their fill of flesh. And there are few creatures whose flesh they prize more than the Adeptus Astartes. Pray, do not give me cause to feed them.’

The incubus, klaive held ready, took up position behind Tangata Manu. The kroot, a species evolved from avian ancestors, ranged their weapons upon the Chaplain. They were wielding modified pulse rifles, fitted with bayonets and blades. Without his armour, the plasma pulses from those rifles would dismember him in less than a second.

‘If you would be so kind…’ With Zhu Lanshang leading and Tangata Manu flanked by the trader’s xenos mercenaries, they made their way over the sand towards the merchant’s clipper. As they passed the chapel, the Chaplain saw, through doors hanging askew from their hinges, that the building had been ransacked of all its contents.

But not every relic was kept in the chapel.

Zhu Lanshang stopped beside the hoard that he had ventured so far to find. The relics were set out, in careful order, before the bay doors of the clipper. The trader gestured towards it.

‘The spoils of a trail followed to its end.’ He turned to Tangata Manu. ‘Worthless. The sentimental accretions of a lost past.’ He picked up a Mk III helmet, turning it one way and then the other. ‘For a collector, of some small interest. For anyone else’ – the trader tossed the helmet onto the sand – ‘just a piece of rubbish.’

It required all the restraint acquired through centuries of hunting in the Void for Tangata Manu to stop himself from attacking the man, but the Chaplain stood still as the surface of the dead planet. Only the blank stare of his black eyes gave any hint of the wrath within.

Zhu Lanshang looked at the Chaplain. ‘You could have it back, you know. Baubles and trinkets of little value. You could have it all back. All I would ask in return is one thing, one small item, a trifle.’ The trader looked more closely at Tangata Manu. ‘You may ask, you know. A question is not a contract.’

‘What do you want?’

The Chaplain ground the words out through his teeth like rough wheat milled beneath a quern.

The trader smiled. It appeared a genuine smile, full of warmth and humanity. ‘There. That was not so difficult, was it? You should try being human more often, Space Marine. You might find you like it. Come, let us speak where we cannot be heard.’

Zhu Lanshang gestured for the Chaplain to walk on, and he walked beside him. He held the monomolecular blade lightly but he held it ready.

When the incubus and kroot were distant enough not to hear, but still close enough for them to be able to cut Tangata Manu down before he could reach Zhu Lanshang, the trader stopped. ‘It is better for my crew to know only what is necessary for them to know,’ he said. ‘As to what I want, it seems to me the fairest of exchanges – fair to you, that is. As I said, you may have all of this back, every item, and we will leave this Emperor-forsaken planet never to return, never divulging its location, all in exchange for a bit of black glass. There, that’s the deal. What do you say?’

The Chaplain looked pointedly around at the weapons still levelled upon him. ‘I am in no position to refuse this item that you say you are looking for. Why don’t you just take it?’

‘Because we cannot find it.’ The words came whipping from Zhu Lanshang’s lips, cutting through his veil of urbanity like an Officio Assassinorum stiletto.

Tangata Manu smiled. ‘Nor will you. It is holy and will not suffer profanation by unclean hands.’

‘Very well. I am a civilised man, but one of the more unheralded marks of civilisation is the refinement of methods of questioning. You will tell me where you have hidden this glass that I have been contracted to find. I pray that your mind will still be intact when you answer my question. I fear that your body will not.’

The Chaplain gave no sign that he had even heard the trader’s words.

‘Take him to the ship,’ Zhu Lanshang called. ‘Ngomi will question him.’

There were rats, crawling in his mind.

Tangata Manu lay strapped to a gurney. He was no stranger to pain, either the damage of battle or the kind of skilful artistry that could be wrought with the blade of a knife wielded with intent to hurt, but not harm. This agony was nothing to him, and the Void within held.

More difficult was the task of closing his mind to the mental assault from the psyker. The knifeman sat back, ready to take his turn when the psyker needed rest, stropping the edges of his blades with a metronomic rhythm.

Ngomi sat quietly beside the gurney, a finger touching Tangata Manu’s temple, his eyes closed, concentrating, while his other hand rubbed the talisman dangling around his neck, the metal sheened by his nervous fingers. The Chaplain lay with his eyes open, staring up at the ribbed ceiling, while in his mind he sought the Void within, resting there, inviolate. He let the rats run through his mind. He did not fight them, nor run from them, but let them crawl and slither where they would, allowing the sensations to pass as soon as they arose, letting them fall into the Void.

The psyker, his face ashen, leaned closer to Tangata Manu. The Chaplain let the stench of his breath pass into the Void.

‘Where are you?’

The question was sound, not words pushed into his mind. Tangata Manu let the question, too, pass into the Void.

The psyker looked round. Still staring up at the ceiling, Tangata Manu heard the door opening.

Now.

Uniting every muscle in his body, he convulsed. The gurney overturned and Tangata Manu, falling, butted his head – the only part of his body that could freely move – against the skull of the psyker.

It cracked.

The rats disappeared from his mind.

From the other side of the interrogation room, the knifeman was starting up to his feet, the rhythm of his sharpening broken. From the door, Tangata Manu heard the sound of a laspistol cycling. But beside him, on the floor, lay the psyker, broken, his talisman on the ground between them. The Chaplain twisted his head, grabbed the talisman with his teeth and, jerking back, broke the strap holding it round Ngomi’s neck. Another flick of his head, and he sent it sliding over the floor towards his strapped and bound wrist.

He could move his fingers. For a moment they scrabbled fruitlessly, then they touched metal.

The knifeman appeared at the end of the gurney. He lifted his knives, one in each hand. He smiled.

The laspistol fired but the reinforced gurney took most of the shot; Tangata Manu noted the burn in his shoulder but discounted it.

The laspistol cycled again.

‘Wait,’ said the knifeman, holding his hand up. ‘This is going to be fun.’

The strap parted. While the knifeman had been contemplating the sport before him, Tangata Manu had been scoring the edge of the psyker’s talisman over the wrist strap, cutting his own flesh in the doing.

His arm free, the Chaplain’s hand shot out, grabbed the knifeman’s ankle and pulled him, a fish hooked, down onto the floor, face to face with the Space Marine.

The knifeman flailed out with his blades. Tangata Manu rolled, letting one knife find his flesh but pinning the arm beneath him while his free hand stripped the other knife from his foe and sliced the strap binding his other arm.

The knifeman stared at him, seeing his death.

It arrived.

‘Fenkell? Fenkell, what’s happening?’

From the laspistol wielder at the door.

Further cycling, then full-auto, the gurney juddering under the impact. Tangata Manu leaned down and freed his legs as the gurney began to disintegrate.

Pulling the knife from his shoulder, he heard the whine of the laspistol pitching higher as the last of its charge was exhausted.

It stopped.

Tangata Manu, Chaplain of the Carcharodon Astra, rose to his feet, knives in hand.

At the door, still squeezing the trigger of his exhausted pistol, was a human – from his tattoos clearly some ganger recruited as muscle from an Imperial hive world. The ganger, realising that his pistol was dry, tried to draw his own knife – he was at least no coward, thought the Chaplain – only to see the hilt of one of the knifeman’s blades protruding from his chest. The ganger, eyes glazing in death surprise, slid down the wall.

Tangata Manu stalked over to the body and retrieved the knife.

Standing by the door, he surveyed the corridor beyond. It was empty. Nor could he see any trace of alarms or sensors. The interrogation room had a panic button, but he had killed everyone in the room before it could be triggered. Any competent interrogation would have outside observers watching proceedings; however, he had seen no pict-lenses in the chamber, and there was no sign of an alarm having been raised.

Striding out into the corridor, a knife in each hand, Tangata Manu made his way towards the bridge: to win a war, go for the heart; to win a battle, strike at the head. This was a battle; the war was with whoever had commissioned Zhu Lanshang to travel to the Last Planet. But as he advanced towards his target, Tangata Manu realised that the ship was all but deserted. He saw only serfs, scuttling wretches that ducked away from him into conduits and pipes. There were none of the xenos and human mercenaries whom he had seen with the trader on the surface of the dead world.

Nearing the bridge, he slowed his approach to better survey for traps or auto-emplacements. There was an auto-stubber concealed in a worn-smooth aquila set to cover the bulkhead doors that opened into the bridge. There were two guards, kroot, standing on either side of the entrance, rifles at the ready. No matter. Stepping out into the open, Tangata Manu advanced on the xenos, who, seeing him, brought their weapons up. But before they could fire, the Chaplain flung the knives, two-handed. He noted that surprise at sudden death was the one thing that united all the races of the galaxy.

Having disabled the auto-stubber, the Chaplain inspected the access pad. It seemed to be simply touch-activated, but of course it would not be keyed to his hand.

He cut the hand from one of the kroot, then skewered it on his knife.

He pressed the hand on the access pad.

The bulkhead doors slid open with the smooth silence of a machine whose spirit had been thoroughly appeased over the years.

Tangata Manu stood in the door, holding the scavenged rifles of the kroot in each hand, and turned the bridge into an abattoir.

The deaths, though, were few.

The command throne was empty, as were most of the control positions; only a few servitors and a skeleton watch were eviscerated by the hail of gunfire.

The Chaplain dropped the exhausted rifles. They rang out on the metal floor. The only other sound was the gentle tick of the ship’s systems, but the bridge was filled now with the iron tang of blood and the stench of shredded intestines. It was the smell of war waged at close range and, as such, a smell almost as familiar to Tangata Manu as his own.

Entering the bridge, he went to the auspex controls and, keying the display, called up the ship’s internal life sensors. It was as he had suspected. The clipper was all but empty – nothing more than a skeleton crew.

Zhu Lanshang had taken his mercenaries onto the planet to search for the Void Glass.

They would not find it.

Where the Chapter’s other relics had been stored in various reliquaries in the planet’s lonely chapel, the Void Glass was hidden deep in a cave in the hills. It would be safe there.

Unless…

Zhu Lanshang’s client evidently had access to knowledge that the Chapter had believed to be secret. If the client could direct Zhu Lanshang to the Last Planet, might that client also know where the Void Glass was hidden?

Tangata Manu considered that. It was not likely but it was possible.

The best way to ensure that the trader did not find the Void Glass was to kill him and all his crew while ensuring the clipper never made it back to the galaxy.

The Chaplain turned towards the Navigator’s sealed cell. That at least would be straightforward.

The creature inside looked reasonably human, for a Navigator. Only the third eye, the unblinking eye that looked into the warp and navigated its horrors, was open, for it never slept, and Tangata Manu averted his eyes from its gaze. But the Navigator himself lay cocooned in his cell, protected by a bath of amniotic fluid in which he floated, foetus like, his human eyes closed, sleeping after the rigours of the passage so far through the immaterium. He was naked as a babe, his limbs as flaccid and pale as a corpse. Even the sound of Tangata Manu forcing open the sealed doors of his cell did not rouse the man from his post-passage torpor.

The Carcharodons treated Navigators well. Operating so far from the light of the Astronomican, they had to. Navigator Houses were afforded much sway, for these mutated scions of millennia-old bloodlines were the glue binding the Imperium together. But among the Houses there were families fallen on hard times, or in less than good repute, who became vagabonds forced to sell their skills to whoever would buy them. This creature probably belonged to one of those renegade Houses. The Chaplain did not really care.

Tangata Manu opened the tank’s bleed valves. The amniotic fluid gushed forth in a new birth. The Navigator sank lower, settling down upon the floor of the tank, gravity dragging him flat.

A body that had not known weight for several human lifetimes lay immobilised by its own mass. Lungs that had forgotten how to breathe began to labour but the diaphragm failed under the weight of the struggling organs.

Tangata Manu watched as the Navigator suffocated in air and drowned in his own flesh.

Before he died, the Navigator opened his human eyes. They stared up, but he could not move or turn his head. It was too heavy. In silence, not knowing the face of death, the Navigator died.

Returning to the bridge, Tangata Manu activated the clipper’s auspex screens once more, searching for a trace of Zhu Lanshang and his mercenaries.

The screens told him at once that Zhu Lanshang had further information, for the life tracks showed that the trader had split his mercenaries into three search teams, who were quartering the hills nearest the chapel. While the entrance to the cave where the Void Glass was hidden was well concealed, Tangata Manu could no longer be assured that the trader would not find it.

The Chaplain marked the team closest to the cave of the Void Glass. They were his first target. He considered searching for his armour then dismissed the idea: any halfway-competent foe would have rendered the armour inoperable to ensure he could not make use of it.

He did not need it.

Leaving the bridge, the Chaplain extracted the knives that had skewered the two kroot guards to the wall. They were fine blades. They would serve.

The Carcharodon, silent as water, slid from the belly of the ship out onto the sand of the Last Planet.

The relics Zhu Lanshang’s men had taken from the chapel still lay stacked by the cargo doors of the clipper, piled up without any guard. The trader had clearly come for the Void Glass. Tangata Manu thought briefly on taking a weapon from among the relics. But they had lain undisturbed for millennia; he had not the time to sort through them to find which were still functional.

The sun was still low. At this season, at this latitude, it hung low to the horizon throughout the short day. But low in the sky, the sun was bloated, fat and red, a star that had swollen into its long senescence. Tangata Manu stepped into his shadow. It pointed towards the hills. He began to run, his bare feet making only faint scraping sounds on the gritty sand, the knives scarring through the air.

There was no cover between the chapel and the first rock outcrops. Speed was his friend in such an exposed landscape as he could not afford to take the time to crawl.

The cuts and incisions the knifeman had made on his body had sealed over, but some of the deeper ones began to bleed as he ran. The blood trickled down his thighs and calves onto his feet so that he left red prints upon the red-yellow sand.

Ahead, the defile that led up to the hidden cave entrance. It merged with the long shadows as a deeper shadow disappearing into the smooth-humped rocks. This world was old. All its edges had been softened by time until only gentle ridges and shallow hills remained.

There. Movement, over the ridgelines. The search team Tangata Manu had seen on the clipper’s auspex were climbing up towards the cave entrance. The other two teams had spread east and west; he could deal with them later.

The Chaplain slid into the shadowed defile. He knew its rocks and pits without looking, enabling him to scan for the mercenaries while still moving forward.

A breeze, chill with the evening, stirred along the rill, shifting sand flurries with invisible fingers. The Chaplain used its rustle to move forward faster, ghosting up the defile to where he saw the rearguard of the search team. Human. Armed with a lasrifle. The trader’s mercenary was trudging uphill with the lack of attention that so often fell upon rearguards.

Tangata Manu scanned left and right. The flank men of the search team were spread out ten to fifteen yards in each direction, far enough apart that a falling Basilisk shell would not kill them all. But also far enough away not to immediately realise that they had lost their rearmost comrade.

The rearguard stopped. Tangata Manu stopped moving too, holding still lest the man turn to scan behind. But instead, the mercenary shouldered his lasrifle and, releasing his belt, straightened out. There was the hiss of liquid on sand.

Tangata Manu allowed him to finish. But as he was doing up his trousers, the Chaplain slid one hand over the man’s mouth and put the other to the back of his skull, twisting. The man went limp immediately, all connection between brain and body broken in a single dull crack.

‘You all right, Osten?’

The call came from the right flank.

Tangata Manu laid the body out in the shadows and slid ahead. The flank man called again. When Osten still did not answer he started back towards him.

‘This better not be you messing around, Osten, or I’ll report you to Zhu.’

The mercenary stepped down into the defile, looking for Osten, only to be met by the Carcharodon standing in the shadows, his dark skin disappearing into the gloom.

Tangata Manu slid a knife surgically into the man’s armpit, slicing through the axillary artery, holding his other hand over the man’s mouth for a few moments before blood loss stopped his eyes staring at his killer.

Taking the man’s lasrifle, the Chaplain cycled a charge. The hum was low and his hands, held over the stock, baffled the little noise it was producing. The trader could afford the best quality weapons for his mercenaries. Tangata Manu had encountered some lasguns in the past that made so much operational noise that they might as well have lit up with a sign pointing at the unfortunate rifleman.

Moving a little further up the defile, Tangata Manu scanned for the man on the left flank. He was scrambling up and down the undulating rocks, using his lasrifle as a support half the time.

The Chaplain put a shot through the man’s head, the heat of the laser cauterising the wound it created so that as the mercenary spun in dying, the connection to his limbs suddenly severed, Tangata Manu saw clean through the hole in his head to the yellow-red rock behind. The flank man fell, tumbling down into the ditch that he had been clambering out from.

That left two. The squad leader and the man on point.

A few minutes later there were none. The point man had proved the most aware, either somehow sensing the Carcharodon’s stealthy approach, or happening to turn at the right moment to see Tangata Manu before he was close enough to kill him by hand or knife. The lasgun had served.

The Chaplain paused over the body. From the dead man’s earpiece came the mutter of vox chatter: Zhu Lanshang’s teams maintained poor sound discipline. But there was nothing to indicate that the trader yet realised one of his search teams had been eliminated.

Taking his bearings, Tangata Manu noted that they were very close to the Void Glass.

He debated eliminating the other search teams before returning to recover the relic but, with the relic so close, the Chaplain decided to first ensure that it was still there and undiscovered. Sliding down into the defile, Tangata Manu made his way the short distance further to the lip of the concealed cave. It was shallow, hardly more than a scoop from the worn-down stone, with the Void Glass set into a niche.

The Carcharodon stopped in front of the Void Glass.

The Chapter hid this holiest of relics in plain sight for, looking upon it, it seemed no more than another piece of dark, fused rock, the product of violent eruptions or one of the Imperium’s more powerful weapons. Rocks like this were scattered throughout the galaxy. It was only upon closer inspection that one saw the true depths of its darkness: light slipped off the Void Glass as if it were ice to any form of radiation.

It was black.

It was black without relief or shadow.

It was a shard of the Void, made material and brought into the galaxy. To stand in contemplation before it was to stand before the Void.

The Emperor Himself had given the Void Glass into the Forgotten One’s keeping, to hold and guard, to keep it secret and to hide it far from human knowledge. Its purpose perhaps the Emperor had given to the Forgotten One, but to his sons the Forgotten One had given solely the task: guard and hide.

So they had, for millennia, keeping the Void Glass first among the holy relics on the Nicor before placing it beyond all human ken at the uttermost end of the galaxy upon this lonely planet. But knowledge of its existence and its location had evidently gone forth, riding the whisper tides of rumour and arcane knowledge that circulated by their own pathways throughout the Imperium and beyond.

Tangata Manu, Chaplain to the Carcharodon Astra, stood before the Void Glass and he stood before the Void. Light slid from the Glass, falling from it. It stood upon its rough plinth, a block of rock fused to glass that carried in its heart all the emptiness that had birthed forth every star and planet, every man and xenos, all the creatures of the phenomenal and noumenal realms, without stain upon its own inviolate nature.

In the beginning was the Void that fathered forth all things.

‘Thank you.’

Tangata Manu turned.

Standing fifty yards further back down the defile was Zhu Lanshang, flanked by the impassive incubus and the kill team of kroot.

The trader smiled. His silk robes moved gently in a breeze that no one else could feel, bringing flowing light to this dulled planet.

‘I hoped you would take me to what my client wants. In gratitude, despite the deaths of my men, I would be happy to give you another chance to accept my offer. All the other items from your treasury, and your life, in return for this one item.’

From east and west, Tangata Manu heard the approach of other search teams closing in.

‘I trust that you now realise I had no thought of breaking you by so crude an interrogation. However, knives can serve other purposes than cutting – they can make an incision in which something small may be hidden.’ Zhu Lanshang raised his hand. Tangata Manu saw the tracker he held. In his back he now felt the transmitter, hidden beneath the quick-growing scar tissue, and remembered the sheen upon the knife when it had first been wielded: a local anaesthetic to conceal the implant.

The trader paused, waiting.

‘Have you nothing to say?’

Tangata Manu began to walk towards Zhu Lanshang.

‘Ah, I see not. I shall leave my associate to conclude negotiations with you.’ The trader stepped back. The incubus moved forward, putting himself between Zhu Lanshang and the Carcharodon. The drukhari was armed and armoured, his helmet a spiked blank, his klaive resting easy in his gloved hands. The drukhari swung the blade lazily through the air. It hissed.

Tangata Manu slowed not a jot. He walked on, knife in one hand, lasrifle in the other, unarmoured before the creature of combat ahead of him.

The kroot spread to either side, their rifles trained upon the Carcharodon, but they waited.

The incubus wanted the Space Marine for himself.

Tangata Manu kept on coming.

The incubus set himself, fixing his boots into the dry sand, the klaive weaving patterns of light before the advancing Carcharodon.

The only sound Tangata Manu made as he came on was the crunch of his bare feet upon the sand, their rhythm speeding up as he drew nearer to the incubus. Behind the drukhari, he saw Zhu Lanshang withdrawing, walking rapidly back down the defile. His business was with the trader; the incubus was in the way.

Tangata Manu ran faster, dropping knife and lasrifle as he came, their fall slightly breaking the klaive’s rhythmic swing.

He dived, driving himself forward through the air with all the power his engineered body could bring to bear. The incubus adjusted the angle of the klaive’s arc, bringing it swinging up to cut through the Carcharodon.

Twisting in mid-air, Tangata Manu caught the flat of the blade between the clap of his two hands and held tight fast upon the weapon. Rolling with its momentum, and uniting it with his own motion, the Chaplain drove the klaive’s arc further, all his weight pushing it. He turned the infinity arc into a Mobius loop, turning the klaive back upon its wielder.

The cutting edge, keen as grief, went through the incubus, cutting him diagonally from shoulder to waist, peeling him apart, and Tangata Manu went through the gap where the drukhari had been, pulling the klaive from the alien’s dead hands. Rolling through a somersault back onto his feet, he set off down the defile in pursuit of Zhu Lanshang.

The Void within as the Void without.

It filled him, even in the midst of battle.

Was he pursuing the trader in revenge for the humiliations that he had endured at Zhu Lanshang’s hands?

Yes.

The Void within.

Should he turn back and make the Void Glass safe?

It was safe. With the Navigator dead, they could not take it anywhere. He could hunt them down – he could hunt them all down – at his leisure.

The plasma bursts of the pulse rifles shattered the rocks at his feet as the kroot tracked closer.

Tangata Manu weaved, putting the rocks between him and the pursuing kroot until he emerged from the defile onto the sand plain. Zhu Lanshang was waiting for him there, silk robes shimmering, his monomolecular blade cutting the light.

Tangata Manu stopped.

The Void within.

He wanted to enjoy this?

Yes.

He heard the kroot running across the rocks, then the sand, their discipline consumed by their desire to devour the flesh before them.

They should have kept range.

A klaive, in the hands of a Carcharodon with centuries of experience, was a dreadful weapon. The kroot were destroyed in a few sweeps of the blade.

But in the time it took to dispose of the xenos, Tangata Manu saw Zhu Lanshang directing a group of men climbing down from the rocks, towards the clipper, while others he called to him.

They had the Void Glass.

They loaded it onto a grav-crate and started pushing it in the direction of the ship. The Chaplain knew that he would have to ritually cleanse himself for allowing this profanation to take place. He also knew that they would not dare to take to the sky without a Navigator. To try to enter the warp without one would be suicide, akin to throwing oneself into a malevolent ocean intent on destroying you.

He would kill the trader first.

He turned back towards Zhu Lanshang.

The man had a squad of mercenaries around him, humans, armed with heavy stubbers and hotshot lasrifles, one with a flamer, their weapons trained upon the Carcharodon.

‘I don’t suppose you would reconsider negotiation?’

Tangata Manu began to advance.

‘I feared you would not.’ The trader retreated behind his mercenaries. ‘He’s all yours, gentlemen.’

The mercenaries opened fire, stub-rounds and hotshot beams lancing through the air around the Carcharodon. Tangata Manu came on, weaving the klaive into a Mobius loop, cutting the shots from the air as he drew closer, implacable as death, for death he was – death made flesh. Though some rounds found their mark, still the Chaplain advanced.

The mercenaries, seeing him, began to break, their shots going wild, some turning to run, others emptying magazines in furious bursts.

Tangata Manu spun the klaive into a shield of light, until the shield reached the first of the mercenaries. Then the klaive became a weapon, and the first of the mercenaries died. The others ran, scattering in panic across the plain, some fleeing towards the clipper, others heading back to the hills.

Zhu Lanshang stood. He did not run. His robes shifted about him, silk blown by a breeze that only he felt.

‘Disappointing.’

The trader raised his sword. The silk flared out, becoming wings skeined upon long finger bones of archeotech, and thrusters flared. Zhu Lanshang soared up, turning as he went towards the clipper.

Tangata Manu saw the men loading the grav-crate into the ship. No matter. It was not going anywhere without a Navigator.

Zhu Lanshang soared higher, riding the rolling level, arms spread. Tangata Manu bent down. He picked up a stone. He looked up, measuring the throw.

The stone hit the trader square in the belly, doubling him up in the air, folding the silk wings into a confusion of material. He fell like a spider falls, drawing its legs in around itself.

Tangata Manu waited as the trader unwrapped himself, peeling back the broken silk, which now looked as much living sheath as dead material.

Zhu Lanshang got up slowly. His face was bleeding. He touched a finger to the blood and inspected it as if in disbelief, then looked to the Carcharodon.

‘Well, aren’t you going to say something? Anything? Gloat over your victory? Invoke the Emperor? Something?’

The Carcharodon advanced, silent.

‘Come on, speak to me, tell me who you are before you kill me, say something.’

Tangata Manu uttered not a single word.

Zhu Lanshang raised his sword, moving it with the fluidity of a master. ‘Very well. Then let us dance in silence.’

He flicked the blade. An edge finer than joy cut the air.

Tangata Manu parried with the klaive, and the blades kissed, edge on edge.

The jets of the clipper fired. Sand billowed out from below, blasting across the plain.

‘No!’

The Carcharodon spoke. He turned away from the trader and began running towards the clipper.

What were they doing? They had no Navigator. If they tried jumping into the warp, they would be lost, lost forever.

The trader was still behind him, shouting himself, but the men fleeing did not heed.

They were running from the death that walked in silence upon this dead world at the edge of everything and, in their fear, they did not stop to think of what lay in store for them.

The clipper rose into the air, jets flaring beneath it, pushing it up and up and up, taking the Void Glass. The other relics of the Chapter lay scattered across the plain, blown hither and thither by the downwash.

Tangata Manu stopped running. He stared up. The ship was high, far above, its main engines beginning to cycle as it rose into thinner, clearer air.

He stood on the plain of the dead world surrounded by the relics. He had failed. They had taken the Void Glass but, in taking it, they were lost themselves, condemned to wander through the immaterium or realspace until time or chance brought them to a landing upon some unknown world or sent them spiralling into a dying star.

Behind him, the sound of laughter, choking on itself.

Tangata Manu turned round.

Zhu Lanshang lay upon the sand. From his mouth spilled the red froth of a man drowning in his own blood, but in his eyes was a great mirth. While the Chaplain’s back was turned, he had taken something. An escape plan.

‘L-lost something?’

The Chaplain stepped towards the trader but Zhu Lanshang fell back upon the sand. When Tangata Manu reached him, the trader’s eyes were empty, his final mirth evaporated into the last Void. He had even managed to rob the Chaplain of vengeance.

From far above came a high-pitched scream as Zhu Lanshang’s ship accelerated away from the thin air of the dying world. Tangata Manu, Chaplain to the Carcharodon Astra, stared up into the sky as it emptied, the ship lost from sight.

The realisation that he had lost the most sacred relic given into the keeping of the Forgotten One by the Emperor Himself overcame him. His face, blank as the Void, stared up into nothing.

Then, slowly, Tangata Manu spoke, the words grinding through his teeth.

‘I will find the Glass though the search take a thousand years.’

LEGACY OF POSUL

CHRIS FORRESTER

The product of a world shrouded in endless darkness, the Mortifactors take more from their home world of Posul than they do from their Ultramarine gene-fathers. To meet these inhumanly savage Space Marines on the battlefield is to meet brutality incarnate, and to fall against them is to see your skull taken as trophy – proof of the death of the Emperor’s enemies.

Black smoke belched from hatches jammed open by corpses, reeking of hot ash and spoiled meat.

Devan Arathos’ mouth watered. It tasted like home: like Posul. Memories of his birth world were few, excised by the Chapter during ascension. He remembered the endless night, barren rock and shale slopes, the hot kiss of ash and flame from roasting pyres. His childhood had been dominated by the hunt, by lives taken in service to survival and the ever-present shade of hunger sated by the taste of fire-cooked flesh. His strongest memory of Posul was blood tracing his chin, fat stringing his teeth and marrow sucked from bones, sweet upon his tongue.

His skin prickled at the thought. His teeth itched and his fingers curled into killer’s claws. The distant crackle of bolter fire and Posulan war cries called him back, despite the insistent tightening in his stomach.

The deck trembled beneath his feet. The Mortuum was still fighting.

Shadows moved in the smoke, clad in thick armour. Arathos halted and waved the Scout, Koralos, behind him. He signed an order to Kalex. The other Mortifactor nodded and took position on the far side of the corridor, his bolter aimed into the fumes. Arathos and Koralos raised their pistols.

‘Fire and manoeuvre,’ he instructed. The Scout nodded, his red eyes gleaming behind the empty sockets of the chipped ork skull he wore in battle. Arathos had been there when he’d taken it. He’d devoured part of that kill at Koralos’ side – a handful of stringy sinew and leathery flesh offered to the Apothecary the way a hunter would gift the first bite to their chieftain.

A challenge-call cut through the smoke.

Arathos lowered his pistol. He knew that voice. Smiling, he bellowed a response and marched through the thick, black clouds. Koralos followed after him. Two Mortifactors stood from behind a makeshift barricade, their weapons raised. Kalex approached from the left.

‘Emperor’s teeth,’ Arathos laughed, offering his hand to the first Mortifactor. The warrior gripped his wrist and they embraced with a clatter of battleplate. ‘Elarion, I thought you dead.’

‘It takes more than a few World Eaters to finish me, brother.’

‘That much is clear.’ Arathos smiled, casting an eye over the dead.

‘Skill did not save him.’ The second Mortifactor clasped Kalex’s hand. ‘His neck is thicker than a Medusan’s. These mongrels lacked the patience to hack through it.’

Arathos nodded. ‘Gerador.’

‘Apothecary.’

‘Is the gene-seed within?’

‘It is.’ Tension coloured Elarion’s reply. They moved towards the apothecarion and Arathos saw black-and-bone armour amid the fallen. ‘Including that of our honoured dead.’

Arathos placed a hand on Elarion’s shoulder.

‘They feast at the Emperor’s side, brother. They shed their lives in His stead, and we do them no service leaving their legacy vulnerable.’ He knelt beside a fallen Mortifactor and picked up his bolter, disconnecting the magazine. He took two more from the warrior’s bandoliers and murmured his thanks. ‘Gather weapons and ammunition. We leave imminently.’

The other four Mortifactors nodded.

Gerador rolled a heretic corpse onto its back, searching for bolt pistol magazines and tracks of chain-teeth. Even their debased materiel could serve. Koralos and Elarion stripped bolter ammunition and grenades from the fallen Mortifactors. Kalex watched the corridor.

Something caught Arathos’ eye.

‘Have you used a flamer before, brother?’ Arathos asked, turning to Koralos. As he did, he pulled the weapon from a dead Mortifactor.

The Scout shook his head, reloading his pistol. Pride burned in his eyes at the Apothecary’s use of the honorific. Full battle-brothers rarely acknowledged their genetic kinship to Scouts, but it was an honour well earned in Arathos’ opinion.

He checked the promethium canister, heard a satisfying slosh and ignited the weapon. Arathos handed the flamer to Koralos and muttered his thanks to the fallen warrior’s shade. He was no doubt now feasting with the Emperor and Lord Magyar in the Hall of Victors.

‘Gently squeeze the trigger,’ he said, adjusting the Scout’s stance. Koralos handled the weapon well. ‘Brace before firing and target clusters. One enemy alone is a waste.’

‘Just don’t turn it on us,’ Kalex said.

‘Pay Kalex no mind,’ Arathos countered. ‘His skill with a flamer is woeful.’

The other Mortifactors chuckled, Kalex loudest of all. Koralos smiled thinly.

‘The apothecarion is in full lockdown?’ Arathos asked, indicating the hexagonal hatch a handful of yards away. Elarion nodded, and Arathos signalled Kalex and Gerador to secure the approach. They vox-clicked their assent. Koralos nodded and took position beside them.

Arathos and Elarion moved to the door.

A skull-faced servitor built into a shadowed alcove swivelled on its gimbal-torso to train a multi-melta on the Apothecary, its eyes glowing killing red. It was the door’s keeper, and most obvious defence. Arathos counted at least three other meltas and six bolters secreted in the shadows, slaved to automated defence protocols that would not hesitate to annihilate any threat.

Arathos removed his helm, exposing a youthful and unscarred face that echoed Guilliman’s noble profile. He spoke quickly and clearly while a red beam scanned his retina, his tone reflecting the frustrated eagerness written in his scowl.

‘Devan Arathos, Apothecary, Second Company.’

‘Voice-print analysis, match.’ The servitor’s voice was a dull metronome click. ‘Retinal scan, match. Gait recognition, match. Vermillion-level access protocols in effect. Gene-sample required.’

A small panel in the door retracted, revealing a palm-sized data-slate. Arathos spat on it and stepped back while it processed his genetic markers. The slate chimed.

‘Gene-match. Gratitude, Devan Arathos.’ The servitor’s eyes blinked from red to amber. ‘Vermillion-level access protocols in effect. Secondary sample required.’

Arathos stepped aside and Elarion took his place beneath the servitor’s blank stare. A servo-blade wiped Arathos’ saliva from the data-slate, and the scanning beam mapped Elarion’s retina. He too spat and spoke his name and rank in a cold, clear tone.

‘Mikael Elarion, battle-brother. First Squad, Second Company.’

Amber blinked green. The servitor fell slack in its housing. Ancient mechanisms thunked and grated, parting the hatch.

Arathos followed Elarion inside.

Six medicae thralls, armed with lascarbines and knapped-flint hand-axes, flanked the gene-vault. Two had the rich mahogany skin of the Posul-born. The rest were dredged from worlds Arathos did not care to know or name. They bowed and fell back. A veteran sergeant was speaking a funerary rite for a fallen squad member. Blood-flecked oath scrolls and skulls were affixed to his waist and shoulder.

Arathos remembered his desperate attempts to save the warrior. Two hours and forty-nine minutes of reconstructive surgery on augmented organs and implants reduced to scraps by fat bullets and mass-reactive bolts. Stimulants and synthesised infusions had tethered the warrior to life with spider-silk strands until the Mortifactor joined the Ultimum Bellator. The sergeant, now the lone survivor of the squad, had taken it hard. Arathos had been secretly relieved when he was then ordered to attend the fallen elsewhere. Words were not his strength, and survivors demanded too many of them. Chaplain Erani’s ministrations had ever been their solace and guide, but not now. Battle had drawn him away, his strength and sword arm needed to repulse the heretics and lead the Mortifactors to victory.

Arathos placed his hand on the gene-vault’s cold surface, his eyes tracing the Corpus Helix and the Chapter’s heraldic skull. The genetic legacy of over sixty Adeptus Astartes warriors was hyper-chilled, preserved to be implanted into fresh initiates at the next recruitment harvest.

If there is another harvest, he thought darkly.

He made a show of checking his bolt pistol, chainblade, reductor and narthecium, acutely aware that Elarion was watching him. Feigning satisfaction, Arathos waited a moment longer, then cleared his throat.

The sergeant glanced up. Blood dappled his grey beard, and his expression was twisted between rage and grief. His augmetic eye clicked as it focused, underlining his frustration. Arathos could not blame him. The warriors he had led, whose survival he had prized above his own, now lay dead. The World Eaters had stolen his duty from him.

‘Their gene-seed is accounted for,’ the sergeant said, nodding sharply at seven shrouded figures. ‘And mine. Take it and go. I have heretics to hunt.’ Arathos noticed the inexpert sutures at his throat. Breath snatched between his lips. An irritated flush of shame spurted through his mind. He felt like a novice presented with his first bolter.

Arathos recovered his composure quickly, still embarrassed.

‘Will you not join us?’ he asked. ‘To ensure their legacy endures?’

‘Erani and Second Squad will rendezvous with you en route to the hangar,’ the sergeant growled. ‘Angron’s dogs murdered my brothers. They die for that, gene-seed be damned.’

Arathos suppressed a snarl. Honour demanded vengeance, but on Posul, hunger was a child’s first tutor. It bred pragmatism as surely as it bred killers for the Chapter to mould into warriors. Pragmatism meant survival, and survival was all to the tribes. Pragmatism would have alloyed his strength to theirs and chosen duty over honour. Duty demanded the fallen’s legacy be preserved. That was his responsibility, and this fool spat on it.

But Arathos saw the pain and despair in the sergeant’s eyes, and knew he craved a death that might wash them away. In less desperate times, Erani would have offered counsel and penance, but now his only atonement would be righteous slaughter. In extracting his gene-seed, however inexpertly, he had served the Chapter, and Arathos was grateful.

Still, news of Erani made him smile. They had grown to boyhood in the same clan, killed their first man together, carving his flesh with flint knives before they’d each gifted their first bite to the other. They had survived the Astartes trials, and decades of service as Faceless. Even when their talents drew them apart, to Reclusiam and Apothecarion, the Emperor’s will saw them assigned to the same battle company. To know his brother was alive was a relief beyond measure. He restrained his smile, though, for this was no day for good humour. Instead, he centred his thoughts, adopted a grave mien and bowed his head.

‘Thank you, brother. May we meet again, in this life or in the Hall of Victors.’

The sergeant ignored him. He was muttering to the fallen again.

Arathos thumbed the vault’s control panel. Anti-grav plates whirred, propelling the casket at an unaugmented human’s marching pace. The massive doors rumbled shut as they left the apothecarion. The others fell in behind, boasts and jubilation forgotten.

‘The sergeant is not joining us?’ Gerador asked, fitting a fresh teeth-track into his chainsword. A flensing knife of carved aeldari bone was sheathed at his waist.

‘No,’ Arathos answered, his annoyance betrayed by his tone. ‘He wishes to hunt the enemy and I am not foolhardy enough to think I can force him from his quest.’

‘He honours the old ways of Posul,’ Koralos said, fingers brushing the hand-axe sheathed at his waist. Its knapped-flint head was secured to a haft of yellowed bone by knotted cord woven from human hair. ‘He hunts the killers of his oath-brothers, to devour their hearts and honour the fallen while they yet feast in the Emperor’s halls.’

Arathos’ eyes narrowed. He remembered no such tradition from his own childhood. His clan killed to feed and preserve their territory. Vengeance was an unworthy motivation in comparison to the slow onset of starvation, and honour was a concept taught by the Chapter alone, one that was utterly alien to the tribes of Posul.

‘You are a fool, boy,’ Gerador said. ‘He craves the Emperor’s gift and the release that comes with it. I doubt he would accept any order that did not offer him blood to shed and skulls to take, or one that did not culminate in his death.’

Koralos made to respond.

‘Enough.’ Arathos silenced them both with a glare. Though not a commander, he was still an officer; his position within the Chapter was similar to that of the tribal healers and shamans that commanded the respect of the Posulan warrior caste. ‘Bickering is pointless and does not serve our purpose. You will both hold your tongues. Is that clear?’

Both nodded.

They assumed a defensive formation around the gene-vault, Gerador and Arathos to the fore. They passed through benighted corridors and training halls turned charnel houses, the scent of blood and scorched meat teasing his hunger once again. The distant sounds of battle were a call Arathos longed to answer. The warrior-sons of Posul did not run except to join the fray and save beleaguered brothers. Pragmatism kept him from the fight, duty seeding frustration and sorrow that poisoned his humours. No one spoke, each vigilant for threats, but Arathos sensed his own distemper reflected in his brothers.

Twice the Archenemy came against them, allowing them to unshackle their frustration and take vengeance for fallen brothers. Twice, packs of canid-faced mutants and mortal men and women in boiled leather, chainmail and furs assailed them with primitive weapons. Bullets and musket balls leapt from the blank eyes of a hundred muzzles. They pinged harmlessly against the Mortifactors’ battleplate, an acned mess of scorch marks and chipped ceramite their only testament. The Mortifactors drove them back, purging the shame of enforced inaction with disciplined volleys of bolter fire, gouts of burning promethium and the strength of their sword arms.

A World Eater led the second assault, a figure of dread inspiration, slaughtering those who retreated or blocked his way. Arathos smiled and moved to intercept him, cutting the mortals apart by bolter fire or by the chainblade snarling in his grip.

One lucky blow cut through the ribbing beneath his arm, biting into the muscle. He crushed the fool’s throat, hurling the corpse aside. His blade rose and fell, parried and countered. Every stroke ended a life.

Sweat beaded his skin. The enemy sold their lives without thought, slowing him with the seconds it took to kill them. Their lord advanced closer. Arathos snarled at the World Eater, spinning his blade.

The traitor broke into a lumbering run. Warp-iron claws protruded from his knuckles, oozing black venom that flecked the bulkheads with every swing. Plasteel hissed and melted beneath the foul liquid. Arathos counter-charged, sidestepping a clumsy blow, and spun under the traitor’s guard before severing his arm at the elbow.

The heretic roared, swiping with his remaining claw.

Arathos turned the swing aside, locking eyes with the World Eater. Bareheaded, he tasted old blood on the traitor’s breath and saw the mindless fury threading his eyes. Cortical implants squatted on his scalp like ugly iron parasites. The legionary sliced, aiming to cut him from collarbone to pelvis. Arathos deflected the strike and slashed at a cracked plate on the traitor’s leg. The chainsword chewed through the weakened ceramite and into meat, muscle and bone. Black blood spurted. The heretic staggered backwards, cursing.

Arathos’ fist cannoned into the heretic’s face. Once. Twice. Thrice. His nose and cheekbone shattered. The legionary struck wildly, but Arathos parried each blow, biding his time. His patience was rewarded. As his frustrated foe overbalanced, Arathos sliced through the heretic’s wrist and rammed the blade into his primary heart. The traitor thrashed and died.

Arathos suppressed a sneer. To be consigned to lead a mortal rabble far from his confraternity must be as great a shame for a traitor as it would be for a loyalist. Arathos ground the warrior’s head to paste with his boot. As a mortal and a Mortifactor, he had taken thousands of skulls from defeated enemies. This duel was not worthy of remembrance.

Nor was the warrior.

‘Were we not to rendezvous with Erani and Second Squad near the twenty-first concourse?’ Koralos asked. The Scout immolated a clutch of renegade Guardsmen with bloodshot eyes and broken features.

‘Aye,’ Kalex said, spilling a mutant’s guts. The creature howled, its axe beating uselessly against the Mortifactor’s ceramite. He struck the head from its shoulders and loosed another burst from his bolter. The enemy were spent. ‘And we just passed the nineteenth.’

‘They may be delayed,’ Arathos declared. ‘We continue.’

They pressed onwards, over the dead of friend and foe alike. Arathos paused at each fallen Mortifactor, recited a funeral litany and examined their gene-seed. Two possessed viable progenoids. The others were ruined by bolt and blade. He cursed Angron’s sons and prayed for those whose legacy would never be imparted to the next generation; whose bones would never see the Chapter ossuaries. That knowledge tore at his hearts. Their deaths would be abstract, footnotes in their archives, with nothing to honour once those who knew them also fell in battle. That they were earned in the Emperor’s service was sparse comfort as his mood blackened.

They sprinted through an ablutorial. Arathos crashed through sheet-metal cubicles, Gerador at his side. His heavy footsteps sent cracks spidering through the tiles and vermin back to their nests. Water drizzled from corroded pipes and nozzles. Regular recycling and filtration gave it the crisp stench of oxidised metal and cleansing agents.

They emerged into a massacre.

The Mortifactors picked their way through the dead, their battle-brothers’ corpses surrounded by mounds of heretics. Oaths vilifying the old XII Legion crackled across the vox. Gerador and Kalex checked for survivors. Arathos counted seven fallen Mortifactors and twenty-three traitor legionaries.

Shards of cream-and-black battleplate twitched at his feet.

Arathos looked upon the ruin of a Space Marine, his limbs and hiking chest a butchered mess. He reached a trembling hand towards the Apothecary. Arathos clasped it, shame burning inside him. There was nothing he could do, save hear the warrior’s valediction, for the enemy’s crude blades had bitten deep, ruining the progenoid.

‘You are Second Squad,’ Arathos said gently.

A pained nod.

‘The enemy ambushed you.’

Another nod.

‘Your squad was slaughtered. Chaplain Erani?’

‘Taken,’ the warrior said, drooling. ‘To… armourium.’

Arathos was impressed he could speak at all. Even Adeptus Astartes physiology had its limits, and these wounds were far beyond that lofty threshold. The Apothecary drew his reductor, light reflecting on the blessed housing, and rested it beneath the Space Marine’s bloody chin. Arathos’ lips pressed together in a thin crease, penning his emotions behind a curtain wall. He could not do his duty to the warrior; he could only grant him the chance to dine with the Emperor and their forebears.

‘Do you desire the Emperor’s Peace?’ Arathos asked.

‘Yes,’ the warrior breathed through broken teeth.

Arathos squeezed the trigger, firing into the Mortifactor’s brain stem. He gasped, twitched and fell silent. Death might have been a gift, but the giving of it to the injured was never easy. He surveyed his brothers, the wounds to their flesh and the damage to their battleplate. His mind was a screaming vortex of conflicting ideas, and his silence allowed the others to speak.

‘We must continue the mission,’ Gerador said.

Koralos rounded on him, Elarion at his shoulder.

‘You would leave a brother behind?’ the Scout said. Koralos’ combat blade trembled in his hand, eyes blazing with barely restrained fury.

‘Have you no honour?’ Elarion snarled.

‘The survival of our Chapter is at stake,’ Gerador countered, the naked logic of his argument soothing Arathos’ anger at how readily he would abandon the Chaplain. Gerador took a step closer to the Scout, towering over him in his full battleplate. Koralos did not flinch. ‘Erani may have embraced death already. Should that be so, I will honour him as a fallen brother. If he has not, he would understand, even encourage us to save the gene-seed.’

‘Aye,’ Arathos barked. He squared off with the larger warrior, subtly shielding the Scout from the Assault Marine. Something like amused surprise flashed across Gerador’s face, and Arathos ground his teeth. ‘In more certain times, he might. But we have had no word of the Chapter since the warp descended into thrashing nightmare and madness. They could be dead in battle, or void-lost and driven to damnation, or worse.’

‘Exactly why we must preserve what we can,’ Gerador retorted. ‘The gene-banks of Terra may be gone, as may the Prosequitor Mortali’s. This gene-vault may be our last hope, it must be protected above all else. Is that not your duty, Apothecary?’

‘It is,’ Arathos grunted. He locked his helm back into place. ‘But we are not defined by our genetic lineage alone. Our traditions make us what we are. They make us Mortifactors, not Ultramarines clad in bone and black.’

Gerador flashed another amused smile.

‘He links us to Posul and the Ultimum Bellator,’ Koralos growled. ‘He is the history of our Chapter, the keeper of our traditions. No other knows the ritual words, or the measure of blood sacrifice needed to commune with the Emperor and the ancients. How would we seek their guidance and wisdom if we do not have a Chaplain to guide us?’

Arathos looked at the Scout, impressed. The youth had a keen and insightful mind, a healthy respect for tradition despite the naivety of his youth and the heart of a true warrior. He would make a fine Chaplain, if there was still one left to teach him.

‘Posul is dead,’ Gerador said. ‘It was dead to us from the moment we were harvested. We are the phantasms that haunt its wastes and people. Posul was our cradle, aye, but all children outgrow the cradle, and innocence surrenders to pragmatism.’

‘The boy is right,’ Arathos said. ‘You evade his questions because you know it is so.’

Silence lingered for several seconds.

‘Erani could be our last Chaplain.’ Elarion’s distant stare undercut his anger. ‘Our Chaplains are the beating heart of the Mortifactors, our link to who we are, to Posul and to the Emperor. Would you sacrifice that simply because mission parameters dictate it?’

‘In a heartbeat.’ Gerador did not even blink.

‘Then you are lost,’ Elarion said sadly, ‘and there is no guiding you.’

‘What should we do, Devan?’ Kalex voxed privately.

The other Mortifactors continued to bicker while Kalex interposed himself between them. Harsh words bloomed into threats. Arathos grappled with indecision as moments stretched into minutes. He saw only one solution.

‘Both must be saved.’

The other Mortifactors fell respectfully silent – the words of an Apothecary were always heeded.

‘We have lost enough of our brothers today,’ Arathos continued firmly. Kalex nodded approvingly and Koralos smiled. Arathos took the first step towards the armourium. ‘We will secure the gene-vault so that, should we fall, it will not be easily found. If the Chaplain is lost, we will return for the progenoids.’

It did not take long.

Concealing the gene-vault in an empty chamber, they mined the door and fused the lock. Gerador was loath to leave it unguarded, but Arathos overrode his protests curtly.

‘It is the only solution that avoids reducing our numbers.’

Erani was being held in an armourium close to the heretics’ boarding site. Stripped, tortured and suspended between the hulls of two assault rams, he was surrounded by twenty World Eaters and twice as many slaves. A champion in cannibalised battleplate delivered bone-shattering blows against Erani’s limp form to roared adulation.

‘Why not just kill him?’ Koralos whispered. Arathos met his eyes, seeing the anger and incomprehension in the Scout’s stare. ‘Why do this?’

‘He is a warrior-priest of the Emperor and an inveterate head-taker,’ Gerador said. ‘Such captives have value as weapons or sacrifices. Perhaps they intend to mind-scour him, indoctrinate him into their vile faith and unleash him against the Imperium.’

Grim silence greeted his pronouncement. They all knew that loyal warriors taken by the Legions might be tortured into heresy, taking their captors’ debased heraldry and warring on the Imperium they had once defended. It was a fate worse than an honourless death.

Arathos watched the champion cut ruinous glyphs into the Chaplain’s flesh. Erani’s head hung slack on his chest. Traitor legionaries and mutants brayed their amusement at this new defilement. Discomfort warred with his simmering anger. Something was wrong.

‘He is a sacrifice.’ Anger edged Elarion’s tone. ‘They seek a daemon’s favour.’

‘Silence!’ Arathos hissed. ‘To know the nature of Chaos is to know truest damnation. Trust your brothers and the strength of your arm. Trust the primarch, who spurned Chaos and fought to purge its influence from the Imperium. Trust the Emperor, with whom we shall all dine at the Table of the Ultimate Warrior.’

The Mortifactors looked to him, their anger fused with fresh resolve.

‘We have the advantage of surprise and superior position,’ Arathos said, then quickly laid out his plan. ‘Elarion, Kalex and Koralos will lay fire to thin the horde. Kill-shots only.’

They nodded and checked their weapons.

‘Gerador and I will force a path to Erani. When surprise is exhausted, reinforce us. At close quarters the World Eaters’ numbers and ferocity will prove the greatest challenge. Protect each other. Do not lose yourselves to rage or vainglory. If defeat looks certain, Elarion and Koralos will recover the gene-vault. We will sell our lives for this. Understood?’

The other warriors nodded, then dispersed to positions on the gantry. Gerador and Arathos moved to the stairs. At their nod, Arathos activated his external vox-caster. His roar echoed through the armourium.

‘In the Emperor’s name, bring them death!’

Bolts punched slaves from their feet. They detonated like overripe fruit or were shredded by mass-reactive rounds. Surprised roars sawed through ancient vox-casters. The legionaries revved their chainaxes and hurled themselves at the Mortifactors. Arathos levelled his pistol. His first kill was a World Eater with a face of knotted scar tissue blistered by cortical implants. Bolts punched through the traitor’s skull.

‘Concentrate on the legionaries,’ Arathos said.

A second traitor legionary was brought down by converging fire. His kindred fired back with blocky, archaic pistols. Rounds hissed past Arathos’ head before one cracked his plastron. Arathos gasped, pain nullifiers flooding his system. He watched Gerador stagger under sustained hits, covered by burst-fire from Elarion.

Arathos reloaded.

Another heretic fell, clutching his throat, blood jetting between armoured fingers. A fourth almost reached the stairs before six blessed rounds evacuated the contents of his head and torso. Arathos kicked through the support rail at the gantry’s edge and dropped onto the deck. Gerador landed beside him, pistol roaring.

Blood burst from severed limbs and ruptured torsos. The cultists trampled their comrades in their eagerness before they were scythed down. Arathos ejected his magazine and slapped a fresh one into place. His bolts ripped through the enemy, reducing them to slabs of meat and splintered bone. He sighted the surviving World Eaters hacking through their own slaves to reach the front.

Koralos stumbled and dropped down beside him, an autogun’s burst of fire rippling across his thigh. Arathos stepped in to shield the Scout, solid rounds snapping at his armour. Something punched through his plastron and pain lanced through him. Alert runes flashed. He dismissed them; his wounds were already closing. Kalex appeared at his shoulder, bolts shredding a pack of renegade scum in boiled leather and furs.

‘I can still fight, lord,’ Koralos said, his voice thickened by pain.

Arathos nodded, drew his blade in a smooth flourish and counter-charged a clutch of tattooed hive-gangers, the stench of ’slaught and psychon hot on their breaths. Blood fountained and limbs slapped onto the deck, their stunted minds unable to recognise death stalking into their midst. He parried a clumsy lunge, swiftly separating the heretic’s head and neck, then saw Koralos and Kalex plunge into the mass at his left, blades angled to strike. Elarion stayed back, covering them with mass-reactive bursts.

The Mortifactors worked in perfect concert, a pack of apex hunters threatened by lesser scavengers, brutal and efficient. When a heretic threatened to cleave Arathos in two, Koralos fired his last bolts into the legionary’s faceplate. The Apothecary returned the favour moments later, decapitating a mutant World Eater before his chainaxe could slice the top from the Scout’s skull. He saved Kalex scant minutes after that, his pauldron cracking under a fusillade aimed for the Space Marine’s head. Minutes passed like moments, as brother protected brother and the enemy suffered for their transgressions against Guilliman’s sons.

Jubilation set Arathos’ hearts soaring. They were a handful of yards from Erani, the Chaplain’s eyes still fixed on the deck. Arathos wrenched his chainblade through a World Eater’s gorget and spun on his heel to deflect a decapitating strike aimed at Gerador’s neck. The Assault Marine’s arm ended at the elbow, but he fought on with his chainsword, rending skulls and slicing through chests and stomach cavities.

Arathos pivoted, searching for the champion.

Hope withered in a half-formed roar.

Koralos was on his knees, chest ripped open to spill his offal on the deck. The World Eater crushed the Scout’s skull with his whirling hammer, gore and grey cranial matter spraying from the blow. The traitor smiled, revealing an ugly agglomeration of brass pegs and yellowed enamel, and the emotion he’d warned his brothers to guard against dragged him beneath its waves.

Rage.

The mere word did no justice to the sensation ravaging his mind. It was less a feeling, more a sledgehammer’s realignment of his cognitive functions. Words that might have been a denial or a curse snagged in his throat. His chainsword swam in his vision to become a length of bone clutched in a child’s bare fist instead of black ceramite. The smell of blood stoked his fury, leeching the finesse from his strikes and the coherence from his thoughts.

Blunt force and ferocity blocked strikes, separated limbs and torsos and heads. Voices pleaded for his attention. The enemy’s ursine grunts and entreaties for divine favour pawed at his ears, the World Eaters’ mongrel tongue morphing into shouted curses in a Posulan dialect. He ignored them all. There was only the kill, and the thunder of blood in his veins. The Apothecary, the trained warrior, was gone. There was only the cannibal savage.

He was a butcher, carving through gristle to reach the choice meat.

Arathos angled his shoulder and rammed the champion into a bulkhead. He roared, the sound reverberating inside his helm, and hacked at the heretic’s armour. His chainsword sheared a damaged pauldron free, teeth snagging deep into muscle. His narthecium’s bone saw plunged through a tear in the warrior’s breastplate, skewering a lung. Arathos ripped it through the warrior’s fused ribcage, black blood jetting across the deck.

The traitor laughed and headbutted him.

Arathos’ skull cracked.

Pain sparked along the splintered bone. Spots blurred his vision. The traitor shoved him backwards. The chain snapped taut and the hammer glanced Arathos’ side, the thunderclap of its power field cracking the ceramite. Bones shattered and muscles snapped. Red agony screamed along his nerves and hazed his vision. Alert lights bleached his retinal feed. Armour sections flared bright yellow and dull red. Damage reports scrolled down his visual feed. His breastplate was shattered, his helm compromised.

He ignored them.

The champion swung his strange chainmaul up towards Arathos’ chin. Kalex stepped in, deflecting the weapon with his combat blade while Arathos stepped back, adjusting his grip on his chainsword. His bones were reknitting – an unpleasant itching sensation that grated on his nerves. The pain evaporated in an icy flood of analgesics and stimms. The champion drove Kalex back, the maul shattering the armour on his thigh and his plastron. Kalex roared, staggering. Gerador elbowed the champion in the face, then carved a deep groove into the legionary’s breastplate with his chainsword. Another traitor charged both Kalex and the Assault Marine, sweeping wildly with a snarling chainaxe and a serrated flensing knife.

Arathos threw himself at the champion, an overarm strike aimed between his pauldron and plastron. The World Eater sidestepped, pivoting on his supporting ankle and swinging his chained maul. Frothing an oath to his vile god, the traitor launched a devastating series of strikes, each one capable of ending Arathos if his concentration slackened for even an instant. He blocked, parried and deflected, breath sawing through his helm’s speaker-grille. The heretic left him no opportunity to counter-attack. He would have to try something different.

Allowing the traitor champion to strike his unprotected ribs, Arathos hooked his blade over the maul’s chain, slicing through it. The powered head clanged against the deck and Arathos buried his chainsword in the heretic’s heart. Blood bubbled in the corner of his mouth; a wet rasping escaped his throat.

Disgusted, Arathos kicked the corpse free and surveyed the armourium.

Gerador was the only one still alive.

The Assault Marine executed survivors with brutal economy, using blade and boot. Arathos scanned the rest of the room and was met with Koralos’ vacant stare. He saw betrayal in those eyes, and in the decapitated ruin of Kalex and Elarion’s dismembered heap.

Drool strung from Erani’s teeth, pooling on the deck. Arathos cupped the warrior’s chin and lifted his head. A slack, uncomprehending expression stared back at him, and the fear Arathos had suppressed since first setting eyes on the Chaplain struck him with the force of a comet. He set his jaw and deployed a data-probe from his narthecium. A sharp click completed its connection with the neural plugs cut into Erani’s flesh. Bioanalytic data flooded his narthecium screen, a litany of severe cerebral haemorrhages and irreparable neurological damage, underlined by the absence of any significant brain activity.

Revulsion split the tidal barrier of his self-control.

Arathos strode over to the fallen champion’s corpse and hacked at it with his chainsword, a strangled roar ripping through his vox-caster. The Apothecary lifted the traitor’s head by its cortical implant crest and spiked it onto a chain at his waist. A memento to remember the consequences of his decision. He had failed his brothers, led them to their deaths to recover a mindless husk that had once been his closest friend.

Questions roared through his thoughts. Was it his hubris that had brought them here? His desire to preserve legacy and tradition? Could they have saved Erani, or was Gerador right to want to sacrifice their Chapter’s soul to ensure its survival?

In the end, it did not matter. It would not change what was.

He knelt beside Koralos and prepared his narthecium. The surgical blade sliced into the Scout’s throat, and Arathos slid his hands into the cut. The flesh peeled back with a wet crackle, the progenoid exposed in its nest of fibrous tendons and connective tissues. He extracted it quickly, speaking the Chapter’s ritual farewell for the fallen. Koralos deserved interment in the ossuaries as a full battle-brother, but that would not happen. He could only honour the boy his way. Arathos repeated the process for Kalex and Elarion while Gerador continued his executions.

Finally, he stood before the Chaplain, unable to meet Erani’s stare. The absence of any life, any sign of the warrior he once knew, was a white-hot dagger twisting in his gut. Gerador had been right after all. Had Arathos chosen his duty, their fallen brothers would be alive and the gene-seed’s fate would not rest on two wounded Mortifactors. They had lost brothers and Gerador had sacrificed his arm for a lost cause. Arathos wanted to offer condolences, to commend him on his steadfast resolve and skill.

But words were not his strength.

He could only do his duty.

Arathos placed his reductor against Erani’s temple and met the Chaplain’s empty, crimson eyes, whispering something in their birth tongue that was either a benediction or an apology. He squeezed the trigger. The reductor barked and Erani hung limp. Arathos’ bone drill and blade sliced across Erani’s throat.

He extracted the progenoid and sealed it in a cryo-canister. It would be bestowed upon another worthy aspirant. Renewed purpose flooded him as the canister misted counterseptic over the precious gland. The Chapter would survive, its physical legacy intact. Even if he were the last loyal son of Posul left in the Imperium, their legacy would endure. He removed a leather-bound tome stamped with an ivory skull and Erani’s rosarius from the Chaplain’s discarded and violated armour. There would be rites to perform once their duty was done. Tradition and ritual were the only balms to his pain.

‘Come,’ he said to Gerador.

Arathos and Gerador turned from the charnel horror and strode back to recover the cached gene-seed. Arathos’ hand gripped the cylinders that were his sacred duty.

The Chapter would endure.

THE WOLVES OF RAUKOS

GUY HALEY

The Wolfspear are proud inheritors of Russ’ legacy, true sons of the Wolf created in the midst of the Indomitus Crusade from the ranks of the Unnumbered Sons in the wake of the Battle of Raukos. These dour warriors strike with precision at the Emperor’s mightiest foes, leaving carnage and confusion in their wake.

The daemon struck, sending Lieutenant Bjarni Arvisson’s bolt-round wide. Chainsword met metallic claws in a shower of sparks as the warp spawn leapt onto him, taloned feet grasping his thighs, so that it was perched on his bent legs and hunched over his torso. The thing was heavy. Its thrashing upset Bjarni’s balance, sending them into a demented dance as he tried to throw it off. From its eyeless head a knot of tentacles slashed down, their hooked ends scraping over his helm. He snapped his head to the side to avoid the hit – he’d seen this breed of warp spawn tear a helmet clean off – but the beast was undeterred, and clamped its arms around him, pulling him into a tight embrace. Bjarni’s sword was trapped flat against his chest where the teeth churned away with nothing to bite. His gun went off in his hand, still pointed down, and the bolt thumped harmlessly into the broken mosaic of the square.

Slobber ran down his eye-lenses. Runes in his faceplate flashed warnings of acid burn.

Claws raked, squealing on ceramite.

This was getting annoying.

‘I’ve had enough of you,’ said Bjarni, and ran forward, slamming the beast hard against the toppled remains of a pillar. It squealed, but did not release him, so he staggered away, allowing the daemon’s weight to propel him backwards, and then with a grunt drove forward again. He hit the stone with great force, jarring himself as he crushed the daemon. Unreal flesh burst under the weight of Bjarni’s armour. False bones cracked. Bjarni shouted into the thing’s squirming face, pushing harder, grinding against the stone as the tentacles wrapped about his helmet.

‘Die, just die, by Russ!’ he shouted at it, and leaned in with all his weight, slamming his forehead into its face again and again.

It keened in pain, and its grip slackened enough that he could angle his bolt pistol up. When he felt the iron sight snag on skin, he emptied the magazine into the creature’s gut.

Explosions ripped through it, flashing through rents in its flesh that grew wider with each detonation. It juddered on his front, still embracing him, until it finally let go of its unreal existence and slipped dead to the floor. Bjarni stepped back. He aimed at the head, but the gun clicked empty, so he stamped hard, reducing its skull to a purple smear.

‘What are you supposed to be anyway?’ he muttered, looking at it. Its physiology made no sense. Were it truly alive, it would be unable to survive. He stepped back, and turned away from the pillar. He realised he had his fist still closed around the throttle of his chainsword, which churned pointlessly at the air. He released it, and the blade stilled.

Ongoing fighting filled a portion of the grand square that Guilliman had built for his Triumph of Raukos. Although only a few years old, it looked like it had been built centuries ago, the nightly battles waged across its length and breadth toppling its statuary and filling the grand facade of the triumphal colonnades with bolt craters.

Giant arc lumens illuminated the battlefield. Several of them had been felled during the fighting, creating a regicide-board pattern of dark and light. The creatures were losing, they always did, pushed into knots that were being methodically blown apart by concentrated bolt rifle fire. The nightly question was how many brothers would fall before sunlight chased the monsters away. Bunched up, the warp spawn looked like the dead daemon’s mouth writ large, as if they were all part of one, gargantuan medusae that could divide itself into smaller pieces, and were only now being forced back into union.

‘Skitja!’ said Bjarni, spitting a mouthful of blood into his breathing grille. He wasn’t wearing his rebreather, and the air slats of his helm were open, so the mix of spittle and vitae ran freely down his front to join with the purple fluids of the daemon. He pulled a face at the smell of the dead creature. ‘Stinks,’ he grumbled. He activated his vox via nerve impulse. ‘Demi-Company Hrossvalur, form up on me.’

‘Fighting’s nearly over,’ Lieutenant Jaleeb voxed him back. ‘Better stay where you are. Sun-up in two minutes. Let my squads handle it.’

Bjarni looked skyward. It was already the steely blue of predawn. The day had crept up on him again. Every night he became so involved with the fighting, the passage of time escaped him.

‘The sun’s not up yet. They’re still here, I’m still fighting,’ he said defiantly.

‘You’ve missed it, my friend. Save your bolts.’

He ignored the advice. ‘Demi-company, on me.’ He strode towards the thickest of the fighting. ‘I’ll not let you show me up, Jaleeb,’ he muttered to himself.

Groups of Space Marines made their way to him until he was leading a wall of pale-grey-and-black ceramite some twenty warriors broad. Their wargear was battered and dirty, their livery scratched. They would stay that way too; after the nightly war there was barely time to make sure their gear was functional before the next fight began.

‘What happened to you, Bjarni?’ asked Sergeant Hoplo, taking in the thick layer of ichor coating his commander.

‘Brother-lieutenant,’ growled Bjarni.

‘Ah. I see. That good a night,’ said Hoplo.

Bjarni led them towards one of the uncertain places the things poured through, naught but a shimmer on the air, but a door to monsters from the warp just the same. They emerged from it like they were stepping through a waterfall, indistinct shapes that became suddenly solid. A squad from Jaleeb’s demi-company were already lined up there, holding back a tide of flail-limbed things, principally by the expedient of blasting them to pieces.

‘Halt here. Take aim,’ he ordered his warriors.

His men raised their weapons.

‘Open fire,’ he said.

Thirty bolt rifles opened up together, smashing into the churning tide of warp spawn. That part of the square filled with deafening, porcine squealing, but Bjarni’s efforts were not needed.

‘Sun-up!’ The call went out, spreading from Space Marine to Space Marine. A line of white appeared on the eastern horizon, a bright bulge in the centre leading the way, swelling as it crawled wearily up: the dying sun of Beta-Kalapus.

Daylight dropped across the square. Where it hit the daemons, they vanished in a rush of hissing vapours. The blood caking Bjarni went black and flaked off into the air, where it steamed into nothing. The shimmer-portals wavered out of existence. No more came through.

His men ceased firing.

‘Russ take them all!’ he snarled.

‘Temper, Bjarni.’ Lieutenant Jaleeb approached from out of the rising sun. Half the orb was now visible, flooding the land with harsh light. The Pit was coming with it: a larger, dark eye in the heavens, drawing away the mass of the star into its maw in a long, permanent flare.

‘What count did you get?’ Jaleeb asked.

‘Ninety-four,’ said Bjarni.

‘You’ll have to do better,’ said Jaleeb. ‘I outdid you by ten.’

‘Right,’ said Bjarni. ‘Who’s counting anyway?’

‘Well, from the tone of your voice, I’d say you are, brother. That’s three nights this week I’ve exceeded your tally.’

All over the square, the brothers of the Wolfspear stopped, some deprived of their opponents mid-fight. There were a few warpform corpses remaining, those that found themselves in shadow as the sun rose, though even these were beginning to sublimate. It annoyed Bjarni that his opponent was among them, and not yet banished.

‘Get these carcasses out into the sun,’ he said. ‘Let Beta-Kalapus have his revenge while he can.’ There was little need to do what he ordered; the corpses wouldn’t last for long even out of the direct light, but it felt good to watch them vanish.

‘Time to get back,’ said Jaleeb.

‘Time to get back,’ agreed Bjarni.

The triumphal square was immense, but its absolute flatness cheated perspective, making it seem smaller than it was. Marching across the corner to return to their fortress-monastery took nearly two hours, and the sun was well on its way to noon by the time they had left Guilliman’s ruined monument behind. They were making their way through the first ring of walls when Chapter Master Senavael contacted them personally.

‘Lieutenant Arvisson, Lieutenant Jaleeb. Have Company Hrossvalur make all haste to the Court of Heroes. We have visitors. The Space Wolves are coming.’

‘The Space Wolves, as in, from Fenris?’ said Jaleeb. ‘The Space Wolves?’

‘They came in through the warp interface, blindsided our augurs. They are testing us. Do not shame me.’

Bjarni didn’t hear Senavael’s irritation. His heart quickened. Warriors were coming from home.

They needed no encouragement, passing the defences and entering the Court of Heroes at a run. The other company present on Beta-Kalapus-9.2 was already arrayed in full parade splendour. Chapter Master Senavael waited with his commanders at the fore.

Bjarni and Jaleeb’s company spread out and took their places at the back, still filthy from combat, as the ship came in to land, bypassing the landing pads of the outer defences and the hangars of the citadel to set down right in the court. It was slate grey, the wolf that walks the stars emblazoned on its sides, and its stubby wings decorated with yellow and red. To a non-Fenrisian it would look primitive, but to Bjarni, who had been brought up surrounded by such designs, it wakened memories of unbearable poignancy.

The ship settled into its landing claws. Gases rushed from pistons. It grunted, and for a moment Bjarni saw it not as a spacecraft, but as a beast of burden, hard-ridden and now grateful to rest.

He shook the impression away. He was a Space Marine, not a tribesman.

The ramp lowered. Three Space Marines marched out, stepping off the end before it had finished opening. One was a Primaris, the other two Firstborn. All of them were Space Wolves though, real Space Wolves, from Fenris, with charms and runestones hanging from leather thongs all over their armour. The Primaris Marine wore a pack-leader’s markings, and had an immense wolf pelt slung over his power pack, secured by the hide of its forelegs tied under the stabilisation jets. The skull had been left attached to the skin and sat on the top of the reactor, staring out with hollow eyes, the fangs scraping the helm of its wearer.

The leader was clad in black armour, with a helm shaped like a wolf’s skull. He carried the crozius arcanum of a Space Marine Chaplain alongside the specialised tools of an Apothecary.

A Wolf Priest, Bjarni thought, a chooser of the slain. A Wolf Priest of the Space Wolves was at Raukos.

The three surveyed the assembled companies, then the Wolf Priest spoke.

‘So this is the Wolfspear, eh?’ His voice growled out of his voxmitter, but the effect did not hide a mocking tone. He nodded, as if confirming an inner prejudice. ‘There is not very many of you, is there? You, the one in the fancy armour. You must be Senavael, yes?’

‘I am he. Master of the Chapter,’ said Senavael. He came forward. His voice was level, not quite hostile, but not friendly either. ‘Whom do I address, and to what do we owe the honour of this unexpected visit?’

‘I am Wolf Priest Ulfreyr Ketilsson,’ said the newcomer. ‘I have been sent here as an envoy by Wolf Lord Logan Grimnar. Don’t get proud, you’re not special, all the Ultima Founding Chapters of Russ’ line are being visited. This is Gjarmin,’ he said, and pointed his crozius at the Primaris Marine. ‘As you can see, he’s Primaris, like you, but he wasn’t before. He crossed the Rubicon to see what it is like being you. How was it, Gjarmin?’

‘It hurt,’ said Gjarmin.

‘He’s got rare insight that one, and he’s chatty. Can’t hardly shut him up, can we, Gjarmin?’ said Ulfreyr.

Gjarmin said nothing.

‘This other here is Troels. He’s a little sceptical of you new warriors.’

Troels too, said nothing.

‘I need balance in my counsel,’ said Ulfreyr. ‘Call him my naysayer, if you want. I don’t care. He doesn’t care either.’

The Wolf Priest reached up and took his helm off, revealing a surprisingly young-looking man, though the fangs protruding from his upper jaw suggested great age. His hair and beard were coarse and blond, braided, with finger bones threaded onto each of the plaits. He grinned at the Wolfspear fiercely.

‘You’ve probably guessed why I’m here. We’re kin. The Great Wolf has sent me to see if you are worthy of that honour. To that end, and with immediate effect, I have been attached to your Chapter.’

There was a moment of silence. The dusty wind tugged at the banners on display.

‘Logan Grimnar has no authority over us,’ said Senavael. ‘Every Chapter is independent. He has no right to command me to do anything, least of all to accept foreign warriors into our ranks.’

‘Fair enough,’ said Ulfreyr. ‘If you don’t want to be counted as true sons of Fenris, I shall let Lord Grimnar know.’ He turned and walked back up the ramp.

‘Wait,’ Senavael said. ‘I will stand no mockery. Are you here to judge us harshly? Tell me now. I will not tolerate that if it is so, and you can leave.’

Ulfreyr sighed, and half turned back, addressing his comments to the horizon rather than Senavael, like he’d said all this before.

‘There is a little judgement involved, but not much. We’re here to help you. Being a son of Russ isn’t like being a son of Guilliman. From what we know of our own Primaris, Archmagos Cawl applied the same indoctrination to all of you, and that won’t work. You’ve got a lot to learn, and there’s a lot we can teach you, some of it bad, yes, but much good. But if you don’t want our help, we cannot force it on you, so we’ll be going. Troels, Gjarmin, let’s go.’

They moved to board their ship.

‘Hold,’ said Senavael.

The three Space Wolves paused.

‘You will teach us of our common heritage without demeaning us for not being of the progenitor Chapter?’ he asked. ‘You will pass on the legacy and the lore of Russ?’ Senavael was a proud man, with a steady head. He sounded neither desperate to learn nor offended by the Wolf Priest’s manner.

‘Aye. That’s why we came.’

‘Then I invite you to fulfil the duty Lord Grimnar set you. I, however, shall decide the length of your tenure here. Is that clear?’

‘Clear enough.’ Ulfreyr turned back round. ‘You won’t regret it.’ He strode down the ramp again, hung his crozius from his belt and extended his hand.

Senavael took it in the warrior’s grasp.

‘How many of you were born of Fenris?’ Ulfreyr asked him.

‘Here?’ said Senavael. ‘A handful. A few more in the fleet, but they are not present. Most of us are from other places. From all over the Imperium, in fact, and from all of history.’

‘Raise your hand if you were born of Fenris!’ Gjarmin shouted.

A few hands went up. Ulfreyr looked them all over, until he got to Bjarni, and he stopped.

‘You,’ said Ulfreyr, pointing at Bjarni. ‘Who are you?’

‘I am Bjarni Arvisson,’ said Bjarni.

‘You are a lieutenant?’

‘That’s what the stripes on my helmet say,’ Bjarni said. He didn’t much like Ulfreyr’s attitude, but Ulfreyr seemed to enjoy Bjarni’s.

‘Ha! You’ll do. I need a guide, someone to intermediate between me and the Chapter. Fenrisian manners aren’t to every taste. It’ll be easier if you’re already used to command, and easier still if you’re of Fenris. Perhaps you will take Wolf Priests of your own to pass on what I will teach. You could be the first.’

‘I cannot be your acolyte. I have no specialist training, and am already a lieutenant.’

‘Not any more, at least not for a while.’ The Wolf Priest looked to Chapter Master Senavael. ‘If that is all right with you?’

Senavael looked at Bjarni. ‘Arvisson, indulge our guest. Act as his guide and intermediary until he leaves. Then you can return to Company Hrossvalur.’

Bjarni came forward. The evening had not worked out at all as he had expected. The relentless, never-changing nature of war on Raukos left him ill-prepared for surprises.

‘Now, Bjarni Arvisson,’ Ulfreyr said, ‘for a little while you will be my guide to your fine brotherhood, and there is one very important fact I need to know first, above all other things.’ He put his hand on Bjarni’s pauldron and gave a look full of meaning obvious to Bjarni.

‘You want ale,’ said Bjarni.

Gjarmin laughed. Troels grunted.

‘So he is a son of Fenris.’

‘Do you have anything to drink here?’ Ulfreyr asked. ‘It was a long voyage in the Sea of Stars and our thirst is great.’

‘We do,’ said Bjarni. ‘We are done fighting for the night. The Day Feast is due to begin. There will be ale there.’ He paused. ‘But I do not think you are going to like it.’

Gjarmin took a deep draught of the Wolfspear’s ale. It came out quicker than it went in in a spray of food and froth.

‘Vahk me!’ he roared, and wiped at his beard with the back of his hand. ‘How do you drink this wyrdkine’s piss?’ He stood, and spat noisily on the floor. ‘Skitja!’

The feasting hall was already quiet, though two hundred Space Marines took their drink and meat within. Gjarmin’s oaths echoed around the space, stilling what little noise there was. The clatter of knives on plates ceased. Everyone looked at him.

‘My apologies,’ he muttered, and sat down. ‘You don’t laugh or talk much, you Wolfspear, do you?’ He pushed the ale pot aside.

Out of his armour, Gjarmin’s Rubicon scars were pronounced. He wore a short-sleeved leather jerkin that left his hugely muscled arms bare, so the long, pale lines that followed his bones were clear on his leathery skin. They cut over faded tribal runes from his time-before and his Great Company markings alike.

‘You were right. I don’t think he likes your beer,’ said Troels. He took a gulp, not his first, and swilled it around his mouth before swallowing. ‘I can’t say I disagree with him.’

They spoke Gothic. Bjarni had tried to engage them in Juvjk, the common language of Fenris, but they were having none of it.

The noise returned to its usual, muted levels.

Troels raised an eyebrow at him. ‘Are you not going to answer the insult?’ he said.

‘Why?’ said Bjarni. ‘You are our honoured guests, and we must accept your rough behaviour, up to a point. That’s hearth law. If you don’t like the ale, then you don’t like the ale.’ He shrugged. ‘Besides, he’s not wrong. It is piss. Not one of these men here know how to brew or drink.’

Troels smiled, glanced at Ulfreyr, raised his tankard then drained it dry.

‘Ale is ale, and I have better manners than Gjarmin.’

Bjarni smiled at him. He felt stupidly nervous.

‘Are you all right?’ Gjarmin said. ‘You look like a maiden on her wedding night.’

All three of the Space Wolves laughed.

Bjarni scowled, unsure of what to say. It was strange to be with these beings. He had been raised to worship the Sky Warriors, and although he was a Sky Warrior himself, he was not of the Space Wolves. If he had not been kidnapped by Cawl’s agents, he might have been chosen by a man like Ulfreyr, watching tribal battles in his forbidding armour. Then he would have known the ways of the Space Wolves and been their brother.

He felt counterfeit, a false wolf. He opened his mouth to answer the jest, but his words would not come.

His feelings of unworthiness, always somewhere at the back of his mind, surged forward, and it was worse for the others in the Chapter. They had no idea how to react to their guests. As for the six of them from Fenris on Beta-Kalapus-9.2, all of them felt Bjarni’s unease.

‘Leave him be, Gjarmin,’ said Ulfreyr. ‘You do not answer. I understand. To admit weakness is hard. But I have seen that look, the one you have on your face right now, on the faces of many others. Yours is not the first Ultima pack we have visited. We are a singular Chapter, of great and noble heritage. We are bred of an unusual world. We had few successors, until now. This situation is unique in our history. Before now we have not enjoyed the extended brotherhoods the other old Legions have maintained. There are not untold numbers of Lord Russ’ sons as there are of Guilliman, or Sanguinius. But it is hardest of all, I think, to be of Fenris, and to be a Space Marine, yet not be of the Great Companies.’

Bjarni nodded. ‘I am not a Space Wolf,’ he said. ‘But I am also not quite not one either.’ His brows drew together at his inability to express his thoughts. He was embarrassing himself.

Troels scowled. ‘Don’t use that name. No real son of Russ uses the name. That’s for outsiders.’

‘What?’ said Bjarni.

‘The one with wolves and space in it,’ Gjarmin said.

‘Well, what name do I use…?’ Bjarni asked. ‘The Sky Warriors?’

Troels and Gjarmin laughed loudly at him. ‘That’s for the Bondi and the tribes.’

‘Be quiet. If he had remained on Fenris, he would know. It is not his fault the trickster Cawl took him,’ said Ulfreyr. ‘I am a judge of men. I can see his worth. He would have been chosen, I am sure of it. I can see it in his eyes. Be easy on him.’ He gulped down his ale, pulled a face. ‘But you are all right about this bloody ale. Gjarmin, it is time. Fetch the mjod in before I sicken.’

Gjarmin smiled. ‘Finally,’ he said. He pushed himself up off the table and moved briskly out of the hall.

‘We call ourselves the Vlka Fenryka,’ said Ulfreyr.

‘The Wolves of Fenris?’ said Bjarni.

‘Yes. And our home is the Aett, not the Fang. There are a lot of other small details that seem unimportant and that we pretend not to care about but are irksome for us. We will teach you all of this.’

‘That would please us,’ said Bjarni.

‘You must teach us too. This arrangement you have here,’ said Troels, waving a chop bone around the hall. ‘Explain it to me. Who are you, what motivates you, what is your mission?’

‘The Wolfspear was founded after the Battle of Raukos,’ said Bjarni, ‘when the last of the Unnumbered Sons were disbanded. All of Russ’ sons left in Fleet Primus were gathered here. There were only five hundred of us. We have been under-strength ever since.’

‘I count two hundred and fourteen,’ Troels said. ‘Where are the rest? Have they fallen in battle?’

Bjarni shook his head. ‘They are away with the fleet.’

‘Why so many on the Chapter planet?’ asked Troels. ‘The stories of the Pit must be true.’

‘It depends on the stories you have heard,’ said Bjarni.

‘Daemons come, every night, and you must fight them. During the day you rest and feast and then fight again,’ said Troels. He picked up another steaming rib from the platter between them. ‘It sounds a good life.’

‘Those stories are true,’ said Bjarni. ‘The Pit is an invidious place, spreading nightmares and dissent for light years around. With us here, we are the focus of the warp’s vileness, and the surrounding sectors know a little peace. Guilliman commanded us to guard this place, so we do, though it costs us in blood, and affects our temper.’

‘Garrison work never suited the hunter. We are wolves,’ said Troels.

Bjarni nodded ‘It is hard for us to accept this duty. After a year, we agreed that we should also patrol the area around the Pit. When the enemy waxes strong, its influence is widespread in the surrounding sectors, and we have curtailed many intrusions into realspace. Three companies rove the stars. Chapter Master Senavael keeps two companies here. We rotate.’

‘If it offends you, why not leave and find your own wyrd?’ said Troels. ‘No one commands the sons of Russ.’

‘We choose to obey,’ said Bjarni. ‘We took an oath. If we left, the Pit would be an open door into the warp. Traitor Marines and daemon legions have both used it before. It is why we are here, though for the last months we have fought nothing but lesser warp spawn.’

‘Every night?’

‘Every night, though we feel less and less like hunters with every dawn.’

Ulfreyr had sat quietly through this exchange. Now he broke his silence again.

‘Do you know what the Wolfspear was, Bjarni Arvisson?’

‘Russ’ spear, given him by the Allfather,’ said Bjarni. ‘When he throws it, it causes lightning in the skies over Asaheim. That is what the gothi said in our tribe. They say its touch teaches the truth of a man to himself, and that Russ did not favour it, but that it served him well.’ He looked down, still feeling foolish. ‘But that’s just a legend. Russ was a primarch, not a god, and he’s gone. Lightning is caused by electrostatic differences generated in an atmosphere equalising themselves. The legends are lies.’

‘Are they?’ said Ulfreyr. ‘“Lightning is caused by electrostatic differences generated in an atmosphere equalising themselves…”’ He shook his head slowly, grinning around his fangs. ‘That’s Cawl talking.’

‘It’s what Cawl put in my head,’ said Bjarni. ‘But that doesn’t stop it being true.’

Ulfreyr nodded. ‘Well, it is true. Lightning is a natural electrostatic effect.’ He toyed with his ale cup, but did not drink it. ‘But it is also Russ casting his spear across the sky.’

‘That can’t be possible.’

‘Maybe. But it is so, in a certain sense,’ said Ulfreyr. ‘Two opposing things can be true. All things are possible.’ He belched. ‘You have a noble calling here, and the chance for much glory.’

‘So you judge us well?’

Ulfreyr nodded. ‘So far. I must see you fight.’

Gjarmin returned at that moment, leading a train of servitors into the hall. Each was decorated with runestruck plating, and carried a wooden barrel in its mechanical arms.

‘Ah, the mjod.’ Ulfreyr smiled again. A servitor approached. Troels directed it to set down the barrel, broached the top with a short-handled axe, then eagerly helped himself to a cup of the contents. He filled Bjarni’s mug next. The liquid was dark and thick, and smelled strongly.

‘Now we will teach you one of the most important things about the Vlka, Bjarni Arvisson,’ said Ulfreyr. ‘We will teach you of mjod. A toast!’

Ulfreyr raised his cup.

‘Fenrys hjølda!’ he shouted.

The first toast was returned politely, but reservedly, by the Wolfspear.

The second had rather more energy to it.

By the third, they were singing.

What Bjarni actually learned was that Space Marines can become intoxicated, given the right chemical mix, and that they could suffer for it afterwards.

His head still felt muzzy and his mouth tasted vaguely of metal as he waited for that night’s incursion.

‘They will come in through here,’ said Codicier Curiminos, sweeping his hand across a broad portion of the square. Bjarni was with the Chapter Master, the command cadre and their visitors. The Librarius had predicted a major incursion that evening, and both companies were arrayed for battle, with armour support.

‘Do they always come in through Guilliman’s parade ground?’ Ulfreyr asked Bjarni.

‘Mostly,’ said Bjarni. ‘Not always, but nearly always.’

‘It makes a twisted sense. The denizens of the warp like to mock us,’ said the Wolf Priest. ‘More the fool they. It makes them predictable. This is a monument to a moment. Unimportant to the war. The Indomitus Crusade sweeps on, and leaves this relic behind. It is always a fault of the great enemy that they focus on symbols.’

‘So why do they?’

‘Because symbols have power. I told you last night that there is more than one version of the truth, didn’t I? It is magic. Magic is the enemy of truth.’

Bjarni nodded. The motion made his head swim.

Space Marine Librarians marked out predicted ingress points with circles of salt and ground silver, to slow the daemons’ manifestation. Servitor teams worked under the direction of Techmarines to raise arc lumens; Bjarni explained that the light seemed to help against the lesser warp spawn.

‘What happens when you face the legions of the Ruinous Powers?’ asked Troels. Filtered through a hangover, Troels’ slightly superior air was even more annoying.

‘Then it doesn’t help,’ said Bjarni. ‘But at least we can see clearly what we are shooting at.’

In contrast to the Space Wolves among them, the Wolfspear Space Marines seemed plain. They lacked the savage aspect of the Fenrisians. Their colours followed Codex norms. Techmarines in red, Librarians in blue, squads marked according to the diktats of Guilliman’s great book. Ulfreyr observed the Chapter at work, but with his face hidden by his wolf mask, Bjarni could not tell what he thought of them.

The sky darkened. Beta-Kalapus sank behind the horizon, dragging the Pit of Raukos on its leash behind it. The work went on until the last moment, when the first stars came out, and the east was shading to black. Then the Space Marines hurried to take up their positions around the proactive rings.

Bjarni unhitched his chainsword and checked his bolt pistol. Cold wind blew up out of Beta-Kalapus-9.2’s desert. It was so quiet they could hear the individual grains of sand bouncing over the broken tesserae of the triumphal ground. His headache subsided. Three hours ago, he’d been drunk. The hangover did not last long. His enhanced biology purged the poison from his body. Ulfreyr had promised the crowd last night that he would reveal the secrets of mjod. It had been met with an uproarious cheer, but right then Bjarni wasn’t sure he wanted to know.

‘There!’ said Gjarmin, pointing into the night. ‘They are coming.’

Colourful lights danced across the square, thicker where the Librarians had said the rifts would open, but they appeared elsewhere too. Officers quickly redressed their troops. Bjarni sent one of his squads out of the battle line to cover a patch of darkness that quivered dangerously.

‘Stand ready!’ Chapter Master Senavael commanded.

‘First speech of fire, then steel tongues babble,’ said Ulfreyr. ‘I’m glad I came. This promises to be a lively night.’

The air shivered. Tears appeared in the fabric of reality, like shreds of mist scudding away, revealing new landscapes. There were hints of blood, and hot rain; a plain of skulls crowded by red-skinned daemons, all tall, with sweeping horns and brazen swords.

Trumpets blew. Cymbals crashed. The daemons moved forward.

‘The god of war honours us,’ Gjarmin said sardonically. ‘Bloodletters.’

‘Fire!’ Senavael ordered. The night erupted with noise and the candle-flame rocket motors of bolts hurtling towards their targets.

Gunfire worked for minutes. The flesh of the creatures was resistant to bolts, las and plasma. The daemons’ purpose was one of melee. Their god disliked seeing them die at range, and would not permit it.

A few fell, their unnatural existences ended by the might of the Imperial technology, but all too soon they were among the warriors of the Wolfspear.

With a crash of iron-hard flesh on ceramite, the bloodletters hit the line. Daemon swords smoking with magic cleaved armoured limbs from bodies. Blood sprayed high, shocking crimson where it rained in lumen light, black as death outside.

There were hundreds of bloodletters. The two companies found themselves engaged on all fronts simultaneously. The tanks backing the fighting line moved out of charge range, but some were caught, and Bjarni’s squads were lit by the explosion of an Impulsor as it was hurled high upon a pillar of flame. Battlefield noise shifted from gunfire to the grinding howl of chainswords and the ringing of brass swords. Daemon speech underlaid the clash with a soul-chilling hiss.

The melee descended rapidly into chaos. Where possible, Bjarni ordered his warriors back to gun at the daemons, but the foe were fast beyond the ability of mortal eyes to catch, and determined to match blade with blade. The battle was one of individual duels. Bolt rifles were cast aside. Combat knives and pistols drawn. Chainswords roared.

Bjarni fought two daemons at once, the whining chain-track of his weapon catching on their swords, slowing his parries. They snarled as they fought, long tongues whipping back and forth in eagerness for his death. Bjarni had to end them quickly, before more of their kind joined them to overwhelm him. So forced into action, he took risks he would normally decline, pivoting dangerously on his back foot to swing his chainsword at the neck of one daemon. The blow was true, and sent the creature’s long head to the ground. The other moved in to be met by a flurry of bolts, and it fell into pieces that Bjarni strode through, already marking his next targets.

‘Fall back, fall back! Corral them with fire!’ he called to his warriors. ‘Fall back, engage them at range!’

But his men were swamped, and could not obey.

The night wore on, both sides keenly aware of Beta-Kalapus-9.2’s particular psychic geography that would see the daemons sent back to the warp with the dawn of day. The two companies were pushed back, and Bjarni fought so hard his transhuman muscles ached. Only once did he see Ulfreyr and his brothers in combat. They moved through the red daemons, bent low to the ground, loping like wolves as they charged into a knot of the bloodletters, whereupon they let out howls that were as joyous as they were furious. Gjarmin and Troels fought with consummate skill, but Ulfreyr was of another order still. Furious as an ice troll, unstoppable as a collapsing mountain, he laid about himself with his crozius arcanum, each hit banishing another daemon to the warp with the thunderous bang of annihilated matter.

‘Fenrys hjølda!’ the Space Wolves shouted, their cries a musical howling. ‘Fenrys Hjammar cold!’

Then they were gone into the red throng, and Bjarni had his test of might.

An unholy champion approached him, long head swinging with the weight of its horns below the hump of its stooped back. The horns were huge and golden, twisted into a likeness of Khorne’s skull rune. It carried a sword as long as a man of what appeared to be fine steel, but the surface ran with blood that dripped upwards, and the hilt was worked with screaming faces that were constantly in motion.

The daemon pointed a long finger at Bjarni.

‘Your skull for his throne,’ it said, and came at him.

The first blow was blindingly fast. Bjarni barely caught it, and the impact shook him to the core, jarring his arm so hard his fingers went numb and his shoulder burned. He had no time to recover; it was already coming at him again, its sword humming through the air. The daemon was tall, but spindly, arms no thicker than a man’s. If it had been mortal, it would have been too feeble to defeat Bjarni, but appearances meant nothing with the Neverborn. It had a strength born outside of reality, fed by the energies of other realms. It took all Bjarni’s efforts to stay alive in the face of its attack. Its tongue whipped at him. Its hoofed feet stamped with every blow. The air writhed and crackled at its touch.

But Bjarni was a son of Russ, born of ancient science and of hope that mankind could survive, and prosper. He was descended from the Emperor’s own executioners. When he saw the opening, he took it.

A spinning cut with his chainsword diverted the daemon’s attention upward. His gun came up. A single shot hit it in the mouth. The head exploded, and it fell, scrawny neck fountaining black blood.

Like all fights, it was brutal and all-consuming, but when done, the bloodletter vanished into the past, its place to be taken up by the next act of violence, then the next, until they blurred into one, long night of bloodshed.

Outside the square, dark passed, headed for the unstoppable dawn.

Surrounded by the bodies of his foes, Bjarni rested against the severed head of a statue, tall as a man, that had been hurled somehow from the galleries of heroes carved into the hills at the sides of the plaza. It must have weighed ten tons. How it had got there, he did not know. He might even have been present the night it had happened; he could not remember. His memory was faultless, but the warp lapped the shore of reality there, and confused the minds of mortals no matter their quality. Each battle bled into the next, into the next, into the next…

His head fell forward. He was indescribably weary.

Ulfreyr joined him. He was helmetless. He’d probably had it torn from him, for it was not at his side and his face was bloodied. Three parallel claw marks crossed his nose, already healing thanks to his Astartes physiology.

‘That was a hard fight,’ said the Wolf Priest. The sun was coming up again, though in the shadow of the stone head the corpses of the bloodletters lingered.

‘It was a costly fight,’ said Bjarni. ‘I lost seven men.’

‘That is not a bad tally. The creatures of the Blood God are among the worst foes you will face in your life as Space Marine, Bjarni Arvisson. You acquitted yourself well. You have real skill with that blade of yours. I saw you fight and kill their herald. It was a rare deed, and should be commemorated in the sagas, or Chapter histories. Whatever you do here.’

‘I could have done better.’

Ulfreyr laughed. ‘We can always do better. For now, be thankful that you are alive.’

‘I am,’ said Bjarni, and he meant it. ‘I would be grateful if you let me be. I have no desire for company.’

‘Very well, but before I go I have one more thing to say to you this day,’ said Ulfreyr. ‘You are not, and never will be, a Space Wolf’ – he stressed the name disdainfully – ‘but you and your men are of the Vlka Fenryka, and we honour you as our brothers. Now look to the sky, and see our purpose here.’

There was a roaring from overhead, of gunships coming down to land. Bjarni looked upwards.

‘Do not be alarmed. They are our men. They are your men.’

‘Our men?’

‘Reinforcements, from Fenris itself. Warriors for your Chapter. Enough to take the Wolfspear up to Guilliman’s thousand, no more. We do not wish for trouble from that quarter. They waited out of augur range, in the blank zone of the Pit, listening for my signal.’

‘Then you must have sent it hours ago.’

‘I sent it the moment battle was joined, for I saw then a true brotherhood worthy of Russ.’

Bjarni watched the ships as they descended like bright stars towards the fortress-monastery.

‘This is a great gift,’ Bjarni said.

Ulfreyr shrugged. ‘It is only the trade of favours between kin. You don’t think Gjarmin, Troels and I came alone do you?’ He grinned around his long, sharp teeth. ‘Remember, Bjarni Arvisson. Wolves always travel in packs.’

THE SINS OF MY BROTHERS

PETER FEHERVARI

Where once the Angels Resplendent rose on burning wings, now the Angels Penitent condemn with the Emperor’s voice. Once seemingly a bastion of culture free from the curse of the Black Rage, a mysterious prophet came and showed them who they really were. In a brutally brief civil war that saw the Librarium erased and all the Chapter’s great works destroyed, the Angels Penitent were born.

The pursuit of knowledge rivals the pursuit of beauty in its arrogance. Both quests are born of hubris, yet of the two, the sin of curiosity cuts deeper and leaves the greater wound.

– Sixteenth Psalm, The Testament of Thorns

The story I have for you is not a good one. Not in any sense of that slippery word. It has no rising arc of drama or moral point to drive home, let alone a potent resolution to reward your attention. Such fine sagas belong to my Chapter’s past, along with the heroes they exalt. The chronicles of the Angels Resplendent are abundant with them!

But the Resplendent are no more.

There, it is said, though the admission tastes bitter, as will my tale. In truth it is more a collection of threaded fragments than a story in the traditional sense. Nevertheless it must be told and I trust no others to listen and remember. Those I once called brothers are now either betrayers or betrayed, blinded by a false prophet or branded as heretics for their dissent. Radiant Malpertuis, the Painted World, has become a pious wasteland of gallows and pyres, where bodies, books and dreams are burned with equal fervour.

Oh, I do not doubt there are others like myself secreted among my degraded brotherhood – unbelievers who toe the line in watchful silence, scheming to break the chains that bind us, but they are the last I would confide in. Whoever they are, I can play no part in their hopes of insurrection. I forfeited such camaraderie long before our fall from grace, if ever I shared it.

My loyalty has always been to another cause. I believe it is a higher one, but that does not absolve my deceit. I chose to abet a tragedy that I might have averted. In doing so I became a betrayer of the worst kind – one who cannot plead ignorance or misplaced ardour in his defence.

Unlike my brothers, I knew what was coming for us.

The betrayer stood at the threshold of the narrow colonnade, whispering into the wind dancing between its pillars. This passageway was among the most secluded in his brotherhood’s citadel, as befitted his confession, yet it wasn’t caution that drew him here. Though Kanvolis was a nest of righteous snakes, where a loose tongue could quickly unravel itself, its overlords shunned the devices that would have made surveillance pervasive. Only the machineries of war were tolerated by the new order – arms, armour and the vessels that carried its crusaders into battle – and even those essentials were distrusted and ceremonially excoriated. All technology was sinful in the God-Emperor’s eyes, decreed the zealots who claimed to be His mouthpiece.

No, it wasn’t privacy the betrayer sought in this forsaken place. It was the crowd.

Even in a city of poisoned dreams some places were distinguished in their malevolence, and few rivalled the Colonnade of One Hundred Dragons. There were only two entrances – one at either end, each framed by a pair of arching reptilian wings carved from opal. By tradition visitors never left by the one through which they entered.

Many never left at all.

Over the centuries countless souls had embraced oblivion on this long and lonely stretch, for it was always lonely to those who craved its solace, and far longer than they imagined when they began their journey. And though they packed its length in death, they remained alone, each phantom oblivious to its kin, as purgatory required.

‘You will linger here until Kanvolis falls,’ the betrayer informed the spectral throng. ‘Until then you shall bear witness, as I must.’

Invisible, intangible and torn, the dead wailed against their fate, given inchoate voice by the wind, yet they listened. What else was left for them? They were the legacy of a bygone era, mortal dreamers cast into shadow by the Shining Ones they once venerated. The Resplendent never desired this doom for their devotees, but nor did they strive to avert it. Most never even noticed, for human lives were too fragile and fleeting to dwell upon. One way or another, whether by accident or intent, the brotherhood always led its followers to ruin. That alone remained unchanged.

‘We are destroyers by nature,’ the betrayer observed, ‘no matter how softly we tread.’ His eyes glittered in the gloom, unblinking despite the haunted flurries assailing them. They were designed to weather far harsher assaults than this. In essence that was the conceit of his entire body, its every organ, muscle and sinew engineered to endure punishment and mete it out in greater measure. It was an almost archetypal construct – the perfect human warrior made manifest, but in manifesting it had ceased to be human at all. Transhuman, scholars called his kind, as though the Adeptus Astartes were biological way stations to something even more exalted.

And perhaps we are, the perfected warrior mused. Perhaps that’s all we were meant to be. The notion didn’t offend him. He was an agent of the ineffable, was he not? Indeed, despite his lineage he didn’t think of himself as a warrior, at least not in the coarse physical sense his body was forged for.

His body? No, the vessel he inhabited would never truly be his. Though his command of its motor functions was complete, its original occupant lingered somewhere bone-deep and inviolable, raging against the theft.

‘Blood for blood,’ the betrayer murmured to his captive. ‘So it goes, brother.’

He stepped into the passageway, his fingers weaving the winged pyramid of the Architect Arisen as he crossed the threshold. The gesture was prohibited, but he wouldn’t intrude upon this rarefied place without offering due respect. Unlike the superstitions that governed his brotherhood now, the esoteric practices of the Resplendent were rooted in reason.

‘I know your name and nature,’ he declared, addressing the colonnade through those it had snared. ‘I taste your hunger and smell your spite.’ He breathed deeply of the spirit-saturated air. ‘We walk as one.’

He felt the colonnade relent, its hostility sinking back into the stones, appeased for now. It ran along the southern face of Kanvolis’ penultimate tier, overlooking the distant churn of the River Tristesse, whose cliffs the citadel straddled. The outer wall was low and windowless, enticing the wind as it once enticed broken dreamers to hurl themselves over into perdition. Their names were carved along its length, each marking a point of departure. Many were scrawls, others inscribed with painstaking finesse, some merely initials, but all spelled despair, for only the lost ever took that final leap of broken faith.

‘My story begins in reflection,’ the betrayer said, closing his eyes. He didn’t require sight to walk this path and its absence invoked the past. ‘As within, so without.’

‘As above, so below,’ my mentor intoned, raising a hand to the shining oval before us. The mirror was affixed to his sanctum’s wall, its span yawning from floor to ceiling, like a portal. Though we were giants beside common men we could have stepped through it without stooping.

‘My will over the world,’ the mirror’s maker continued, skimming his hand over the glass. His fingertips never quite touched the surface, but it rippled in sympathy beneath them, briefly softening to liquid then hardening again, its weave subtly altered by their passing. ‘The world by my word.’

‘As within, so without,’ I answered, completing the incantation. ‘So it goes.’

This formula encapsulates the fundamental principle of the Arc Resplendent, the codex that has shaped my Chapter since its renaissance, and continues to do so even now, deep into its decline, working covertly through instruments like myself. Once its teachings were available to all our brethren, embodied in myriad tomes; however, its most profound insights were veiled in metaphor and scattered among thousands of lesser passages. Our warrior-artisans would scour the text assiduously, hunting for those hidden verses, but few outside the Librarium Radiant ever glimpsed them, let alone grasped their meaning. They resonate with the psychically gifted, you see, for we feel the malleability of the world more intimately than most. That is why the Resplendent exalted its Librarians above all others.

We were more than our Chapter’s battle psykers or the keepers of its lore – we were its Architects, entrusted with our brothers’ fate by the First Magister himself. And like the codex he authored, we were layered, embodying mysteries within mysteries. A rising spiral of coteries ran through our order, its every coil penetrating a higher stratum of truth, each more tenebrous than the last. The pursuit of enlightenment is a perpetual ascent into the infinite, like soaring into an inverted abyss. So it goes. How could it be otherwise?

At the apex of this noble endeavour stood the Paladins Luminous, whose nature and number were known only to themselves. Membership of our coterie could not be pursued, only offered, and never refused. Our power was discreet, yet when required, absolute, though its exercise went unrecognised.

But I digress. It is the mirror I wanted to tell you about, and what I saw there.

Though its glass was beautiful, the frame that caged it was not. Carved from dark, yellow-stained wood, it still reeked of its origins despite its antiquity. That resinous stench permeated my mentor’s sanctum, stirring memories of the forest that spawned it. We call that oblique realm the Reverie, though the zealots who rule us now have outlawed the name, along with any mention of the place. It offends them, as all true mysteries do.

Nameless or not, the forest lies nineteen leagues downriver from our stronghold, caged within the valley beyond the Severed Ridge.

It also lies… elsewhere.

My recollections of the Reverie are troubled, yet smeared with yearning, for part of me will always wander there, eager to learn more. All who have ventured into that riddle of snowbound trees share this longing, but it is more tenacious in some than others. The infatuation is both a blessing and a curse, capable of invigorating or eroding a soul. As always, the balance lies within the seeker. Not so long ago, crossing that precarious territory was the trial we set the Chapter’s recruits, for there is no finer measure of an aspirant’s calibre.

But perhaps you already understand the Reverie’s allure? I have spied its radiance from your parapets on many a night, distant yet insistent. Was it longing that awakened your stones? Was it denial that made you so spiteful?

Well, no matter, I have not come to judge you.

The mirror, you say? Yes, as you have no doubt surmised, it wasn’t forged to reflect the mundane world. Occasionally I saw myself in its glass, though never as I was – or imagined myself to be – but more often it was the Reverie I saw there, for it preoccupied the mirror’s maker. My mentor had travelled further along the forest’s coils than most, yet whatever he sought there still eluded him. Though I’d served him in secrecy since my Ascension to the brotherhood, almost two decades ago, he had never revealed the nature of his quest. Whenever he summoned me to ponder the glass I wondered whether the time had come. Was this to be the revelation? Was his trust in me finally complete?

After so long in his shadow I should have realised the truth. Trust was not in Master Satori’s nature. I sometimes wonder whether he even trusted the cause we served, though his dedication never wavered. Perhaps that is the truest measure of loyalty – to serve without conviction.

‘What do you see?’ he asked, stepping away from the mirror.

‘A forest,’ I answered. But not the one I expected. The glass brimmed with a flood of rampant, waterlogged vegetation. Fungal trees sagged like sickly giants, their branches drooping with creepers, their trunks glistening with slime. Lesser growths vied for space between them, clotting the water in cancerous tangles or reaching for the canopy on slender stalks. Flowers leered from the snarl, their fleshy petals haloed with insects. Everything rippled through a grey-green haze that lent the plants an uncanny quality of animation. They looked vigorous yet also wasted, as though they were devouring themselves in their eagerness to propagate.

‘A swamp,’ I amended my answer as mist seeped from the glass – hot, wet and quintessentially filthy. Beside this quagmire the ambivalent abyss of the Reverie seemed pristine. ‘Or a jungle perhaps.’

‘What do you see?’ my mentor repeated, without inflection.

I embraced my disgust, tasting voracity… decay… imbalance…

‘Corruption,’ I said, understanding. ‘What is this place, Master Satori?’

‘Another world, I think. Probably a distant one, though I cannot say for sure. It has plagued the glass for some months now. I call it the Morass.’

‘You didn’t summon it?’

He shook his head. ‘It comes and goes of its own accord.’

‘You intend to find it?’

‘No.’

His answer surprised me, though I was relieved, for I had no desire to walk that mire, as duty would have required if my mentor made the journey. The stain it left would likely be perpetual.

‘There is no need to find it,’ Satori added. ‘It will find us.’

‘Find us?’ I frowned, unsettled by the thought.

‘I believe so.’ He turned to regard me, his eyes as empty of emotion as they were of colour. Their sockets were heavily wrinkled, yet the skin beyond them was smooth, sheathing the refined features of a warrior-artisan in his prime. Amongst our bloodline that might be a century or so, for most Resplendent are short-lived by the measure of the Adeptus Astartes, yet I knew this was only a fraction of Satori’s actual span. Our coterie was exempt from the toll of years the Reverie took upon our brothers.

‘What does this filth want of us, master?’ I said, fighting the urge to drive a fist through the mirror and shatter its portent.

‘Everything,’ Satori said quietly. ‘This is where our end begins.’ He indicated the glass. ‘It is our future.’

The betrayer released the memory. Even now, decades later, he didn’t know whether that grey-green jungle was an actual place or a metaphor made manifest. Radiant glass didn’t make such distinctions. It scried meaning over matter, and the meaning of the vision had been clear. Voracious corruption.

‘Satori was right,’ he told the phantoms gusting about him. ‘The Morass found us.’

Opening his eyes, he realised he’d drifted to a halt. The colonnade was washed in moonlight now, its pillars gleaming softly. The remnants of winged serpents coiled about them, carved from the same luminous opal as the entranceway. They had been ‘exorcised’ during the zealots’ purge of the citadel, their majestic forms battered into abstracts. He was accustomed to such sights, but this particular desecration always moved him, for the Celestial Serpent symbolised the Chapter’s First Rhapsody.

Company, he corrected himself. They are called companies now.

Glassy debris crunched under his ceramite-shod boots as he pressed on. He was fully armoured, as the new laws required, his helmet nestled in the crook of an arm. In the Resplendent Age it was considered vulgar to wear battleplate within the citadel’s walls, but those civilities were gone, along with the culture they once enshrined, abolished by the Chaplains who presided over the brotherhood now. The Crown of Thorns, those grim puritans called themselves. Their authority was absolute, yet they weren’t the real power here. No, that lay with the stranger who’d poisoned the Chapter’s spirit. Scarcely two years had passed since the Undying Martyr’s arrival, yet so much had already been lost.

‘He has made us kin to you,’ the betrayer murmured to the phantoms. ‘Shadows of ourselves.’

One by one the Resplendent Battle Rhapsodies were being dissolved and purged from the Chapter’s records. Soon they would simply be Penitent Companies, stripped of the colours and customs that defined them, their leaders slain or turned to the Martyr’s cause. Only the Second Company, the Vigilant, would retain a semblance of its former identity. Its dour warriors had been the first to embrace the Testament of Thorns, drawn to penitence by the old dishonour they nursed, for they had failed the brotherhood before. In recognition of their self-loathing they were permitted to retain the silver trim of their armour, though they tarnished it diligently.

The other companies were allowed only black, as plain and lustreless as the new creed. The decree had come shortly after the Martyr took power. All armour was to be repainted with a tarry pigment mixed and degraded by their saviour himself. Every trace of ornamentation was to be ritually expunged and atoned for with self-flagellation.

More edicts followed regularly, growing more stringent with every passing month. There were rules of conduct for eating, washing, training and meditation – even solemn rituals governing the pious voidance of waste matter. No action could be undertaken without its supporting liturgy, no emotion entertained without misgivings. Even contempt was suspect, for it flirted with pride, just as fury courted bliss. Shame itself could become a vice if taken to excess. Recently their prophet had announced his dissatisfaction with the Chapter’s new colouration. Apparently the God-Emperor deemed black too pure for penitence.

Will he command us to smear our armour in excrement next? the betrayer wondered sourly, but without anger. His Chapter’s humiliation was painful, but deserved. More to the point, it was necessary.

‘We are what we are,’ he whispered. ‘What we must be.’ It was the mantra of the Paladins Luminous. He believed it more completely than his mentor ever had.

‘Do not oppose it,’ Satori warned. ‘When the storm comes you must stand aside.’

‘I understand,’ I answered.

My former master studied me in the paradoxical fashion I knew so well – his eyes distant, yet piercing, seeing through to the heart of things, much like his glass. I made no attempt to shield my thoughts, though I might have succeeded. Seven years had passed since he shared the portent of corruption. He was unchanged, but I was not. Since then I had risen from a Codicier to an Epistolary and forged my own mirror. Our talents were more evenly matched now. Perhaps mine even exceeded his. My conviction certainly did. I had nothing to hide.

‘I will become a shadow amongst shadows,’ I said. ‘I will bear witness.’

‘Yes.’ Satori accepted my answer without intruding deeper. He knew what I was. After all, he had primed me for this role. I was his creation.

No… That isn’t quite right. This has always been my purpose, fused with my spirit more intimately than my body ever was, for I have abandoned the flesh I was born to without faltering in my course. Satori honed my sight and hastened my step, but he was my guide, not my maker, just as the First Magister was his.

My gaze drifted past him to the colossus towering over us, climbing the folds of its robes to the cavernous cowl shrouding its face. The statue of the First Magister, Xøren Castaneda, rose from the citadel’s pinnacle like a silver mountain, wings unfurled and arms raised to the stars. The wings alluded to our celestial heritage, but I have always considered the figure’s pose more intriguing. Were those arms raised in command or supplication? Summoning or worship? Like so much else about our founder, there was no absolute answer, which was entirely the point. That enigmatic figure represented more than Castaneda himself – it was the embodiment of the Resplendent way of life. Every warrior-artisan carried its likeness on his armour.

‘This is where he departed,’ I whispered. It wasn’t a question. I knew the visionary had left our world – possibly all worlds – from this exalted site, but my choice of words would have been contentious outside our select circle. The accepted term for Castaneda’s disappearance was ‘transcended’.

‘It is,’ Satori concurred, following my gaze. ‘This is where the First Magister tore himself from the thread of being.’ A pause. ‘Or was torn.’

Naturally we had discussed this momentous event often over the years, but never here, at its epicentre. Indeed, we rarely met outside the seclusion of Satori’s sanctum; however that wasn’t what lent the matter greater weight on this occasion. No, it was the presence suffusing the starlit plaza.

‘He is here,’ I breathed, feeling it for the first time, though I’d visited the Apex Solaris many times, as befitted my rank. The citadel’s summit was the province of senior Architects and Knight Exemplars alone, reserved for the gravest meditations on our Chapter’s course. ‘Still here…’

‘Yet also not,’ Satori countered.

‘Yes,’ I agreed, feeling this too.

We contemplated the paradox in silence, understanding the contradiction was only illusory. The material world is not what most dreamers imagine it to be. Nor is it anything more.

‘You must take command of the Librarium,’ Satori said finally. ‘Otherwise it will resist the coming storm. Our Architects are strong, especially when united. It is possible they would prevail. That must not happen.’

‘It will not,’ I replied. The matter was in hand, as he well knew. I had been gathering support among our brethren for years. When Chief Architect Trémier stood down I would be named his successor. That time was imminent, for Trémier’s longing for the Reverie was becoming overpowering – something I’d heightened through subtle suggestion since winning his trust. He would soon undertake his final pilgrimage and my path would be clear.

‘It is a breach of tradition and trust,’ Satori observed, ‘but a necessary one.’

Indeed, it was forbidden for one of our circle to hold the Librarium’s highest office, but only Satori knew of my true affiliation. To all others I was simply the ranking Architect of the Ninth Rhapsody. I had distinguished myself in both scholarly and military pursuits, yet I was always respectful of my rivals, cultivating allies where I might have made enemies. My brothers called me the Whisperlight in recognition of my ‘tranquil clarity’, never imagining the irony of the title.

‘I am sorry,’ Satori said, turning from the statue to face me. ‘It is a terrible thing I ask of you, to hasten our brotherhood’s fall.’

‘It is not you that asks,’ I said, meeting his gaze. I took no pride in my machinations, but I didn’t share my mentor’s guilt. It was always there, that guilt, like a rash of shame beneath his composure, though he rarely let it show so openly. Today was different. Today he wanted me to see.

‘You are leaving,’ I said, unsurprised. I’d been expecting his departure for some time and it explained his choice of venue for this meeting. He was always partial to excessive symbolism.

‘I am.’ Satori offered no explanation. Neither did I require one. I had outgrown my curiosity about his secrets, as I’d outgrown his tutelage. Doubtless he would return to the Reverie to continue his long hunt. Whatever – or whomever – he pursued there wasn’t mine to know, but it would surely further our cause.

‘It will not be as easy as you imagine,’ Satori cautioned.

‘Easy?’

‘To bear the burden of betrayal, Whisperlight.’ That was the first and only time he ever used my soubriquet. I couldn’t tell whether he was mocking or honouring me.

‘Necessity is the highest authority,’ I answered, deploying one of his favoured aphorisms. ‘We are what we must be.’

‘So it goes,’ Satori conceded, turning away.

‘So it goes,’ the betrayer affirmed. He would never meet his mentor again. They had both foreseen that. On every viable thread of possibilities their roads parted irrevocably. Such prognostications grew more uncertain the further they stretched, for the future was a tangled and frangible territory, liable to snap into unforeseen configurations if studied too closely, but a few constants could be mapped, among them this divergence. Navigating it was more a matter of art than science – one the Paladins Luminous excelled in.

‘I was true to my word,’ he told the expectant dead. ‘But false to my oath of Ascension.’

He had claimed the mantle of Chief Architect shortly after Satori’s departure. There was no opposition. Indeed most of his peers backed him enthusiastically. Even the volatile berserker mystics of the Rhapsody Conflagrant fell into line, never imagining he belonged to the secret circle they despised. Only the representatives of the Astral were equivocal, but that elusive cabal was equivocal about everything. The nine Battle Rhapsodies were as diverse in character as they were in heraldry, yet all recognised themselves in the betrayer’s words.

‘Mine was the voice they wanted to hear,’ he confided. ‘That is the subtlest trick of power.’

With his authority secured he had continued the long game, nudging prominent pieces towards the positions they must occupy when the crisis came. Success was never in doubt, but it smelled more like defeat with every advance, for Satori’s second warning proved as astute as the first. Like the corruption revealed by the mirror, guilt was inevitable.

The thought drew the betrayer’s gaze back to the desecrated columns. His stride slowed as he pictured the warriors who bore the dragon on their standard. The Rhapsody Celestial had been gone for decades now, following the Chapter’s mercurial master on yet another of his ‘dream quests’. They had been declared lost, but the betrayer knew better. The weave would have screamed with the death of Varzival Czervantes.

‘You remember him, don’t you?’ he asked the phantoms. ‘Czervantes?’

The sirocco wailing grew fiercer, spiked with fury. Yes, they remembered. Few of the brotherhood had intruded on their territory as often as Czervantes, but that wasn’t why they hated him. No, it was the curb he’d imposed on their appetites that enraged them. He had closed the colonnade to Kanvolis’ human citizens, cutting off its sustenance. The stones hated him out of hunger and the spirits out of pique.

Misery craves company, the betrayer reflected. The suicides had thrilled these shades, fleetingly vindicating their own folly. That was the nature of wounds – if left untended they festered and spread their poison through the wider body.

‘Be still,’ he hissed, sharpening the command with a spike of psychic contempt. Chastened, the spirits subsided, but the stones continued to radiate malice. He ignored them. They couldn’t harm him. Nor would anger deafen them to his tale. They wanted to hear more, especially about the knight they hated.

‘He did not come here for you,’ he murmured. You were nothing to him.

It was time, for this was the place. His feet had come to a halt of their own accord, recognising their destination while his mind wandered. He sighed as his eyes caught up, settling on the scorched patch marring the outer wall. The heat hadn’t quite cracked the marble, but its mark would endure, for it had been an unnatural fire.

‘You still feel it, don’t you?’ he murmured, placing his hands on the blackened parapet. It was much colder here, as though the colonnade’s bitterness was focused on its scar, yet his palms prickled with a borrowed memory of scalding.

‘What happened here?’ Always the same question, asked whenever he returned, but never answered, for his empathy with the stones was purely tactile. He felt their pain, but saw nothing of the cause. Nevertheless he was certain this burning hadn’t been accidental. The scar was roughly midway along the colonnade, far from prying eyes or the possibility of escape. This violence had been premeditated. There was a name etched into the scorched patch, but someone had scraped it into illegibility.

‘Tell me,’ he urged, but the stones were jealous of their secret. They couldn’t be tricked, cajoled or threatened into sharing it. He’d tried often enough to know attempting it was futile.

Why did the mystery matter? That at least was easy to answer. It mattered because it had obsessed his friend. It might even have solved the riddle of Varzival Czervantes.

The betrayer’s gaze drifted over the parapet to the bones littering the tier below. They were strewn about like seeds, glowing faintly, energised by their restless progeny. Were any of them connected to the burning? It was doubtful. That heat would have carbonised bone, yet these shards were pale.

He let the mystery go. It wasn’t why he’d returned tonight. He was here to confess, not absolve himself of the unknown.

‘Czervantes never wanted the Chapter’s command,’ he began. ‘He never wanted to be our Magister. It was imposed on him by chance and obligation.’

The chances and obligations I sowed. The fate I spun…

Despite his part in the knight’s rise he still found it strange to think of his friend as the Chapter’s liege. Czervantes had many talents, but he was unsuited to a role that required diplomacy, pragmatism and commitment. Indeed, he’d dedicated precious little time to governance since his inauguration. Most of the brotherhood believed his heart lay among the stars, driving him to chase after far-flung mysteries. Some claimed he was on the trail of a prize that could raise the Chapter to new heights. More than a few simply thought him mad. There was some truth in all these views, but they were only part of the reason for Czervantes’ wanderings. The greater part was loathing.

‘He hated this world,’ the betrayer whispered into the wind. ‘And feared it.’ Naturally his friend would never admit as much, even to himself. Fear was anathema to the Adeptus Astartes, supposedly purged from their psyches along with other blemishes of the human spirit, but sometimes the excisions were imperfect, especially among those who aspired to perfection.

‘It clung to him like a shadow, that fear.’ The betrayer looked beyond the bones, following the dark ribbon of the fjord to the lip of the land, his supernal vision reaching farther than the sharpest eyes ever could. An unruly radiance seeped over the distant ridge, staining the sky with dancing colours, like ink swirling through water. A lesser witness might have called those deviant hues impossible, but he knew better. In the Sea of Souls such phenomena were not merely possible, but entirely probable.

Like every shade of delirium…

‘It is restless tonight,’ I said, studying the aurora on the horizon.

‘Yes,’ agreed the knight who stood beside the scorched wall. His hands were on the balustrade alongside his helmet, their fingers tapping fretfully at the marble. He was armoured, as he always was when he visited the colonnade. It defied convention, but nobody would challenge him. Varzival Czervantes had earned the right to walk his own path long before the Chapter made him its master.

‘The Reverie senses your elevation, brother,’ I judged.

‘You think it cares for such things?’ His tone was harsh, betraying dread and the resentment of it.

‘It echoes our dreams,’ I replied. ‘As to whether it cares… I doubt the concept applies. Does the ocean care whether its tides carry a voyager to a safe harbour or drag them down? Does the storm delight in the devastation it wreaks?’ I shook my head. ‘No, they are simply true to their nature.’

It was the best answer I had, and remains so, though my mentor disagreed. I regard the Reverie as an elemental force, devoid of desire or intention, but to Satori it was always a foe.

The knight was silent, evidently considering my reply, though his conclusion would be the same as it always was. His loathing of the Reverie wouldn’t allow otherwise. In this single respect, my liege and my mentor were alike.

I waited, watching the flowing illuminations of Czervantes’ armour while he brooded. Its plates shifted hue languidly, washing through blues that never quite softened to green then back through purples that flushed just shy of vermillion, never settling on a shade for long. Sometimes the colouration was homogenous, sometimes patterned in multiple swatches, but always shimmering. Neither paint nor heat could erase those colours, for they ran much deeper than the ceramite plates, infusing the wearer’s blood and spirit, binding him to their source until death, and quite probably beyond. Only the warriors of the Rhapsody Eternal were marked with the Umbra Scintillant. They chose to wear it with pride, for it was a legacy of their leader’s most audacious campaign. Wherever they went, the Reverie followed.

‘I think you’re wrong, my friend,’ Czervantes answered finally. ‘That warped land knows its own mind. It cares for the same things as any other predator – survival and a ready supply of prey.’ His voice twisted into a snarl. ‘I’ll starve it as I starved these stones!’ He rapped the wall, striking a blow against the entire colonnade, then swung round to face me. ‘I’ll send no more aspirants into that hell.’

I was accustomed to his outbursts so I met this with equanimity. ‘You plan to end the Mirrored Trials?’

‘Will you oppose me?’ he challenged, his violet eyes glittering.

‘I advise against it, but I will abide by your decree, Chapter Magister.’

Czervantes’ anger deflated, punctured by the unwanted title. Age swept in to fill the vacuum. He’d been at the tail end of his youth when he recruited me, but that was over half a century ago, and unlike my mentor, he carried the years heavily. His face was still handsome, but harried by deep lines and shadows, the long hair framing it streaked with white.

‘Don’t call me that,’ he said quietly.

‘It is what you are.’

‘Not to you, Athanazius.’

And so it is done. I have given you my name. Since the purge I have avoided acknowledging it, but I cannot speak honestly of Czervantes without relenting, for he never used another. Never Whisperlight or some banal abbreviation, nor any of the formal titles I progressed through in his service. No, it was always the name I’d given him when we first met – a boy who was never a child and a giant who was never a man, standing vigil over a world beyond redemption. That planet of fire and nightmares is where the Rhapsody Eternal is garrisoned now, ignorant of its Chapter’s fall.

But let us return to the subject of names. They are of great significance to the Resplendent, hence our aspirants are gifted fitting ones upon completing their trials. These ‘risen names’ are drawn from the list of renowned dreamers in the Nomen Honoris, a compendium that predates our brotherhood. Thus we dignify our future with the glories of mankind’s past. The practice continues even now, though I cannot fathom why the zealots preserve it. Perhaps they consider it a mockery of sorts.

In any case, my comrade’s blood-born name wasn’t ‘Varzival Czervantes’, nor was my surname ‘Calvino’, but I have always been Athanazius, for the name our Architects drew randomly from tens of thousands of possibilities was already mine.

Make of that what you will.

‘Brother?’ my friend prompted, for I had drifted into introspection. It is a common affliction among those with a fluid perspective of time. To us the present often loses its prominence, seeming merely one angle among many, all equally sharp. That is why my memories are so vivid and my mind wanders.

‘You are now Magister to all the Resplendent,’ I answered, recovering my focus, ‘even to its Chief Architect.’

‘Did you have a hand in it, Athanazius?’

‘You know I did, but not out of friendship. I advocated for the best candidate.’

‘Even if I didn’t want it?’

‘Because you didn’t want it,’ I corrected. ‘Our Chapter is in decline – a leisurely, prosperous decline, to be sure, but a decline all the same. In mastering our bloodline’s curse we have become decadent.’ I imbued my voice with a passion I didn’t feel. ‘Our vitality is lost! Aldyss, Giacommeti, Vonegath – any other Exemplar – would preside over a golden fall. You alone have the vision to reawaken us, Varzival!’

He scowled, but I could tell my words pleased him.

‘Your spirit is restless,’ I pressed on. ‘You are driven to tear aside the veil of ignorance and defy the unknown, as the Arc demands. That is why you led the Ninth into the Reverie’s heart, brother!’

‘But it was folly, Athanazius. A disaster…’ His eyes clouded and his armour darkened to indigo in sympathy. ‘I lost half my command in there.’

‘And immortalised those who returned! The Rhapsody Eternal eclipses all others, even the Celestial.’ I dropped my tone to solemn gravitas. ‘Your instincts are sound, brother. You will lead the Resplendent into a new era.’

It was the truth alloyed with lies and gilded in hyperbole. Satori would have approved. And yet, for all my fine words, doubt lingered in Czervantes’ eyes.

‘Trust in yourself, Varzival.’ I brushed his mind with my will, galvanising the pride that skulked beneath his honour. He was aware of the flaw, but too ambitious to outgrow it. Not that I would have allowed such an evolution. Pride is a pliable string to play, and too profitable to sever. He was my friend, but he was also a pivotal piece in the game. And the game eclipses all else.

‘The Chapter’s destiny is in your hands.’ I extended mine, palms upwards, as though offering a gift. ‘You know this, Magister.’ I clenched my fists fiercely. ‘Seize it!’

Inevitably he did and the Chapter slipped through his fingers, as I knew it would.

‘So it goes,’ Athanazius whispered, stepping away from the scorched wall. He had always resisted prising its story from his friend’s mind. The secret wasn’t relevant to his purpose so it would have been an intrusion too far.

I am a betrayer by necessity, not nature.

Somewhere deep down, the prisoner inside him laughed, mocking the avowal.

‘Czervantes proved to be a poor Magister,’ Athanazius said, ignoring the scorn. ‘He was aloof, impulsive and impatient with his fellow Knights Exemplar, deeming them blind to the Arc’s message, though he couldn’t articulate it himself. They resented him in return, but the Architects stood by him and our word was final. There was a price for our loyalty, of course.’ Athanazius cast a hand through the wind, indicating the distant valley. ‘The Mirrored Trials continued. He never forgave me for that.’

The Chapter’s cardinal tradition had survived until the coming of the Undying Martyr. Under the outsider’s aegis aspirants faced the so-called Rites of Atonement in the citadel’s catacombs. They were harrowing ordeals to be sure, yet superficial beside the Reverie, only testing the body and the will to endure. The soul itself passed untried.

Thus we create monsters and name them angels, Athanazius brooded. The ravenous, self-devouring Morass he’d seen in the mirror slithered before his mind’s eye. It was growing inside every newly anointed battle-brother now, along with most of the old guard, seeded by the zealot, who named it penitence. Moreover, the blight was spreading beyond Malpertuis, carried by the Chapter’s missionaries, as though the Imperium were short of fanatics.

It is necessary, he told himself. And it won’t last.

But lately he’d begun to doubt that. What if he’d misread the weave of possibilities? What if nothing rose from his Chapter’s ashes except the Morass incarnate? Maybe there was no spiritual phoenix waiting to be born.

I won’t accept that. I won’t allow it.

The shades wailed, growing impatient with his silence. His tale might be baffling, but it was the only one on offer. The stones were more reserved, but no less eager, anticipating the wretchedness of his conclusion.

‘Czervantes sealed the Chapter’s fate,’ Athanazius said, resuming his walk. ‘He took his place at the head of the Rhapsody Celestial, as tradition demanded, but his spirit belonged to the Eternal. Severing that tie soured him.’

There had been no alternative. The Eternal were committed to a different fate, bound by a primal oath that couldn’t be broken.

And who made that bargain? Who damned them? Why not tell it all?

No, that wasn’t something to be shared, now or ever. Besides, they were doomed either way. If they had remained here the Martyr would have purged them.

Or they would have purged him, a treacherous thought suggested. And cleansed the stain before it spread.

‘As the years passed, Czervantes’ absences grew longer,’ he pressed on, ‘until he was effectively gone, taking the Celestial with him, yet there was no impetus to replace him. The remaining Rhapsodies were too divided to rally behind a successor, while those with the authority to intervene declined. The Librarium was mine and our Chaplains were mired in a crisis of faith.’ Unconsciously, Athanazius’ fingers made the sign of the thorned aquila. ‘I had seen to that.’

The haunted visage of Master Chaplain Malvoisin flashed before him, ravaged by radiation and self-loathing. Nobody would see that face again, for its wearer had riveted his iron death mask to the bones beneath, inspiring a grisly custom among his order. If the Martyr was the messiah of the fall, then Icharos Malvoisin was surely its herald.

‘Without a Chapter Magister to bind them, each Rhapsody followed its own path, which carried them far from Malpertuis. When the stranger appeared outside our walls, near death yet afire with revelation, only the Vigilant remained to meet him, bound by their duty as the citadel’s custodians.’

And primed by disgrace to betray it…

Like a plague, the malignant creed had passed from the stranger to Malvoisin and his fellow Chaplains, who contaminated the garrison. All were fertile soil for the seeds of corruption to grow. Athanazius sensed the Morass everywhere – nesting inside his brothers and extending intangible, questing tendrils towards fresh conquests, eager to infest more souls. Always more…

It is necessary, he reminded himself, but now the faithful axiom felt brittle. Perhaps saying it aloud would fortify it.

‘It is ne–’ Athanazius froze as another memory surfaced, unbidden and unanchored to the past, overwhelming him with the force of a tsunami.

I stand atop a massive slab of obsidian, my face upraised to a roiling, soot-choked sky that stares back blindly. Seven distant spires pierce the smog, encircling the monolith like the points of a sundial, each proclaiming a virtue staked in vice. Lightning plays about their pinnacles, sporadically arcing between them in a vast ring that lights up the entire lava-locked archipelago. This is where my journey began and must someday end.

But not this day!

Veins of magma spread through the slab’s black crust as I begin my incantation. The words taste like old ink and splintered certainties and promises made in pain – and so much more and less, as the most puissant ones always do. They inspire and repulse me, elevating then debasing my spirit by turns, amplifying the best and the worst of myself.

I am the master of my own enslavement!

The eight mortal acolytes gathered around me take up the chant, shuddering as they spit syllables like thorny morsels, for human tongues are not meant for such vocalisations. Streamers of mist ooze from their mouths, wafting about them in penumbral, blood-flecked halos. Soon they are bent beneath the weight of their robes, drained by their exertions, yet none falter. Sacrifice is a sacrament to them.

I have made it so!

The air ripples as living figments hatch from its currents like crystalline birds. Trilling bittersweet nonsense, the dream shards flit about us, spinning contrails of delirium. Their myriad facets glitter with transient eternities that gnaw and claw at each other, vying for supremacy. Each is a lens into a divergent thread of events that defies all rivals. No two are ever the same. Sometimes the differences are frivolous, sometimes prodigious, but only a few thousand configurations serve my purpose.

So it flows!

Gathering my will, I seize those precious few prospects and drive them towards becoming, channelling the archipelago’s energies into the endeavour. Corralled by my words, the dream slivers shiver towards a consensus. It is a skittish accord at best, for the infinite abhors absolutes, but most of the surviving variants are acceptable.

So mote it be!

As the ritual approaches its zenith, the monolith quakes then cracks, spewing molten blood from multiple fissures. Two of my acolytes catch fire, but continue chanting until they are consumed. A third slips through a widening fracture and a fourth shatters like glass, shredding those to either side. None of my coven will survive the ceremony. None of them care to, for they understand this life is only a fable. I myself am lost on some spins of the Great Wheel, ending the game prematurely, but fate usually favours me, for nothing is truly chance and I have plotted my course meticulously.

So it goes!

The figments shriek as my will draws them together into a vast, manifold lens. It whirls above my head, weaving bold probabilities from the ether. The last of my followers are annihilated by the revelation, their bodies unravelled in crimson spirals as their spirits soar into the crystal sun, eager for transcendence.

‘As above, so below!’ I beseech and demand, raising my arms to the shackled infinite. ‘As within, so without!’

Beneath my feet something dark-bright and broken stirs, then meets my mind.

‘The Emperor condemns!’ the betrayer shouted, banishing the world of fire and spires. His gauntleted hand lashed out, shattering the remnants of a dragon and cracking the pillar beneath. The impact dulled the emotions bedevilling him. The shame was his, but not the fury, and certainly not the odious credo it had elicited. Those belonged to the warrior whose body he had stolen. Incensed by the vision, the captive soul strained against the psychic bonds binding it. As always, anger empowered it, but it had never broken through to speech before.

He saw it too, Athanazius realised, then frowned at the colonnade. They all did.

The wind had ebbed, its riders cowed by the vision he’d inadvertently shared. It had overcome him like a fugue state, more immediate and visceral than the episodes he’d recounted – a wilful, hungering glimpse of the future. Not a memory, but a prophecy…

‘Heretic… filth…’ his prisoner rasped, forcing the words through its captor’s lips like sludge. ‘Sorcerer!’

The accusations were warranted, but didn’t sting Athanazius. Yes, warpcraft could be corrosive, but only to those who revelled in its mechanisms. To a sober practitioner like himself it was purely another discipline of science, albeit the most fundamental and potent of them all. Like the Reverie, it was neither inherently good nor evil.

And yet… That vision had reeked of atrocity, as though he were–

‘Intention alone bears moral weight,’ Athanazius declared, quashing his doubts along with the prisoner’s voice. As always, the Arc’s wisdom restored his balance. Shame was irrational. Irrelevant. He might feel it, but he didn’t believe in it.

But you do, his prisoner urged, silenced yet not. You know what you are. What we all were! Its thoughts tasted liked spoiled wine, heady with ruin. We were the worst of sinners. Apostles of the Golden Heresy!

The Golden Heresy… It was the Martyr’s name for the Resplendent path, but it encompassed any belief in beauty, nobility or the hope of something better. The fanatics were nothing if not generous with their contempt.

‘You are wrong,’ Athanazius whispered, tightening the chains binding his captive. The vision had shaken them loose. It had shaken him. Though he’d committed many questionable acts in service to the Arc, nothing approached that apocalyptic ritual. Its scope and complexity were far beyond his current abilities, but that wasn’t what troubled him. No, it was the ambition behind it.

The arrogance, his prisoner suggested.

‘Yes,’ Athanazius agreed, nodding. The vision had been instructive. It was too lucid to be a false prophecy; however it only foretold a possible future. He would ensure that strand never blossomed into being.

‘Perhaps you are fated to serve as my conscience, brother,’ he told his prisoner gravely. ‘Even if your own has withered.’

The ghost in his body – its rightful owner – was called Tomaz Carriére, which was the name Athanazius went by now. He had seized Carriére’s memories along with his body and built upon them, securing his host’s place in the new order. While many warriors had fallen foul of the Martyr’s laws, even true believers, Carriére always prospered. The thief behind his eyes guided his course with glacial precision, plotting a path through the tangle of rites and regulations like a virtuoso regicide player. That road was circuitous, but its trajectory crept ever upwards. Someday it would lead to the Crown of Thorns, and through it to the false prophet himself.

I am fortunate, Athanazius reflected. I had strong foundations to build upon.

Carriére had been primed for advancement. Though he was young and only recently ascended from neophyte status, he had been a prominent champion of the new creed. Even now his faith was unwavering. Athanazius felt the boy’s fury like an emotional echo, distant yet insistent, demanding free rein.

‘No,’ he admonished, strangling the tantrum with a twist of his will. He felt no remorse over stealing the youth’s life. After all, it was Carriére who’d taken his. ‘You will–’

He reeled as another memory seized him.

The doors of our inner sanctum are flung open. Those great portals would have held for days if sealed with arcane wards, but we didn’t even lock them, or defend the Librarium’s walls when the zealots stormed its gates. No, we have invited this desecration.

There are only eleven of us, but we are all Architects of formidable ability. We have been observing our city’s torment with astral eyes, following the devastation as it spiralled towards us. Together we could have smothered the anarchy at its inception or blunted its force even now. Indeed, my colleagues argued for such courses, but they acceded to my veto, trusting my judgement unto this most bitter of ends. They will never know that I fostered our fall.

So it goes, because it must.

Droning psalms of castigation, the zealots surge into our most sacred space, flowing around the pentagonal dais where we stand. Herded by skull-masked Chaplains, they surround us yet keep their distance, like leashed attack dogs. Their human prophet is not among them. He has not left the Cathedral Elegiac since the unrest began, though I am certain it isn’t fear that restrains him. Whatever else the Undying Martyr may be, he is no coward. He believes his creed with all his heart. His faith permeates the city like a miasma, stinking of the grey-green Morass. Doubtless he is communing with his god, though perhaps not the one he imagines he worships.

We meet the trespass with apparent tranquillity, but I can feel my companions’ tension. Their desire to respond to this outrage is almost physical. The Librarium is forbidden to all save its Architects.

+No,+ I urge my brothers silently, speaking with my mind. +Rise above yourselves and they shall follow.+

What is one more lie among the legion I have already told? Nothing, yet this one tastes particularly sour, for my love of the Librarium is sincere. Bringing it to ruin is the worst of my sins, but also the most imperative.

The zealots fall silent before our serenity. Unlike us they are armoured, though they wear no helmets and carry only daggers, trusting that faith will empower their blades. Their faces are a savage tapestry of rapture, loathing and rage, occasionally frayed by doubt. All are stained with blood, sweat and smoke, for these fanatics have not washed since their crusade began. That was seven days ago – merely the blink of an eye in our Chapter’s annals, yet enough to despoil the endeavour of centuries. Destruction is so effortless beside creation, as though the grain of existence leans towards its own unmaking.

In a perversion of our Chapter’s heritage the destroyers have named themselves the Angels Penitent, supplanting majesty with misery, yet clinging to the conceit of superiority. Intoxicated by their messiah’s rhetoric they have scourged Kanvolis – wrecking, burning and cursing the works of their forebrothers in praise of shame. Their Chaplains call it the Great Purge, evoking the worst instincts of the wider Imperium, which we Resplendent have always rejected. Thousands of the Chapter’s mortal followers were slaughtered in the process. Many died defending the galleries or gardens they tended so lovingly. Most confronted the marauders with reason or pleas in the name of art, but some tried to fight, though they knew nothing of warfare. Remarkably few submitted to the squalid mercy of thraldom. Their defiance came to nothing, yet I take more pride in their courage than my own achievements. They were only human, yet we made them glorious!

There were also detractors amongst the Resplendent themselves of course – indomitable souls who rejected the madness and fought back, mostly alone, occasionally in small bands, but they were too few to hold back the tide, let alone turn it. The best of the Resplendent were not there. I had seen to that.

The zealots left the Librarium until last. It wasn’t caution or strategy that informed their decision, but malice. They wanted us to behold their work and despair before granting us death. But now, with nothing else left to burn, they have come for us.

And so we face each other across a gulf that can no longer be bridged, even if I attempted it. We have travelled too far for amnesty or reconciliation. We are Resplendent and Penitent now, opposites that must collide and subtract one another from the Chapter’s essence. Through this alchemical annihilation our brotherhood shall arise once more, renewed and purified as the Arc’s most veiled passages predict. I believe this absolutely, yet at this moment of no return I cannot feel it.

No matter, duty must suffice, as it did for my mentor.

‘We rise on burning wings,’ I say, extending my hands to the intruders, palms upwards, offering the Chapter’s credo like a self-evident truth, as I once offered Varzival Czervantes the lie that led us here. I speak softly, yet my words reverberate through the chamber, finding purchase in hearts that threats could never pierce. That noble phrase will always have power, even over the fallen.

I watch strands of doubt spreading through the throng, weaving remorse among the best of them. Here and there guilty eyes are lowered, followed by daggers. A blunt-faced veteran with shorn grey hair shakes his head, as though trying to dislodge something from his skull. He is uncommonly ugly for a Resplendent, but there is a sober dignity about him that draws my gaze. His eyes meet mine and I see the sickness isn’t deeply rooted in this one, and probably never will be. That is good. Some of our brothers must cleave to the old ways while the shadow reigns.

But not too many…

For a few fleeting moments I wonder if I have gone too far – and a craven part of me hopes I have – then Master Chaplain Malvoisin steps forward and I see the madness resurging with renewed hunger. My attempt to prevent it was disingenuous, a symbolic gesture to give my lost brothers pause so they shall reflect and grieve in the years to come, knowing the offer of peace was made. It is a cruel curse to bestow upon them, but an essential one, for it will linger in the Chapter’s collective conscience. Someday it will be the spur that rouses these sleepers from their nightmare.

But that day is distant. Today there is only ruin. So it goes.

‘The Emperor Condemns!’ Malvoisin bellows, his voice amplified to a roar by the yawning skull-speakers on his pauldrons.

‘The Emperor Condemns!’ his congregation howls in response, charging forward. The grey-haired veteran hangs back, his expression anguished, then I lose sight of him.

+Be still,+ I urge my companions, throwing my will behind the command. For a few crucial heartbeats they are frozen, then it is too late. The fanatics are upon us.

I immediately recognise the one who will kill me, not because I know him, but because my death shines in his eyes as they meet mine. He is at the forefront of his brothers, his youthful features twisted into a scar by hatred, his sandy hair matted with blood. An inverted aquila is carved into his forehead, ragged and raw, signifying the God-Emperor’s contempt.

‘Heretic!’ he snarls, raising his dagger. As it slashes towards me I speak the words of power I have prepared, then abandon my body, hurling my spirit into his before the blade connects. For a heartbeat there is darkness and shrieking silence, then I am restored. Through stolen eyes I see the blade plunge into my own throat, extinguishing an empty vessel.

‘Penitence is pain!’ I proclaim as my fellow Architects are butchered.

‘No,’ the betrayer gasped, tearing himself out of the past. He wouldn’t relive that carnage to its conclusion. The event was an inescapable part of his confession, but he’d planned to recount it from a distance, presenting the facts without touching them – without letting them touch him. Taint him…

Too late for that!

Athanazius wasn’t sure whether the retort belonged to him or Carriére. His head was pounding, as though his prisoner were trying to batter a way out. The vile memory had skewed his equilibrium. Like the prophecy, it had struck with the violence of a seizure.

Or a psychic attack…

Instinctively he glanced over the parapet, searching the horizon for a shimmering stain, but the Reverie was quiescent now. Or playing dead? No, that ascribed too much volition to it. It was dangerous, but it wasn’t a sentient entity. Not like the colonnade…

‘Was it you?’ he asked, laying a hand on the wall. The wind had picked up again, though it veered around him, scarcely brushing his face. Its phantoms were still wary of him. But not the stones… No, they watched him with a rapt intensity quite unlike their previous animosity. Reverence, he realised. His blasphemies had impressed them. He had impressed them.

‘I don’t want your worship,’ he muttered, ‘or your kinship.’

Suddenly he was eager to be gone from here. He had lingered in this toxic place too long. It had grown stronger since his last visit, feeding off the citadel’s sickness.

I must be more careful next time, Athanazius decided, weighing up the dark passageway. The way out wasn’t far now, yet the journey stretched improbably in his imagination, urging him to delay the attempt. Why not stay a little while longer? Surely he had more to tell?

‘No,’ he lied wearily. ‘You have it all.’

Inevitably there would be more disgrace to come. So much more… The Chapter was systematically devouring its scattered Rhapsodies, recalling each to face the Crown of Thorns alone, like errant children. Three had already been ‘reformed’. The Astral would likely be purged in its entirety when its turn came, along with much of the Empyrean. Both burned too brightly to fade gently into the darkness. And after that, when he rose to become the prophet’s trusted advisor, what then? What horrors would he expedite to secure the Chapter’s future?

Whatever I must, Athanazius admitted.

‘But I won’t prove false,’ he murmured, echoing a promise he’d made long ago. It predated his service to the Arc, yet it remained his most sacred oath.

‘I will be a redeemer,’ the betrayer added, renewing that precious vow.

His obligation here was complete, even if its conclusion had come in a fragmented storm. The phantoms would soon forget his tale, as they forgot everything except their own grief, but the colonnade would remember, as it remembered every sin that passed through its maw. That was good. Someone – something – beside himself needed to know the truth. Preserve it. The desire to share it had become a compulsion over the past few days, though he couldn’t say why. Perhaps–

‘Tomaz Carriére,’ a voice called over his shoulder. ‘The Arc sees you.’

Turning, Athanazius glimpsed a flash of steel. ‘Who…?’

A dagger rammed into his throat, precisely as Carriére’s had once done.

Again, he thought, shocked by the absurdity as much as the blow itself. Again…

No, this time it was different. This time he felt it. This time he was inside the dying vessel. Trapped. Blotting out the pain, he fought to untether his spirit and leap into his attacker’s body as he’d done before, but blood drowned the needful words.

‘You were the worst of us, boy,’ growled the warrior who’d been stalking him. ‘Because you killed the best.’

Athanazius stared at his assailant, recognising that heavyset face and those mournful eyes. It was the veteran who’d impressed him in the sanctum. The doubter. He was still free of the taint. Still Resplendent.

Bitter laughter bubbled up inside Athanazius as his prisoner clawed its way out of darkness to die alongside him.

‘We rise on burning wings,’ their killer hissed, yanking his dagger free. Was this attack premeditated? How long had this warrior been nursing his hatred, watching for an opportunity to avenge the slaughter?

Wait! Athanazius tried to say as the veteran seized his shoulders and swung him towards the wall. You don’t understand, brother! But nothing came except Carriére’s wet crimson mirth.

Then they were over the parapet, plunging towards the tier below, blood streaming in their wake. The phantoms howled with delight, welcoming another soul into their limbo, never realising it was actually two. Ordinarily an armoured transhuman might survive such a fall, but Athanazius was plummeting with a speed that mocked gravity, as though an unseen hand were yanking him down. He wouldn’t bleed out slowly.

The Emperor Condemns! Carriére gloated.

Perhaps He does, Athanazius conceded, making no effort to shield his head.

In those final beats, just before his twin hearts ruptured, the betrayer understood he would never be anything more.

So it goes, the colonnade breathed, echoing his mantra. So it always goes.

PATIENCE KILLS

GARY KLOSTER

With bloodied hands, the Crimson Fists have fought against the ever-growing green tide on ten thousand worlds, enacting a vicious crusade born amidst the War of the Beast to see the ork threat burned from the stars. Devastated by the disaster on Rynn’s World and numerous other catastrophes, the Era Indomitus has brought them new blood with which they will become Dorn’s glorious vanguard once more.

There was a wound in the face of Rynn’s World.

Reyher Romero closed his red-painted gauntlet around a strut of the ancient cargo plane as it circled the massive crater. The strength in the Space Marine’s power armour easily held him in place as the craft tilted, but he had to be careful not to tear the strut in half. This plane, meant for supplying the outposts of Rynn’s World, was fragile compared to the Thunderhawk transports Romero was used to. He hated it for that, and its slow, rattling crawl through the sky, but it did have one advantage over those heavily armoured combat craft. It had windows, and through them Romero could see the raw pit that had once been the Arx Tyrannus, the mighty fortress-monastery of the Crimson Fists.

‘One missile.’ Sergeant Castellar’s voice cut through the drone of the plane’s engines. ‘One weapon error, and our Chapter was almost destroyed, our world almost lost.’

One missile, spiralling back down and smashing into the ammunition stores. The Arx Tyrannus had been a mighty fortress, and now there was nothing, just a monstrous hole carved into the Hellblade Mountains. But something in the crater caught the light of the setting sun. Romero increased the magnification of his amour’s visor until he could see the monument that stood in the crater’s centre. A massive block of black granite, supporting a huge metal fist. That metal had once formed the gates of the fortress-monastery, and long before that it had been part of the hull armour of the Rutilus Tyrannus, the starship that had been the Crimson Fists’ original home. Now it marked the place where six hundred Space Marines had died.

‘So much lost.’ As Castellar spoke, the larger of Rynn’s World’s twin suns slipped below the horizon, and the great metal fist caught its last crimson rays, glowing red as if dipped in blood. ‘But our brothers did not despair. We are the furious hand of the Emperor, and in glorious battle we triumphed! Look at that monument and understand the lesson that it teaches. We can be hurt, brothers, but we can never be stopped!’

Romero stared at the gleaming fist, so like the one painted on his armour. A good lesson, yes, but… What would his veteran brothers say, the ones that had survived the Battle of Rynn’s World, the ones who’d known the men whose names were laser-carved straight through that huge block of dark stone? What had they learned from this disaster?

Romero didn’t know. The veteran Firstborn Crimson Fists never talked about it. Not to a Primaris Marine like him.

The squad stayed silent as Rynn’s World’s smaller white sun followed its great yellow sister below the horizon and shadows swept across the crater. When the monument was swallowed by darkness, Sergeant Castellar’s armoured fist tapped against the bulkhead that separated the cargo area from the cockpit, denting it. ‘Take us on,’ he told the pilots through his vox-link. ‘We have orks to kill.’

Romero stepped out of the truck bed and the abused vehicle’s shocks groaned, finally free of the weight of five Space Marines in full armour. The truck was parked in the central square of a tiny agri village, a cluster of habs, equipment sheds and grain silos nestled in a valley between the forested foothills of the Hellblades. A few villagers stood at the edges of the square in the midnight dark, staring at the huge armoured men with a mixture of awe and fear. Romero ignored them, focusing on the two figures standing in front of him, Crimson Fists of the Third Company. Both had their helmets off, dark-eyed men with short-cropped black hair and light brown skin, each wearing the twin red gauntlets of veterans. They were slightly smaller than the men of Romero’s all-Primaris squad. Firstborn.

‘Brothers,’ said the lead Firstborn. His voice held none of the barely buried suspicion that Romero often heard from the older Space Marines. In the light of the village square’s sole lumen Romero could see the valour marks on the warrior’s armour. ‘I am Sergeant Corda Vayne. This is Sandor Santos. Welcome.’

‘Brothers, I am Sergeant Castellar, Eighth Company, Assault Intercessor Squad Sierra.’ Castellar introduced them all, then raised the massive power fist that covered his left hand. ‘We hear you have greenskins to kill.’

‘There are always greenskins to kill,’ said Vayne. ‘But these walk on our world. Come.’ He started towards one of the equipment sheds, the watching villagers bowing and backing away fast as he moved past. Castellar followed, Sierra Squad falling in line, Romero last of all. Except for the veteran Santos, who followed after, preternaturally quiet despite his heavy armour, a dark-sky-coloured ghost who watched Romero with eyes black and expressionless.

The shed was half full of agri machines, stinking of grease and promethium, but one end had been cleared for them. They stood in a circle around a holo-projector, helmets off, staring at the glowing map hovering in the air before them.

‘The ork band is at least fifty strong, according to the survivors of the villages they have already destroyed.’ Sergeant Vayne pointed at the map, and two red dots lit up, marking where the agri villages had been before the orks razed them. ‘All armed with hand weapons.’

‘Sticks and stones,’ Sergeant Castellar sneered. ‘No match for bolters and chainswords.’

‘Not just sticks and stones any more,’ Vayne said. ‘They have taken two villages full of equipment. Orks are savage, but clever. They will have turned tools into swords, hunting rifles into sluggas.’

Castellar shrugged. ‘Understood, brother. But that is still nothing compared to our blessed armour.’

‘If that is all they have.’ The voice was quiet, but it cut through the air. Brother Santos stood a little behind Vayne, dark eyes gleaming with the reflected light of the holo-projector. This was the first time he’d said anything to anyone.

Castellar turned to Santos, but the veteran said no more. Instead Sergeant Vayne spoke again. ‘We had to call you in, brothers, because the truck bringing our squad struck something. An ork mine, an unexploded bomb, we do not know. This whole range is littered with ordnance from the war. It tore the truck apart and sent three of my men back to the Apothecaries in New Rynn City. Brother Santos hints at the possibility that the orks may find something in these mountains that will let them make weapons more dangerous than tool-swords.’

Romero ducked his head, trying to hide the frown that flickered across his face, but Santos noticed. ‘Did you have a thought, brother?’ he asked, dark eyes looking right at him.

Romero cursed the expression that had betrayed him to the sharp-eyed veteran, but… he did have a thought. Picking his words with care, he laid it out. ‘Apologies, brother. The use of civilian transports to bring us here seemed inefficient. And after the incident that you just described, dangerous. A Thunderhawk–’

‘A Thunderhawk would have brought us here quickly and safely,’ Santos said, his quiet words cutting him off. ‘And it would have alerted the orks that the Crimson Fists had come.’

Sergeant Vayne glanced over his shoulder at the other veteran, and something unspoken flickered between them. Santos returned to silence, and Vayne took over again. ‘Over a century ago, the orks assaulted our world. We slaughtered them for that sin, but like a green cancer their spore-spawned remnants remain. It is our mission to remove that filthy stain from Rynn’s World. As I said, the orks are savage but clever. They know we are death to them, and if they catch a whiff of us they will go back to hiding deep in the Hellblades.

‘This village is next in their path. They will be coming.’ Vayne looked around the circle, gaze shifting from one Primaris warrior to the next. ‘But only if the orks do not know we are here. That is why we brought you in at night, on trucks meant for vegetables. That is why the civilians are still here, despite what approaches. Orks want a fight, but they are not suicidal. We want them to see an easy target and rush in, every last one of them.’

Vayne stabbed one red-painted finger at the map, and it shrank down to just the village. Dots and lines sprang to life on it, position indicators and fields of fire. ‘The orks rush in – and we surround them and slaughter them, every one. We leave no wounded to crawl away and die in the forest, their corpses spilling spores. We will burn the greenskin infection out of this world.’

Romero and the others raised red-painted fists and struck them against their armoured chests, a clashing salute.

‘Now, brothers,’ Vayne continued, ‘let us discuss the righteous slaughter that we will bring.’

Vayne laid out the details and Romero listened, committing it all to memory. But part of him still noted Santos, staring through the holo-projection into the darkness, as if he were looking through the shed’s steel walls to watch the orks approach.

There was a thin line of light on the edge of the sky, dawn’s harbinger, invisible to eyes not as sensitive as an Adeptus Astartes’. He stared at that faint line and tapped his fingers against the hilt of the chainsword hanging from his hip.

‘Ready?’

The quiet question came from behind him, and Romero’s hand tightened on his sword, almost pulling it. But he forced his hand to stillness and turned.

Santos stood there, dark armour blending with the night. In one arm he cradled a heavy bolter, the huge gun leaning easy against the Space Marine’s shoulder, thick ammo belt running to the pack on the veteran’s back. Romero had known heavy weapons experts before. There was a type – loud, brash and confident. They did not tend to move this quietly while hefting weaponry like that, but somehow Santos had moved up behind him without Romero even noticing.

It was a skill to be praised, but it was also unsettling.

‘Ready.’ Romero rolled his shoulders, and his armour flexed smoothly around him. He fell in behind the veteran, following him out of the village’s central square. In the predawn dark, Romero could see the rest of his squad taking up their positions. When the dawn came, they would be well hidden, waiting patiently as the civilians pretended to go about their day. Waiting for the moment that the auspex array they’d hidden in the forest at the village’s edge revealed the arrival of the orks; waiting for the villagers to run, drawing the xenos. Waiting to destroy.

It chafed using that kind of trickery, but Romero understood the plan. One missed ork could spore-seed a hundred more. Every xenos had to be burned. And while the set-up for the battle wasn’t ideal, the fight itself promised to be brutally satisfying. Orks tended to prefer close combat – but Assault Squad Sierra, armed with bolt pistols and chainswords, would show the xenos what hand-to-hand fighting really was.

Except for Romero. His purpose was elsewhere, and that chafed much more.

Moving out of the village, he saw Castellar. Romero locked eyes with his sergeant, and his gaze was returned, steady and stern. There was no need for words. This was Romero’s assignment, and he would follow his orders. Not bothering to hide his frown, Romero lifted his helmet, locked it into place, and followed Santos out of town.

The ridge overlooked the village, a steep hill whose slopes were broken by shards of stone, like vertebrae pressing out of dead flesh. Romero followed Santos, trying to keep up, trying not to make ten times as much noise as the veteran.

The Firstborn finally stopped between two heavy stones and looked down at the village below. There were lights in windows, people starting to move in the growing predawn light. Santos tapped a red-painted hand against one of the stones, listened, and nodded.

‘This will do,’ Santos said over the vox-link between them, settling into position between the stones, his heavy bolter at ready rest before him.

Romero looked around. These stones looked like all the others. ‘Why?’ he asked, unable to keep the question in. He kept to the vox too, because Santos had, even though they were only feet apart.

‘Echoes,’ the veteran said. ‘The way the ridge is shaped, the way these stones sit… Orks’ vision is not great, but their other senses are keen. When I fire from here, the echoes will make it hard for them to determine our position.’

‘You have done this before,’ Romero said.

‘Yes.’

‘Provided sniper support with a heavy bolter.’

‘Yes.’

‘Primaris…’ he said, then stopped. He needed to pick his words carefully. ‘Sniping is not something usually done outside of Scout platoons, or those specifically trained for it. And never with…’ Such an unsuitable weapon would not work. ‘And not with a heavy bolter.’

‘We did what we had to,’ Santos said. His voice, quiet over the vox, cut through Romero’s words. ‘Worked with what we had. We had to make many… adaptations when the Arx Tyrannus fell.’

Romero went silent. The veterans didn’t talk about the siege of New Rynn City. About the long months that they’d held out, vastly outnumbered, slowly pressed back by the orks until they held only the centre of the city against the vast horde. Romero and his Primaris brothers had joined the Crimson Fists long after that dark time, and while they were told the basic history, the details… the Firstborn kept them locked away behind clenched fists and hard eyes. He wondered if that was all Santos would say, but as the brilliant point of Rynn’s World’s smaller white sun slid over the horizon and drew stark shadows across the valley below, the veteran continued.

‘The orks came in waves, roaring down the streets through the burning habs. Beasts baying for blood, each one larger even than you Primaris, xenos monsters made for war.’ Santos’ voice was flat, bled of all emotion. ‘The fighting was hot then. We poured the bolter fire in, guns roaring until they glowed, and the blood made red whirlpools in the gutters. But as the siege went on, as the days and months passed, there were long stretches of time when we were just staring at the beasts over the ruins, taking shots when we could. When they would count.’

Santos didn’t move as he spoke. He crouched in his spot, watching the village below and the forest beyond it, unmoving as the rocks around them. ‘I would get to know the orks across from me. One Tusk. No Ears. Big Bite. I would watch and wait, and sometimes one of them would make a mistake and cross the line I had drawn across the ruins, and then…’ Santos moved one finger, tapping his heavy bolter. ‘Finis would speak. She is no sniper rifle, but she has range. And after months of playing that game, we became very good at it, me and her.

‘That is why,’ Santos said. ‘Vayne set me here to pick off any stragglers because he knows what Finis and I can do. And you… you are here because of something else we learned during those days. That the worst can always happen, and we never know what the worst will be.’

Caution and care. Admirable, but–

In the corner of Romero’s vision, red light flickered. The auspex array that Vayne and Santos had set in the woods, sending out its signal. Romero crouched behind Santos, going still as the veteran, and focused on the edge of the forest below. Beneath the trees the shadows boiled, and shapes stepped out into the morning light.

Orks. Dozens of them – massive green xenos with jutting tusks and red eyes. Their green skin was wrapped with crude metal armour made from the steel sides of equipment sheds. From their hands swung heavy hammers and spiked clubs, barbed spears and rough-honed swords. The weapons were as makeshift as the armour, but they looked murderously effective in those massive hands. The xenos grunted as they pounded out of the forest, a war chant so deep and loud it easily carried up to Romero.

The villagers below certainly heard it. They were screaming and running, their panic real but not blind. Vayne had told them what to do. The civilians dashed for the farthest equipment shed, a sturdy building that Vayne had ordered them to reinforce. Romero watched them race inside and slam the doors shut before the orks could reach them – except for one man who’d stumbled, turning his ankle. An ork caught the limping farmer, grabbed his arm and pitched him towards another ork with a guttural laugh. The orks stopped in the town square to toss their victim back and forth, trying to see how high and far they could get him, and for far too long ragged screams came from the increasingly broken body before they finally, mercifully, cut off.

‘Dorn’s blood,’ Romero growled. His vox caught the words, and Santos answered.

‘Patience. Those are just the first.’ The veteran switched to the common vox-channel. ‘Vayne, I place thirty-seven orks, lightly armed, closing on the civilian shelter. The rest are still in the forest, moving slow for some reason… ah.’ There was finally an inflection to Santos’ voice, faint but there, but it was hard to tell if it was satisfaction or resignation.

From the woods three long lines of orks emerged, hauling chains, pulling a black-and-blue-painted metal monstrosity behind them. It had been an agri machine once, but the xenos had stripped it down to its tyres and frame then covered it in sheets of steel decorated with spikes and skulls and femurs. The crude armour sheltered a bizarre pile of equipment – batteries, coils of electrical cable, looted generators, all twisted together with alien-looking equipment, arcane and shoddy. A wicked-looking barrel stuck out of the tangled mess, and that was enough for Romero to understand. It was a weapon of some sort.

A huge one.

‘What?’ Vayne asked over the vox.

‘Do you remember those energy weapons the orks sometimes used?’ Santos said, calm and conversational. ‘The things they called zzap guns? They have built themselves one and are hauling it towards the shelter. They are going to blow the civilians apart.’

‘Understood.’

Understood? ‘Are we moving in?’ Romero asked, over his private channel to Santos.

Santos was busy on the common channel, counting xenos for his sergeant. There were a lot more than fifty, and Romero remembered a Firstborn telling him once that the only sure thing about orks was that there were always more. A crowd of bellowing greenskins followed the crude Battlewagon, waving guns and spike-covered weapons. There were at least a hundred, not including the ones already in town. When he finished, the veteran flipped back to their shared channel.

‘You think we should move in on twenty-to-one odds, and a heavy weapon we know nothing about?’ he asked, voice calm and curious.

‘What else can we do?’ Romero asked. ‘They are going to wipe out that village.’

‘What else can we do?’ The only movement Santos made was the slow, silent tracking of his gun barrel, following the orks as they pulled their wagon towards the village square. They must have been in range, but they seemed intent on using the massive weapon point-blank. Probably just to see how much carnage they could do. ‘I heard that question so many times through the siege, sometimes even from my own lips. When our fortress fell. When the orks smashed through the outer walls using their transport ships like battering rams. When they flooded through the city like a filthy green tide. And every day over the long months they spent building their war machines for the last siege. What else can we do but charge out and fight? Bring the battle to the enemy, and die defiant, dragging as many of those monsters down with us as we could. What else can we do, we asked, when faced with odds like that?’

The orks reached the square, dropped the chains and circled around the wagon, bellowing and banging weapons together as a smaller ork, dressed in armour made of wired-together cogs, climbed onto the wagon and began flipping levers. The xenos shouted at the others, and teams of orks grabbed on to long metal struts that stood out from the wagon and began to turn them like huge cranks. The orks spun them slowly at first, massive muscles straining, but gradually the cranks moved faster and faster. A crackling, humming noise began to build from the strange machinery, and arcs of electricity danced around the wagon, occasionally snapping off to strike a warrior, making them bellow and the other orks laugh.

‘Did you find an answer?’ Romero growled. The ork on the wagon was turning the barrel of the weapon, slowly grinding it around to line up with the door to the farmers’ shelter.

‘Chapter Master Pedro Kantor gave us one,’ Santos replied. ‘Survive. Until you can destroy.’ The veteran shifted his heavy bolter, tracking the movement of the weapon below. ‘You want to act, Romero?’

‘Yes!’

‘Good. New plan. Remember how I said that this place’s echoes would make us hard to find? If you step out and stand in front of that leftmost stone, they should instead help you get those greenskins’ attention.’

‘What?’ Romero asked.

‘Step out and challenge them. Quickly. That weapon’s almost ready to fire.’

‘They will fire it at us,’ Romero said, but he was beginning to stand. He had no fear of the xenos, but he wanted to understand.

‘Exactly. Make them turn it towards you. Do it now.’

Romero still didn’t get it, but he didn’t care. He wanted to move, and Santos… Santos had dealt with worse than this. Stepping out, Romero took his position and stared down at the orks and the sparking, crackling weapon. ‘Xenos!’ His shout, amplified by his armour, was caught by the stones and boomed over the valley. ‘You want to fight? Then face Dorn’s blood and die!’ Romero raised his chainsword and pistol over his head, armour flashing in the rising sun. Below, the orks stopped, great heads with spit-gleaming tusks and tiny red eyes all turning towards him.

‘Unh?’ one bellowed, confused, and Romero leaned forward.

‘Is this not what you want, you monsters? A fight? Or do you fear me?’ Romero aimed his pistol and fired. At this range a hit was almost impossible, but the Throne blessed him. The bolt slammed into the alien’s arm and the mass-reactive slug exploded an instant later, tearing through the ork’s flesh. The xenos bellowed, blood spewing from its pulped shoulder as its arm fell to the ground, but the red flood cut off as the ork reached down and retrieved a massive cleaver from its lost hand, barely affected by the explosive amputation. It swung the massive blade as it headed towards Romero, and behind it the rest of the crowd started to shift, beginning to follow.

Then there was a shout from the wagon. The gear-armoured ork was shifting the zzap gun, switching its aim to Romero, and the orks stopped, eager to see what would happen when the weapon fired at the Crimson Fist.

Romero was less eager.

‘Santos?’ he asked. The barrel ground towards him, sparks running up and down its length.

‘Patience,’ said the veteran.

Patience wasn’t what Romero had. The Primaris Marine could feel the adrenaline burning through him, sending both his hearts racing. He wanted to leap down the slope, too fast for the heavy weapon to track, and fall on the foes below with blade and pistol. But patience… He growled to himself and leaned forward, staring down the bright aperture of the zzap gun as it swung to line up with his chest.

‘A few inches more,’ Santos’ quiet voice came over the vox, cutting through the roars of the excited orks and the hammering of Romero’s hearts. ‘Come on. Cross my line. One inch more…’

The rough, crackling hum of the weapon below was building, almost drowning out the orks, and a great arc of electricity splashed out of it, hitting one of the habs and splitting its rockcrete walls. The ork riding the wagon laughed and reached for a great red-handled switch, jerking it down just as Santos muttered, ‘Finis.’

The word was followed by a crack, the familiar sound of a heavy bolter firing, and then the world exploded into light as a monstrous clap of thunder boomed.

Romero dived to the side, blinded by the light and then by the protective filters his auto-senses slammed over his eyes. Something washed over him, a crawling electric prickle that made every hair on his body stand upright, and for a moment everything went dark, silent, all the systems of his blessed armour failing – and then they sprang back to life. Thrown by the momentary loss of control, Romero hit the ground hard, rocks crunching beneath his ceramite plates, but he was up and ready to battle in an instant as his vision snapped back to normal.

In the village below, the Battlewagon was a red-hot lump of melting slag. A dozen dead orks surrounded it, cooking in their crude armour, and behind the wreck… Romero raised his head, tracing the black line scorched across the landscape, a ruinous mark drawn across the village’s fields and then into the forest. Smoke rose from the ruin of trees burned suddenly into ash, a straight row of incineration running towards the horizon, its edges glowing with fire.

‘Sent my slug straight down the barrel right when he flipped the trigger.’ Santos was quiet as always, but there was no hiding the satisfaction in his voice. ‘Made the cursed thing backfire.’ Romero was trying to think of an answer, but then the orks below began to roar.

They bellowed and waved their weapons, thrown into a frenzy by the thunder and fury of all that destruction. They howled like mad things, and Santos leaned into his gun and fired again. Once, twice, picking his shots and lining them up as if the heavy weapon were a hunting rifle, he sent slugs tearing through one ork’s chest, another’s head. The echoing crack of the shots and the splashes of blood focused the orks’ wild attention back to the ridge, and with a whoop the mass of them began to move, pounding through the village for the steep slope, running at Romero.

‘Here they come,’ Santos said, still picking his shots, the heavy slugs from his gun bowling over green monsters as they bounded up the slope. ‘Time to spring the trap.’

‘They have not cleared the village yet,’ Romero said. He rolled his shoulders and raised his bolt pistol, aiming it down the slope, waiting for the raging xenos to get in range. ‘Patience.’

There was silence for a moment on their vox-channel, and then Santos laughed. ‘Get ready,’ he warned. The slowest orks were still straggling through the buildings below, but the fastest were bounding towards them like monstrous apes, almost there. An ork slug cracked into the boulder behind Romero, wildly off target, but the Space Marine didn’t flinch as he carefully lined up his first shots and began to fire. His armour and the durametallic coils threaded through his muscles kept the gun still in his hand despite its massive recoil, and bolt after bolt found head and chest and throat, blowing holes bigger than his sergeant’s power fist in crude armour and xenos flesh. Orks fell, but they kept coming, and the pistol clicked over to empty.

With a reflexive prayer of thanks, Romero holstered the weapon and stepped forward, the teeth of his chainsword a whirring blur. Behind him Santos jumped to his feet, hefting his huge weapon. The heavy bolter roared as shells poured out of it, rocketing down the slope and cutting bloody furrows through the orks. The Firstborn was no longer picking his targets with precision. He was dealing death generously now, and the xenos were rushing like mad to cut him down. But as the first ork hurtled over the final stones, massive spiked hammer raised, Romero moved.

The monomolecular edge of the sword’s teeth didn’t slow when they swept through armour and ork flesh. One cut, and two pieces of xenos hit the ground, blood spilling from both. Romero didn’t pause to appreciate his kill, busy moving on to the next, stepping around Santos as the other Space Marine continued to fire. He sliced off the reaching arms of another ork, ripped off a leg before slashing the throat of the next, never slowing, never stopping. He didn’t worry about Santos – his brother Crimson Fist stood still as a rock, firing, never coming close to hitting Romero as the Primaris Marine moved back and forth, killing the xenos that made it past the heavy bolter’s line of death, the two moving in a harmony of blood and steel.

‘Time to call the others,’ Santos said calmly. ‘All the xenos have fallen into the trap.’

True, thought Romero, as he caught the blow of a massive club on one upraised arm. The strike was enough to send him to one knee, but he swept his sword, catching the ork in the ankle. The brute fell, bellowing, and Romero launched himself back to his feet, slamming one heel down on the xenos’ head as he landed, crushing the thick skull under his armoured boot. There was a moment when there were no foes around, and Romero could see the blue-armoured figures charging out of the village below, tearing into the rear of the ork band, swords swinging and pistols cracking. The xenos were suddenly trapped on the slope, their charge faltering as they were carved down from behind. Then Romero’s view was gone, blocked by a huge, one-armed ork holding a monstrous cleaver. It swung and Romero ducked, taking its other arm before kicking it in the chest, sending it staggering back. It roared at him, uncaring, challenging – and then a heavy bolter round took it in the chest and sent it tumbling down the slope into the mass of its dying brethren.

The sound of the Thunderhawk’s engines was a muted roar through its thick-armoured sides, and the air in the transport’s belly was sharp with the familiar smell of the blessed cleaning oil. Romero sat on a metal bench, liberally anointing his chainsword, carefully stripping away the blood and the shards of flesh and bone that clung to its teeth as he whispered the litany of praise to the machine-spirit housed in the weapon. Around him, he could hear his squad speaking the same words, a good, familiar sound, but… He looked across the belly of the craft, to where Santos sat with Vayne, cleaning his heavy bolter. Picking up his flask of lautix, Romero stepped across the hold and took a seat next to the veteran.

The Firstborn didn’t look up from his careful cleaning, but when Romero sat he spoke.

‘You did well out there, brother.’

‘Thank you.’ Romero took the special brush used for cleaning his sword and dipped it into the astringent fluid. The chemical stink of it burned, but it helped flush away the memory of the smoke that had blown off the charnel pile they’d made from the ork dead. They hadn’t left the village until they’d burned every xenos body to ash.

He sat beside Santos, working, trying to decide what to say until the veteran stopped and looked at him.

‘What is it?’

There were so many responses, and Romero was afraid that the wrong one would slam that wall back between him and the Firstborn. But he had to say something.

‘When we flew here, we saw the monument.’ Romero waved his red gauntlet at the metal walls of the transport. Unseen beyond them were the mountains, and somewhere that metal fist, raised in defiance over six hundred names. ‘Castellar said that it was raised to remind us that no matter how hurt we are, we cannot be stopped. That the Crimson Fists will triumph, because we will not surrender to despair. This is what we see. But as I have the chance, I wanted to ask what it meant to you. To those who raised it.’

For a long time Santos sat motionless in the rumbling din of the transport’s hull, dark eyes gleaming as he stared at the windowless walls, as if he could see through them and find that upraised fist. ‘Your sergeant gave you a strong answer,’ he said finally. ‘It is an answer I would have given before the Arx fell. But after that, after the siege…’ The Firstborn tapped fingers red with paint and spilled blood against his weapon.

‘We came so close to falling, to being destroyed, and we had to face that possibility every day. But we survived, because we did not give in. We did not surrender to despair, as your sergeant said, but neither did we surrender to the vanity of one last, blazing assault. That would have ended us just as surely. We dug in, we survived, and we won. And that, I think, is the lesson that I learned. That while honour and rage can carry you across a battlefield, in war… patience kills.’

Romero stared at his fist, crimson paint overlaid with ork blood, and thought of what might have happened if he had been in command on that ridge. How many civilians might have died at the hand of his fury? How many brothers might have been killed? How many of the Emperor’s enemies might have survived?

‘Yes,’ he said, raising his bloody fist to his chest in salute. ‘Patience kills.’

BLESS THE CURSE

CALLUM DAVIS

Allegedly born to the mythic Cursed 21st Founding, the Black Dragons are unique. A mutation in their gene-seed has granted them great strength, in bone-formed crests on their heads and blades protruding from their arms, but has also led many to doubt their purity. Despite this mistrust, it is to the Imperium’s defence that these Space Marines ply their gifts, with fire and bone.

‘We have found them.’

‘What?’ said Ekorash.

‘Your Chapter brothers, we have found them,’ repeated the inquisitor.

‘Cease,’ Ekorash commanded. The training servitors that stood against him in the training cage went still. Sweat poured off Ekorash and stained the simple loincloth he was wearing.

Nine other Space Marines were in the chamber, sparring with each other or with servitors. All were Greyshields of the Black Dragons Chapter.

Ekorash unlocked the cage door and walked out to meet the inquisitor.

‘This close to the Eye?’ asked Ekorash.

‘Indeed. An ill omen,’ said the inquisitor. Diokoles Unj of the Ordo Astartes was a slight man of indeterminate age thanks to the rejuvenats he used. Ekorash had never seen him smile. He had dark circles under his eyes and his back was hunched slightly, telling of countless hours sat poring over reports and data-slates. He always carried an antiquated laspistol at his hip. ‘Walk with me, Ekorash,’ he said, gesturing to the practice chamber’s exit. ‘If you please.’

Ekorash placed his combat knife on one of the weapon racks and accompanied the inquisitor. The Space Marine was two feet taller than the man, and at least that much wider. Though Ekorash could have snapped him in half in an instant, the inquisitor showed not the slightest concern.

‘My Chapter brothers may be taking the fight to the enemy,’ said Ekorash. ‘It is a good place for any warrior of the Emperor to fight.’ He wanted this to be true, but the rumours that circulated around the Black Dragons were ominous to say the least. Ekorash and his brothers had always been kept separate from other Greyshields. They had always worn armour of deepest jet. They had been assigned to one of the torchbearer fleets swiftly, nominally because their Chapter was expected to be incredibly difficult to find. That, at least, had proven to be true. It was only after joining the fleet that they learned the gene-seed they were implanted with was that of the Black Dragons.

‘I am not so sure, Ekorash,’ said Unj. ‘You may have heard tales about the Black Dragons, but you do not know the half of it. Censured in the past, late on gene-seed tithes, threatened with force to make the tithe, intolerable deviances of both body and Codex – you name it.’

‘All intolerable,’ Ekorash agreed.

‘Yes, but not enough to indict them,’ said Unj. ‘That is where you come in. You have a chance to finally uncover the treachery that surely lies within the Chapter. Traitors are everywhere, Ekorash, you’ve seen this yourself. Heresy can take many forms.’

Images from past battles flashed through Ekorash’s mind – the many-mouthed horrors of Kodunga VII, the screech-witches of Anteeok, the tech-fiends of Kenghys Betaris. He had seen what treachery could do, and what a terrible threat it posed.

‘If the Black Dragons exhibit heresy they must be revealed for the traitors they are and dealt with,’ said Ekorash.

But where would that leave me and my brothers?

‘Take this,’ said Unj. He held a device, small enough to fit into the palm of his hand. It was highly innocuous, bearing no marks of any kind. ‘This device, once activated, will emit an encrypted signal. The Black Dragons will not be able to detect it, but I will. Earn their trust. Once you have identified the nature of their heresy, use this. You will have done the Imperium a great service.’

Ekorash took the device. ‘Agreed,’ he said.

Ekorash paced the cell aboard the Sablewyrm, the Black Dragons’ strike cruiser. He was too big for it. It was designed for a smaller kind of warrior.

What is taking so long? he wondered. He had been locked in here for hours. His brothers were in neighbouring cells. They had been commanded here upon arrival and escorted by thin, black-robed serfs of the Chapter. He had not even seen one of the Firstborn Black Dragons yet – they had only spoken to Custodian Alezandrios, the warrior who led the torchbearer fleet. The Custodians’ task was not only to convince the Black Dragons to take Ekorash and the other Greyshields, but also to convince them to take Primaris technology and the many scores of tech-adepts with the knowledge to implement it.

What is there to discuss? thought Ekorash. The Black Dragons surely won’t refuse the Custodes? Though the warriors of the Chapter had pushed the boundaries of what behaviour the Imperium would accept before, to openly go against the Ten Thousand was surely beyond even them. They cannot have survived this long without knowing the right time to cooperate.

The door opened. Ekorash stopped his pacing immediately. A serf stood in the doorway, hooded and cloaked. Next to him stood a servitor. It had a heavy bolter where its right arm should have been. It pointed the weapon straight at Ekorash.

‘You are to come with me,’ said the serf.

Ekorash felt his body tense up. He clenched his fists.

A serf, addressing me in this way? He wanted to strike the menial before him for his audacity. But he remembered Inquisitor Unj’s words: Earn their trust.

He left the cell and followed the serf. As they walked down a corridor his brothers joined him, accompanied by more serfs and servitors.

‘Where are you taking us?’ asked Ekorash.

No serf answered.

‘Answer us, menials,’ said Norith, another of the Greyshields.

There was no response.

‘They will not reply,’ said Ekorash. ‘We will have to be patient, brothers. We shall see soon enough.’

The serfs took them to a council chamber. The menials and servitors stopped at the entrance, an archway crafted from the bleached bone of some monstrous creature.

‘It is forbidden for us to enter the Chamber of Fire and Bone,’ one said. ‘You will go in now.’

Ekorash led his battle-brothers through the arch. The space within was surrounded by tiered seating, upon which sat dozens of Black Dragons Space Marines. The Greyshields were met with a wall of stony silence from them. All were armoured. Some bore colours marking them as members of the Fifth Company, others of the Ninth. There was no sign of Alezandrios or the other Custodians.

What demanded Ekorash’s attention the most, however, was a central throne, empty, carved from bone in the likeness of the dragon that formed the Chapter symbol. Its head reared over where the occupant would sit. To its right was a smaller throne of similar design. The occupant of this second throne was unhelmed, and held a rosarius and crozius arcanum. Two horns, each as long as Ekorash’s forearm, protruded from his skull. They were coated in adamantine, which gleamed in the flickering torchlight that lit the room.

They bear their mutations so obviously? Without shame?

Two dozen horned warriors sat around the Chaplain. No Space Marine’s set of horns was identical to those of another.

Ekorash carefully observed the Black Dragons sitting all around the chamber.

Those with horns at the centre, closest to the seats of power… Those without to the side. They honour the mutated. It was worse than he had ever thought possible.

But it is not treachery.

The Chaplain knocked the pommel of his crozius on the arm of his throne.

‘Name yourselves,’ said the Chaplain.

‘Where is Custodian Alezandrios?’ asked Ekorash.

‘Name yourselves, I said.’

‘Where are the Custodians?’ Ekorash asked again.

‘You will not question me on my ship. I would know whose presence I tolerate. Then you will have the answer to your question. Not before. Name yourselves.’

Earn their trust. Ekorash gritted his teeth.

‘I am Sergeant Ekorash. These are brothers Norith, Jorros, Haren, That’vor, Gorahan, Yaashen, Skoryl, Bor’len and Vunoor. We are Greyshields of Torchbearer Fleet Alezandrios Menza and battle-brothers of the Black Dragons.’

This statement brought uproar from the Black Dragons. Many were on their feet, pointing at Ekorash and his brothers, roaring curses. The Chaplain silenced them with several more strikes of his crozius to the arm of his throne.

‘You may wear our black, but you are no Dragons,’ said the Chaplain. ‘The emblem with which you sully the Dragon of Bone on your shoulder is all we see, Greyshield. Earning the title of Black Dragon takes more than just declaring you are such. And to answer your question, the Custodians are gone. I, Chaplain Darrigg of the Black Dragons’ Fifth Company, serving commander following the death of Captain Gherryn, gratefully accepted the gift of the Emperor with all the due awe and reverence one would expect from a faithful servant of the Imperium. Yet now I finally see it in the flesh and hear its words, I find myself… disappointed.’

Many of the Black Dragons laughed at this.

‘Face me in the cages, Chaplain, and I will show you what this disappointment can do,’ roared Norith, stepping forward to stand by Ekorash’s side.

‘Be silent, brother,’ said Ekorash, but it was too late. Some of the Black Dragons were still laughing. Many more had stopped, however, their expressions grim. They had moved their hands to the pommels of their combat blades or to bolt pistol holsters.

‘What shall I call you, would-be wyrmling?’ said Darrigg.

‘Norith.’

The Chaplain smiled.

‘What must we do, Chaplain, to earn the title, to earn our place in this brotherhood?’ interrupted Ekorash.

‘And now you make demands of me, sergeant,’ said Darrigg. ‘There is little you can do here. Though it gives Apothecary Talorc and Lexicanium Eanfrigg much misgiving, we do not have time to test… what exactly you are. Nor is there time for the Rites of Bone, the Rites of Fire, the Rites of Claw. Those are but the first steps for any would-be Dragon, long before one can bless the curse and join our ranks in full. Nay, battle will soon be upon us. We will see you fight. I presume that that much at least we do not have to teach you?’

‘I will not stand beside them,’ stated one of the hornless warriors, rising to his feet far to Darrigg’s left. ‘I fight only beside Dragons.’ Many of the Space Marines roared their agreement.

‘Stand alone, fight strong!’ the seated Black Dragons chanted.

Chaplain Darrigg silenced his warriors.

‘We will see how they fight, Sergeant Drostyn. The High Dragon will want to know when I report these events to him. They will be baptised in fire on Rendolia.

‘Leave us, Greyshields. There is much for we Black Dragons to discuss. Except for you, Norith. With you, I shall have words.’

‘We approach Rendolia,’ Chaplain Darrigg said. ‘The dogs of the World Eaters and their damned hordes of mindless followers and craven slaves besiege its fortresses. We come to relieve the defenders.’ He stood on a container in one of the Sablewyrm’s hangar bays, addressing the Black Dragons and the Greyshields before a number of gunships of various marks. Most of the aircraft had lost the majority of their paint to the wear of battle, others bore panels clearly improvised to fix damage. Now Ekorash could see the Firstborn Black Dragons up close, out of the darkness of the chamber, he observed that most sported battle damage. Like the gunships, almost every warrior’s armour had visible signs of repair. Despite the fact that the host assembled here included Space Marines from more than one company, they were fewer than a company in number.

They have done and seen much, these warriors. But in service to whom, or what? Darrigg was surrounded by the same warriors who had sat around him in the Chamber of Fire and Bone. All wore jump packs, were unhelmed and displayed their horns with pride. Some of the warriors were huge, as tall as Ekorash and his brothers.

What deviance must bring about such an occurrence? Ekorash was almost unable to take his eyes off them. But then he noticed something even worse. Many of the other Black Dragons, those without horns, had painted claws on the vambraces of their armour and helmets.

Even those without the curse take it upon themselves in spirit.

The idea of wishing the Emperor’s creation to be twisted so overtly made Ekorash feel sick.

In the hangar Ekorash and the Greyshields stood apart from the rest of the Black Dragons. Ekorash stole a glance at the faces of his warriors, to gauge any reactions. Norith’s face was covered in bruises. One of his eyes was sealed shut by swelling.

‘Our first destination is the Pavlo Kyser citadel,’ said Darrigg. ‘It is defended by the One Hundred and Twenty-Fourth Cadian and elements of the Third and Six Hundred and Eighty-Ninth. It guards the Kredoleen Pass, the only navigable route through the Holspyne Mountains. To the north, the traitors have taken much of the territory but refugees remain there. Until this citadel and others nearby are relieved the refugees have no way of escaping south. When we succeed in relieving the fortresses, we will have formed a bridgehead for counter-attack. The defenders will regain momentum and we can withdraw. We strike swiftly, we kill swiftly, we move on swiftly.’

Ekorash was startled. He cares for refugees? The thought was a strange one. He had never expected the Black Dragons to put themselves at risk to aid civilians. Perhaps there is a nobility in them, he thought, but seeing the horns of the jump pack-equipped warriors made him recoil. To take pride in such abominable mutation is the antithesis of nobility.

‘We split into three forces,’ declared Darrigg. Squads Eithnig, Ligach, Talorkan, Uredak and Tarain are to deploy to the citadel itself, defend it from within and push out the heretics. Squads Drostyn, Onnig, Krautrig and Erilyk will deploy outside. The Whirlwind Hailclaw will join you. It is your task to divide the traitors and draw as many as possible from the citadel.’

‘What is our task, Chaplain?’ asked Ekorash.

Darrigg looked directly at him.

‘The Greyshields shall support in the action outside the fortress.’

Ekorash saw the body language shift in many of the Black Dragons. He assumed those were of the squads expected to fight with them. Many glared at him. They dared not challenge their Chaplain, but they were not pleased.

Be sure I have no wish to fight alongside you either.

‘I will lead the Dragon Claws in reserve. We will strike at the optimum moment, when the heretics are split. We will crush them.’

In that moment, every one of the jump pack-wearing warriors raised their right arm into the air. Out of each arm shot a spike. In some cases they were six feet long. They were organically shaped, like the horns atop their head. These were not mechanised forearm blades, they were a part of the warriors themselves.

‘Fire and bone!’ roared Darrigg.

‘Fire and bone!’ roared the Black Dragons in return.

‘Bless the curse!’

‘Bless the curse!’

Ekorash did not join in, staring at Darrigg the entire time the Black Dragons chanted, and neither did the other Greyshields. Ekorash knew that if he so much as murmured the words, Darrigg would know he was lying. And that he could not allow. Earn their trust, he remembered. The more he learned, the more he was sure he would have the need of Inquisitor Unj’s device.

The cultist exploded in a gush of blood, bone and offal. All that was left of the blood-crazed maniac was its legs – the explosion of the bolt-round had reduced the rest to little more than mist and fragments. It was but one of hundreds cut down in a matter of minutes by Ekorash, his Greyshields and the other Black Dragons fighting outside the Pavlo Kyser citadel.

They had seized high ground barely two miles from the fortress. Their mere presence had lured thousands of fanatics; they hadn’t had to fire a single shot to bring an army upon themselves. The cultists ran at them at full pelt. Most were drenched in viscera, their eyes bloodshot and their veins swollen to the point of bursting. Many roared and screamed incomprehensibly at the Space Marines. Some, however, managed to shout crude mantras as they gnashed their teeth and pink foam frothed around their mouths.

‘Blood for the Blood God!’

‘Skulls for the Skull Throne!’

Ekorash pulled the trigger of his bolt rifle and cut short the war cries of one unfortunate with a bolt-round to the mouth. Brains splattered over many of the cultists all around. It only spurred them on, their eyes rolling into the backs of their heads as the fluids stained their skin red and the droplets fell down their faces and arms.

Ekorash took aim and fired again, killing another of the heretics. He did this again and again and again. There was no stopping them. His ammunition was running low.

All along the Black Dragons’ line the Space Marines poured in fire. No matter how many they killed, the cultists were gaining ground, their numbers endless. Only sergeants Onnig and Erilyk’s Devastators were keeping the fanatics back. Their sweeping and calculated salvoes of heavy bolter fire and onslaughts of frag missiles mowed down hundreds of the traitors.

‘Squads to fall back further up the hill. Two at a time, starting with squads Krautrig and Erilyk. The Greyshields to go last,’ said Tactical Sergeant Drostyn over the vox. ‘We will lure them further away. Do not get yourselves killed, Greyshields. Do not get us killed, either.’

Ekorash said nothing, instead taking out his anger on the cultists. Killing them did little to salve it. It was a bare minimum effort expected from the Black Dragons, and in this he agreed with them.

Where are the World Eaters? he thought. We cannot demonstrate our worth killing these wretches, no matter how many there are.

‘Moving,’ said Sergeant Erilyk.

‘Moving,’ said Sergeant Krautrig.

‘Hailclaw, give them a volley. Incendiaries,’ ordered Drostyn. The artillery tank only fired on command. The Black Dragons had not been resupplied in months and had to ration almost all of their meagre supplies carefully.

Ekorash watched a volley of missiles fly overhead. They spread out over a wide area as they tore through the sky, propellant trails pouring out behind them. They arced upwards before gravity took hold and they dropped. They wobbled slightly in the air, stabiliser fins keeping them true.

When they struck there was a ripple of explosions. Ekorash felt the shock wave rush through his armour. The fireballs shot dozens of feet into the air where the missiles impacted. Ekorash’s visor compensated for the bright flash of light. He saw ripped-off limbs and heads flung skywards. Bloodthirsty roars turned into screams of agony as scores of the fanatics were set alight by burning promethium that clung to the bloodstained rags they wore. Many continued to run at the Black Dragons, completely consumed by fire as they thrashed and stumbled in the furious heat. None of them got close, collapsing to the ground in still-burning heaps as their cooked flesh slipped from their bones and tendons and muscles were seared to nothing.

‘Do not waste a round on those that burn,’ Ekorash ordered his squad. ‘Let them feel the fury of the Emperor’s vengeance. Let them feel the righteousness of His judgement.’

The Black Dragons picked off those cultists who had escaped the flames. There were not many. The Whirlwind’s bombardment bought the Space Marines some reprieve, though Ekorash knew it would be only temporary.

Though fires still burned, much of the smoke from the explosions had faded. Ekorash saw movement behind it. Things were coming towards them, fast. He heard them before he identified them. Bloodthirsty roars pouring through vox-grilles that sounded like meat and rusting shrapnel being put through a grinder. The biting, whining revving of chain weapons hungering for flesh.

They stormed through the flames like inferno-dwelling hounds from the most tortured nightmares. They cut through the cultists in their path, hacking them apart in showers of gore with sweeping blows from chainswords and chainaxes. Their deep red and brass armour plates flared in the firelight and were caked in gore. The heads and skins nailed to their armour had been set alight, perfecting their resemblance to creatures of the deepest hells. Vicious spikes and horns burst out of their knee pads, pauldrons and helms. Some were bareheaded, their faces twisted into inhuman snarls of insatiable rage. Their eyes were bloodshot, their teeth sharpened to points. Wires and cables had been sutured into their skulls. There were scores of them.

The World Eaters, thought Ekorash. They come to us at last. He had never seen Traitor Space Marines before. He grimaced in disgust at the mutations many bore. Horns, claws, talons – all coated in the life force of dead servants of the Emperor.

Not unlike the Black Dragons. The similarities were so tangible. Yet the Black Dragons are no raving madmen. Here they have slain the Emperor’s foes, not His loyal subjects.

Just the sight of the traitors stirred in Ekorash a hatred he had never known before. It was deep, primal, as natural as any feeling he had ever experienced. It was as if their very existence were anathema to him. His soul rejected them as the body might reject a foreign organ.

To know these creatures spurned the gifts of the Emperor so brazenly, and now spit in His face… They must be annihilated… the monsters… the heathens…

‘Open fire!’ he ordered. ‘Send them back to the hell from whence they came! Deny them honourable death blade to blade!’

‘Now we have a worthy foe,’ said Norith.

‘That we do, brothers,’ said Ekorash. ‘Now we prove our talents. Now we make the Black Dragons wish they could claim the name Greyshield!’

‘Cut them all down!’ bellowed Sergeant Drostyn over the vox. ‘Do not let them gain ground on us! Slaughter the heretics!’

Scores of the World Eaters were felled by the Black Dragons’ fire, their bolt-rounds ripping off heads and limbs. But many did not fall. Some carried on, no slower than before, with missing arms or gaping wounds in their chests, the bloodlust set even deeper in their expressions.

Ekorash could not fear the World Eaters, that was impossible, but the sheer… inhumanity of the heretics gave him pause.

Their rage and fanaticism is like nothing I thought possible…

Ekorash took a moment to consider the situation. The onrush had taken the Black Dragons by surprise: many were still taking up new positions when the World Eaters attacked. Without the firm firing line from before, the heretics would certainly reach the Black Dragons’ positions and engage them hand to hand.

‘This will be a time for blades, brothers,’ said Ekorash to his squad. ‘The World Eaters will not hesitate, slow or stop – and neither shall we. Do not hesitate at their wrath, for it is a false one! It is a rage built upon the sand of lies and cowardice, a compensation for weakness in soul, mind and body. Let them see our wrath, a true wrath, one nourished by purity of hatred and purpose and guided by the Emperor Himself!’

Ekorash saw that despite the charging heretics, Sergeant Drostyn had not changed his orders. Two of the Black Dragons’ squads were still falling back.

They are going to get caught, he thought. Even if they were to get into position it would be too late; the World Eaters would have reached the remaining squads in Drostyn’s detachment by then.

He activated his vox-link with the Black Dragons sergeant. ‘Sergeant Drostyn, squads Erilyk and Krautrig are still moving. They need to stop. If they do not, the heretics will be upon us all while we are disordered.’

‘Be silent, Greyshield. This is the work of war. I will not have the untested and the clawless give me orders.’ The sergeant closed the vox-link.

The heretics were gaining more and more ground. The rapid fire of the Space Marines had slain more of them, but it was not enough. Even another barrage of explosive missiles from Hailclaw failed to do more than slow them down temporarily. He saw jaws sheared off by chunks of shrapnel, and mutant claws atomised in a deluge of viscera. They just kept coming.

The heretics were twenty paces away.

‘Draw blades!’ Ekorash bellowed. His Greyshields stowed away their bolt rifles, drawing combat blades and bolt pistols.

Ten paces.

‘Charge!’ Ekorash roared. ‘For the Emperor!’

‘For the Emperor!’ chorused his warriors. Such a sound stirred his hearts more than anything.

Ekorash selected his first opponent. The warrior wielded a gore-drenched axe in each hand and ran with a limp imperceptible to unaugmented eyes. One of the heretic’s eyes swivelled independently of the other. He bled from wounds on his right forearm. All this Ekorash assessed in the two heartbeats it took for him and the World Eater to meet each other.

Ekorash ducked one sweeping blow that would have torn through his neck. He avoided another that would have disembowelled him.

Throne, he is fast, thought Ekorash, as he dodged another would-be killing blow. Within a second he was forced to block another. The fierce vibrations caused where his blade met the teeth of his enemy’s chainaxe nearly shattered his arm. Ekorash gritted his teeth.

My wrath is pure. His is false, he told himself as he pushed against the axe to keep it away from his armour’s neck joins.

He brought up his bolt pistol. Just before he pulled the trigger, the traitor knocked away his arm. Ekorash fired out of reflex. The shot detonated in the blood-caked ground.

Ekorash drove his helmet into the heretic’s skull in a vicious headbutt. Blood poured from the traitor’s nose. He took a backward step. The slight movement released the pressure on Ekorash’s combat blade and gave him the chance to drive the blade into the World Eater’s neck. He stabbed the heretic a second time, then a third.

‘Die!’ he shouted. ‘Curse you all!’

Where his squad fought, jet ceramite met crimson plate in a terrible crunch. The air was filled with the whine of chain weapons biting into power armour. Warriors swore oaths of hatred and vengeance and fealty to a dark god. Roars of anger mingled with roars of pain. Heretic and loyalist alike slipped and fell amid the blood-coated corpses and gore-drenched battlefield. They grappled, punched, kicked, headbutted, stabbed. Strategy and order broke down. Squads lost all cohesion. The fight descended into a hectic melee, each warrior fighting to stay alive.

His warriors were dying. Vunoor, That’vor, Haren – gone.

It was no different for the Black Dragons. Ekorash could hear the desperate orders of Sergeant Erilyk over the vox as he tried to ready his squad for the World Eaters’ onslaught. The quickest of glances told Ekorash all he needed to know: all of them were embroiled in brutal close combat. There was no finesse, no glory, just fury – a fight driven by the deepest hatred and wrath, and fuelled by ruthless determination to see the foe dead by whatever means necessary.

Ekorash fought and killed, fought and killed. Pain wracked his body from the incessant effort. His muscles burned. His lungs fought for air. He grappled with another World Eater, wrestling the monster to the ground and trying to drive his blade into wherever he could find a gap.

Where are the Dragon Claws?

He cursed himself for wishing they would arrive.

Ekorash exchanged blows with yet another World Eater. The heretic wielded a huge two-handed chainsword that could easily cut him in half. He dodged every heavy blow. Each move brought fresh pain. His muscles screamed in protest.

‘BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD!’ the heretic roared, over and over. His helmet had no lower portion. Ekorash could see the traitor’s forked tongue, black lips and bleeding gums.

He saw no way through the World Eater’s defences. The heretic’s furious blows kept him on the defensive constantly. His combat blade, already blunted by the furious fighting, would be chewed up by the chainsword if he tried to parry.

Ekorash went to dodge another blow. The force required to do so resulted in him landing hard on his back. The World Eater laughed, the sound as maniacal as it was deafening. He raised his chainsword above his head to finish off Ekorash.

‘FIRE AND BONE!’

Ekorash looked up. The Dragon Claws descended like the creatures for which they were named, the adamantine of their horns and spikes catching the light of fires and muzzle flashes alike. They were almost daemonic in their visage, their jet plate and crimson eye-lenses only adding to their sinister appearance. The roar of jump packs nearly drowned out the sounds of battle.

One landed on Ekorash’s foe. The World Eater was crushed. Ekorash heard scores of bones snap beneath the mass of the Dragon Claw. Blood poured from dozens of wounds.

It was Darrigg.

The Chaplain looked down on Ekorash.

‘On your feet, Greyshield,’ he said, before rushing into the fray, bone claws extended.

Ekorash rose, unable to take his eyes off the Chaplain. Darrigg weaved around the World Eaters with incredible grace and skill, punching his forearm blades through knees, guts and heads. Wherever he went, the blood of the foe flowed in rivers.

Ekorash could not help but feel jealous of the Chaplain’s power.

No. It is a curse. A deviance. A temporary advantage exchanged for a lifetime of impurity. It is a sickness. But he was not convinced, not when finally the battle had shifted against the World Eaters. They kill the heretic with all the fury a Space Marine is expected to. To think anything else was to lie.

‘Renew your efforts, brothers! Take the fight to the World Eaters! Kill them all! Bless the curse!’ roared Sergeant Drostyn over the vox. The harsh orders of the Black Dragons warrior snapped Ekorash out of his reverie. He picked up a discarded combat blade and charged into the fray.

The arrival of the Dragon Claws saw the Black Dragons gain ground. The World Eaters were depleted, their momentum lost. They fought madly, without cohesion. It made it easier for the Black Dragons to isolate the frothing madmen and cut them down.

For deviants, their discipline is strong, thought Ekorash. The battle-brothers of the various squads were working together, their formations regrouped after the initial shattering charge of the World Eaters was broken by the arrival of the Dragon Claws.

They were containing the World Eaters now almost everywhere.

Except there, Ekorash thought. The World Eaters’ champion was one foe the Black Dragons had yet to fully contend with. He was a huge warrior. Affixed to his armour were gore-coated skulls from a dozen species. Spikes protruded from his plate, and he had driven the heads of dead Space Marines onto them. He wielded a pair of axes, each so large that a regular Space Marine might need two hands to utilise them effectively. Such was this traitor’s power he even exerted a degree of control over the other World Eaters around him, forming as coherent a block of blood-crazed warriors as was possible.

Ekorash witnessed the World Eater hack a Dragon Claw in half with a single swing of an axe. Blood and offal poured out of the warrior onto the viscera-drenched battlefield. Horror and agony were etched onto the warrior’s facial expression in his grisly death.

Ekorash saw Chaplain Darrigg make for the champion. As the melee swirled around them, Darrigg was isolated from the rest of the Dragon Claws. Ekorash could see a route to Darrigg through the fray. He was the only one who could aid the Chaplain.

I will not stay in your debt, Chaplain. Shame at having been saved by the leader of the Black Dragons prickled at Ekorash. He would see the debt repaid now fighting this World Eater, and his honour restored.

Even Ekorash, with his augmented vision, could barely follow Darrigg’s duel with the traitor champion, such was the speed of the combatants. They ducked, weaved, feinted, thrust – there was no doubting their sheer warrior skill.

When Ekorash was but yards away, Darrigg drove one of his forearm spikes into the World Eater’s shoulder. The heretic roared in pain. He wrapped the curve of one of his axes around the spike still buried in his flesh and pulled hard. Such was the traitor’s strength the spike snapped off. It was Darrigg’s turn to bellow in agony. Ekorash saw the force of the trauma had shattered the Chaplain’s gauntlet.

‘You are mine, traitor!’ Ekorash bellowed, tackling the warrior to the ground before he could bring up an axe to slay the Chaplain. Ekorash’s strike knocked the axes out of the World Eater’s hands and he wrestled with the heretic. They rolled over wounded warriors and upturned blades. They punched and grappled. Ekorash tried in vain to bring his combat blade to the champion’s neck, but the warrior turned the weapon aside each time.

Ekorash tried once more, lifting his arm. The heretic caught him by the wrist and pushed back. The World Eater looked straight into Ekorash’s eyes, his expression full of ruthlessly determined rage. Drool flowed from the corners of his mouth as he clenched his jaws. He bared his black teeth, which resembled those of some great feline predator. His face was gaunt, bordering skeletal. His nose was like a serpent’s.

Truly, we can fall far, but no Black Dragon I’ve seen is like this.

The heretic was still bleeding where Darrigg had pierced him.

An advantage.

‘I will be the death of you, traitor,’ said Ekorash, meeting the World Eater’s gaze with every ounce of righteous fury he could muster.

‘Not before I send you to your false Emperor, slave-weakling,’ said the heretic.

Slowly, the World Eater turned Ekorash’s wrists. The blade now pointed at Ekorash. The traitor pushed it closer, slowly but surely.

Ekorash fought back, straining with all his might. Every muscle in his body completely tightened up. He clenched his eyes shut with effort. He could feel the World Eater’s effort weakening, just.

With no warning the resistance to Ekorash vanished. He lunged forward, the sudden movement jarring his shoulders.

He opened his eyes.

The World Eaters champion had an adamantine spike driven through his head. A spike that belonged to Darrigg.

‘I had him!’ Ekorash shouted. He shoved the corpse to one side.

‘I know, Greyshield,’ said Darrigg. ‘But not fast enough.’

The Chaplain stood over Ekorash, offering a hand.

Ekorash glared at him. He hesitated.

Earn their trust. He took the Chaplain’s hand, and Darrigg brought him to his feet.

‘We have done enough here now, Greyshield,’ said Darrigg.

Ekorash looked around. The traitors were broken. Corpses were everywhere and already flesh-eating birds had descended on some of them.

‘You and your brothers fought well. But you are not yet Black Dragons, far from it. Still, there are other battles to fight in which you might improve. We must away.’

This was the first of many such engagements on Rendolia. The Black Dragons slaughtered hordes of deranged cultists, faced down more World Eaters and even banished raging monsters from the empyrean. Each time, they fought, killed, saved a fortress from destruction and withdrew. Ekorash and his brothers were thrust again and again into where the fighting was thickest. Only four of his fellow Greyshields now remained. Yaashen had been impaled on a World Eater’s spear in their second battle. Norith was beheaded with a chainglaive in the previous engagement. Though the Greyshields had fought with the Black Dragons for many weeks, Ekorash felt no more a part of the brotherhood. The Greyshields were excluded from all rituals and traditions, as well as all tactical discussions. A short time ago, he would not have cared.

Now a part of me longs for their comradeship, he reflected. His views towards the Black Dragons had softened, despite his efforts to prevent such a line of thought.

Not one sign of treachery.

Ekorash removed his armour in the cell that was too small for him back on the Sablewyrm.

They have bled like us, died like us. They have slaughtered the mutant and the traitor and the heretic. Their effectiveness on the battlefield is undeniable. They have honoured the Emperor in victory after victory. In all these battles, all these opportunities for heresy to reveal itself… not once has it reared its head. Surely they cannot have hidden it from me all this time?

Ekorash felt pain. A different kind of pain. The pain of battle he knew well, and no part of his transhuman body escaped it. But this was different. It was not the pain caused by something striking from without. It was from something within. He felt it in his forearms.

He removed his vambraces. He ran his hands over his arms. Then he felt them. The protuberances. He knew what they were – they could only be one thing. The claws were growing within him.

The curse. It too blesses me. He formed the words before he could check himself.

He expected to feel horror, disgust. Yet he did not. He stared at the lumps forming beneath the skin of his arms.

Even being associated with warriors with these mutations had once shamed him. Now he possessed them himself. And he could not help but feel pride.

‘I am a Black Dragon, whether they acknowledge it or like it or not. And I will make them see it, one way or another,’ he said.

Ekorash remembered Diokoles Unj’s words again. Earn their trust.

Why should the Black Dragons trust me, when people like Unj dedicate their lives to destroying them? When you are treated like an enemy despite your continued, millennia-long loyalty?

Ekorash removed the rest of his armour and put on a long tunic that covered his arms. He could not be sure if he was ready to show the Firstborn Black Dragons – or his Greyshield battle-brothers – what was growing within him.

‘Ekorash,’ said a voice in the doorway. Ekorash looked over. It was Darrigg.

What is he doing here?

‘Chaplain,’ he said.

‘You and your brothers serve the Emperor well. You have followed every order and slain a multitude of foes. I can ask for little more. I will keep a close eye on you, always, as my duties demand I must. But I wanted you to know that I have advised the High Dragon that I endorse using the Primaris technology brought to us with you.’

Ekorash was stunned.

Recognition? At last?

‘I am grateful, Chaplain,’ he said. ‘Does that make my Greyshield brothers and I Black Dragons in your eyes?’

‘You must complete the trials and rituals to fully earn the title. It would be a dishonour to the entire Chapter if you were granted our name without doing so. Until that day has come I cannot call you brother. But you have earned my respect. Be grateful for that.’

‘Yes, Chaplain.’

Darrigg left.

Ekorash smiled. Then he remembered the device the inquisitor had given him. He had never let it leave his person in all the weeks since he had joined the Black Dragons. He took it from an ammunition pouch on his armour.

The inquisitor would gladly kill me now. To the inquisitor he was a traitor, given what was growing in his arms.

Ekorash could not imagine the warriors he had fought beside being slaughtered by whatever forces the Inquisition could muster. Not after seeing them fight so hard for the Emperor, so many bleeding and dying. To kill these warriors would be injustice of the most gross and self-defeating kind.

He placed the device on the floor. He brought his boot down on top of it, crushing it.

‘Bless the curse.’

LIVING RELICS

DAVID GUYMER

It is with the most revered artefacts of the past that the Consecrators do battle with the foes of the Lion. Relic weapons, armour and vehicles presented as if plucked directly from myth, tirelessly collected and put to use by these, the Lion’s most faithful sons.

Artur Nerod, questing knight of the Consecrators’ inner chamber, kicked in the crash-weakened bulkhead. Melta-carved adamantium alloy sheared away from the remnants of the interior wall, and a slab ten feet in height and almost half that in thickness slammed onto the floor.

The artificial cavern beyond was a void space between the outer plating and the pressure hull within, serviced by a labyrinth of catwalks and servitor crawlways. It was unlit and silent. The sound of the falling wall rang through it like a bolt-round fired off in an anathema psykana fortress. Buttressing pillars and monolithic support gables flexed and groaned, much as they had been designed to, the ship’s bones shifting and settling.

Nerod stepped onto the gantry.

The Tartaros suit he was encased in, lightweight and mobile relative to more common Tactical Dreadnought patterns though it was, was a phenomenally heavy suit of plate. The stressed flooring shuddered as Nerod added the armour’s weight to that of the outer hull section he had already kicked onto it. Superheated air rose from the dribbling metal to waft through the crimson tabard of his order. Smoke drifted across his armour’s lamps, listless and mocking in the ship’s gravity, his auto-targeters chasing locks that were not there.

No sooner was he through the breach than his brothers at arms were pouring in behind him, spreading out along the walkway to cover the multitude of sight lines and angles. Regil and Moriel in their studded armour. Kassal and his multi-melta. The Intercessor, Haldain, gigantic in the soulless contours of Mk X Tacticus plate.

Only the Apothecary, Listor, too valuable an asset of the small errantry detachment to endanger in the front line of a boarding action, had remained back.

‘The air appears to be breathable,’ he said, the twinkling gem-displays of the narthecium affixed to his left vambrace decorating his white armour like an aeldari corsair’s treasure. ‘Remarkable for a vessel this old, and showing such obvious exterior damage. It would seem that at least some of the ship’s secondary systems remain operational.’

Nerod drew his lion-hilted power sword, Inclemitus, and, turning it point down to the gantry, lowered himself to one knee with a shriek of hydraulics. He made the sign of errantry across his plastron.

His brothers put up their bolters and bowed their heads.

All, again, was silence.

‘The Lion watch over us on this quest,’ said Nerod. ‘May he deem our efforts worthy and grant us success in his name.’

‘In his name,’ the knights intoned, crossing their breasts with their own emblems and sigils.

Nerod gestured to the Apothecary, rising as he did so.

‘Now, my brothers. We proceed.’

Between the milky-white dot of Beta-Pericron and the pale blue pulse of Thucydides, far out on the Perseus Arm of the Eastern Fringe, a starless desert lay.

It was an expanse that the terrestrially evolved brain was not built to comprehend. It was nothingness in every conceivable direction and in every inconceivable distance. There was no dust, no gas, no stellar heat. An orphan moon would become lost in it. A ship’s auspex could probe it for a thousand years and sweep only the smallest fraction. It was the space at the borders of the map that the astrographers of old had filled with dragons.

In that lightless gulf the city-sized Legion-era warship was the speck of a speck and less even than that. Everything forward of its dorsal tower had been reduced to a fan of metallic debris spread wide and fine by the distant gravitic tug of a rotating galaxy.

A single, colossally lonely point of light crawled over the castellated ridges of its aft gun decks. The servitor-guided Stormraven gunship orbited her like a moonlet around a dead, dark world.

How the ship had come to be there was a mystery, lost to the distant reaches of time and the incalculable vastness of space.

Her name was the Chevalier. This, at least, was known.

Her age was incalculable.

And the Consecrators had been seeking her for two thousand years.

A clerestory of huge viewing portals stared blankly into the void. Moriel walked to the wall of windows. He was not sure what drew him. He was a creature of custom and logic, from a tradition that understood only what it could hold and remember, and there was no logical reason to seek anything of worth from that quarter. He went anyway. Perhaps that was reason enough.

The portals were coldly massive, the mullions between the armaglass panes decorated with woodland scenes etched onto pewter panels. The light they admitted from the neighbouring Kirsanov Cluster was barely enough to actuate the photoreceptors in his helmet lenses, just enough to throw a grainy shadow from Brother Regil as the Space Marine Errant continued on alone. The great portals loomed massively, like expanding black holes over his left shoulder.

And they were alone.

Nerod and Listor had taken a separate path, the better to explore and map the derelict most efficiently. They had been out of vox contact for several days. Kassal, who boasted of some machine lore in his long service, had departed to seek out the enigmatic Chevalier’s source of running power. He had taken Brother Haldain. Nerod had almost had to order him to do so.

The void absorbed Moriel’s gaze, and his thoughts.

He was aware, on the logical stage that a superhuman crafted by human sciences inevitably occupied, that this particular slice of visible galaxy was not dissimilar to any that he might have observed in any other place. He could have been in the Kriegan, Agripinaa or Armageddon systems and, unless they had been in orbit of one of the principal planets, never expected to see another ship or the body of a world simply by looking at random through a window. Even within systems, the void was sufficiently huge. Distant stars were not objectively less distant. And yet, he could not dissociate the view from the feeling of being so far beyond the farthest edge of the nearest stellar enclave. This ship had died. So totally alone that the explosion that had ripped out its forward sections would not have reached the closest Imperial colony on Pericron for decades after its demise.

The Unforgiven did not celebrate their triumphs, nor mourn their fallen. They had their own reasons. But Moriel could almost feel the Chevalier’s anguish.

He was here with her now. He could not shake the sensation that he had been lured into the same trap.

Something tapped on the armaglass.

He started back from the viewing portal and brought up his bolter. He stared hard at his own cold reflection, his heavily armed likeness pointing its weapon at his own chest plastron. His auspex glitched, throwing up a random collation of golden runes onto his lens. It had been doing that. It was something about this ship.

The system made a tapping sound as it reset and re-scanned.

Suppressing a shudder, he shouldered his bolter and turned to continue on, before Regil could think too deeply about what was keeping his brother.

His reflection watched him go.

Kassal held firmly to the barrier rail overlooking the bottomless chute, and rapped on his helmet lens. As if the raindrop patter of his auspex could be cleared with the tap of a finger.

‘What is it?’ Haldain asked him.

‘It is nothing.’

‘Nothing does not need such frequent purging from your screed.’

Kassal consciously lowered his hand. ‘Auspex glitches are to be expected on a ship as old and haunted as the Chevalier.’

The Intercessor appeared to have thoughts of his own, but he kept them to himself. Knowing how the first generation Primaris Marines felt about words like haunted, Kassal made it a point to use them all the more. While he had reluctantly accepted the Primaris’ supremacy in battle, combat was but one of the arenas in which a knight was expected to excel.

It pleased him to test the warrior’s patience.

‘The false auspex returns are most likely due to near-death activity in the Chevalier’s machine-spirits,’ he explained. ‘Perhaps a scrambled hatch access on the tier above us, misreading the scanner wave as an input command and returning the glitch as a nonsense signal.’

Without an acknowledgement, Haldain pressed ahead around the perimeter walkway, his bolt rifle aimed from the shoulder and fully loaded.

Three days of chasing power fluctuations through what was left of the ship’s primary grid had brought them here. They had gained access to the chute through the front grille of a dormant plasma furnace about six hours earlier and had been climbing ever since. Narrow footbridges ran the circumference at intervals of seventy feet, overlooking the stifling abyss, each adjoined to the next with crumbling steel ladders that creaked and flaked under their transhuman weight. Every few hundred yards, huge rusted fans ground slowly around or sat idle, the air curdling in a bath of rust, ozone and occasional static discharge. Every sound and utterance echoed a thousand times off listing corbels and sagging rotors.

Those three days, without rest, had not yet drained the Primaris Marine’s stamina nor impaired his discipline.

Kassal would be the first to acknowledge that his feelings towards the new breed of warrior were complicated.

They had not proven their resolve over ten thousand years of purgatory, enduring the decline of their sclerotic empire and fighting to preserve it nonetheless. And yet… What were they, these Primaris, that first cohort at least who had fought their way across the Cicatrix Maledictum with the torchbearer fleets, but relics of their own ennobled past, objects of reverences no different to Questor Nerod’s Angivain combi-bolter or the noble power sword Inclemitus. Kassal was unsure if his distrust of the Primaris was the antagonism towards change that was expected of a knight, or if his scepticism was tainted by envy.

He was not sure which of them was the relic.

‘I have something here,’ Kassal grunted, pulling himself from his reverie.

Tapping irritably on his helmet lens again, he scattered the nonsense symbols long enough to clarify the glyphs and icons that were hovering over the dulled fascia display console opposite him. The fascia would, on a human enginseer, have been on an ergonomic slant at about chest height, but came up to Kassal’s groin. He punched in the corner and, with a whir of motorised servos, ripped the panel out of the wall. It fell down the chute, rattling and clattering as it struck the turbofans, the echoes growing fainter, fainter until they could simply no longer be heard. Haldain leant over the barrier rail. His lenses glowed red in the dark and surrounded his Tacticus helmet in a crimson haze of particle dust. Kassal had no doubt that the Primaris warrior’s senses were as superior as his battle skills, but given that he was still looking down, he had most likely not yet heard the final impact either.

‘A long way down,’ Haldain opined.

Without answering, Kassal crouched over the wiring that was now exposed behind the interface panel. His lens display continued to flicker and spasm as it ran through analytics he did not remotely understand.

Haldain straightened and turned back towards him. ‘Can you trace the source of the power?’

‘No. We have gone downstream. Or so it appears, though it makes no sense.’

‘How so?’

‘There is a significant power draw from one of the forward sections. But there should not be anything forward of us but debris. We saw it on our approach. We are about one hundred and fifty feet from empty void.’

‘Then we have wasted the last three days. If there is anything of value on the Chevalier we will not find it by chasing embers.’

‘Something is actively using power.’ He reached inside. ‘It will take me a few minutes to divine which of these cables bears the onward flow.’

‘It should be a Techmarine doing this work.’

‘There is no Techmarine here.’

‘There should be.’

‘A knight with two masters will serve both poorly,’ Kassal quoted.

He glanced up, expecting a return that had not come. Haldain had continued around the footbridge, but come to a stop short of the stairway. He was studying what appeared to be a minor blemish on the wall.

‘What have you found?’

‘Some kind of organic residue,’ said Haldain.

‘Log it for Listor to analyse on our return.’

‘No need.’

Haldain reached up to his helmet’s manual release clasps. The air aboard the Chevalier was old and deeply stale, but it was breathable. There was a visible jet of air as the Intercessor’s hermetic seal broke and the black helmet came away.

The Primaris Marine had a flat, broad face, with a powerful-looking jaw. His eyes were hooded, secretive, a dark and mottled green like emeralds chemically treated to take away their lustre. His head was covered with a sandy-coloured stubble, but completely bald in patches where the subdermal wiring of his armour’s interface ran through the cranium. He lowered his wide nose to the mark on the wall and sniffed.

‘What is it?’ said Kassal.

Haldain frowned. ‘Blood.’

‘How old?’

‘Very old.’ The Primaris warrior leant back from the wall and turned towards Kassal. ‘If I were to ask a question of you, would you answer it?’

‘That would depend on the question. And on whether I had an answer to give.’

‘What befell the Chevalier?’

‘I do not know.’

The Primaris Marine nodded, clearly expecting that answer or one like it. They were brothers, after all, however distant. ‘Does it not trouble you, brother?’

Kassal thought about how to answer. Haldain did not lightly refer to the older generation of knights as brother. ‘It does. But simply by being here we restore a small piece of our former glory. Perhaps, on our return to the Chapter, her deeds will be honoured as they should be.’

Haldain nodded. Kassal could see the doubts still in his un-lensed eyes, but he could also see that the Primaris warrior had come to some kind of peace with them. Returning his attention to the wall, Haldain pressed his tongue back to the red mark. He made a gurgling sound in his throat. His eyes flickered and rolled back into his head, exposing staring whites as his omophagea organ sampled its biochemistry.

Kassal left him to it.

This would take some time, and he had his own divinations to perform.

The combat patrol was strewn across the maintenance hangar floor. A handful of individuals appeared to have been partially consumed. None yet bore any obvious sign of decomposition as far as Nerod could determine without a closer inspection.

The corpses numbered about a dozen, although the scattering of body parts allowed for a margin of error. Their thin bodies were clad in parkas made from cavity insulation fibres, and armoured in a kind of chainlink vest that seemed to have been woven together using the steel lugs of caterpillar tracks and coloured loops of plastek wiring. A few lay close to weapons that, before soldiers of limited means and even lesser skill had been charged with their upkeep, might once have resembled Naval shotguns. The rest bore handmade spears, lengths of wood or plastek topped with knapped pieces of adamantium.

They were also human. Or once had been, somewhere in their distant ancestry.

‘How recently were they slain?’

‘It is impossible to be certain,’ said Listor, carefully. ‘Not without a more complete investigation of the Chevalier’s atmosphere and microfauna than I am equipped to prosecute.’ He glanced around, taking in the bullet-riddled hulks of Atlas and Aurox tanks, most of them just bones, long ago stripped of serviceable materials. ‘A better estimation might be drawn from an analysis of the gunfire than the dead. But that is not my specific area of expertise.’

‘Did they perish with the Chevalier?’

‘I cannot–’

‘Speculate, Apothecary. I will not ask again.’

‘I think it unlikely, brother. The Chevalier has been lost so long she has drifted into myth. Her air may be thin, but there are enough systems still running to keep it breathable. Under such conditions the bodies of the original crew would have long ago become dust.’

Nerod closed his eyes, feeling as ancient, almost, as the Chevalier. His lenses gave a sympathetic flicker. ‘Then someone else has found her first.’

‘Given her extreme isolation I think that unlikely as well. Our Chapter has spent two millennia chasing rumours that exist nowhere outside our own libraries and the vaults of the Rock.’

‘Then some amongst the original crew might have survived and…’ He prepared the word distastefully, looking down on the thin, pale, stunted corpse. ‘Evolved.’

Listor nodded. ‘For all mankind’s individual weaknesses, as a species it is infinitely robust. Look no further than you and I, and Brother Haldain.’

‘It is indeed,’ Nerod agreed. ‘It is why humanity yet endures and why it may yet be saved.’ His Terminator armour gave a colossal heave as he thudded down to one knee beside the nearest set of remains. It was a female, gaunt and hooded with hugely flared nostrils, presumably an adaptation to the thin atmosphere, and covered in a thin layer of facial hair against the cold. She lay across the body of a spear. Her chainlink vest crinkled as he prodded her. ‘The consumption of the dead I could overlook. There are hive cities I have trodden where worse is done on an industrial scale, and feudal worlds under the aegis of our own brotherhoods where the act has assumed pseudo-religious significance. But the metal in that spear… Unless I am much mistaken it is a small piece of what was once a Space Marine combat knife. And the armour. These are tracks from a front-line military vehicle, not a civilian or a support tank. Legion.’ He breathed the word as though it were holy. ‘That kind of cannibalism…’ He closed his mouth lest his words betray his thoughts, and in them the sin of despair. ‘Assuming the Chevalier has harboured a human population since time immemorial, what relics of the old Legion can we expect to find undamaged?’

For a long time the Apothecary was silent. So long that Nerod began to suspect that he was afraid to answer honestly. ‘The Chevalier is a mighty ship, even the little of her that remains,’ he said finally. ‘If our Legion forebears were anything like you or I then their greatest treasures will have had security measures in place. But still, over so many thousands of years…’ He left his personal conclusion unspoken.

Nerod bowed his head as though in prayer over the foul corpse beneath him.

‘We should attempt to locate these people’s settlement, if they have one, and make contact,’ said Listor. ‘There is a chance that some knowledge of what befell our lost brothers might have been carried down in their folklore.’

‘Agreed.’ Nerod rose to his feet in a whirring growl of hydraulic motors. He hefted the Angivain, another relic of its time, in one enormously appointed gauntlet. ‘Let us make contact.’

Moments after he had first touched his taste receptors to the blood smear, Haldain resurfaced with a gasp of stale air. ‘The blood is human. And old. Too old for me to be certain of anything more. All I see is… glimpses. Impressions.’ His eyelids fluttered, and for a moment Kassal thought the remembrancer organ was about to draw him back under. ‘A world of corridors. A life lived in cold and darkness. A predator. A daemon of maggots and worms.’

‘Daemon?’ said Kassal, instantly on alert.

Haldain shook his head, frustrated. ‘I see nothing more.’

‘Then assist me,’ said Kassal, up to his elbows in the fascia cavity. Loose wires emerged in the slow but inexorable process of entangling his limbs. ‘My efforts would benefit from a Mk X sensorium suite and generator.’

The Primaris Marine was clearly rattled by his remembrance: he did not even acknowledge the faint praise of his new-iteration wargear. He raised an uncertain hand and laid it over the smear on the wall. ‘This… this is no random marking. It is a word, the last recorded act of a desperate life. A warning, or perhaps… or perhaps a way of lancing its author’s fear through the act of naming.’

‘It is in no language I have ever seen,’ said Kassal.

‘I know it. Or rather, I know the meaning of this sigil.’

‘What then does it say?’

‘It says “daemon”.’

Kassal opened a vox-channel and attempted to raise Nerod. Then Listor. He got nothing both times. There must have been too much ship still between them. His auspex jittered.

He refused the temptation to tap on the lens.

Haldain glanced up. A moment later Kassal heard what the Primaris warrior already had. The distant rattle of bolter fire rang down the chute.

‘That is the Angivain,’ said Kassal. ‘The relic of Hegemenon. Questor Nerod would not blaspheme against the bolter’s spirit by firing without intending to kill.’

Haldain stepped back from the wall. ‘How much farther does this shaft climb?’

‘I do not know.’

The Primaris Marine nodded towards the fascia cavity in which Kassal was still working. ‘How much time do you need?’

Kassal grunted. ‘Go, brother. Now. You are quicker than I am, and stronger, though when this is done may we dispense with such honest talk and return to pretending otherwise?’

Another distant burst of fire rang down the shaft, broken up into concussive chatter by the slow turning of turbofan blades.

‘That we may, brother.’ Haldain knelt perfunctorily, bowed his head, and refitted his helm. The lenses flickered crimson as helmet systems powered up, his voice plummeting in pitch as it emerged from the augmitter grilles. ‘I will run as though the lions of lost Caliban give chase, brother.’

A short passageway led Nerod and Listor from the maintenance hangar. Its bulkheads and decking had been stripped of useable metal and plasteks over what must have been generations. All that remained of the floor was the pipework, which had endured purely by virtue of being a single-cast piece, ultra hard and sporadically electrified, and wholly integrated to the bones of the deck. It was doubtful whether it had ever been intended as such, but the cattle grid of corroded pipes proved an effective impediment to a Space Marine assault. Apothecary Listor was soon falling off the advance, forced to attend to his footing or risk a stumble. The wider footprint of the Tartaros, however, allowed Nerod to proceed with only a cursory frisson of care.

He emerged to the slow whup, whup, whup of a struggling fan the size of a Devourer drop-ship, lights strobing with an equal slowness, as though he suffered simultaneously from the effects of a photon flash grenade and a stasis bomb. A walled settlement had been built across the protective housing and rim of the outlet fan of an atmosphere recycler. Buildings made of scrap metals hewn from the Chevalier’s hallowed walls encrusted the thick plasteel spokes of the fan guard and the ferrocrete ring of the housing.

The turbofan, even marginally active, would have provided atmosphere and warmth, and even a little kinetic lighting, while the handful of bridges to the fan’s core provided a natural defensibility that the crew’s abhuman descendants had upgraded with bastions and gun turrets.

Nerod could respect their ingenuity and their stubbornness in the face of a slow and inevitable death, but he could not think of them as human. They were the vermin that had desecrated a relic of the Dark Angels of old in their selfish desire to exist. The questing knight could almost feel the potential trove that had been stolen from his grasp.

Sacrilege allowed no mercy.

The opening challenges called down from the nearest bastion went unheeded. The Consecrators did not acknowledge their foes and they did not speak to their friends, lest they ever again fail to recognise one from the other.

The defenders opened fire.

Slug-rounds ricocheted off his heavy armour. A far greater proportion of the abhuman defenders were armed with maintained autoguns and stubbers than had been evident from the patrol. The combined fire of several dozen descended on him like a meteor shower, but ranged against even a single Adeptus Astartes warrior in Terminator plate the defenders might as well have been children throwing stones.

He hosed their positions with the Angivain.

He remembered the first time he had unearthed the rare Diamat-pattern combi-bolter on the molten planetoid Corinth-12-Gamma.

To be so close to its hard-lined symmetry, its hunting-mastiff finish, even in the cool sanctity of the Chapter consecralium, was to feel the yearning of a machine-spirit to be held, loaded, and used in wrath. But to hold it… to hold it was to feel something of a purer time and a clearer purpose, the simplicity of vengeance. The weapon’s first owner had been a legionary of the old First named Angivain. Angivain, it was recorded, had fought and died in the years immediately following the destruction of Caliban, in one of the many bloody battles fought between the loyal sons of the Dark Angels and renegade Astartes factions on the fortress world of Hegemenon.

Though the weapon now rested in Nerod’s custody, he did not consider it his own. It was the property of the Consecrators and, through their stewardship, all their brothers of the Unforgiven.

And none need ever learn of Angivain’s fall from the Emperor’s light, for Nerod was his redemption.

A squad of abhuman fighters ran hunched along the ramparts towards the outer bastion, dodging from crenel to crenel. Nerod mouthed in silence from the Catechisms of Hate as the Angivain chewed their cover to stub teeth and mowed the fighters down. A standard bolt-round could punch through ceramite and armaplas. The scavengers’ barricade was plain interior steel. Nerod could have torn it up the middle with his bare unpowered fists, and in his wrath he was almost tempted to remove his helmet and gauntlets and demonstrate. Let them recognise the magnitude of their folly! But a demonstration was an indulgence, one that would need to wait on due vengeance, and the final reckoning on whether there was anything of his long quest yet to be saved. The Chevalier was a large ship. Some of the Chapter’s most treasured icons had been pulled from chunks of Calibanite rock orbiting rogue comets, or exhumed from the yard-thick glass of worlds obliterated from orbit.

Hope was the last recourse of the dissolute.

But more had been salvaged from less.

Listor was out of the corridor and rapidly making up the ground, crossing Nerod’s path on a tangent in order to draw fire and answering it with semi-automatic bursts from his bolt pistol. This he did without instruction, and in silence.

Battle had been joined. The universe became simple. For these precious moments there was nothing that needed to be debated, hidden or explained.

Abhuman defenders cried out, sensing the ponderous Terminator-armoured footsteps of their doom approaching, and began to pull back from their positions on the outer wall.

With deck-shaking strides, he arrived at the abhumans’ palisade. Its height varied across its length, in tune with its ramshackle construction, but was nowhere less than two feet higher than the biggest of the defenders. Nerod could have easily struck at the fighters still cowering behind the ramparts had he wished to.

He did not.

A single blow from Inclemitus, the sword wreathed in the powered blue glow of a molecular disruption field, struck through the scrap barricade. A hammer blow from his elbow widened the gap further, and then he threw his armoured bulk at the breach with a shriek of iron teeth on ceramite skin and the righteous howl of servo-motors.

Terrified mortals poured fire into him while he was wedged. An auto-round put a crack in his right lens. Another nicked one of the cable bundles feeding power to his right side. Grapeshot from an antiquated shotcannon blasted through the joints in his plate, lead grinding from him like milled pepper as he tore his left arm free and raised the Angivain.

A burst of fire and they were all dead, blood splattered on the backing wall.

Metal squealed and bent as Nerod forced his massively armoured frame through the settlement wall. The surviving abhumans screamed as they fled deeper into their heathen enclave.

With the blink-selection of a rune-icon he dialled out the screams.

They sounded almost human.

He ejected the Angivain’s spent magazine and inserted another.

Haldain powered up the service staircase, taking the light aluminium steps six at a time. The frame rattled where it was bolted to the wall; there had been moments where the entire stanchion had threatened to come away and pitch him into the abyss, and he gave frequent thanks to the oversight of the Lion and the Emperor that it yet held. There was no way any of the walkways beneath him would take the weight, and the added kinetic impact of a falling Primaris Marine, involved in breaking his fall should they fail. The peril only goaded him to run harder. The endorphins pumped into his bloodstream inured him to any concept of personal danger.

Indeed, the chemical rush had him grinning as he thundered on. What irony would it be if it was he, the knight who had journeyed half the length of the Imperium Nihilus to save the Chevalier, who precipitated the destruction of her atmosphere system?

Faster than any of his brothers could have achieved the same ascent, Haldain made the final stair.

The last and largest of the turbofans turned sluggishly overhead, drizzling the interior of the shaft with dirty orange flecks. The harsh explosive clatter of a bolt weapon and the occasional light-flash rang from the gigantic housing.

And screams now.

Human screams.

He opened a vox-channel and tried Nerod again. Still no response. Either they were still too far away and the transmission of sound through the chute was deceptive, or the heavy construction of the turbofan block was obstructing the signal.

Or the Chevalier really was haunted.

He thought again of the memory of the word.

Daemon.

His bolt rifle came up, and he looked quickly about for a route to the top. A faint signal blinked across his auspex. He swung around, gauntlet finger light on the rifle’s trigger, aiming steadily into the achingly slow ferrous drizzle. His two hearts beat a fast but regular rhythm. Unstressed. Unafraid. He swung back and repeated. He almost found himself aping Kassal’s habit, and giving the misfiring auspex display in his helmet lens a brisk tap. He resisted. The auspex unit on the Tacticus Mk X was another of Magos Cawl’s upgrades to the arcane instrumentarium aboard the older power armour marks. It did not suffer jitters aboard a haunted ship.

And the blip had already passed.

He lowered his bolt rifle.

The monster slammed into him from behind.

He never saw it, his auspex continuing to blink at him with nonsense possibilities even as he was lifted off the deck and slammed into the bulkhead. His faceplate took the brunt of the impact. He cried out as both lenses exploded back into his helmet. Another heavy blow landed on his lower spine. He felt armour buckling, the bulkhead he was pressed up against deforming under the pressure like putty accepting a thumbprint. Any one of his brothers might have been crippled by such a blow, but he was a warrior of the new breed. His bones were thicker, his muscles heavier. He recovered quicker.

Haldain drew his sidearm from its mag-lock, passed it around himself between the girdle plate and the wall his assailant had pushed him up against, and fired.

A warbling shriek was his efforts’ reward, and the monster relinquished its grip on the back of his helmet. His auspex flickered like a bored scribe skimming through a transponder library, but through the jagged holes left by his shattered lenses, he saw… He was not even sure what he saw. It was loosely humanoid, but hulking, broad and heavy, encased like an immense crustacean in plaques of non-reflective carapace and shrouded in frayed robes. It had no face. What looked like live maggots dribbled from the opening in its hood.

Daemon.

With a roar of hatred, Haldain raised his sidearm.

The chamber clicked empty.

The errantry squad gathered again over the turbofan’s bronze hub, at the centre of the abhuman settlement. Picket iron fencing and barbed wire encircled it. Presumably as a safety precaution. Body parts dangled from the wire where they had been thrown, dripping blood over the rest of the barrier. The cannibals had made their last stand here.

This was the judgement that the Emperor’s warrior angels had wrought upon them.

Regil, Moriel and Kassal knelt in meditation.

Before them, mounted on an abhuman’s spear, was a rough triangle of burnt cloth that Listor had rescued from a lean-to, where some simpleton creature had been using it as a curtain. The faded charges and ordinaries of the old Legion were just visible over the green field. It was a corner fragment of an ancient banner, but the Consecrators gazed on it as though struck dumb, tears glinting in their unhelmeted eyes. If it could be restored, reconstituted into a company banner or a standard of errantry that the sons of the Lion might fight under once again, then this would be a satisfactory end to a long quest.

There had been nothing else here.

Nerod reached up to his gorget rim and released his helmet seals. There was a hiss of equilibration, the scents of blood and fyceline and a stinging cold displacing the charcoal taste of filtered oxygen inside his helm. He lifted it over his shoulders like an old man struggling with a younger knight’s burden.

He did not know exactly how old he was. Relativistic time and the vagaries of frequent warp travel had rendered the tally he had used to keep of his years meaningless. But he was old. The face that was wedged between the mountainous pauldron plates of the Tartaros suit was worn, but it was a hard kind of wear, like the grip of a weapon that had been handled every day by the same old soldier for four hundred years. Four hundred years felt about right. The Consecrators cherished age and experience, and rewarded long service over any other honour, but Nerod felt as though he should rightfully have perished decades ago. There had been many occasions over the last fifty years when he might have allowed himself to see his duty’s end had it not been for the burden set upon him by Grand Master Nakir: to find the resting place of the Chevalier and return her relics to the Chapter consecralium.

Now, with the discovery and exploration of the lost ship, even that burden was lifted.

‘I declare this quest exitus malus,’ he said. There was a melancholy on him now that the battle was over and his choler spent. There could be no celebration in triumph. The long struggle ended only in defeat, he knew, but it was the victories claimed along that bloody way that would allow the Unforgiven to face their end with dignity. ‘We will retrieve Brother Haldain’s equipment and gene-seed and signal the Stormraven to retrieve us at our original ingress point.’

‘I do not understand what could have befallen him,’ Kassal muttered, tearing his gaze from the listlessly flapping banner. ‘Not all of these degenerates together could have overcome a Primaris Space Marine of the Lion’s stock. But if he simply stumbled and fell, if the ascent proved too much for his weight…’ He shook his head. ‘I should have been the one to make the climb.’

‘The failing is not yours, brother,’ said Nerod.

‘You will have the answers to your questions when we locate his body,’ said Listor. ‘Most likely it lies at the bottom of the atmosphere chute, and we will be able to deduce for ourselves what transpired.’

Moriel glanced up, leaving only Regil staring rapt at the tattered relic flying from its simple pole, his eyes glazed and unblinking, repeating a mantra over and over under his breath.

‘We should recover his gene-seed and then leave the rest of his equipment for the Chevalier. He was the first warrior to wield it in anger. We know nothing of its age or its provenance.’

‘I know,’ Kassal growled. ‘It will be a relic to someone one day, a knight who will wield it and recall Brother Haldain with honour.’

‘I mean no disrespect,’ said Moriel.

‘And yet disrespect is what you give.’

Nerod raised a weary hand.

‘Why do we do what we do? Why do we forsake the sanctity of our monastery and the company of our brothers, and the wars of the Imperium that we are each of us sworn to uphold unto death?’ He looked at the tired banner, thousands of years old, a remnant of glory. ‘Why do we persist?’

‘To remind ourselves of an hour when the end was not so near,’ said Moriel. ‘To restore ourselves to honour and aid ourselves to victory.’

Nerod smiled tiredly. ‘When you can answer that question correctly, brother, you will be ready to have your worthiness to join the inner chamber judged.’

The knights fell into a contemplative silence.

Nerod examined the banner, the Chapter’s reward for two thousand years of searching and countless lives. His attention was drawn by the curling script woven around the heraldic beasts, men with the heads of lions and feathered wyrms.

‘Can you read it?’ asked Listor.

‘Partially. It is in the script of old Caliban, but…’ He extended a finger, not yet daring to go so far as actually touch the relic, leaving the digit hovering half an inch from the threaded script. ‘It is a roll of battle. We are fortunate indeed that it is the lower right quarter that has been preserved. Here is a record of the last battle of the Chevalier. I cannot interpret every rune, and the tear is unfortunately placed, obscuring much about the nature of the foe, including their name. It speaks of an alien species that threatened the hegemony of man in this segmentum. A battle was fought – no, a war, a great war, in which this ship was joined by a great fleet from the Legion of old.’

Nerod closed his eyes, imagining the glorious endeavour that such a battlegroup must have entailed, and how terrible the foe to warrant such deadly force.

What could an Azrael or a Nakir achieve, he wondered, with a hundred thousand Dark Angels at his call? They would drive the hive fleets back across the Eastern Fringe into the void from which they came, put the arisen necrons to permanent rest in their tomb worlds and force the Despoiler back into the Eye of Terror.

‘It speaks of… of shape-shifters. I believe that to be the word, but I am unsure. What follows is a roll of the fallen in the engagements leading to the Chevalier’s last action. There were many of them, brothers, a Chapter’s strength, borne to the ship’s apothecarion to have their gene-seed preserved in state.’

He sighed.

Now there would have been a worthy prize.

The knights bowed their heads, observing the expected silence in reflection, but Kassal looked up sharply.

‘Did you say apothecarion?’

‘What is it, brother?’

Kassal shook his head. ‘It is impossible. The front half of the ship was completely destroyed. We saw it from space.’

‘What is impossible?’ said Nerod.

‘The apothecarion. It did not occur to me before because it cannot be. But that must be where the ship’s power is going.’

‘Are you certain of this, brother?’

Kassal was not sure which of his brothers spoke.

Nothing existed but the view.

They were yards from where the Chevalier had been ripped open and there, beyond the wavery blue envelope of a molecular cohesion field, was the void.

Fragments of the Chevalier floated free, serenely still, glinting with faint frost, like consecralia pieces under sympathetic light. The corridor continued on, becoming ever more fraught and skeletal as it extended outwards. The inconceivable forces involved in wrenching in half an Imperial battleship and crushing its forward sections must have partially melted it. Otherwise the torque required to twist and plait it so completely around on its spine would have torn it loose and added its mass to the debris field. The flickering and jostling of coherence fields held the Chevalier’s atmosphere in abeyance but chunks of debris, dislodged from their stately orbits by the miniscule gravity well of the Stormraven, passed through the huge rents in the bulkheads, bumping and clanging off the plasteel frame. A Space Marine would be similarly unimpeded should he fall.

It was as though they had come to the interstice between two realities.

One was home to human beings and their earthly kind. The other was the domain of gods.

Even as a boy, on a world ruled by superstition, Kassal had never felt so abundantly mortal.

‘As certain as I can be of anything,’ he murmured. ‘The Chevalier’s apothecarion lies, or lay, at the far end of this corridor. We did not include this section in our explorations because the exterior survey revealed nothing, but according to my readings something is continuing to draw power from her furnaces. There must be a handful of shielded chambers at the other end of this corridor, hidden within the debris field.’

‘I cannot guarantee the stability of the atmosphere,’ said Listor. ‘Localised coherence failures make flash decompressions likely.’

‘Nor can I vouch for the superstructure,’ said Kassal. ‘But the gene-seed of a thousand warriors, plus the instrumentation of the apothecarion itself, makes it a prize worth risking our lives for.’

‘We are agreed at least that the abhumans are extraordinarily unlikely to have made this crossing themselves?’ said Listor.

Regil snorted.

Moriel glanced at him and nodded.

‘We are wholeheartedly agreed,’ said Kassal.

Listor eyed the twisted corridor a moment longer. ‘We should cross one at a time. There is no need for one warrior’s misstep or misfortune to doom the entire quest.’

Kassal nodded. ‘I will go first.’

‘I will go first.’ Heavy with ceremony, Nerod drew Inclemitus and held it out for Listor. Then, to Kassal, he charged the Angivain. ‘If I should falter at the last then see these relics returned to the Chapter. Leave my body to the void.’

Nerod voxed back. He was across. None of the knights showed the relief they felt.

Listor declared that he would be the next to cross. One by one, the others argued that it was the duty of an Apothecary to remain behind, but on this occasion, for this prize, he would have none of it. Nerod had proven that the way was traversable, if not safe. ‘Some things,’ he said, faintly amused by their care, ‘are better done quickly, and with the minimum of forethought.’

Long minutes later he voxed back.

He was across.

Kassal grunted and, before anyone could pre-empt or debate him, stepped through the coherence field. The field lapped around his shoulders like a viscous oil and snapped shut.

They waited.

He voxed back.

Regil and Moriel shared a look.

‘Go on,’ said Moriel. ‘I can bear to wait a little longer.’

Regil set his gauntlet on his brother’s pauldron and squeezed, hard enough for the plate’s baroreceptors to register the pressure. Ponderously, he turned about, ducking his head as though bracing it for high winds, and stepped through the field.

Moriel watched him go, picking his way along the narrow bridge of ductwork, rotating by degrees as the corridor’s gravitic orientation moved away from Moriel and the Chevalier’s reference, until he was gone. He waited. The breath grew stale in his lungs, his multi-lung a taut ache in his chest as it turned to reprocessing the carbon dioxide in his blood.

Regil voxed back.

He was across.

Moriel let go of the breath he had been holding. The waiting was the hardest.

He had taken his first step towards the field when a signal trace blipped across his auspex. Something large, and approaching from the goods corridor behind them. He turned, raising his bolter, but the posture was nothing more than a habit bred of his conditioning. Underneath his faceplate he was smiling. He recognised the trace. The one oddity that he noted was that it had not registered on his auspex until it was twenty yards away. But then this was an old ship, haunted and full of ghosts.

He lowered his bolter and opened a channel to his brothers.

The heavy steps halted at the other side of the door hatch.

The auspex trace stuttered. He ignored it.

Ghosts.

‘Brothers, I have found Haldain.’

Kassal turned back. The view from this vantage was, if it were possible, even more stupefying than it had been from aft. The shorn-off stub of the antechamber they had exited from was no longer visible. It was too tiny by comparison to the mountainous hulk of the Chevalier, hidden behind the corkscrew of the corridor they had just traversed. The ship itself was three hundred and sixty degrees of visual overload, an adamantium glacier, alone in a still universe. Even the stars were hidden, scrubbed out by the criss-crossing, overlapping ambience of the coherence fields. Kassal had never felt so alone in the company of his brothers.

‘Say again, Moriel.’

Static hissed back at him.

‘Moriel, repeat.’

‘Attend me now, brothers,’ said Nerod.

The questing knight towered over Apothecary Listor, the next nearest figure to him before the weary grey steel of a circular door hatch. Regil stood off to one side, out of the way, his stance that of a knight at ease but his air one of hair-trigger readiness. Like Kassal, his attention was back rather than forwards. The knights of the Consecrators had little companionship beyond their immediate circles; few at all had any outside of the Chapter. Bonds of brotherhood, where they did exist, were tighter than the alloyed elements of plasteel.

‘The door has been gene-locked,’ Nerod said.

‘Then we will cut through,’ said Kassal, bringing his multi-melta to bear.

‘Attend,’ the questor said again, this time with a whisper of reverence, and placed his gauntlet flat to a palm reader that had been partially concealed from view amidst the side panelling of the frame. There was a burr of actuating systems. Lethargic scanners awakened in a choristry of flashing lights and electronic chimes to sample the knight’s gene-keys, instigating next the clanks, hisses and whirs of vacuum seals releasing, magnetic locks reversing, and physical bolts being withdrawn.

Nerod drew his hand back, pleased.

‘It would seem that we are nearer to our lost brothers than some would have us fear.’

The door shuddered as it rolled aside into the bulkhead.

Nerod’s armour filtered all but the tiniest of odour-carrying particles from the outside air before admitting it into the closed system of his suit. But he could imagine the pickled smell, of chemical preservative and slow, graduated decay.

Medicae servitors listed in their charging cradles. Their organics were wasted, mummified by the dry, sterile air, clinging to their pristine bionic components like the thin hands of old men to treasured mementos. On wall displays and still-active consoles, gem-lights blinked in non-repeating, seemingly random patterns. Liquid nitrogen hissed periodically from containment pods. The soundless, odourless, non-visible hum of stasis fields squeezed on his thoughts like a tumour of the brainstem.

Listor looked around, speechless, as though a Watcher in the Dark had appeared before him and spoken. Even Kassal, ordinarily so stalwart in his duties, gave the room the most cursory of sweeps.

Nerod turned to Regil, who remained by the open hatch.

‘Wait outside. Stand watch for the others.’

The knight dipped his grille and backed out into the corridor.

Listor, meanwhile, had crossed to a bank of mortuary drawers. The Apothecary explored the gilt engravings on the drawer fronts with his armoured hands. He grunted as his explorations uncovered a hidden slot, and slid his finger inside. A spring mechanism caused the drawer to pop out on its runners with such well-oiled suddenness that the Apothecary almost jumped. Kassal chuckled. Nerod was grateful for him then, even if Listor, for that moment at least, was not.

They were all too tense.

The three knights crowded around the open drawer. Coolant sublimated off into a rising cloud that misted their lenses and made the world look pale. The Apothecary looked inside.

‘Is it…?’ Nerod asked.

‘Yes,’ Listor replied.

‘Has it survived without degradation?’

‘I will not be able to determine that for certain until it can be returned to the Chapter laboratoria. But the augurs are good. The power being drawn to this room is substantial. The air tastes clean and stasis protocols appear to have been maintained. Whoever set these instruments of their long sleep deserves to be commended in the Tomb of Heroes. Their mechanical ancillaries have stood their vigil well.’

‘Then let us reward their labours and remove what we can,’ said Kassal.

‘I see a problem,’ said Listor. ‘There are over a thousand active containers here. There is no way my reductor can store so many for transport.’

‘Then we can summon the Stormraven to extract us directly,’ said Nerod.

Kassal shook his head, slow with reluctance. ‘We are tethered to the Chevalier and her furnaces by the smallest sliver of metal. Stress it any further than we have already and it will break. We could lose everything.’

Nerod was silent as he thought. ‘Then we will send Regil and the others back to the insertion point and hold here while they return with the storage equipment you need. Think of this delay as a boon, brothers. It will give us many days to study the apothecarion master’s archives, and to properly catalogue the treasures he has left us.’ The questor smiled as he read the mood from his brother knights’ dour silence. ‘We may even find ourselves with a moment or two for rest.’ He twisted about the immense rotator rings of his waist flexer and called back. ‘Brother Regil.’

There was no response from the corridor.

His tired brow furrowed.

That was odd.

A delicate tinkling intruded on his thinking and he looked down to see a pair of black-painted frag grenades rolling in through the open hatch.

Nerod had a split second to react. Between protecting himself and his brothers or protecting the last bequest of the Chevalier he chose the latter without question.

He stepped on the first grenade. It exploded under his giant boot with a plaintive burst of scrag metal. The second went off directly between his legs.

The enormous suit was weighty enough to stride unmolested through blasts a hundred times more severe than a knight’s frag grenade, but he had been hurried, and in hurrying had allowed himself to be caught off balance. The blast turned him forty-five degrees around and slammed him hard into the bulkhead.

Bolter rounds flashed through the ensuing shower of sparks and caught Listor in the gut. The Apothecary went down with a cry of shock.

Regil strode inside, spraying the room indiscriminately with fire.

Kassal dived for cover behind a cogitator bank.

‘What madness is this, brother?’ Nerod yelled as he tore his way out of the bulkhead.

The rogue knight smoothly shifted targets and bracketed Nerod with fire.

Bolt-rounds exploded across the Tartaros’ thick front panels, staggering Nerod with weight of fire even without fatally penetrating the exquisitely crafted armour. Helm diagnostics splashed up damage reports. Even at a glance, Nerod could see the impacts and spread were inconsistent with mass-reactive damage. And a Mk IIIa Godwyn should have emptied its magazine by now.

Unseen, Kassal rose from cover.

The Consecrators did not shout or lay curses upon their foes. They did not cry oaths before doing battle. Regil did not see the veteran until the last moment as he came up, his multi-melta on his shoulder, his fingers on the trigger plate.

Regil hit the deck as the microwave blast from the portable cannon atomised the ceiling.

A flash decompression lifted the four knights, Regil included, from their feet, dragging them towards the ceiling for about a second before the coherence fields were able to compensate and restore atmospheric containment. The Space Marines crashed back down like stones. Kassal obliterated the cogitator stand he had been sheltering behind. Nerod crumpled upon the deck. The cryogenic vial that had been lying in the opened mortuary drawer shattered an inch from his hand. Desperately, he pawed through the obscuring layer of nitrogen mist for the broken pieces.

A terrible, numbing cold swept through him.

‘Guns down!’ he roared. His colossal harness shuddered as he sat up and then stood. Like a battle tank drawing upright. ‘We settle this as knights!’ Listor still had Inclemitus and there was no time to find the Apothecary to retrieve it. He drew his combat knife. The two-thousand-year-old blade was the most modern piece of kit he bore, one of a unique consignment of sequentially stamped pieces fabricated on Mars itself in honour of the Chapter’s founding. There were fewer than two hundred still in existence. Fifty in active service. The millennia had been harsh. It looked like a pin in his gargantuan ceramite glove, but it was a sharp and storied edge. His own size and power would be adequate for the rest.

Regil, too, got up. Blood trickled from between his fingers and painted the floor. A Space Marine heart beat against the cage of each hand. Kassal lay still at his feet, his backplate broken open in two places.

Nerod shook his head.

This was wrong. All wrong.

Auspex screed ran down his display like overspill from a busted drain. Threat locks tussled over the spectrally enhanced tri-D outline of Brother Regil.

But it was wrong.

A Space Marine was not that strong.

With a snarl of frustration, Nerod pulled off his helmet. The transformation that came over his renegade brother was instantaneous, and dramatic.

Gone was the Space Marine in black Mk V power armour, red studs across the left pauldron and a stripe down the helmet. In his place was a maggoty horror, ten feet tall and over a ton of squirming flesh encased in scarab carapace. Some kind of sweating bio-plasma weapon panted in its right ‘hand’. Nerod looked again at his auspex. It was still reading the thing before him as Regil, but it was no longer feeding the same lie directly to his eyes. Here, clearly, was one of the alien shape-shifters that the battle rolls had spoken of, that the old Legion had devoted so much blood and hardware to exterminating from the Eastern Fringe. It was not a shape-shifter so much as a technological chameleon. Either through a kink of its evolution or by genetic design, it could pass under Imperial auspex as whatever it wished its prey to see. Nerod could see only too clearly how Haldain, Moriel and the real Regil must have fallen, and how even the old Legion, with the Lion himself to lead them, had been so hard-pressed that the Chevalier had been as good as forgotten.

Somehow, one had survived.

Either their lives were naturally long or they did not age at all.

Nerod would have pitied his brothers, had his hearts the room for anything but hatred for the alien.

The xenos issued a gristly sound from its mouthparts, the sound made by a windpipe as it was crushed under a pneumatic grip. It might have been some kind of an ultimatum. It might have been a challenge.

Nerod did not care.

He gave it nothing in return.

He ran at the alien, his suit building momentum as it crossed the apothecarion. The monster raised its gun, aiming for Nerod’s unarmoured face. He raised his forearm as a shield and the sticky bio-plasma splashed across his rerebrace. There was no time for another shot.

He rammed the alien with his own body and slammed them both into the wall. He clamped a gauntlet around its throat. It bellowed, its face in his, all dribbling mucus and obscene wriggling parts, then lifted him, Terminator armour and all, two feet off the deck and threw him into the hatch frame. The metal buckled under him. He staggered forwards, blood in his mouth, gyros fighting for balance and making his head spin with their efforts. The alien strode towards him.

Snarling, Nerod swung his knife in a drunken lunge. The relic scored a shallow gash across the alien’s chest. Brown ooze and a swampy stench rose up from the torn robes. Nerod reversed his grip and struck again. This time the xenos drew back, wary of the cutting edge, and with a flurry of quick blows Nerod drove it fully back into the apothecarion.

With a roar threatening to bubble over from somewhere inside, he aimed a thrust into the alien’s maggoty face, hoping to strike something crucial. It jerked aside and the knife plunged into its shoulder. The creature delivered a piercing scream. Nerod ignored it, drawing neither pity nor pleasure from its pain, and wound back his arm to follow through with a punch to the gut. There, his arm drawn back, the alien pinned under the weight of his armour and under the point of his knife like an inspirational fresco, he noticed the mortuary cabinet that was directly behind the monster.

And just for that moment, he hesitated.

The alien rammed its shoulder into his gorget guard, breaking his lock and tipping him onto his heels. Nerod twisted the knife, muddy ichor pouring down his arm in floods, but the monster merely bellowed and strove all the harder, driving him fully over and spilling them both back to the deck. The nitrogen cloud swept out from under them as though appalled by the touch of the alien and Nerod slammed hard onto his back. The alien landed on top of him, straddling his plastron and immediately pawing for his throat behind his high gorget.

After millennia of patience, waiting for a son of the Lion to return and break the gene-lock on this one, final door, it would finally complete its mission.

It would finally be able to kill them all.

Beating aside Nerod’s fists, it got its hands around the questor’s neck.

It pulled and twisted.

Nerod’s entire body felt the snap.

Then his body felt nothing at all.

The alien gristled and chirped in triumph as its foe went limp. Nerod stole himself for the lethal blow, welcoming it almost, regretting only that his companions would share in the doom of the Chevalier, when an explosion of bolter fire ripped through the alien’s chest. The xenos jerked as though pummelled with high explosives, bits of exo-shell and maggoty pulp spraying over Nerod’s body before it collapsed to the deck with a sound like an arthropod being torn in half. Nerod tried to pull his body towards it, to deliver one final blow should it be necessary, but he could not. The nervous bypass of his black carapace could only compensate for so much damage. His eyes rolled up.

Brother Haldain looked down at him.

He looked as though he had fought with a Demolisher. His plastron was entirely crushed on the right side and he was holding his bolt rifle one-handed in his left. Dark, forest-green eyes lurked behind a mangled helm, peering out through busted lenses.

‘You… are… alive,’ Nerod managed to whisper.

‘That makes two of us.’ The Primaris’ eyes appeared to smile. ‘The xenos beat me and left me for dead. I believe it, too, underestimated the durability of Cawl’s new breed.’

‘The Lion… I believe… would have… approved.’

Haldain bowed his head, clearly moved and not wishing to show it.

‘The alien is dead?’ Nerod asked.

‘I believe it was a slaugth,’ Haldain answered. ‘And yes.’

‘Slaugth…’

Nerod had not heard of the species before, but he was not surprised. There was a galaxy of secrets, interrupted only by the lies.

The Primaris Marine looked up from his stricken commander to survey the apothecarion. ‘Listor is dead. And Kassal. And Regil. And Moriel too. I cannot complete this quest alone.’

‘Look at me, brother.’

The Primaris warrior turned towards him, sorrow in his hooded eyes.

‘Why do we do as we do?’ Nerod asked, posing the same question to Haldain that he had to Moriel and Kassal. ‘Why do we risk all that we are, all that we yet have, to restore these relics of the benighted past that brought us here?’

The Primaris Marine thought long and hard before answering.

‘So no one else may find them first.’

Nerod smiled and allowed his head to rest against the high-backed gorget rim. ‘Then you can complete this quest. Exitus malus, brother.’

‘Exitus malus,’ Haldain returned.

The Primaris Marine moved quickly around the room, gathering up Inclemitus and the Angivain and a handful of other relics before returning to Nerod. There, he bent and retrieved the scrap of old Legion banner that the questor had bound around his ventail as a stole.

Nerod did not speak, closing his eyes for a long-awaited moment of rest as Haldain left the room.

From the corridor he could hear the Primaris warrior calling in the Stormraven. Already, he could feel the Chevalier’s apothecarion shaking itself apart under the gunship’s engine. Within moments, he would be exposed to the void.

He smiled grimly.

His quest was accomplished.

IRON WATCH

CALLUM DAVIS

These sons of Ferrus Manus are willing to suffer to uphold their oaths. The Iron Lords are the guardians of the Grendl Stars, gaolers of their perfidious xenos inhabitants. Under their stern watch, they have prevented the barghesi’s escape, and averted potential disaster by holding Hive Fleet Kraken at bay, even when the formation of the Great Rift left them cut off and without aid.

In the cold depths of the endless void, the ship was a predator. A hunter that prowled between the stars. In the warp though, it was prey. It was wounded. Its black-and-crimson carapace was rent, scarred and torn in hundreds of places where its enemies had sought its destruction. Here, in the empyrean, its apparent weakness was plain for the denizens of this unnatural place to see. And they attacked. Monstrosities bounded over the hunter’s shell – screeching, hooting and giggling as they sought a fracture in the shimmering field that enveloped the vessel. They were untiring, ceaseless, and had been since the predator had first torn its way into their domain some days before.

Scratching. Always scratching. A thousand thousand voices, claws and maws. Crawling, screeching, scratching. Screams of pain as some attempt to breach the Geller fields. Screams of rage as frustrated nightmares slash and snarl at each other for the right to claim the best pickings.

Aelerond of the Iron Lords Space Marine Chapter was brought back to the present from his visions as he strode purposefully along the plain, iron-wrought corridors of the Iron Watch, heading for the Gladius-class frigate’s hold. He smiled thinly, imagining the frustrations of the warp spawn as they tried and failed to pierce the ship’s Geller field. He felt them sometimes, trying to undermine the vessel’s protection by prying into his mind, their aim to pierce reality through him. Their attempts were unsuccessful. As an Epistolary, he was well versed in the art of shielding his mind from their predations. Combined with the power of his psychic hood, he was rarely vulnerable to their efforts. Though that never stopped them from trying.

Aelerond continued walking, pondering the state of his armour. His Mk III plate was worn in many places from its proud cerulean to the bare ceramite beneath. The ship is no different, he thought.

Aelerond was near his destination. He felt the warp spawn’s ugly laughter as they continued to harass the ship. They sensed weakness, vulnerability, people who had seen horror. For many weeks, the Iron Watch had been fighting the barghesi, tasked with repelling yet another breakout attempt from the savage xenos abominations. Whilst it was an arduous task, the Iron Lords had embarked on missions of this nature for three millennia. What had been different this time was the sudden, and unexpected, demand to take specimens alive, for biologis study. Such a thing had not been done in centuries, and only ever at great cost.

The order, coming from the highest level of the Chapter’s hierarchy, had complicated matters, to say the least. Without Aelerond’s psychic powers, it would have been all but impossible for his strike force of Iron Lords to carry out the order with the resources available. We are hunters, gaolers, not gamekeepers, Aelerond thought. Why now, why the urgency?

I know already, he supposed. Kraken. The incursion of the tyranid hive fleet in recent years had changed everything. The risk of barghesi DNA being consumed by the tyranids was not one that could be allowed to materialise. Aelerond almost shuddered at the thought of what horrifying creatures the tyranids might create with such genetic material. The arrival of Kraken had increased the need to wipe out the barghesi considerably, yet resources to carry out such an action were not remotely available. The desperate need for solutions had brought about this mission and the hope, however small, that one might be found.

Aelerond’s warriors had done their duty, but it had been a uniquely gruelling action, and one that had led to the deaths of nearly half of the brothers in the hastily assembled strike force. Barely twenty remained. The cost saddened Aelerond deeply. ‘But duty comes first,’ he affirmed to himself.

It can aaaalll be ended nooow…

Aelerond ignored the cries of the warp spawn. He had heard their empty promises before and would do so many times again before his time was done.

…with nought but acceptanccccce, the power to end the alien can be yoouurrssss…

He had seen too many good men fall to the Archenemy’s seductions. He recognised their poison… And yet… ‘Were but it true,’ he snarled, silencing the lies with his own voice, though not entirely without regret. ‘No…’ he whispered. Then again, more forcefully, ‘No.’ To embrace such power would make him into something worse than any xenos abomination. There could be no easy path to victory. ‘Ours is a long war. So it always was and so it always shall be.’

He arrived. The hold was freezing, its smell intensely sterile. A number of Rhinos and Razorbacks lined the walls, though there was capacity for twice as many again at least. Their armour was dented, scratched and burned. Nothing had escaped the frenzied wrath of the barghesi undamaged. Chapter-serfs and servitors toiled around the vehicles, carefully working to repair them and soothe their wounded machine-spirits. Brother Audoin, the Techmarine, had been slain in the fighting. Without him the work would be much more difficult, and take much longer.

Aelerond strode past the serfs as he entered, barely acknowledging their presence as they abruptly halted their work, bowed their heads and formed the sign of the aquila. Their hands shook, blue with cold, and their eyes were heavily ringed.

The space now also served as the housing for the ship’s stasis field caskets. Usually, these were held in the apothecarion, reserved only for the most critically wounded warriors, heroes bound for a Dreadnought’s sarcophagus. Now, though, they housed something more sinister. The time-frozen contents were covered with rough, bloodstained cloth. The material was insufficient to entirely obscure the caskets’ contents. Aelerond saw clawed feet ominously poking out from beneath the makeshift shrouds.

Emphidio, the strike force’s Apothecary, stood facing the caskets, whispering cants of preservation and purity as he performed checks on the stasis fields’ integrity. The white of his armour contrasted with the black worn by the rest of the Chapter, though the Chapter symbol, a clenched iron fist before a white, pointed ring on a field of black, remained consistent.

The Apothecary spoke without greeting. ‘The creatures inflicted minor damage in their attempt to avoid capture. Since we began our return journey, there have been several breakages in stasis, each fractions of a second. Without Audoin it will not be possible to achieve a full repair.’

‘That will have to be acceptable for now, Emphidio,’ Aelerond replied.

He turned the conversation to the caskets’ contents. ‘You keep them veiled? Do you not wish to study and learn of the barghesi? Few of us have had the opportunity to look upon them in such a way without imminent risk of death,’ he said, although he did not need to see them in order to know what they looked like. The image of their spectral forms and diabolic red eyes had been burned into his mind ever since his first encounter with one of their kind. That had been centuries ago, when he was an aspirant and tasked with hunting and slaying a juvenile barghesi as a part of proving his worth to the Chapter.

‘Every second those wretched monsters lie on this ship, my hate and anger grows,’ Emphidio said. ‘I have learned enough tearing my chainsword through their flesh. I need know little else. It is an insult to keep that filth aboard, so near to the remains of those they slew. The damage they inflicted on our dead was so great, I could only recover a third of their progenoids.’

Aelerond had not yet learned that statistic. As tragic as the loss was, it was not unheard of when fighting the barghesi. It has been much worse before at times, he reminded himself.

‘Your zeal does you great credit, brother,’ Aelerond said. ‘Anger is the air we breathe, hate the food we eat. With them we are forever sustained in doing the Emperor’s work. But you would be wise to remember that our duty to the Emperor as Iron Lords always comes ahead of our personal desires. We need the specimens alive, and the stasis fields are the only way to contain them for our return to Sternac. We have moved the caskets here from the apothecarion, away from the gene-seed vaults, out of respect for our brothers’ sacrifice. At your request. In these most difficult of times, we do what we must.’

Emphidio did not reply as he concluded his checks.

‘We can and will beat them, brother,’ Aelerond continued. ‘Myths of old tell us that the xenos of the Grendl Stars were tough of hide, sharp of claw and that none could best them. They were half right. Hardy and tenacious though the barghesi are, the Lords of Iron have found them wanting again and again. Our iron has pierced their hides, our blades have cut their claws. One day the final victory will be ours, brother, the last of the barghesi will be slain, and whilst the price paid will be high, it will be worth every drop of blood, and every ounce of patience.’

‘Hope is the first step on the road to disappointment, brother,’ said Emphidio. ‘We should not expect this situation to ever resolve itself fighting as we do. If our blades are so effective, why does our Master not lead a purging crusade against the barghesi himself, assembling our full strength? The Iron Grip need only be tightened to crush the life out of our foe altogether, once and for all.’

‘More than one Master of the Iron Lords has had the hope of a final victory, tightening the Grip in the hopes of exterminating the barghesi,’ countered Aelerond. ‘All have failed, with disastrous results. I should know.’ Aelerond gestured to his right arm and leg, both of which were entirely bionic. ‘The Grip was nearly broken in the aftermath of that campaign. We cannot risk something like that again.’

Emphidio looked away in frustration. Despite the Apothecary’s lack of resistance, Aelerond pushed further. ‘If the loss of a dozen brothers grieves you so, wait until you cannot recover the gene-seed from scores, hundreds even. Our time for the final triumph will come, and I promise you it will be an Iron Lord that slays the last of the barghesi. But that time is not now. We sacrifice so that others may live and succeed. This is why we must suffer their presence on our ship. The Imperium must know all it can of the barghesi, to know their weaknesses and how to finally break them. For Throne’s sake, we have not yet even learned which of the Fourteen they originate from! And the Rift has made our situation even more precarious. We cannot fulfil our task through rash thinking.’

Aelerond felt his hearts beating faster as his own anger began to flow through him. He felt the excitement of the warp spawn as they sensed weakness and vulnerability. But then he felt something else. Something more sinister and insidious:

A new power approaching from afar, unnoticed and unheeded by the warp spawn. Slowly. Implacably. It is a primordial spectre; a deep, insatiable hunger. Its being is an antithesis to the chaotic squabbling and selfish motivations of the malevolent and spiteful beings that surround the ship. They are powerless against the single-minded, prime force of the shadow. Its hunger dominates and shatters the selfish wills of the lesser beings that threaten its sustenance. They scream in agony, fighting and climbing over each other to escape it–

Emphidio saw Aelerond collapse to his knees, blood pouring from his nose as he clutched his head. As the Apothecary rushed over to help, he felt the ship lurch suddenly. He fell to the ground as the hold’s lumens stuttered out, only to be replaced by the dark red of the emergency lights. The hold looked as if it had been painted the shade of freshly spilt blood. Warning sirens filled the air, reverberating from the cold, iron walls.

Emphidio recovered, making his way over to the Epistolary, who had also managed to regain some semblance of stability following his collapse. ‘Emph… Emphidio,’ the Librarian managed, out of breath, ‘we must… get to the bridge. We are… under attack.’

‘The barghesi?’ Emphidio asked, heaving the Librarian to his feet.

‘No. Something worse.’

Aelerond ran to the bridge, Emphidio with him. He suppressed the pain coursing through his body as he kept pace with the Apothecary. They passed numerous serfs on their journey. Many sported minor wounds as they rushed to check on the serviceability of the ship’s systems.

By the time they reached the bridge, it was in a state of near chaos. Despite the fact that the shrieks of the warning klaxons had been silenced, the shouts of bridge crew trying to reacquire control of their respective stations filled the air, none of them louder than those of Shipmistress Gnuarcha. She stood at the foot of her command throne, her booming voice audible over the cries of her crew as she demanded status reports and issued orders to her officers, tech-priests and servitors.

Aelerond strode to the command throne and stood beside her. ‘Declare all hands to combat stations, shipmistress, and give me a full situation report,’ he ordered. His voice was not raised in the slightest, but she apparently heard every word. Within seconds her voice echoed from the voxmitters across the ship.

‘This is Shipmistress Gnuarcha, with orders from Lord Epistolary Aelerond. All hands to combat stations, alertness level alpha. Repeat, all hands to combat stations.’ Across the vessel, serfs and Iron Lords would now be arming themselves and deploying to the ship’s most vital locations.

‘My lord, the Iron Watch has fallen out of the warp, quite literally,’ said the shipmistress. ‘Power has been lost to virtually all systems, including engines, shields and primary weapons, although many are in recovery. Mercifully, the Geller field held.’

‘How soon until the ship is ready to fight, shipmistress?’ asked Aelerond.

‘Two hours, my lord – at least. I appreciate the circumstances are suspicious and leave us vulnerable, but why do we need to be ready to fight now?’

‘What happened to us is no accident, Gnuarcha. The shadow in the warp fell upon us. The Great Devou–’

‘Augurs running, my lords,’ a crewman declared. ‘Single alien vessel detected. Organic…’ He turned to face them, his face ashen. ‘Tyranid… Hive Fleet Kraken.’ This was dire news indeed.

‘It is as I saw,’ said Aelerond.

Emphidio moved forward. ‘Tyranid? The Kraken has never penetrated this far from the Eastern Fringe. Check again, lieutenant.’

‘I already have, my lord. The scan matches with the profile of a vanguard drone ship. A scout.’

Vanguard drone ships were the harbingers of doom. Seeder vessels capable of deploying hundreds, if not thousands, of bioforms, they were bred to seek out worlds to prepare for the invasion of the hive fleet. Stopping them was essential to the slowing down of any tyranid advance. Finding one here is a dire portent of things to come, thought Aelerond.

‘The Kraken’s hunger for new worlds is insatiable,’ he declared. ‘We should not be surprised if we have more and more of these encounters. Normally a Gladius-class would be more than sufficient to deal with a threat like this, but with the power down the fight will be on the xenos’ terms. They think us vulnerable. We are. We will need to hold out long enough for power to be restored so that we can annihilate them. Whatever happens, we cannot allow the ship to continue its work and feed information back to the hive fleet proper.’

‘They’ve launched boarding craft, lords!’ shouted the lieutenant. ‘Impact in three minutes. No clear formation, vectors are wide. Multiple points of ingress expected.’

‘Show me,’ ordered Gnuarcha.

The lieutenant brought the feed from his augur to the pict screens in front of the assembled leaders. The dozens of bright green blips on the display were undoubtedly assault craft. They were approaching rapidly.

‘They will flood us on every level. What weapons systems are operational, lieutenant?’ demanded Aelerond.

‘A handful of point defence weapons, lord. Nothing that will seriously impact their numbers.’

‘Open fire and do not stop until every round is spent.’

Gnuarcha again broadcast across the ship as the token defences opened fire. ‘This is Shipmistress Gnuarcha to all hands. Stand by to repel boarders. The tyranids of Kraken attack. We will send them back to the abyssal hell they crawled out of.’

The group fell silent after the order was given, all eyes glued to the augur screen in front of them. A handful of blips disappeared from view as some of the tyranid boarding pods were destroyed. Will that be enough? wondered Aelerond. Within seconds, the ship shuddered with impacts, and across multiple decks the Iron Watch screamed in fury and pain as the sound of klaxons began anew. In short order, the sense of urgency in the shouts of the bridge crew grew, their vox-systems flooded with reports of panicking serfs coming under attack.

‘Seventy-five per cent of decks are reporting alien ingress,’ declared a second bridge officer. ‘All vital zones and systems threatened.’

Aelerond saw Emphidio don his helmet and draw his bolt pistol and chainsword.

‘Every available hand will be needed to secure the vessel, Epistolary. I will go to the apothecarion, to protect the gene-seed,’ the Apothecary said.

‘I will remain here to defend the bridge and guide the defence. Be ready to move, Emphidio, I may need you elsewhere,’ said Aelerond.

‘The Chapter needs me with its future,’ said Emphidio. The Apothecary left.

‘Iron of grip,’ said Aelerond over the vox, using the first component of the Iron Lords’ cyclical battle phrase.

There was no response. Customarily, the response to ‘iron of grip’ was ‘iron of vigil’. Together they demonstrated the Iron Lords’ commitment to deep surveillance and direct action. The phrase could be begun with either of the two statements – to the Chapter neither action nor surveillance took priority over the other.

Short-sighted fool, thought Aelerond, shaking his head.

He returned to surveying the state of the ongoing battle. His concern grew as the din on the bridge reached a crescendo as the crew attempted to both coordinate a defence and return the ship to full operational capability. ‘Emperor preserve us all,’ he whispered.

Emphidio raced for the apothecarion. The sacred lifeblood of the Chapter was stored there, the seed of five brothers lost to the barghesi preserved so that they could be implanted into the next generation of Iron Lords. It was imperative that the voracious predators that now infested the ship were kept from the precious resource.

It was not long before he came upon the first signs of battle. The ruined corpses of half a dozen serfs lay scattered around the entrance to an armoury, their lacerated bodies torn by claws and rent by teeth and their blood, still warm, splattered all over the iron walls. He shook his head in disgust at what the aliens had done.

Emphidio continued to the apothecarion apace. He sacrificed caution for haste as he navigated the ship. He knew he could collide with xenos monstrosities at any moment, but dared not waste time, trusting in his chainsword and Space Marine reaction speed.

The risk did not pay off. As he turned one corner he saw a pair of hormagaunts. He charged them, the impact sending both reeling to the floor. ‘Damn you, abominations,’ he growled. He drew his bolt pistol and squeezed its trigger quickly, putting a bolt through the side of the first alien. The detonation that followed sprayed alien meat and ichor everywhere. As he drew the pistol on the second, it barrelled into him, sending them both to the floor and knocking Emphidio’s weapons from his hands.

Emphidio felt the creature’s chitinous hooves kick and scratch ineffectively at his power armour. He managed to force his wrist between the beast’s razor-sharp teeth before it could try to tear into his helmet. Despite the alien’s ferocity, Emphidio’s armour held. He took the creature’s head in his other hand and gouged out its eye, feeling the jet-black orb pop under the pressure. The beast screeched in pain, releasing its grip on Emphidio’s forearm as sticky jelly poured from its ruined eye socket. Seizing the creature’s skull in both hands, he twisted its head to one side with a sickening crack. Without any hesitation he got to his feet, collected his fallen weapons and rushed to the apothecarion.

As he moved on, Emphidio saw many small battles erupting as the tyranids swarmed over the decks and corridors. At one vital choke point he assisted a fellow battle-brother with potshots from his pistol. He passed scores of wounded serfs, ignoring their screams and pleas as he raced on. He could not spare the time to tend to them. He did not even have time to grant them the Emperor’s Peace. His priority was clear; he could not halt for long.

Emphidio at last reached the apothecarion. The battle had not left it untouched. The open space before it, normally intended to act as spill-over room for occasions when casualties had mounted to unusually high levels, was littered with the bodies of tyranids and serfs alike, their corpses entwined in death. Spent rounds and detached limbs languished in pools where alien ichor had blended blasphemously with human blood. Near the door to the apothecarion a series of barricades had been hastily erected. Behind them stood teams of serfs and a single Iron Lord. The colours on his Mk VI plate had almost been worn away completely, but flecks of vermillion on his helmet marked him as a member of the Sixth Company.

As Emphidio drew near, the serfs snapped to attention and saluted. They were breathing heavily, their eyes darting between the entrances to the space outside the apothecarion’s entrance, but they clutched their lasguns with an admirable determination and firmness.

Good, thought Emphidio, their discipline remains strong.

The Space Marine leading them nodded to Emphidio, and the two Iron Lords gripped each other’s forearms in the manner of warriors as they greeted each other. ‘Jute. Sixth Company. Well met, Brother-Apothecary. You will soon see that your skills are very much needed here. We are being badly mauled across the ship. We hold here. The wounded and the gene-seed remain secure,’ he said.

‘You have led an effective defence, Brother Jute,’ said Emphidio, acknowledging the number of alien corpses that were spread across the field. ‘Where are your brothers? My understanding of defence deployments was that the Sixth should have had a stronger presence here.’

‘Casualties in the campaign, brother. The Sixth is also responsible for the engines. Their defenders were hit hard early on. We split our force here to relieve them, under orders from Epistolary Aelerond. If we lose the engines we will not be able to engage the tyranid vessel when the Iron Watch is operable again.’

‘Thank you, brother,’ said Emphidio, with a forced calm. He was grateful for his helmet in this moment. Its expressionless ceramite hid his look of fury. He places the gene-seed and wounded at such risk to kill a tyranid scout?

‘They did not take the order lightly, brother. They knew what was at risk here,’ said Jute, as if he could read Emphidio’s thoughts.

Emphidio did not say anything. Clearly I am not the only one with misgivings around Aelerond’s priorities, he thought. He clasped his brother on the shoulder before entering the apothecarion.

Rows of iron slabs filled the space, many of which were covered with wounded. Blood poured from terrible injuries inflicted by savage claws and teeth, the rich, sticky crimson drenching the floors and slabs alike. At least seventy wounded already, in various states of injury. Teams of fraught medicae serfs hurried through the rows of walking wounded, pushing men roughly aside as they rushed between those with the most serious injuries. Howls of pain filled the air, mixed with the high-pitched whine of surgical equipment. The once sterile air was polluted with the stench of open wounds, spilt alien ichor and human excrement.

Truly, the flesh is weak, thought Emphidio. The Iron Hands’ idiom had been adopted lately by many of the Iron Lords. Given how the tyranids used consumed organic matter not only as a food source but also to breed new and more dangerous bioforms, flesh had increasingly been seen as a vulnerability. Once the Iron Lords had had halls full of trophies taken from xenos they had slain, including thousands of barghesi. No more. All had been put to the furnace, to prevent any kind of biological resource from falling into tyranid maws. After every campaign, ships and wargear had to be scrubbed clean and sanctified with purifying incense to ensure no trace of genetic material somehow remained.

The rearmost slabs served as the final resting place for what remained of several of the Iron Lords lost in the campaign. A number of medicae serfs tended to their armour and wounds, cleaning them even in their ruined state to give them some semblance of dignity and honour on the journey back to Sternac. Even when the ship was under attack, maintaining the dignity of fallen brothers was of the utmost importance.

Rest well, brothers, thought Emphidio.

The serfs shivered in their robes as they worked; the air temperature had been deliberately reduced to near-freezing levels in order to help preserve the remains of the fallen as they were being cleaned. The wounded were no different; many were covered loosely with the thin blankets available, their pained breaths and cries of pain visible as steam in the air. Then a new sound joined the pained cacophony. Alien screeches. More come, he thought.

On the bridge, Aelerond followed the course of the battle. Reports from serfs and Space Marines alike filled the command centre. A live schematic of the ship filled the screen, showing the locations of the enemy. Everywhere was under attack. Behind the sealed blast doors Aelerond could hear the crack of las-fire intermingled with bolter fire as the bridge guards held off tyranid attacks. Emphidio held the apothecarion, as was his duty. The engines were also under heavy attack. The Iron Lords were spread thin, but their knowledge of the vessel and their determination were peerless.

We are holding. We can win, thought Aelerond.

‘One hour remaining until the ship is fully operational,’ said one of the bridge officers.

‘Good,’ said Aelerond. But then something changed. There were slight alterations in enemy movements, declines in reports from some areas of the ship replaced with increases in others. The enemy grew more purposeful. Something was directing them, yet no leader-forms had been detected. ‘Where are you going?’ Aelerond whispered as his brow furrowed. His eyes narrowed as he tried to make sense of the data before him. He gasped as he saw the pattern. The barghesi… How did they…? Dread filled him mid-thought as he remembered Emphidio’s words. The field is not whole. In bare fractions of seconds as the stasis fields had fluctuated, the tyranids had detected the barghesi.

The prospect of new, untasted biomatter was irresistible to the tyranids, drawing them to the hold. They absolutely could not be allowed to consume the barghesi – doing so would give the Kraken access to the genetic material of one of the most savage and ferocious alien races ever encountered by the Imperium. Emperor knew what abominations they would be able to create to add to their hordes with the barghesi’s genetic code.

So far the hold was relatively untouched, any attackers being swiftly dealt with by the Iron Lords stationed there.

‘Halga, Unferth,’ he voxed, reaching out to the Iron Lords guarding the hold. ‘Their attack patterns are changing. They have detected the barghesi. They are coming for them.’

‘Understood,’ said Halga, his voice unmoved by the warning.

‘Their leader-forms have yet to commit to the fight. This might be their impetus to emerge. I am coming down there. They must not consume the barghesi.’

‘Yes, Brother-Epistolary. We will do our duty unto death.’

‘Iron of vigil, brother.’

‘Iron of grip,’ replied Halga.

Aelerond switched off the vox, and turned to the shipmistress. ‘I go to the hold.’

‘Yes, Lord Epistolary. The armsmen can hold the bridge. Once the ship is fully operational, we will blast the Kraken from the stars and victory will be ours. Emperor be with you,’ she said, and saluted.

Aelerond left the bridge at a run after opening the blast doors. Outside, dozens of serfs, with a pair of Iron Lords from the Seventh Company, stood at defensive positions, the corpses of dead and dying tyranids clogging the corridors. When the serfs realised who was sprinting past they hurriedly snapped to attention. Their drill was sloppy, but Aelerond didn’t care. He was utterly focused on getting to the ship’s hold. Nothing else mattered. The dead and dying alike were crushed under the heavy ceramite of his boot and bionic leg as he rushed to his goal.

He was amazed at the behaviour of the tyranid gaunt forms. They appeared to be driven with an inexorable purpose. They flowed down the corridors like water. His progress was loud, direct and brutal, and he made no attempt to disguise his presence. Yet often, he found that they would not react to him. He could follow them directly with no response as they skittered towards their destination. He slew many with ease, and many only reacted to his presence when their lives were actively threatened.

Finally, he could see the entrance to the hold ahead. Halga and Unferth held firm, keeping the chitinous tide away from the doors. Between the resolute Space Marines at the bulkhead and the Librarian’s determined advance, the tyranids were butchered. Aelerond fell into line between the two warriors, securing the defence of the hold and the specimens within. For now, there were no more tyranids attacking them.

The respite would not last long. They had to hold for an hour. He had previously thought that they could win, but the change in the tyranids’ tactics altered everything. The nearest location from which he might be able to expect some kind of reinforcements was the apothecarion, where Emphidio was fighting, and attempting to look after the wounded.

He switched on the vox.

‘Brother Emphidio.’

‘Brother Aelerond,’ said Emphidio. His voice was pained.

‘The tyranids have sensed the barghesi. More and more of them come to the hold.’

‘Then you had best stop them, Aelerond. The apothecarion overflows with the dead and dying. We are barely keeping the beasts from consuming our own, let alone the abominations we should never have allowed on this vessel.’

Aelerond could hear the skittering of tyranid hooves and the brays of hungry mouths as the next wave of aliens approached him. ‘They are many, Emphidio. You know what can happen if we are overrun. We may yet need you.’

‘My duty is to the wounded and the gene-seed, Aelerond. My life and blade is for that.’

The vox fell silent just as the first of the hormagaunts fell into range. Aelerond cursed the short-sighted Apothecary, but had little time to indulge his frustration as the three Iron Lords began to open fire into the onrushing tyranids, whose number flooded the corridor.

The Iron Lords’ bolt-fire shredded the first ranks of the bioforms, but was not enough to slow their advance. Heedless to the loss of their brood-brothers, the remaining tyranids threw themselves at the Space Marines.

In the fray, Aelerond’s staff was a blur of motion as he brought its head down on the aliens that assaulted him. Every impact of the weapon caved in a skull or collapsed vital organs, but no matter the losses he inflicted, the tide continued, their ravenous hunger for new genetic material insatiable.

Around him, the brothers of the Eighth Company fought with a determination that would fill the breast of even the most cold-hearted Iron Lord with pride. Truly they were the masters of bolt pistol and chainsword, as each pull of the trigger or rev of the blade saw the tyranids bleed and fall. Smoke poured from swords clogged with xenos meat, but still the warriors fought on. Even as their blades finally choked and fell silent, the Space Marines continued to wield them with even greater ferocity. Thanks to the weapons’ sheer mass they were more than capable of severing limbs with the power of the Adeptus Astartes behind them.

But the numbers of the tyranids were overwhelming. Aelerond could feel even his battle-brothers’ transhuman physiques tiring under the strain of the intensity of the combat. Their armour was tattered in numerous places by the horde, and he could see blood pouring from some places, which only intensified the ferocity of their foe.

First, Unferth fell. A hormagaunt finally broke through his otherwise impeccable defence, piercing the soft armour seals around his waist with one of its wicked claws. He roared in agony, swatting the beast away with a fierce backhanded blow from his chainsword. The distraction was enough however, and more of the creatures found the opportunity to push their blade-arms through his body and bring him down. Aelerond felt his loss keenly.

Though much of his psychic power was still extinguished by the shadow in the warp, Aelerond could feel Halga’s rage. The depletion of the defence was taking its toll on the Space Marine. Though Halga continued to fight the tyranids with the burning hatred for the alien and anger the Iron Lords were known for, Aelerond knew it was only a matter of time before he too was overwhelmed. Blood flowed from wounds that dotted his body. To most Space Marines, this was merely what had to be endured as a part of their hard life. But against a foe as insidious as the tyranids, any weakness, however small to the human eye, was an immense vulnerability. One termagant, before being crushed underfoot by Halga, was able to fire a single burst from its weapon-arm. Dozens of ammunition-beetles bounced ineffectively from Halga’s armour, but a handful found purchase. Aelerond felt Halga’s agonising pain as they burrowed into his flesh. The Iron Lord fought through his torture, using it to drive himself on, but his effectiveness was compromised. He finally fell as a hormagaunt drove its claw through his neck.

Aelerond roared in fury, opening fire with his bolt pistol at the creature that had brought down Halga. The round embedded itself in the beast’s torso and detonated, sending chunks of xenos meat flying in all directions and covering its kin with its ichor.

Then the aliens’ behaviour changed. Their onslaught stopped. They retreated, moving away from the fight. The Librarian fired a handful of shots into them as they fled, confused.

Is this some kind of trick to draw me away? To leave the path to the barghesi wide open?

Aelerond stood firm, holding his staff in the morrgaor fighting stance, ready to strike with all the speed and ferocity of the sea-serpent from which it took its name.

Perhaps their leader-forms are slain elsewhere, he thought. That would weaken the link between the mindless drones he had been fighting and the hive mind.

No. Their withdrawal was too ordered. They are planning something.

His suspicion was proved right. At the end of the corridor appeared a creature much larger than any he had yet fought in this battle. Bigger than a Space Marine in Terminator armour, its bulk filled the majority of the space, each of its four scythe-arms the length of a man. Human blood covered the length of its claws and dripped heavily from its fang-filled maw. Even with the shadow in the warp clouding his abilities, Aelerond could sense its sinister intelligence. It looked directly at him with its dark, gleaming eyes as it paused to regard him. It saw him only as prey. He knew that this monster would have little trouble breaking through the sealed bulkhead that blocked the way into the hold, where the barghesi were stored, if left unchecked.

‘What are you waiting for, beast?’ he muttered.

Two of the creature’s brethren appeared, their tall crests and limbs visible behind the first.

I cannot stop them all. Emphidio, I need you now more than ever.

He began firing his last bolts as he switched on his vox.

Emphidio tore his chainsword through the throat of the hormagaunt as it threw itself at him, the terrible weapon leaving the creature’s head hanging by a thread of sinew as its life force spilled from the wound.

The tyranid assaults against the apothecarion had been particularly heavy. The tyranids sensed the weak, the injured and the fearful. Their hunger could be easily satiated here, were it not for the stalwart defence led by Emphidio. It was his sacred duty to see the safe return of his fallen brothers’ gene-seed to the Iron Lords’ fortress-monastery of Heorot on Sternac.

Though other parts of the ship felt minor reprieves from attack as the tyranid organisms prioritised the hold, the apothecarion had remained hard-pressed. Jute was dead, his life lost to a dozen tyranid claw-arms as he attempted to cover the arrival of more wounded serfs. Many lives had been saved by his sacrifice. As noble and honourable as it was, the defence needed him far more than the serfs. A waste, Emphidio thought bitterly. It is a serf’s duty to die for the Iron Lords, not the other way around. Few wounded had arrived since then, the corridors of the ship being too dangerous for the movement of the slow and injured. Emphidio was grateful for this, knowing that many more would have meant having to create a wider cordon to defend the spill-over pouring out of the apothecarion. With his limited number of able-bodied armsmen, they could not possibly have defended a bigger front.

His vox crackled into life.

‘Emphidio!’

It was the Epistolary.

The fool.

‘I have little time for distraction, Aelerond,’ Emphidio said, as he blew an attacking termagant apart with a shot from his bolt pistol.

‘The leader-forms are here. Three warrior-class tyranids. Halga and Unferth are dead. With the shadow in the warp still strong I may not be able to hold them. They will consume the barghesi!’

‘Let them! Withdraw to me. We will win this fight, and once it is over we will slay them before they can return to their ship.’

‘They do not have to wait that long – they can take the genetic material and leave through one of their boarding pods! You have defended the apothecarion with honour, but do not disregard our living and future brothers by letting the tyranids take what they came for.’

‘I will not abandon the gene-seed, Brother-Epistolary. It is my duty. I am not the only Iron Lord who can help you.’

‘Emphidio, lis–’

Emphidio cut the vox-link. The flow of tyranids appeared ceaseless, but he could make it to the hold if he moved quickly. He knew he was the closest to Aelerond, but he could not pull himself away. He did not know if the armsmen could hold without him, even if some of the wounded were armed and forced to fight.

If I leave, we might lose the gene-seed. But if I stay, will we lose more?

Aelerond gritted his teeth as his arms jarred beneath the impact of the first tyranid warrior’s claw against the length of his staff, barely parrying a blow that would otherwise have cleaved him in two. Fortunately, the massive beasts could only engage him one by one in the narrow corridor. They had the advantage in strength, numbers and stamina, and they knew it. They were content to bleed him slowly, exhausting him, waiting for him to make a mistake.

With a roar of effort, he shoved the creature’s claw away, and brought his staff around into the tyranid’s knee with a speed that belied his exhaustion. The shadow in the warp still clouded and halted his psychic abilities, so he could not channel his supernatural powers through the weapon. Nevertheless, the transhuman strength of the Space Marine ensured that the creature’s knee joint was shattered with a sickening crunch. It screeched in pain as it was forced to the ground by the power of the blow and the weakness in its broken leg.

The creature’s self-preservation instincts kicked in, its once cold and calculating eyes filling with frenzy and panic. All finesse fell out of its strikes. It snapped its jaws and swung its claws wildly in an attempt to reach the Librarian. Aelerond barely kept the pommel of his staff between its claws and his chest, feeling each clash of the weapons throughout his body. Finally, he swung his staff around again, this time bringing its heavy, ichor-slick head into the creature’s chin. He heard the crack as its jaw broke, and saw several razor-sharp teeth fly out of its crushed maw. The creature fell to the floor, dead.

Aelerond had barely formed the aminya defensive stance when the second tyranid warrior attacked. Unlike the first, which had attacked ferociously with blade claws, its brood-brother’s primary arms were fused into a long-barrelled cannon. The creature opened fire immediately, and a hail of deadly crystals filled the air. Some hit the corpse of the first tyranid warrior, shredding the creature’s body. A greater number hit Aelerond. Many of them shattered on impact with his power armour, the plate so strong that even in its battered state it held true. One found a weakness, however, piercing the armour in the joint where the leg armour met the groin guard. Aelerond roared in agony as the corrosive projectile ate into his flesh, falling to one knee.

Sensing weakness, the creature moved forward, readying its lesser blade-arms to finish the kill. Aelerond felt the fallen bolt pistol of Brother Halga in his hand as he steadied himself on the floor. Gripping the weapon, he could judge by its weight that it still held two bolts. In one motion, he raised the pistol, took aim and fired both. The first hit the oncoming creature in the eye, blinding it and tearing into its brain. The second sped into its open mouth, knocking out teeth before it bored into the back of its throat and detonated. The combined power of the two explosions left nought but a bloody stump where the creature’s head had been, and a deluge of inky-black viscera was sprayed over the ceiling. It stood for a few seconds before crumpling to the floor atop its brood-brother, the liquid that made for its blood still pumping from its death wounds.

Aelerond knew he would not survive to defend the hold, feeling corrosion reach further into his body from his wound.

Emphidio has to get here.

He spoke into his vox. He didn’t wait for an acknowledgement from the Apothecary.

‘Emphidio!’ he gasped, fighting to get the words out as the third beast loomed over him. Each breath was heavy and pained, every word a struggle. ‘You know–’

‘–what is at stake here!’ the ragged voice urged from Emphidio’s vox. ‘Our Chapter’s future… Think… of your broth–’

Aelerond’s voice was drowned beneath a terrible alien screeching, then surged back in a roar of tortured defiance.

‘Aelerond!’ Emphidio shouted into the vox. ‘Brother!’ He was answered by a hiss of static. The thought of losing more brothers to the enemy was horrifying. It served only to cement the deep feeling of failure that had accompanied him throughout this mission as the number of casualties rose.

Emphidio was already running to Aelerond.

He had left only a handful of armsmen defending the apothecarion, and the gene-seed vault. It pained him to leave, but he understood Aelerond’s conclusions. If the tyranids consumed the barghesi there was no telling what the implications would be. All possible outcomes offered nothing but ruin and shame to the Iron Lords, and near-unparalleled death and destruction across the Imperium.

As much as he detested the thought of leaving his post – as much as he railed at the idea of fighting to protect the stasis-frozen barghesi from whatever violation the tyranids would enact upon them – he had to deny the Kraken its prize.

I have no choice, Emphidio thought.

He arrived at the entrance to the hold quickly, having gutted the tyranids he encountered on the way. He found a leader-form trying to smash open the entrance to the hold with its bulk. Two of its brood-kin were dead, their corpses left where they fell. Its powerful tail thrashed and its clawed feet pounded the floor as it ran up to the door to batter it down. Emphidio bellowed his anger as he saw the bodies of Aelerond, Halga and Unferth carelessly trampled by the alien. He fired his bolt pistol at the creature.

‘Die, xenos filth!’ he roared.

The majority of the shots found no purchase in the tyranid’s chitinous armour, though it was enough to draw its attention.

It opened its maw wide as it screeched a challenge to Emphidio. Drool and blood ran to the floor from its needle-like teeth; its eyes were filled with primal anger. It charged at him, its powerful hind legs launching it down the corridor with a pace that belied its bulk.

Emphidio charged straight at the creature in return. He fired his bolt pistol as he ran, emptying its clip. Many of the shots ricocheted from the monster’s carapace, its heavily armoured head-crest and shoulders seeming to be perfectly designed to protect it from such projectiles. One round found its mark, however, boring into the elbow of one of the bio-
form’s four weaponised limbs. The bolt detonated, ripping off the scythed arm in a spray of jet ichor.

The creature’s momentum was broken as it recoiled from the loss of its arm and roared in pain. Emphidio seized its moment of weakness. He ran in close to the creature. There was now a gap in its reach. He swung his chainsword into the beast’s less well-armoured torso. He tore the weapon right through the tyranid without any loss of momentum, turning to face it as he broke through behind it.

Even as the monster sagged to the floor, its innards beginning to pour from its terrible wound, it was still incredibly dangerous. It was driven by a mind so strong that it was capable of making the creature perform feats that should have been impossible for something that had suffered such grievous injuries. It turned to face Emphidio, more slowly than before, but still fast. It swiped at the Apothecary with its talons, each attack growing with ferocious desperation as its life force drained from its body. Emphidio held his rage in check, knowing that he could outlast the tyranid, dodging or deflecting its attacks as necessary. Finally, as the bioform’s strength began to fade, Emphidio struck.

He went on the attack, hacking off another of the creature’s arms. Ichor splattered off his power armour as he continued his offensive, not wishing to lose any momentum. He brought his blade up through the creature’s knee, bringing it to the floor, before driving the chainblade into the creature’s mouth, churning his blade in its head. His rage was finally satiated as the creature’s dark eyes were popped, and its skull cracked, by the sword’s churning teeth. Finally, the chainsword stopped, totally clogged by ichor, bone, chitin and flesh. He tore the inactive blade from what was left of the creature’s mangled head.

As Emphidio panted, he heard a faint, choked splutter. It came from where Aelerond, Halga and Unferth lay. He ran to them. Only Aelerond was unhelmed.

‘Brother!’ he cried.

Aelerond was barely breathing. ‘You fought… well… brother,’ he said. He clenched his teeth in pain.

‘You were right,’ Emphidio said. ‘I am sorry–’

‘You have… learned… from… it. Remember.’

In any other circumstances Emphidio would have raced Aelerond into a stasis casket. He might be treatable later or, if not, could be put into a Dreadnought’s sarcophagus. But he could not. The barghesi were held in the only caskets they had.

‘I cannot save you, brother,’ he said. He could not look the Librarian in the eye.

‘I… know. But you… have saved… more…’

Aelerond died.

‘Be at peace, brother,’ said Emphidio.

Bright light suddenly flooded the corridor, replacing the emergency crimson that had been the only illumination for almost two hours. The power is restored, Emphidio thought. As his eyes adjusted in a fraction of a second to the new light, he willed Shipmistress Gnuarcha to end this fight, knowing that soon the weapons and engines would be ready.

As if he had ordered it himself, he felt a low tremor run across the length of the vessel. At last, the weapons were firing. The rumble of cannon batteries that shook the ship felt like every weapon in its arsenal was unloading its entire ammunition stock at the tyranid scout vessel. After everything that had happened, Emphidio could not take any satisfaction from the thought of the living ship writhing in pain as explosions rippled across its hide and its chitin burned in nuclear fire.

Shipmistress Gnuarcha’s voice cascaded from every vox-point on the Iron Watch. ‘This is Shipmistress Gnuarcha to all hands. The tyranid ship is dead, victory is ours! Scour the xenos from the vessel, wipe their abominable presence from our decks.’

All across the ship, the moment the creature-ship died was felt. The remaining tyranids on board, previously so focused and purposeful, descended immediately into primal, base behaviour. Some fled, some hid. Others turned on each other in a mindless frenzy or fought the defenders on pure survival instinct. No matter what they did, they died. The surviving Iron Lords and Chapter-serfs pursued and butchered, their anger and hate fuelled by the slaughter enacted by the tyranids. This was time for revenge, a chance to unleash pent-up frustrations and rage after fighting a ceaseless war against the alien.

Despite their victory, Emphidio’s work was not done. He raced towards the apothecarion, failing to put thoughts of the recently slain behind him as he wished desperately for the survival of the gene-seed stored there. Guilt coursed through him. It was a small mercy that Aelerond, Unferth and Halga’s progenoids were recoverable.

Emphidio’s path was mired in the dead – the corpses of disembowelled armsmen and las-scarred tyranids alike were piled together in death at every turn. He passed nothing that still lived, friend or foe.

When he arrived at the apothecarion, he found a bloodbath. The impromptu barricades that defended the entrance had been overrun, piles of dead bioforms ramped up against them, their bodies riddled with wounds. Behind the barricades, he found the defenders. Their bodies were almost unrecognisable. Talons had ripped open chests, limbs lay scattered about and faces had been ripped apart by savage bites. The most unfortunate men had been stripped of flesh by the tyranids’ ravenous living ammunition, their remains nought but sinew and bone held together by strips of cartilage.

His already faint hopes draining at the sight of the overrun defences, Emphidio walked into the apothecarion. He imagined seeing bloodied but victorious defenders, clutching their wounds but retaining their pride in holding off the aliens at the last. His hopes were swiftly dashed.

Between the iron slabs that filled the apothecarion, Emphidio found the surviving tyranids feasting on the dead and fighting amongst themselves for the scraps. Sluggish without the leader-forms to guide them, they were slow to react to the Apothecary’s presence. Emphidio heard the sickening sound of their chewing and the crunch of bones being cracked open cease as they began to realise he was among them. They attacked.

The bioforms bounded and leapt towards Emphidio. His chainsword roared, but he did not. He cut the first clean in half, his sword eating through its carapace with ease. Ten more remained, each of their arms extending into scythe-like claws the length of a man’s torso.

They acted without heed for their own survival, driven only by the need to kill. This made them foolish. Emphidio butchered them all, cutting each down in turn without mercy, just as they had done to his brothers. There was no satisfaction in this. The damage had already been done. Vengeance was devoid of value in the face of such devastation.

As the last tyranid fell into an eviscerated heap at his feet, Emphidio ran to the gene-seed vault. There was surely still a chance that the Chapter’s most precious resource may yet be undamaged.

Please, let not all of it be lost.

The gene-seed vault had been cracked open by the tyranids, its sacred contents befouled and consumed by the monsters. Emphidio dropped to his knees, howling in anguish at the irreplaceable loss and his failure in his duty to preserve the legacy of the Chapter. He had only been able to recover a small number from the fighting with the barghesi, and now the tyranids had taken them all. He felt the weight of the progenoids he had recovered from Aelerond, Halga and Unferth in his narthecium.

‘I am unworthy of you all!’ he yelled.

It was only then that Emphidio noticed the corpse of a serf, the man’s fist still clenched around a laspistol. His chest was ripped open, his vital organs shredded. A bloodied bandage was wrapped around his head, covering his right eye. The serf had fought to the last, doing his duty to the very point of death. Emphidio bowed his head in respect to the armsman. As he looked down he saw a vial, almost completely buried underneath the serf’s body.

‘Surely not?’ he said, gently pulling the vial from beneath the fallen figure. He examined it, his heart rate accelerating as he contemplated what it held. ‘By the Throne…’ he whispered. The armsman had been able to save the progenoids of one of the fallen, against all the odds and with the sacrifice of his life. On closer inspection, he saw that it was Audoin’s.

My pride has nearly cost us everything. It will not do so again. Though I am unworthy of being your brother, I will not abandon my duty to you now, he vowed silently to the lost.

Within an hour of its slaying of the vanguard ship, the Iron Watch had been almost entirely purged of the xenos taint. Only the boarding pods that had brought the tide of tyranids to the ship remained, clinging like razor-toothed limpets to the adamantium hull. Teams of Iron Lords were already in the process of prising them from the flanks of the ship and destroying them altogether. The furious power of melta bombs tore the pods apart, ripping them from the vessel. As the dead, ruined spores drifted away, teams of voidsuit-wearing serfs immediately went to work sealing the wounds in the side of the ship. The Iron Watch would continue to serve the Iron Lords yet.

Emphidio looked out of the viewing port in the ship’s hold. Out there were the Grendl Stars. The home of their greatest enemy, the besieged barghesi. Out there was the Eastern Fringe, from where the Imperium’s besiegers, the tyranids, descended upon the galaxy. The Iron Lords fought the long fight. Like Iulio Kesr at the Battle of Aelija on Ancient Terra, we are both the besiegers and the besieged. We are sired from the Iron Hand. Our grip must remain as impervious as it is cold. It must be unyielding to those within it and immovable to those without.

One object loomed closer than the others. Emphidio stared as its brightness, reflected from its sun, filled the port. As the Iron Watch drew close, its silhouette blocked out the stars and the insidious evil therein. He looked upon it with a mixture of relief and foreboding. Sternac. His home world. Finally, his lost brothers would be laid to rest and their gene-seed prepared for implantation into new recruits. He could make out the orbital defence stations that ringed the planet, and identified a pair of other Gladius-class vessels docked for repairs. A number of Thunderhawk gunships moved between the docking station and the world below, ferrying Iron Lords and their serfs to and from the planet.

No imposing battle-barges sat in orbit, watching over the home world. No defensive fleet ready to strike at attackers or be launched wholesale at new threats. The Iron Lords’ ships were almost entirely abroad, waging the Chapter’s constant war penning the barghesi in their constellation, or fighting gruelling campaigns to stem the flow of the Great Devourer.

The Iron Watch drew into an orbit of its own, heading inexorably into a docking point.

There would be no honouring welcome for the warriors upon their return. Nought but the administration and diagnostics of clerks and engineering serfs. The hallowed halls and corridors of Heorot would be devoid of brothers with whom to share tales of heroism or mourn the lost. The wars consumed all. But despite it all, the warriors of Sternac still held, and would continue to do so. The Iron Grip remained as tight as it had ever been. The Iron Lords would do their duty, to whatever bitter and bloody end.

SON OF THE STORM WORLD

AARON DEMBSKI-BOWDEN

‘What are you doing?’

I was expecting my master’s voice, but it isn’t him. It’s Morcant.

‘Greetings, Morcant of the Arakanii.’

‘Hello, little slave.’ The Spear grins his carnivore smile, showing the filed teeth of the Arakanii clan. ‘I asked you a question.’

As ever in Morcant’s presence, I can’t help but wonder if he’s come to kill me. He’d enjoy that. I can see it in his eyes.

‘I’m parsing my master’s archived reports,’ I tell him, which is the truth.

He grunts a reply: ‘Tedious work.’ Which is also the truth.

I pointedly look around the preparation chamber with its racked weapons and monastic sparsity. The only instruments currently active are my bank of monitors and the hololithic console that controls them. ‘Is there something I can help you with, Battleguard Morcant?’

I don’t call him lord. A slave I may be, but I’m not his slave. I’m not, technically, even of his Chapter. I was born in the fortress-monastery of the Mentor Legion and raised to serve those warriors of consummate discipline. The barbarians of the Emperor’s Spears couldn’t be more different from the soldiers I was trained to serve.

Morcant gives another smile, a flash of knife-teeth from a clan of coastal cannibals. ‘I’m looking for Guilliman’s favourite son.’

I don’t react to his sarcasm. He enjoys it too much when I do.

‘My master is…’ I hesitate, taking a moment to uplink my concentration through the sensorium-web that binds me to my master. Three seconds pass. Five. Eight. A distorted and flickering feed overlays the vision of my left eye. I see through my master’s sight: blades flashing and sparking. He faces a warrior in the azure of the Emperor’s Spears, with a crested helm denoting the rank of Force Commander. ‘He’s in the practice cages, with Breac of the Vargantes.’

Morcant’s facial tattoos twist as he chuckles. ‘Who’s winning?’

I don’t need to check for more than a moment, nor do I really need to answer. Of course Breac is winning. My master, Amadeus Kaias Incarius of the most noble Mentor Legion, is a bladesman of no small talent, but Breac is Lord of the Third Warhost and a warrior without peer.

Morcant moves closer with a snarling chorus of armour joints. Close enough now that I can see the nicks and scratch-scars on his azure ceramite, which his thralls have done their best to burnish back to perfection. Close enough that I can smell the alkali reek of his skin and hair. The storybooks and faerie tales that speak of Space Marines tell much of their legendary immortality and prowess as the God-Emperor’s Angels of Death. They neglect to mention how an active suit of ceramite hums loud enough up close to make your eyes ache in their sockets, or the fact that even the cleanest Space Marine on extended deployment reeks of unwashed skin and old sweat. The bitter tang of consecrated weapon oils can only mask so many sins.

Morcant indicates one of my eleven screens – one with images flicking across its face instead of coded data-spillage. He gestures to the hazy pict-footage of a Spear warrior, alone in the dust of a dying city. The warrior holds a chainblade in one hand, a bolt rifle in the other.

‘That’s Connall.’ The battleguard’s baiting smile fades. ‘You have footage of his death?’

I nod, watching the warrior leaning over me, not the warrior dying on screen. ‘This is footage from my tertiary servo-skull during the Battle of Akamakar.’

Morcant – every inch the barbarian – murmurs a curse, something obscene and not at all biologically possible. I scarcely speak the language of Nemeton, the Emperor’s Spears’ homeworld, but I believe he’s calling my parentage into question and suggesting there was an animal involved in my conception.

‘Amadeus,’ he says, speaking my master’s name with narrowed eyes, ‘still keeps all of these records? Does he intend to hand them over to the Mentor Legion one day, when he’s finished spying on us?’

I err on the side of caution. Honesty, but cautious honesty. ‘My master hasn’t yet ordered me to purge this data-spool, no.’

I expect Morcant to order me to do it now. I expect him to sneer and bare his cannibal clansman teeth and demand I purge the footage from the archives.

But he doesn’t.

‘Show me,’ he says, still watching the monitor. ‘Show me how Connall of the Kavalei died.’

And so I show him.

The dust was thick that day. Connall of the Kavalei was already dying, his armour cracked and shattered, his wounds scabbed but grievous – dooming him whether they continued to bleed or not. A human soldier would already be dead three times over. Connall kept moving, his weapons in his hands, stalking through the dust behind enemy lines. His ceramite, once the colour of summer Terran skies from an era long since consigned to myth, was painted with dust and wretched with burn scarring. His helmet was gone, torn from his head in the savage fighting that was ripping the city apart.

With the city falling, rockrete dust turned the air almost too thick to breathe. Connall moved on regardless. Chalk-dust surely coated his three lungs. It bleached his tongue grey-white.

Then he saw my servo-skull.

‘Helot,’ he said into the cloudy dust. Blood flecked his lips, giving him a splash of colour in the ghastly paleness. He had to force the words through his split lips and broken teeth. ‘I see your probe. Drifting there. Which slave. Are you?’

‘Anuradha.’ It was my voice on the recording, crackling with interference and distorted by time.

The Emperor’s Spear repeated my name in one of Nemeton’s many guttural accents. ‘Move ahead. Tell me. What you see.’

The view shifted as my servo-skull drifted away. Dust. Dust. Dust. The thunder of distant artillery. The crackle of equally distant las-fire. And then… Silhouettes. Shapes, human shapes, in the dying city’s gloom.

‘No.’ This from Morcant by my side, not Connall dying in the past. ‘Show me the very end,’ the battleguard says. ‘Show me how he fell.’

I obey. My fingers ghost across the hololithic keys that are beamed flickering into the air before me. The image on my monitor degrades to a blur of quickened motion. I slow it back down after almost a minute, and the image resolves once more, as much as the dust allows.

Connall has his combat blade in hand, and nothing more. His bolt rifle is gone. His armour is gouged by fresh las-fire, burned with new holes and glancing scorch marks. Before, his helmet had been missing. Now half of his face is gone, ripped away down to the bone by a fragmentation grenade. The heavy, percussive rattle of an autocannon is barking thunder somewhere out of sight.

The Spear runs. Teeth clenched, dagger in a reversed grip, he scrambles up an avalanche of tumbled masonry. The picter footage keeps crackling into an indistinct haze as the servo-skull tries to keep pace with him. Even wounded, even over terrain blasted by artillery, he runs as fast as a cargo-8 truck in second gear.

Shrapnel clatters against his fouled warplate. Las-fire flashes around him, taking him in the chest, in the shoulders, in the thighs and calves. He keeps running. Slower, slowing with every lance of painful light that tears through him, but still moving, never stopping.

Almost at the crest of the ruined screed, he hurls the combat blade. It sings through the dusty air too fast to follow, appearing in the chest of an Exilarchy gunner manning a sandbagged autocannon nest. The rattling thunder falls silent.

At my side in the here and now, Morcant chuckles again.

Connall reaches the squad of ragged soldiers. He can’t run now. They try to flee, and he can’t chase them down. Only three of them are close enough to reach, and they die in the time it takes for me to write the final words of this sentence. The first dies to his fists. The second to an elbow. The third is gripped in both hands, struggling, broken-backed, and hurled from the rampart to the street below. The picter view doesn’t pan to watch the body burst. It stays on Connall.

The Spear sinks to his knees now. The choice to stand is taken from him by his failing body. When he can no longer stand, he crawls. His ravaged features lift to my probe once more.

Throat-shot, he no longer has a voice with which to speak, but I recognise the words he mouths in choked silence.

Skovakarah uhl zarûn. The battlecry of the Emperor’s Spears. Redden the Earth.

I thought then, at the time, he was crawling towards the stilled autocannon, in order to die with his back against that final trophy of victory. But he makes it instead to the first slain Exilarchy soldier. The Spear’s final act in life is to pull the combat blade from his foe’s flesh.

And then, he’s still. Motionless in the dust. A dagger in his hand.

At my side, Morcant gives a grunt of appreciation. Or recognition. I can’t tell which.

‘He died well,’ the battleguard says. It seems a strange thing to say. To my eyes, he died as all Space Marines die: he died hard, betrayed by a body carved apart in war.

‘Why did he do that?’ I ask.

‘Why did he do what? Die? Because he’d been shot to pieces over several hours, Anuradha. Are you blind?’

Of all the Spears my master and I have encountered since reaching Elara’s Veil, Morcant’s temper is the foulest. He also has the bluntest sense of humour, but I answer mockery with patience and hope for the best.

‘No, at the end, why did he reach for his blade?’

Morcant senses my sincerity and, for once, doesn’t mock me for my ignorance.

‘Because he was a son of the storm world, little slave. Each one of us took an oath to defend Elara’s Veil. Part of that oath means what you just saw. Every one of us is sworn to die with a weapon in our hands.’

‘A matter of superstition, then.’

He shows me his cannibal smile one last time. ‘A matter of tradition. Now purge that data-spool. It’s none of your Mentor Legion master’s business how my brother died.’

ABOUT THE AUTHORS

Graham McNeill has written many titles for The Horus Heresy, including the Siege of Terra novellas Sons of the Selenar and Fury of Magnus, the novels The Crimson King and Vengeful Spirit, and the New York Times bestselling A Thousand Sons and The Reflection Crack’d, the latter of which featured in The Primarchs anthology. Graham’s Ultramarines series, featuring Captain Uriel Ventris, is now seven 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, and the Warhammer Horror novella The Colonel’s Monograph. 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.

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.

Chris Forrester lives and works in his home town of Wolverhampton. A lifelong science-fiction fanatic, he has been an ardent fan of Warhammer 40,000 for over half that time. ‘Disgraced’ is his first adventure with the Sons of Sanguinius.

Aaron Dembski-Bowden is the New York Times bestselling author of the Horus Heresy novels The Master of Mankind, Betrayer and The First Heretic, as well as the novella Aurelian and the audio drama Butcher’s Nails, for the same series. He has also written the Warhammer 40,000 novels Spear of the Emperor and Ragnar Blackmane, the popular Night Lords series, the Space Marine Battles book Armageddon, the novels The Talon of Horus and Black Legion, the Grey Knights novel The Emperor’s Gift and numerous short stories. He lives and works in Northern Ireland.

Edoardo Albert is a writer and historian specialising in the Dark Ages. He finds that the wars and cultures of the early Medieval period map very well on to the events of the 40th and 41st millenniums. Silent Hunters was his first novel for Black Library. For Warhammer 40,000, he has also written the short stories ‘Green and Grey’, ‘Last Flight’, ‘Born of the Storm’, and the novella Lords of the Storm.

Guy Haley is the author of the Siege of Terra novel The Lost and the Damned, as well as the Horus Heresy novels Titandeath, Wolfsbane and Pharos, and the Primarchs novels Konrad Curze: The Night Haunter, Corax: Lord of Shadows and Perturabo: The Hammer of Olympia. He has also written many Warhammer 40,000 novels, including the first book in the Dawn of Fire series, Avenging Son, as well as Belisarius Cawl: The Great Work, Dark Imperium, Dark Imperium: Plague War, The Devastation of Baal, Dante, Darkness in the Blood and Astorath: Angel of Mercy. He has also written stories set in the Age of Sigmar, included in War Storm, Ghal Maraz and Call of Archaon. He lives in Yorkshire with his wife and son.

Peter Fehervari is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels Requiem Infernal, Cult of the Spiral Dawn and Fire Caste, as well as the novella Fire and Ice from the Shas’o anthology. He has also written the Warhammer Horror novel The Reverie, as well as many short stories for Black Library, including the T’au-themed ‘Out Caste’ and ‘A Sanctuary of Wyrms’, the latter of which appeared in the anthology Deathwatch: Xenos Hunters. He also wrote ‘Nightfall’, which was in the Heroes of the Space Marines anthology, and ‘The Crown of Thorns’. He lives and works in London.

Gary Kloster is a writer, a stay-at-home father, a librarian and a martial artist – sometimes all in the same day, seldom all at the same time. He lives among the corn in the American Midwest and his short fiction can be found in Analog, Apex, Clarkesworld and others. For Black Library, he has written the Necromunda novella Spark of Revolution, and a number of short stories.

Callum Davis is a Warhammer 40,000 Background Writer for Games Workshop. He has worked on a wide array of codexes and campaign books as well as written short stories and articles for White Dwarf magazine. ‘Iron Watch’ and ‘Bless the Curse’ are his first stories published for Black Library. He lives and works in Nottingham, UK.

David Guymer’s work for Warhammer Age of Sigmar includes the novels Hamilcar: Champion of the Gods and The Court of the Blind King, the audio dramas The Beasts of Cartha, Fist of Mork, Fist of Gork, Great Red and Only the Faithful. He is also the author of the Gotrek & Felix novels Slayer, Kinslayer and City of the Damned and the Gotrek audio dramas Realmslayer and Realmslayer: Blood of the Old World. For The Horus Heresy he has written the novella Dreadwing, and the Primarchs novels Ferrus Manus: Gorgon of Medusa and Lion El’Jonson: Lord of the First. For Warhammer 40,000 he has written The Eye of Medusa, The Voice of Mars and the two Beast Arises novels Echoes of the Long War and The Last Son of Dorn. He is a freelance writer and occasional scientist based in the East Riding, and was a finalist in the 2014 David Gemmell Awards for his novel Headtaker.

An extract from Dawn of Fire: Avenging Son.

‘I was there at the Siege of Terra,’ Vitrian Messinius would say in his later years.

‘I was there…’ he would add to himself, his words never meant for ears but his own. ‘I was there the day the Imperium died.’

But that was yet to come.

‘To the walls! To the walls! The enemy is coming!’ Captain Messinius, as he was then, led his Space Marines across the Penitent’s Square high up on the Lion’s Gate. ‘Another attack! Repel them! Send them back to the warp!’

Thousands of red-skinned monsters born of fear and sin scaled the outer ramparts, fury and murder incarnate. The mortals they faced quailed. It took the heart of a Space Marine to stand against them without fear, and the Angels of Death were in short supply.

‘Another attack, move, move! To the walls!’

They came in the days after the Avenging Son returned, emerging from nothing, eight legions strong, bringing the bulk of their numbers to bear against the chief entrance to the Imperial Palace. A decapitation strike like no other, and it came perilously close to success.

Messinius’ Space Marines ran to the parapet edging the Penitent’s Square. On many worlds, the square would have been a plaza fit to adorn the centre of any great city. Not on Terra. On the immensity of the Lion’s Gate, it was nothing, one of hundreds of similarly huge spaces. The word ‘gate’ did not suit the scale of the cityscape. The Lion’s Gate’s bulk marched up into the sky, step by titanic step, until it rose far higher than the mountains it had supplanted. The gate had been built by the Emperor Himself, they said. Myths detailed the improbable supernatural feats required to raise it. They were lies, all of them, and belittled the true effort needed to build such an edifice. Though the Lion’s Gate was made to His design and by His command, the soaring monument had been constructed by mortals, with mortal hands and mortal tools. Messinius wished that had been remembered. For men to build this was far more impressive than any godly act of creation. If men could remember that, he believed, then perhaps they would remember their own strength.

The uncanny may not have built the gate, but it threatened to bring it down. Messinius looked over the rampart lip, down to the lower levels thousands of feet below and the spread of the Anterior Barbican.

Upon the stepped fortifications of the Lion’s Gate was armour of every colour and the blood of every loyal primarch. Dozens of regiments stood alongside them. Aircraft filled the sky. Guns boomed from every quarter. In the churning redness on the great roads, processional ways so huge they were akin to prairies cast in rockcrete, were flashes of gold where the Emperor’s Custodian Guard battled. The might of the Imperium was gathered there, in the palace where He dwelt.

There seemed moments on that day when it might not be enough.

The outer ramparts were carpeted in red bodies that writhed and heaved, obscuring the great statues adorning the defences and covering over the guns, an invasive cancer consuming reality. The enemy were legion. There were too many foes to defeat by plan and ruse. Only guns, and will, would see the day won, but the defenders were so pitifully few.

Messinius called a wordless halt, clenched fist raised, seeking the best place to deploy his mixed company, veterans all of the Terran Crusade. Gunships and fighters sped overhead, unleashing deadly light and streams of bombs into the packed daemonic masses. There were innumerable cannons crammed onto the gate, and they all fired, rippling the structure with false earthquakes. Soon the many ships and orbital defences of Terra would add their guns, targeting the very world they were meant to guard, but the attack had come so suddenly; as yet they had had no time to react.

The noise was horrendous. Messinius’ audio dampers were at maximum and still the roar of ordnance stung his ears. Those humans that survived today would be rendered deaf. But he would have welcomed more guns, and louder still, for all the defensive fury of the assailed palace could not drown out the hideous noise of the daemons – their sighing hisses, a billion serpents strong, and chittering, screaming wails. It was not only heard but sensed within the soul, the realms of spirit and of matter were so intertwined. Messinius’ being would be forever stained by it.

Tactical information scrolled down his helmplate, near environs only. He had little strategic overview of the situation. The vox-channels were choked with a hellish screaming that made communication impossible. The noosphere was disrupted by etheric backwash spilling from the immaterial rifts the daemons poured through. Messinius was used to operating on his own. Small-scale, surgical actions were the way of the Adeptus Astartes, but in a battle of this scale, a lack of central coordination would lead inevitably to defeat. This was not like the first Siege, where his kind had fought in Legions.

He called up a company-wide vox-cast and spoke to his warriors. They were not his Chapter-kin, but they would listen. The primarch himself had commanded that they do so.

‘Reinforce the mortals,’ he said. ‘Their morale is wavering. Position yourselves every fifty yards. Cover the whole of the south-facing front. Let them see you.’ He directed his warriors by chopping at the air with his left hand. His right, bearing an inactive power fist, hung heavily at his side. ‘Assault Squad Antiocles, back forty yards, single firing line. Prepare to engage enemy breakthroughs only on my mark. Devastators, split to demi-squads and take up high ground, sergeant and sub-squad prime’s discretion as to positioning and target. Remember our objective, heavy infliction of casualties. We kill as many as we can, we retreat, then hold at the Penitent’s Arch until further notice. Command squad, with me.’

Command squad was too grand a title for the mismatched crew Messinius had gathered around himself. His own officers were light years away, if they still lived.

‘Doveskamor, Tidominus,’ he said to the two Aurora Marines with him. ‘Take the left.’

‘Yes, captain,’ they voxed, and jogged away, their green armour glinting orange in the hell-light of the invasion.

The rest of his scratch squad was comprised of a communications specialist from the Death Spectres, an Omega Marine with a penchant for plasma weaponry, and a Raptor holding an ancient standard he’d taken from a dusty display.

‘Why did you take that, Brother Kryvesh?’ Messinius asked, as they moved forward.

‘The palace is full of such relics,’ said the Raptor. ‘It seems only right to put them to use. No one else wanted it.’

Messinius stared at him.

‘What? If the gate falls, we’ll have more to worry about than my minor indiscretion. It’ll be good for morale.’

The squads were splitting to join the standard humans. Such was the noise many of the men on the wall had not noticed their arrival, and a ripple of surprise went along the line as they appeared at their sides. Messinius was glad to see they seemed more firm when they turned their eyes back outwards.

‘Anzigus,’ he said to the Death Spectre. ‘Hold back, facilitate communication within the company. Maximum signal gain. This interference will only get worse. See if you can get us patched in to wider theatre command. I’ll take a hardline if you can find one.’

‘Yes, captain,’ said Anzigus. He bowed a helm that was bulbous with additional equipment. He already had the access flap of the bulky vox-unit on his arm open. He withdrew, the aerials on his power plant extending. He headed towards a systems nexus on the far wall of the plaza, where soaring buttresses pushed back against the immense weight bearing down upon them.

Messinius watched him go. He knew next to nothing about Anzigus. He spoke little, and when he did, his voice was funereal. His Chapter was mysterious, but the same lack of familiarity held true for many of these warriors, thrown together by miraculous events. Over their years lost wandering in the warp, Messinius had come to see some as friends as well as comrades, others he hardly knew, and none he knew so well as his own Chapter brothers. But they would stand together. They were Space Marines. They had fought by the returned primarch’s side, and in that they shared a bond. They would not stint in their duty now.

Messinius chose a spot on the wall, directing his other veterans to left and right. Kryvesh he sent to the mortal officer’s side. He looked down again, out past the enemy and over the outer palace. Spires stretched away in every direction. Smoke rose from all over the landscape. Some of it was new, the work of the daemon horde, but Terra had been burning for weeks. The Astronomican had failed. The galaxy was split in two. Behind them in the sky turned the great palace gyre, its deep eye marking out the throne room of the Emperor Himself.

‘Sir!’ A member of the Palatine Guard shouted over the din. He pointed downwards, to the left. Messinius followed his wavering finger. Three hundred feet below, daemons were climbing. They came upwards in a triangle tipped by a brute with a double rack of horns. It clambered hand over hand, far faster than should be possible, flying upwards, as if it touched the side of the towering gate only as a concession to reality. A Space Marine with claw locks could not have climbed that fast.

‘Soldiers of the Imperium! The enemy is upon us!’

He looked to the mortals. Their faces were blanched with fear. Their weapons shook. Their bravery was commendable nonetheless. Not one of them attempted to run, though a wave of terror preceded the unnatural things clambering up towards them.

‘We shall not turn away from our duty, no matter how fearful the foe, or how dire our fates may be,’ he said. ‘Behind us is the Sanctum of the Emperor Himself. As He has watched over you, now it is your turn to stand in guardianship over Him.’

The creatures were drawing closer. Through a sliding, magnified window on his display, Messinius looked into the yellow and cunning eyes of their leader. A long tongue lolled permanently from the thing’s mouth, licking at the wall, tasting the terror of the beings it protected.

Boltgun actions clicked. His men leaned over the parapet, towering over the mortals as the Lion’s Gate towered over the Ultimate Wall. A wealth of targeting data was exchanged, warrior to warrior, as each chose a unique mark. No bolt would be wasted in the opening fusillade. They could hear the creatures’ individual shrieks and growls, all wordless, but their meaning was clear: blood, blood, blood. Blood and skulls.

Messinius sneered at them. He ignited his power fist with a swift jerk. He always preferred the visceral thrill of manual activation. Motors came to full life. Lightning crackled around it. He aimed downwards with his bolt pistol. A reticule danced over diabolical faces, each a copy of all the others. These things were not real. They were not alive. They were projections of a false god. The Librarian Atramo had named them maladies. A spiritual sickness wearing ersatz flesh.

He reminded himself to be wary. Contempt was as thick as any armour, but these things were deadly, for all their unreality.

He knew. He had fought the Neverborn many times before.

‘While He lives,’ Messinius shouted, boosting his voxmitter gain to maximal, ‘we stand!’

‘For He of Terra!’ the humans shouted, their battle cry loud enough to be heard over the booming of guns.

‘For He of Terra,’ said Messinius. ‘Fire!’ he shouted.

The Space Marines fired first. Boltguns spoke, spitting spikes of rocket flare into the foe. Bolts slammed into daemon bodies, bursting them apart. Black viscera exploded away. Black ichor showered those coming after. The daemons’ false souls screamed back whence they came, though their bones and offal tumbled down like those of any truly living foe.

Las-beams speared next, and the space between the wall top and the scaling party filled with violence. The daemons were unnaturally resilient, protected from death by the energies of the warp, and though many were felled, others weathered the fire, and clambered up still, unharmed and uncaring of their dead. Messinius no longer needed his helm’s magnification to see into the daemon champion’s eyes. It stared at him, its smile a promise of death. The terror that preceded them was replaced by the urge to violence, and that gripped them all, foe and friend. The baseline humans began to lose their discipline. A man turned and shot his comrade, and was shot down in turn. Kryvesh banged the foot of his borrowed banner and called them back into line. Elsewhere, his warriors sang; not their Chapter warsongs, but battle hymns known to all. Wavering human voices joined them. The feelings of violence abated, just enough.

Then the things were over the parapet and on them. Messinius saw Tidominus carried down by a group of daemons, his unit signum replaced by a mortis rune in his helm. The enemy champion was racing at him. Messinius emptied his bolt pistol into its face, blowing half of it away into a fine mist of daemonic ichor. Still it leapt, hurling itself twenty feet over the parapet. Messinius fell back, keeping the creature in sight, targeting skating over his helmplate as the machine-spirit tried to maintain a target lock. Threat indicators trilled, shifting up their priority spectrum.

The daemon held up its enormous gnarled hands. Smoke whirled in the space between, coalescing into a two-handed sword almost as tall as Messinius. By the time its hoofed feet cracked the paving slabs of the square, the creature’s weapon was solid. Vapour streaming from its ruined face, it pointed the broadsword at Messinius and hissed a wordless challenge.

‘Accepted,’ said Messinius, and moved in to attack.

The creature was fast, and punishingly strong. Messinius parried its first strike with an outward push of his palm, fingers spread. Energy crackled. The boom generated by the meeting of human technology and the sorceries of the warp was loud enough to out-compete the guns, but though the impact sent pain lancing up Messinius’ arm, the daemon was not staggered, and pressed in a follow-up attack, swinging the massive sword around its head as if it weighed nothing.

Messinius countered more aggressively this time, punching in to the strike. Another thunderous detonation. Disruption fields shattered matter, but the daemon was not wholly real, and the effect upon it was lesser than it would be upon a natural foe. Nevertheless, this time it was thrown backwards by the blow. Smoke poured from the edge of its blade. It licked black blood from its arm and snarled. Messinius was ready when it leapt: opening his fist, ignoring the sword as it clashed against his pauldron and sheared off a peeling of ceramite, he grabbed the beast about its middle.

The Bloodletters of Khorne were rangy things, all bone and ropey muscle, no space within them for organs. The false god of war had no need for them to eat or breathe, or to give the semblance of being able to do so. They were made only to kill, and to strike fear in the hearts of those they faced. Their waists were solid, and slender, and easily encompassed by Messinius’ power fist. It squirmed in his grip, throwing Messinius’ arm about. Servo motors in his joints locked, supplementary muscle fibres strained, but the White Consul stood firm.

‘Tell your master he is not welcome on Terra,’ he said. His words were calm, a deliberate defiance of the waves of rage pulsing off the daemon.

He closed his hand.

The daemon’s midriff exploded. The top half fell down, still hissing and thrashing. Its sword clanged off the paving and broke into shards, brittle now it was separated from its wielder. They were pieces of the same thing, sword and beast. Apart, the weapon could not survive long.

Messinius cast down the lower portion of the daemon. There were dozens of the things atop the wall, battling with his warriors and the human soldiery. In the second he paused he saw Doveskamor hacked down as he stood over the body of his brother, pieces of armour bouncing across the ground. He saw a group of Palatine Sentinels corner a daemon with their bayonets. He saw a dozen humans cut down by eldritch swords.

Where the humans kept their distance, their ranged weapons took a toll upon the Neverborn. Where the daemons got among them, they triumphed more often than not, even against his Space Marines. Support fire rained down sporadically from above, its usefulness restricted by the difficulty of picking targets from the swirling melee. At the western edge of the line, the heavy weapons were more telling, knocking daemons off the wall before they crested the parapet and preventing them from circling around the back of the Imperial forces. Only his equipment allowed Messinius to see this. Without the helm feeds of his warriors and the limited access he had to the Lion Gate’s auspectoria, he would have been blind, lost in the immediate clash of arms and sprays of blood. He would have remained where he was, fighting. He would not have seen that there were more groups of daemons pouring upwards. He would not have given his order, and then he would have died.

‘Squad Antiocles, engage,’ he said. He smashed a charging daemon into fragments, yanked another back the instant before it gutted a mortal soldier, and stamped its skull flat, while switching again to his company vox-net. ‘All units, fall back to the Penitent’s Arch. Take the mortals with you.’

His assault squad fell from the sky on burning jets, kicking daemons down and shooting them with their plasma and bolt pistols. A roar of promethium from a flamer blasted three bloodletters to ash.

‘Fall back! Fall back!’ Messinius commanded, his words beating time with his blows. ‘Assault Squad Antiocles to cover. Devastators maintain overhead fire.’

Squad Antiocles drove the enemy back. Tactical Space Marines were retreating from the parapet, dragging human soldiers with them. An Ultramarine walked backwards past him, firing his bolter one-handed, a wounded member of the Palatine Guard draped over his right shoulder.

‘Fall back! Fall back!’ Messinius roared. He grabbed a human by the arm and yanked him hard away from the monster trying to slay him, almost throwing him across the square. He pivoted and punched, slamming the man’s opponent in the face with a crackling bang that catapulted its broken corpse over the wall edge. ‘Fall back!’

Mortal soldiers broke and ran while Squad Antiocles held off the foe. Telling to begin with, in moments the assault squad’s momentum was broken, and again more bloodletters were leaping over the edge of the rampart. The Space Marines fired in retreat, covering each other in pairs as they crossed the square diagonally to the Penitent’s Arch. The mortals were getting the idea, running between the Adeptus Astartes and mostly staying out of their fire corridor. With the fight now concentrated around Squad Antiocles, the Devastators were more effective, blasting down the daemons before they could bring their weight of numbers to bear upon Antiocles. Sporadic bursts of fire from the retreating Tactical Marines added to the effect, and for a short period the number of daemons entering the square did not increase.

Messinius tarried a moment, rounding up more of the humans who were either too embattled or deaf to his orders to get out. He reached three still firing over the parapet’s edge and pulled them away. A daemon reared over the parapet and he crushed its skull, but a second leapt up and cleaved hard into his fist, and power fled the weapon. Messinius pumped three bolts into its neck, decapitating it. He moved back.

His power fist was ruined. The daemon’s cut had sliced right through the ceramite, breaking the power field generator and most of the weapon’s strength-boosting apparatus, making it a dead weight. He said a quick thanks to the machine’s departed spirit and smashed the top of his bolt pistol against the quick seal release, at the same time disengaging the power feeds by way of neural link. The clamps holding the power fist to his upper arm came loose and it slid to the floor with a clang, leaving his right arm clad in his standard ceramite gauntlet. A century together. A fine weapon. He had no time to mourn it.

‘Fall back!’ he shouted. ‘Fall back to the Penitent’s Arch!’

He slammed a fresh clip into his bolt pistol. Squad Antiocles were being pushed back. The Devastators walked their fire closer in to the combat. A heavy bolter blasted half a dozen daemons into stinking meat. A missile blew, lifting more into the air. Messinius fell back himself now, leaving it to the last moment before ordering the Assault Marines to leap from the fray. Their jets ignited, driving back the daemons with washes of flame, and they lifted up over his head, leaving four of their brothers dead on the ground. Devastator fire hammered down from above. Anti-personnel weapons set into casemates and swivel turrets on the walls joined in, but the daemons mounted higher and higher in a wave of red that flooded over the parapet.

‘Run!’ he shouted at the straggling human soldiery. ‘Run and survive! Your service is not yet done!’

The Penitent’s Arch led from the square onto a wall walk that curved around to another layer of defences. His Space Marines were already making a firing line across the entrance. A gate could be extended across the arch, sealing the walk from the square, but Messinius refrained from requesting it be closed, as the humans were still streaming past the Adeptus Astartes. Kryvesh waved the banner, whirling it through the air to attract the terrified mortals. The Space Marines fired constantly into the mass of daemons sprinting after them, exhausting their ammunition supplies. Shattered false bodies tumbled down, shot from the front and above, yet still they came, overtaking and dismembering the last warriors fleeing away from the parapet.

Squad Antiocles roared through the arch, landing behind their brethren. Messinius passed between them. For a moment he surveyed the tide of coming fury. Endless red-skinned monsters filling the square like a lake of spilled blood, washing over a score of brightly armoured Space Marine corpses left behind in the retreat. Several hundred humans lay alongside them.

He opened a vox-channel to Gate Command.

‘Wall batteries three-seven-three through three-seven-six, target sector nine five eighty-three, Penitent’s Square, western edge. Five-minute bombardment.’

‘On whose order?’

‘Captain Vitrian Messinius, White Consuls Chapter, Tenth Company. I have the primarch’s authority.’ As he dealt with gunnery control, he was also datapulsing a request for resupply, and checking through layered data screeds.

‘Voice print and signum ident match. Transponder codes valid. We obey.’

The far side of the square erupted in a wall of flame. Heavy cannon shells detonated in a string along the rampart. High-energy beams sliced into the square, turning stone and metal instantly to superheated gas. The approaching daemons were annihilated. A few bolt-rounds cracked off as the last daemons nearing the Space Marine line were put down.

‘Company, cease fire. Conserve ammunition.’ Nobody heard him. Nobody could. He re-sent the order via vox-script. The boltguns cut out.

Penitent’s Square was a cauldron of fire so intense he could feel the heat through his battleplate’s ceramite. The ground shook under his feet and he considered the possibility that the wall would give way. The noise was so all-consuming the idea of speech lost relevance. For five minutes the Lion’s Gate tore madly at its own hide, ripping out chunks of itself in a bid to scrape free the parasites infesting its fabric, then, as suddenly as it had begun, the bombardment ceased.

Where the Penitent’s Square had been, a twisted mass of black metal and shattered stone remained. So formidable were the defences of the Lion’s Gate that the structure beneath had not been penetrated, but it was like this, in small bursts of destruction, that they could lose this war.

Messinius accessed the gate’s noosphere. No daemons had as yet rounded the projecting Penitent’s Spur to come up against their new position. When the attack came again, which it would, it would come from the front.

An ammunition train raced down the walkway from the fortress interior and came to a squealing stop fifty yards away. Medicae personnel jumped down. A Space Marine Apothecary came with them. Human peons rushed about with heavy sack bags full of bolter magazines, passing them out to the transhumans. Spent magazines clattered to the floor. New ones were slammed home. Messinius contacted his squad leaders, taking a quick census of his surviving men, not trusting the digits that read ‘Company Casualties 23%’ blinking in the upper right of his visual field.

Through the smoke given off by burning metal on the far side of the ruined square, he saw movement. Auspex returns tripped his armour’s machine-spirit, and it blinked warnings in his helm.

<threat detected.>

‘They’re coming again,’ he said.

‘My lord?’ A soft voice, one that did not belong in that moment. He ignored it.

‘Engage at fifty-yard range. Make every shot count.’

The ammunition train was hurriedly relieved of their allotted supplies, and sped off, bearing the worst-wounded, to aid whichever beleaguered unit needed it next.

‘Stand ready.’

‘My lord?’ The voice became more insistent.

The voidships in orbit were beginning to fire. Their targeting systems were perturbed by the boiling warp energy and the vortex in constant motion over the Imperial Palace, and many shots went wide, crashing down into the Anterior Barbican, a few falling as far out as Magnifican.

Red monsters bounded towards them, as numerous as before, as if their efforts to thin them had been for naught.

‘Fire,’ he said coldly.

‘My lord, your duty rotation begins in half an hour. You told me to wake you.’

This time he heard. Bolters boomed. Messinius froze them with a thought, and with another he shut down the hypnomat entirely.

Vitrian Messinius awoke groggily.

‘My lord,’ his servant said. Selwin, he was called. ‘You are returned from your recollections?’

‘I am awake, Selwin, yes,’ Messinius said irritably. His mouth was dry. He wanted to be left alone.

‘Shall I?’ Selwin gestured to the hypnomat.

Messinius nodded and rubbed his face. It felt numb. Selwin flicked a number of toggles on the hypnomat and it powered down, the steady glow of its innards fading to nothing and winking out, taking the immediacy of Messinius’ memories with it.

‘The wall again?’ Selwin asked.

The hypnomat’s primary use was to instil knowledge without active learning on the subject’s part, but it could reawaken memories to be lived again. Full immersion in the hypnomat required cooperation from Messinius’ catalepsean node, and coming out of the half-sleep was never as easy as true waking. Reliving past events dulled his wits. Messinius reminded himself to be guarded. He forgot sometimes that he was not on Sabatine any more. The local saying ‘This is Terra’ encompassed a multitude of sins. Spying was among them.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Personal debriefing.’ He shook his head and unplugged the hypnomat’s input cables from the neural ports set into his arms and neck. ‘Nothing new learned.’

Selwin nodded, then hesitantly said, ‘If I may be so bold as to ask, why do it, my lord, if you expect to learn nothing?’

‘Because I can always be wrong,’ Messinius said. He pointed at the hypnomat. It was a bulky machine set on a trolley, but not too big for an unaltered man to move. ‘Take that away. Inform my armourer I will be with him in a few minutes.’

Selwin bowed. ‘Already done, my lord.’

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A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

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* 3. Further to the general restriction at paragraph 2, Black Library shall be entitled to terminate this license in the event that you use or store the e-book (or any part of it) in any way not expressly licensed. This includes (but is by no means limited to) the following circumstances:

o 3.1 you provide the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.2 you make the e-book available on bit-torrent sites, or are otherwise complicit in ‘seeding’ or sharing the e-book with any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.3 you print and distribute hard copies of the e-book to any company, individual or other legal person who does not possess a license to use or store it;

o 3.4 you attempt to reverse engineer, bypass, alter, amend, remove or otherwise make any change to any copy protection technology which may be applied to the e-book.

* 4. By purchasing an e-book, you agree for the purposes of the Consumer Protection (Distance Selling) Regulations 2000 that Black Library may commence the service (of provision of the e-book to you) prior to your ordinary cancellation period coming to an end, and that by purchasing an e-book, your cancellation rights shall end immediately upon receipt of the e-book.

* 5. You acknowledge that all copyright, trademark and other intellectual property rights in the e-book are, shall remain, the sole property of Black Library.

* 6. On termination of this license, howsoever effected, you shall immediately and permanently delete all copies of the e-book from your computers and storage media, and shall destroy all hard copies of the e-book which you have derived from the e-book.

* 7. Black Library shall be entitled to amend these terms and conditions from time to time by written notice to you.

* 8. These terms and conditions shall be governed by English law, and shall be subject only to the jurisdiction of the Courts in England and Wales.

* 9. If any part of this license is illegal, or becomes illegal as a result of any change in the law, then that part shall be deleted, and replaced with wording that is as close to the original meaning as possible without being illegal.

* 10. Any failure by Black Library to exercise its rights under this license for whatever reason shall not be in any way deemed to be a waiver of its rights, and in particular, Black Library reserves the right at all times to terminate this license in the event that you breach clause 2 or clause 3.