GRAHAM MCNEILL
THE EITHER

I
    
    SHIPBOARD HOROLOGS SHOWED that three years had passed since the infamy of Isstvan. It felt longer. Much longer. Three bloody years hunting the mewling scraps of Legions culled on the black sands. A duty he hadn't relished, even as he recognised its necessity.
    Three years the XVI Legion spent earning glory without him, fighting at the forefront of this new-birthed war.
    That hurt. That hurt a lot.
    But he was nothing if not a true son, and he knew the value of obeying orders. So much time apart from his brothers and Lupercal was akin to a hot blade cutting pieces of his soul away.
    Leaving a void like the one gouged by Verulam Moy's death.
    Was this what the warriors of the X Legion felt, knowing their gene-sire was dead? Hollowed out and empty. In need of fresh purpose to fill that void? Was that what drove them to keep fighting in the face of certain extinction?
    A yearning for purpose when there was no purpose?
    He had described his feelings to a flesh-spare warrior of the Iron Hands they'd captured a year ago in the airless hulk of the last remaining Momed voidhive.
    His name was Tharbis of Clan Felg, but that was about all he ever told them. Interrogating one of the Legiones Astartes through pain was an exercise in futility. Doubly so with an Iron Hand.
    Instead, he sought to break Tharbis with words of Ferrus Manus.
    'I saw your gene-sire die on Isstvan,' he would say on one of his frequent visits to his captive's cell. 'I watched the Phoenician weep as he clove his brother primarch's head from his shoulders. And do you know what else I saw as he fell? I saw the fight wither in the Iron Hands still standing. They simply gave up. One by one, they laid down their weapons and were slaughtered like swine. All so they might die next to their father. Quite noble in its own way.'
    All inventions, of course - he had seen nothing but dying Salamanders on Isstvan - but they cut Tharbis deeply. Over and over he sought to break his captive with hopelessness and despair, yet even to his last, metallic, oil-rich breath, Tharbis had defied him.
    The last word to pass his lips had been a curse and a threat all in one. A name, he had since come to learn.
    Shadrak Meduson.
    He had laughed as Tharbis died, leaning close so that the last thing the warrior would hear would finally crush him.
    'Haven't you heard?' said Tybalt Marr. 'I've already killed Shadrak Meduson.'
    
    THE SKIES OVER Dwell burned hot. Re-entry cones painted it in fire. Tybalt Marr was bringing his ships and his warriors back to the Warmaster. They'd translated in-system seven days ago and made all speed for the fifth planet. Only the ruins of the ship schools, battery plates and drifting siege-hulks locked in ever-decreasing orbits forced them to exercise more caution in their approach.
    The Sea of Enna shone like an elliptical mirror of brass, reflecting the low sun and the sky-born atomic fires. It reminded Marr of the great amber eye at the centre of Lupercal's breastplate.
    He guided the Stormbird lower, circling the haphazard collection of dwellings that made up the city of Tyjun, a disordered collection of eclectic structural forms filling a shallow rift valley like the leavings of a tsunami.
    Only a vast ochre necropolis atop an overlooking plateau presented any unity of form. He'd learned it was known as the Mausolytic, and that it pre-dated the Imperium by millennia.
    Fitting that this reunion would be held in the shadow of a house of the dead.
    Marr overflew its blocky immensity, keeping the proud nose of the Stormbird high. A flyby to honour Lupercal and to announce the triumphant return of one of his true sons. Wasteful not to simply land, yes, but he and his warriors had earned the right to preen a little.
    A dangerous warleader was dead by their hand, his host broken. That was worth a little grandstanding.
    Ten Stormbirds flew in formation with Marr's craft, roaring overhead with a legacy of victory carved into their entry-hot flanks. Marr made one more circle before finally issuing the order to land. Coming in from the north, the septentrional aspect he had always favoured, he transitioned his gunship to vertical flight.
    He brought the heavy craft down hard, a war landing.
    Leaving the post-landing checks and protocols to a Legion thrall-servitor, Marr decoupled from the controls and made his way back through the crew bays.
    Kysen Scybale already had the squads on their feet. Scybale was a sergeant, Cthonian to the core. Old guard, but with sense enough to move with the times. A man of his experience should have been made captain by now, but Scybale knew where he fitted best.
    One look into his flinty grey eyes, lit from within by Cthonia's dark fire, and even captains found themselves taking an unaccounted step back.
    Marr's chosen warriors formed up, eager to rejoin the Legion. Scybale stood at Marr's right hand, Cyon Azedine on his left. The Company Champion's hand never strayed from the leather-wound grip of his mortuary sword, its basket-hilt reworked to bear the death mask of the Iron Hand who had borne it before him.
    'Don't we all make a pretty picture?' asked Scybale.
    Marr grinned and gave the sergeant a nod, locking his transverse-crested helm into the crook of his arm as the forward assault ramp lowered with a squeal of pneumatics.
    Russet light poured in on a gust of air, hot with propellant from the Stormbird's exhausts.
    Marr tasted Dwell.
    Dry, spiced atmosphere. Salt-rich wind from the sea and a low range of still-smouldering heavy metals. A lingering taste of acrid preservatives.
    He marched down the ramp, his stride sure and confident, purposeful in a way it hadn't been for a long time. He emerged from the shadow of the Stormbird onto a newly-constructed apron of scorched plascrete at the edge of the plateau. Gunships squatted like scaled raptors in hot clouds of vapour to either side.
    'The Legion was expecting us, yes?' asked Azedine.
    Marr had no answer for him.
    He hadn't expected a triumph to match Ullanor. He'd hoped, but hadn't really expected Horus Lupercal to be here. He'd hoped a few companies of Sons of Horus at least.
    Four warriors stood at the far end of the apron. Three were known to him as brothers, the fourth a stranger. At their number, Marr felt a twinge of unease. Nothing he could identify, just a ripple of sourceless disquiet.
    First Captain Ezekyle Abaddon was impossible to mistake.
    Tybalt Marr, 18th Captain of the Sons of Horus
    
    Towering and brutal, his shaven head and swishing topknot made him unique among the XVI Legion. Cleaving close to Abaddon was Falkus Kibre, his enormous war-plate making his already massive frame even larger.
    The third warrior's face was cold and humourless, sharply angled and patrician in mien. Like the Warmaster, but without the dynamism of Horus Lupercal. A true son, saw Marr, but one that was unknown to him.
    But in the face of Little Horus Aximand, Marr had his first real shock. He did his best to hide it, but the look on Aximand's face told him he hadn't been successful.
    Little Horus held out his gauntlet before he could say anything.
    'Welcome to Dwell, Tybalt,' said Aximand, his disfigured face moving as though the muscles beneath his skin were being worked by invisible strings. Still recognisably a true son, but somehow entirely other. Marr couldn't decide whether Aximand now looked more or less like their sire.
    'Little Horus, what—' said Marr, but Aximand shook his head.
    'Another time,' said Aximand. 'Let's just say that steel forged on Medusa has such a fine edge, and leave it at that.'
    'As you say,' agreed Marr with a slight incline of his head.
    'So the Either returns to us,' said Abaddon with what was probably meant to be a grin, but came off looking more like the death mask on Azedine's mortuary blade. 'Or is it the 'Or', I could never tell you two apart…'
    Anger touched Marr at Abaddon's poor attempt at humour.
    'You never did have any skill at jests, did you, Ezekyle?' he said. 'Verulam died on Davin's moon. So I'm not the Either any more, and I'm certainly not the Or. Now I'm just Tybalt Marr. Captain Tybalt Marr.'
    Abaddon's brow furrowed, but he refrained from rising to the barb, much to Marr's surprise.
    Before that changed, Aximand took a step towards him and put a hand on his shoulder guard. He gently, but firmly turned Marr towards the polished ochre stone of the Mausolytic.
    'We meet in a liminal space,' he said. 'A place where life and death are not so far apart as we might wish. It's fitting we remember the dead as we knew them. Ezekyle meant no disrespect to the memory of Verulam. Did you, Ezekyle?'
    'No,' said Abaddon through gritted teeth. 'I did not.'
    Aximand nodded and stepped back. 'You see? The restoration of the Mournival has given Ezekyle fresh reserves of empathy and humility.'
    That made Marr smile until the full import of Aximand's words hit home. That explained the vague unease he'd felt when he'd seen there were four of them.
    The others saw the realisation in his eyes.
    'He didn't know,' said the unknown warrior. 'Of course, how could he?'
    Marr rounded on him, taking in his inferior rank.
    'Who are you, and why are you talking to me as though you're my equal?'
    The warrior gave a curt bow, barely enough to show respect.
    'Apologies, Captain Marr, I offer all respect,' he said. 'My name is Grael Noctua of the Twenty-Fifth Warlocked.'
    'You're just a squad commander,' said Marr.
    'Yes,' said Noctua. 'For now.'
    'And you're Mournival? All of you?'
    Noctua nodded, and Marr saw a cold glimmer of a ruthlessly calculating intelligence. He wondered if the others had seen it.
    'We needed our confraternity restored,' said Aximand. 'Now more than ever.'
    Marr nodded, the muscles in his jaw tight as tension cables in a Stormbird's wing.
    'And Lupercal?' he said. 'He approves?'
    'He does,' said Abaddon, and Marr felt the knife in his back twist just a little deeper.
    Falkus Kibre stepped forward and clapped both gauntlets on Marr's forearms. He and the Master of the Justaerin had never been close, but Marr had always respected Kibre's honest and brusque to-the-point manner.
    'It's good to have you back,' said Kibre. 'Took your time disposing of a few ragamuffin survivors, eh?'
    'You didn't vox ahead to tell them?' asked Scybale. 'Tell them what you did.'
    'Tell us what?' asked Aximand.
    Marr took a breath and said, 'That a warleader of the Tenth Legion named Shadrak Meduson was alloying those ragamuffin survivors into a fighting force of not inconsiderable strength. We destroyed his fleet at Arissak.'
    Almost immediately, Marr knew something was wrong when he saw the confused reaction to his pronouncement.
    'No, Tybalt,' said Aximand. 'I'm afraid Shadrak Meduson is very much alive.'
    
    He should have died.
    That was the thought uppermost in Marr's mind as he watched grainy pict-capture of the Iron Hands' Fire Raptors strafing the Dome of Revivification with gunfire. High-velocity shells tore through its latticework structure, detonating the cryotubes within and wrecking mechanisms thousands of years old.
    The Fire Raptors circled, their centreline and waist turrets braying with explosive fire, and the tower upon which the dome sat erupted like a flaming geyser.
    Horus, Mortarion and Fulgrim were in that dome.
    A meeting of brothers undone by an attempted decapitating strike.
    If it hadn't been directed at his own primarch, Marr would have admired such a gutsy approach. Especially in the wake of the White Scars' abortive assassination attempt.
    To have lain in wait for so long displayed a level of patience Marr had hitherto not encountered in his dealings with Shadrak Meduson. The boarding action he'd led aboard the Crown of Flame had taught Marr much about the man: his cunning, his determination and his resilience. Also recklessness and the exploitable desire to strike back hard.
    But patience? No, that wasn't a virtue he associated with the warleader of the Iron Tenth.
    Could Meduson be alive? Might he have escaped the slaughter in the Arissak System? It had been so comprehensive a defeat, so thorough in its bloodletting, that it seemed impossible anything could have escaped. He'd watched Meduson's flagship die, seen its guttering hulk tear itself apart in a lethal torsion of reactor detonations and warp implosions.
    Marr shook his head and returned his attention to the pict capture, the swaying feed coming from a servitor drone attracted by the sudden noise and light.
    When the end came, it came suddenly.
    One of the gunships crumpled as though being crushed in the inescapable gravity of a black hole.
    Then Horus Lupercal was there.
    Marr's breath caught in his throat.
    He'd watched this a dozen times already, and still the power of the Warmaster was astonishing. He leapt onto the prow of a gunship hooked by a chain hurled by the Death Lord. With one sweep of Worldbreaker, Lupercal demolished the Fire Raptor's prow, before vaulting onto the last enemy craft and breaking its spine.
    It was the most incredible thing Marr had ever seen.
    The pict capture exploded into static as Sons of Horus gunships finally arrived on station and shot down anything that didn't bear the Eye of Horus. Marr reached forward. He toggled the ivory switch to loop the broadcast and sat back on his bench seat as the image of the dome reconstituted itself in veils of light.
    Marr sat in the central courtyard of what might once have been a wealthy merchant's villa, but was now just an empty marble shell. It sat on the upper slopes of the rift valley, within walking distance of the Mausolytic Precinct, wherein Horus Lupercal was said to be communing with the frozen dead of Dwell.
    Marr had brooded within the villa for five days, the knowledge of Shadrak Meduson's survival having robbed him of the triumphant news he was to deliver. Small wonder the primarch made no time for him.
    Two dozen data-slates lay scattered on the black-veined flagstones of the courtyard, each filled with notations of enemy actions over the last three years, spreading out from Isstvan. He'd studied them obsessively for those five days and his eidetic memory was fully conversant with everything they contained.
    Marr picked up the nearest and scanned its contents again.
    Acts of sabotage, supply lines cut, fuelling asteroids destroyed and a host of guerilla engagements where enemy forces had attacked, fallen back then attacked again.
    Raven Guard through and through.
    The random nature of each strike, and, more tellingly, its isolation from the others, had kept Marr - kept everyone - from registering their importance. But when viewed as being part of a greater whole, the faintest hint of an implacable, resolute and indefatigable will became apparent.
    An iron will.
    Marr saw nothing definitive, but each morsel was a tantalising breadcrumb that pointed to one inescapable conclusion.
    Shadrak Meduson was indeed alive.
    Not just alive, but raising his threatened storm with new skills and a new level of cunning alloyed in the fire of his apparent destruction.
    Meduson's supposed defeat had come in the shock-spasms following Isstvan V. The Iron Hands warleader had fought as he'd always fought, the only way he knew how, gathering whatever resources he could to assemble a fresh fighting force.
    That was the way of the X Legion. If a machine broke down, they did whatever it took to get it working again, replacing broken parts with whatever came to hand. Meduson had taken that credo to its logical extension by incorporating squads from the Salamanders and Raven Guard into his formations.
    And it had very nearly worked.
    Marr had destroyed Meduson's agglomerated fleet, but the scattered, ad hoc flotillas in the outer reaches of the system had taken much longer to hunt down.
    In the end, the survivors had been too broken, too dispersed and too psychologically shattered to endure the ferocity of Marr's vengeful prosecution. Of course, there had been elements that evaded destruction, but he'd believed them to be minor irritations and barely worth notice.
    The assassination attempt on Dwell was the prism that threw an entirely new and dreadful light on that belief.
    He reached down and lifted a clay amphora of wine that had somehow survived the city's fall and which he'd found half-empty in the basement. It was too thin and watery to his tastes, but just drinking it stoked a fire in his belly as his genhanced metabolism countered the alcohol.
    The wine tasted sour, but everything tasted sour just now.
    
    MARR WANDERED THE empty halls of the villa, drinking from the amphora and letting his mind consider the idea that the random attacks on forces sworn to the Warmaster were not random at all.
    He had to take his suspicions to Horus Lupercal, but needed to be absolutely sure that what he believed was beyond doubt.
    Too much certainty and he would be viewed as paranoid, jumping at shadows and seeing threats where none existed. Too little and Lupercal would dismiss him out of hand, relegating him to the rear echelons of forgotten warriors whose names history wouldn't bother to remember.
    But hadn't that already happened?
    How many more times could he be passed over? How many more times could he be ignored? The Either and the Or, two nicknames blithely indifferent to the individual heroism of Tybalt Marr and Verulam Moy's achievements.
    Marr knew how the Legion viewed him. Precise, efficient and workmanlike. Steady, but without the glories won by men like Sedirae, Abaddon or, apparently, Grael Noctua. Even Marr's magnificent victories in the low mountains of Murder hadn't changed that perception.
    He remembered standing in the strategium of the Vengeful Spirit during the early stages of the war on Murder. Loken had been there, spitefully leaving him to the droning attentions of Iacton Qruze. The old warrior had been a relic from a bygone age of the Legion, a man whose counsel was rarely sought, but always offered.
    'I won't be the half-heard,' said Marr, making his way down a carpeted hallway in the upper levels of the villa, a passageway replete with portraits that bore unmistakable genetic links.
    Only the most recent picture had no date of death beneath it. A woman shawled with rich fabrics and draped in expensive jewellery stared back at him, handsome with rich living and what looked like subtle flesh sculpting.
    'Did you own this fine dwelling?' he asked the portrait. 'How did it feel to have it taken from you? To have your dreams crushed under the boots of the Sons of Horus?'
    The portrait was, of course, silent.
    'Are you even still alive? Perhaps you fled to the interior countryside to wait out the war. Maybe you took refuge in another of your holdings, or in the household of a friend.'
    Marr stepped away from the portrait and hurled the amphora at the wall. It shattered and soaked the picture, drenching it in wine that dripped in garnet droplets from its gilt frame.
    'It doesn't matter!' he roared. 'Whatever became of you, you are nothing now. Whatever your achievements, they are as dust in the wind. All your labours, all your dedication, blood, sweat and tears… all shed for nothing.'
    He turned as he heard a door opening below. Footsteps on marble. Too heavy a tread to be anything other than a legionary.
    'Tybalt?' shouted a voice, echoing through the villa. 'Are you in here?'
    He made his way back through the villa to the head of a fine set of marble and ouslite stairs that split apart midway down their length to curve groundwards in opposing symmetrical arcs. Below was Little Horus Aximand, standing in the centre of a mosaic floor of coloured glass tiles that depicted bucolic scenes of Dwell's pastoral antiquity.
    'What do you want?'
    'To talk,' said Aximand. 'As old friends do when they meet after long absences.'
    Marr made his way down the stairs, much as the lady of this house must once have done when receiving guests. Aximand waited patiently, his new face regarding Marr quizzically. Belted at his waist was a huge blade of Cthonian bluesteel, its edge notched and badly in need of repair.
    'I want you to know that I put your name forward,' said Aximand. 'For the Mournival, I mean.'
    'But I was rejected.'
    'Ezekyle knows you are a good man, and coming from him that is a superlative compliment.'
    Marr reached the bottom of the steps.
    'But he still rejected my appointment,' said Marr. 'Which goes some way to explaining why he didn't tear my head off when I insulted him on the landing field.'
    Aximand nodded. 'I'd urged him to be sympathetic. After a while he agreed.'
    Marr grinned. Little Horus Aximand had been a true friend to him over the years, but this latest wound in his pride was going to take more than consoling words to salve.
    'Why was I rejected this time?' asked Marr. 'And please, don't try and sweeten the balm.'
    'Very well. Ezekyle didn't think you had the stomach for the job,' said Aximand.
    Marr ground his teeth at so casual a dismissal.
    'He kept pushing for his own men,' continued Aximand. 'Choleric types like Kibre, Targost and Ekaddon, but we needed balance. I hoped you would be the one to bring it, upon your return.'
    'Balance?' asked Marr. 'And yet you let the Widowmaker in? I wonder if you properly understand the concept of balance.'
    'You know Ezekyle,' said Aximand with a shrug. 'Once he gets an idea in his head, it's next to impossible to shift.'
    'So that's why you made the overture to Grael Noctua? One of his, one of yours.'
    'Something like that,' said Aximand, and Marr caught a trace of something else, some other reason behind Aximand's suggestion of Grael Noctua, something he wondered if Aximand himself even understood.
    He sighed and said, 'I'd offer you some wine, but I think I just smashed the last amphora in Tyjun.'
    'Shame.'
    'No, it wasn't very good.'
    Aximand smiled, and even with his new face, its warmth was genuine. 'So what are we to do if not drink as warriors?'
    'You brought a sword,' said Marr. 'We could fight.'
    'Would that help?'
    'Help with what?'
    'To balance your humours,' said Aximand. 'Because it looks like they need balancing.'
    'Aye,' said Marr. 'There's a courtyard at the centre of the villa, that should suffice for an arena. Take up that monstrous blade of yours and we'll fight.'
    'Mourn-it-All,' said Aximand.
    'What?'
    'My sword, it's called Mourn-it-All'.
    'I know how it feels,' said Marr. 
    
  II
    
    'RIDICULOUS,' SAID ABADDON, dropping the data-slate to the gleaming obsidian table. 'That's what they want you to think.'
    They gathered in one of the sepulchral audience chambers of the Mausolytic, a place where the citizens of Dwell could meet and commune with their ancestors. Octagonal, with semicircular alcoves spaced at regular intervals around the wall, the gloomy and sombre chamber had been appropriated by the Mournival for their newly instigated meetings.
    At Marr's request they gathered to hear his suspicions of the growing threat of Shadrak Meduson.
    Aximand sat before a glowing hololith, the light throwing the bruises on his cheek and swollen eye into sharp relief. Their sparring in the villa had been a brutal, punishing affair, of which Marr had taken the honours. Cathartic and not a little liberating, Aximand had been proven correct in that it had balanced Marr's humours.
    Little Horus studied an entoptic rendering of interlinked icons.
    Each one was the location of an attack on their or their allies' forces, with a spreading chain of outcomes linking to other attacks and their consequences.
    It looked so much like a web - Marr half expected to see the image of a glowing spider at its centre.
    Or an iron fist.
    'It's entirely the opposite,' said Aximand. 'If Tybalt's right, then they want us to dismiss them, to view them as a negligible threat until it's too late.'
    Grael Noctua had a spread of data-slates fanned out before him, scrolling through multiple informational cascades at once.
    'Or Ezekyle's right and it's all just beating the brush to make noise, to make us think there's a huge force out there working to some unseen plan and forcing the Warmaster to divert resources to fight them.'
    Of all the Moumival, Noctua had thus far asked the most penetrating questions. Aspects Marr himself had not considered, counter-positions and Advocatus diaboli refutations that made him feel like he had entered a court-martial with nothing more than circumstantial evidence and hearsay to prove his case.
    Abaddon paced the floor, his boundless energies keeping him from sitting in one place for any length of time. Kibre sat opposite Aximand, restraining himself from pacing as Abaddon did with visible effort.
    'If this were true,' said Falkus Kibre, speaking slowly and tapping the nearest data-slate, 'don't you think Horus Lupercal would have seen it?'
    Elevation to the Moumival was evidently suiting Kibre.
    Much to Marr's surprise, it was allowing a maturity he hadn't suspected the Widowmaker was capable of attaining to bloom. He'd asked the one and only question that had given Marr second thoughts about presenting his findings at all.  Marr hesitated, knowing he was taking a risk in suggesting any lack on the part of the Warmaster.
    'Lupercal's gaze is fixed upon Terra,' he said 'It keeps him from seeing what is behind us.'
    Abaddon stopped his pacing.
    'And you said he didn't have the stomach for this,' said Aximand with a chuckle.
    The First Captain switched his thunderous gaze between Marr and Aximand. 'Another one who thinks he knows war better than the Warmaster,' he said, with a shake of the head. 'There's nothing here, Marr, just a lot of smoke with no fire. You were on Isstvan. You know what we did there. Do you really think Lupercal would have been so careless as to let enough warriors escape who might form any kind of credible threat?'
    Marr knew he was on dangerous ground here. To agree with Abaddon was to openly criticise their primarch, and even Aximand would take a dim view of such open dissent.
    Speculation was dangerous here, so he stuck to facts.
    He leaned over the table and switched the hololith to display scrolling diagrams that looked like genealogical trees, but which were in fact Legion orders of battle.
    'This is a full manifest of the enemy forces deployed at Isstvan as it was divined at the opening of the assault,' said Marr, splitting the holo into three columns, silver, green and black. 'Iron Hands, Salamanders and Raven Guard. Watch.'
    One by one, the icons representing enemy squads changed from pale blue to red as Marr fed in casualty reports and recorded exterminations. Like the creeping cellular sickness Marr had once observed Apothecary Vaddon studying in the bloodstream of an infected Scout auxilia, it expanded and increased the speed of its attack.
    'Even though they are our enemies, it still chills the blood to see so much Legion strength lost,' said Noctua.
    'Don't be foolish,' said Abaddon. 'You don't grieve for the enemy when he dies, you give thanks it wasn't you.'
    Eventually the display finished updating, leaving the estimated forces a ragged shadow of their former glory.
    'As best as can be estimated through collated butcher's bills and recovered armour, this is as close to an accurate figure as I can ascribe to the number of warriors who likely escaped Isstvan.'
    The red icons of destroyed Legion formations faded out, and Marr swept the remaining icons together. They didn't fit together nearly as neatly as the original diagram, but then this wasn't an order of battle, just a representation of what had likely survived the massacre.
    'Look at what's left, look at what we can't account for,' said Marr. 'I'll wager it's more than you thought, yes? Perhaps twenty-two thousand warriors all told, give or take a few thousand either side. That's not a force we can just ignore.'
    'So more got off Isstvan that we thought,' said Abaddon. 'It still doesn't prove Shadrak Meduson's behind all these attacks or that he has some overarching plan. He mustered some resistance here at Dwell, but we defeated him. You broke him at Arissak. If he is in command, then he's doing a pretty poor job of fighting us. These attacks, irritating as they might be, are meaningless in the larger scheme of things.'
    'Are they?' asked Marr, skidding a data-slate over the tabletop towards Abaddon. 'Meduson threatened to raise the storm against us, and that's just what he's done. Look at what these meaningless attacks achieved. An entire company of Sons of Horus diverted from the front lines of the war. Months spent securing Isstvan's supply routes, increased security around captured systems and, more crucially, the slowing of the march to Terra.'
    Abaddon slammed his fist down on the table and cracks spread across its mirror-black surface, reaching out to each member of the Mournival.
    'Enough! You think because Meduson escaped you once before that he is everywhere now. You really expect us to take these guilty delusions of yours to Lupercal? No, Tybalt, go back to your company and get them ready for war. Within the week we will leave Dwell for a greater prize.'
    'You won't take this to Lupercal?' asked Marr.
    'No,' said the First Captain. 'We will not.'
    'And the rest of you agree with this?'
    Kibre nodded, as Marr knew he would. Noctua also nodded, but he had at least considered his decision.
    Aximand placed his palms on the table, but any hopes that Little Horus would side with him were quickly dashed.
    'I think there is some merit in this, Tybalt, but I have to agree with my Mournival brothers,' he said. 'If this threat is as dire as you believe, to divert the level of resources you'd need to deal with it would greatly weaken our thrust on Terra.'
    Marr nodded slowly and switched the hololith's display from the combined survivor lists to an image of the galactic spiral. Isstvan shimmered with a faint nimbus of cerulean light, Terra with a pulsing yellow haze, a blister in need of lancing.
    'Ask yourself this, Mournival,' said Marr, pointing to the tenebrous gulfs of space between the blue and the gold. 'Who knows how much time the remnants of these shattered Legions have bought the Emperor and his warriors to fortify, regroup and prepare? How much closer to Terra would we be now, if not for them?'
    He leaned forwards.
    'And I'll tell you another thing, if Meduson is behind these attacks, then he has a plan, and things are only going to get worse.'
    
    KYSEN SCYBALE AND Cyon Azedine were waiting for him in the pillared approach vestibule beyond the Mausolytic's inner chambers. He marched past them, helm held in the crook of one arm, his other hand gripping the hilt of his sword. He kept up the swift pace until they stood on the scorched granite steps of the Mausolytic, looking out over the Sea of Enna.
    'I'm guessing that didn't go well,' said Scybale.
    'No,' said Marr. 'It didn't.'
    'And there is no word yet from the primarch?' asked Azedine.
    'None.'
    'But I see you're still set on this course,' said Scybale. 'Without sanction or authority?'
    Marr looked up into the burning sky and nodded.
    'Now more than ever,' he said.
    
    SORTIES OUT TOWARD Dwells Mandeville point were rare, and despite the name such locations were very rarely fixed points in space. The term was equally applied to any point far enough away from the gravity well of a star to allow safe translation into the warp. In essence, any point on a notional sphere surrounding the star could be the Mandeville point, which made a mockery of any attempt to guard it.
    Local system pilots and astropaths, of course, knew points upon that sphere where the angles between the Empyreal realm and real space intersected to a greater degree and allowed for a smoother warp-translation.
    Occupying regions of space tens of thousands of kilometres wide, they were haunted voids, where sourceless voices muttered obscenities and ghosts lurked in the shadows.
    And such points could be guarded.
    Three Sons of Horus vessels followed a stately course towards Dwells coreward jump point, known locally as the Azoth Gate. The two destroyers, the Helicanus and the Kashin, and the frigate Lupercal Pursuivant, bristled with vanes and spikes, mailed fists in the face of the void.
    The small flotilla had set out from Dwell six days ago, and were making good time through the asteroid belt spread between the seventh and eighth planets. Marr commanded from the bridge of Lupercal Pursuivant, keeping his vessels in close formation as they navigated between waypoints towards the Azoth Gate.
    The asteroids were the debris of the system's creation millions of years before, left to drift in a captured orbit around the sun. Hundreds of kilometres in diameter, each vast hunk of inert rock drifted through space like an aimless wanderer. Thousands of kilometres separated each asteroid from its nearest neighbour, making transit of the belt a relatively simple affair.
    Cosmic dust and micrometeor impacts ablated the hulls of all three vessels, fouling local auspex sectors with false returns and phantom images.
    If there were going to be an attack, this would be an ideal location from which to launch it. Despite that, the three shipmasters were making no attempt at stealth. A constant chatter of vox passed between each vessel and active surveyor sweeps, together with high-energy electromagnetic pulses, lashed the void before them.
    The auspex stations on every bridge revealed no trace of enemy presence.
    Not that Marr expected any.
    Not yet, at least.
    
    THE FIRST SIGN of trouble came when the engines of the Lupercal Pursuivant stuttered with occlusion flare. The venting systems of a starship's drive systems were necessarily extensive, given the volatile plasmas employed in their reactor cores.
    The fouling of venting systems with void-borne dust was something no captain could afford, carrying as it did the risk of explosive blowback into the reactor cores.
    When the Master of Engines sent word to the bridge of the Lupercal Pursuivant of ejection failures throughout the engineering decks, Marr immediately shut down the reactors.
    A flurry of urgent vox passed between the three shipmasters as the best course of action was deliberated. The Master of Engines estimated thirteen hours for the servitors to scrub the vents clear, and thus Marr gave the order for the Helicanus and the Kashin to continue onwards.
    Two vessels on station was better than none.
    The Lupercal Pursuivant would haul anchor in the shadow of an asteroid and rejoin the flotilla upon the restoration of drive functionality.
    
    ELEVEN HOURS PASSED before they caught the first hint of another ship on an intercepting parabola. Marr stiffened on the command throne as the Master of Auspex lifted his fist - a withered, fused claw of a thing.
    'Captain Marr,' he said in a sopping gestalt of a dozen or more interleaved voices. 'A vessel approaches.'
    'Designation?'
    'By displacement, a rapid strike cruiser. The minds aboard bear the unmistakable touch of Medusa upon them.'
    Marr didn't question this last morsel of information.
    More than just machines were searching the void around the Lupercal Pursuivant. Locked in a pitch black chamber within the vessel's prow, a host of warp-touched astropaths were linked to its sensorium via neural spikes driven into their cuneocerebellar tracts.
    As it had been described to Marr, they felt vibrations in the spaces between real space and the warp.
    Dark-robed Mechanicum adepts had modified the Lupercal Pursuivant's auspex systems during the three year hunt for Meduson's fleet, which had given the Sons of Horus a marked advantage against the Iron Hands.
    A ship could go as dark as it was possible to go and still the Lupercal Pursuivant's shuttered astropaths could find it if the minds aboard burned brightly enough.
    And from the look of the phosphor-bright image on the viewscreen, the minds on this new ship burned so very brightly.
    The Master of Auspex had once been a warrior of the Sons of Horus, but now he was something both more and less than transhuman. His altered body reclined on a grav-couch, pierced through by scores of bubbling tubes and inload cables. His head was encased in a latticework scaffold and the lid of his skull was crowned by numerous invasive implants. All of which completely remodelled the synaptic architecture of his brain to better process the visions coming from the astropaths and display them in a useable fashion.
    'Looks like you were right,' said Scybale, his slate-grey eyes following the glittering track of the incoming starship. 'They've been watching us. Who knows for how long…'
    Marr nodded.
    'It makes sense,' he said. 'We were the last of the Sons of Horus fleets coming in to Dwell, and such a muster speaks of a greater deployment to come. I can't imagine that Shadrak Meduson wouldn't want to know what Lupercal's next move is.'
    'So he left a vessel lying in wait to watch our movements.'
    'Yes, but whoever is in command of that ship is Iron Hands to the core,' said Marr. 'He couldn't resist a foundering vessel in an asteroid belt.'
    'More fool him.'
    'Who's to say we wouldn't do the same if Lupercal fell? What risks would we take to strike back at those who cut him down?'
    Scybale shrugged, unwilling to concede he might make such an error of judgement. Instead, he changed the subject, gesturing towards the Master of Auspex.
    'As useful as… this has proven, it's no end for a warrior of the Legion,' said Scybale.
    Marr nodded in agreement. 'It sits ill with me also, sergeant, but the results speak for themselves.'
    Scybale's vox chirruped and he placed two fingers to his ear. He nodded at what he was hearing.
    'Enemy vessel five thousand kilometres and closing on our ventral rear quarter,' said the Master of Auspex.
    'Coming in behind and below,' said Marr. 'Classic breaching tactics. They mean to cripple us then board us.'
    'Azedine has his warriors ready on your word,' said Scybale, unable to mask his own urge to be locked in a gunship assault pattern.
    Marr grinned.
    'Don't worry, Kysen, you'll get your chance to fight,' said Marr. 'You and I both.'
    
    THE PERFECT KILL. Executed flawlessly. The enemy's demise would be welcome in and of itself, but to deliver a deathblow with such machine-like precision against the Warmaster's own Legion just made this manoeuvre all the sweeter.
    The Gorgorex was a rapid strike cruiser of the Vurgaan Clan, old and hoary even before the treachery of Horus. It had fought its way clear of Isstvan with a shell-shocked cadre of survivors; mainly Iron Hands, but with a solid proportion of Salamanders and a handful of Raven Guard.
    The Vurgaan were a proud and isolated clan, and thus the crew of the Gorgorex were well suited to the new way of war forced upon them after Isstvan.
    Its commander was an Iron Father of the X Legion named Octar Uldin, and he swung the Gorgorex in below the stricken Lupercal Pursuivant using only the smallest bursts of thrust to manoeuvre. They were operating purely on external visual feeds; the risk of the enemy ship detecting any auspex sweeps were too great to countenance.
    Uldin had watched the three vessels surging towards the Azoth Gate and logged them in the ship's database, assaying their speed, armaments and quirks as they went.
    Any and all information on enemy vessels was invaluable, for just as warriors had their foibles, strengths and weaknesses that could be exploited, so too did starships.
    Legion registries identified the frigate as Lupercal Pursuivant, the destroyers as Helicanus and Kashin. All were known to the Iron Hands after news of the disastrous engagement at Arissak had trickled down through the necessarily compartmentalised network of attack cells.
    The Helicanus, the larger of the two destroyers, was slightly slower adjusting course to port. Its armour looked to have been repaired numerous times on its starboard flank, layered plate over layered plate, making it heavy on the turn. The Kashin had a few seconds latency on its manoeuvring igniters, a weakness that a foe with greater agility could turn to its advantage.
    And, it now transpired, the Lupercal Pursuivant had issues with its vent cowlings. Its reactors were burning hot, far beyond any recommended tolerances. If those vents weren't cleared soon, the ship would blow itself to pieces without any help from the Gorgorex.
    At full magnification, the servitor crews struggling to clear the vents were like swarms of ants moving around the armoured haunches of a plains-dwelling leviathan.
    Under normal circumstances, Uldin would not have engaged. His orders, passed down through secretive relays and encoded with the highest priorities, were to watch and wait. To observe and report.
    That wasn't the Vurgaan way, especially when intercepted vox-traffic between the enemy ships appeared to confirm that the Lupercal Pursuivant was the flagship of a XVI Legion captain named Tybalt Marr.
    That this was undoubtedly the same Tybalt Marr whose head Shadrak Meduson had sworn to take, made the danger of exposure worth any risk.
    The dorsal launch tubes were loaded and ready.
    They would kill the crew of this vessel, render it dark and then ram it out of the Dwell system with a single, high-intensity burst of acceleration. The ship would never be seen again, its disappearance a celestial mystery that would never be explained.
    'On my mark, light them up,' said Uldin.
    
    'THEY'RE MAKING READY to launch,' said Scybale.
    'Counterspread on my command.'
    'It's a risk letting them fire first.'
    Marr shook his head.
    'No, it was the only way to get them in close enough,' he said. 'Once we stir the void with enough blood, the sharks will come to feed. And you know the first rule of void-war?'
    Scybale grinned and said, 'Be the shark.'
    
    THE FIRST WAVE of boarding torpedoes raced from the Gorgorex at almost the same instant as a spread of countermeasures launched from the ventral guns of the Lupercal Pursuivant.
    With a much lighter payload, the Sons of Horus missiles closed the distance between the two ships in the time it took the boarding forces to travel a hundred kilometres.
    Little more than two hundred metre-long tubes filled with shrapnel, the countermeasures exploded and formed supersonic clouds of tumbling debris. The torpedoes had no chance to evade, their guidance systems locked until their terminal manoeuvres, and fully half were ripped open or sent tumbling off into deep space.
    Battery fire engaged the rest and yet more were blasted to ruin before they got to within fifty kilometres of the Lupercal Pursuivant.
     Point defence guns killed the rest as they executed their terminal dive.
    Only one torpedo survived to penetrate the frigate's hull.
    Avakhol Hurr, one of 18th Company's most feared breach-leaders, was waiting for it with his blood-spattered warriors.
    Not a single enemy warrior set foot on the Lupercal Pursuivant.
    Realising he had been lured into the attack, Octar Uldin broke off immediately. The Gorgorex's engines fired, but having drifted for so long, it took time to coax them to full power.
    Time that the Lupercal Pursuivant did not need, having kept its engines hot to maintain the illusion of reactor cores on the verge of overload.
    Marr swung the frigate around and let the multiple batteries on its prow and portside flank have free rein as it rapidly closed the distance to its prey. The hunted now became the hunter as slashing arcs of high-yield lasers raked the Gorgorex s length.
    Its voids were yet to ignite, and detonations marched across the dorsal armour, melting armoured plates to molten slag and explosively venting hull compartments to the void. Serfs and menials spiralled out, shock-freezing in an instant.
    The Gorgorex shuddered in pain, but it was a vessel of the Iron Hands, proud and defiant. The voids finally lit as it took its wounding stoically, like a pugilist who knows he cannot win the fight, but will stay on his feet until the last bell. Its engines flared, ready to push it from this one-sided engagement.
    Its rear quarters exploded as a flurry of torpedoes launched in its rear arc slammed home and detonated within the drive cowlings.
    Swinging out from behind the moon-sized asteroids that had covered their swift turns, Helicanus and Kashin effectively crushed any hope of the Gorgorex's escape. Its engines vanished in an expanding plasma corona and oxygen bled into the void like glittering silver blood trails.
    The two destroyers manoeuvred into close range. Their guns flayed its voids, collapsing entire quadrants of protection in moments before targeting its point defences. They pulled away with perfect synchrony as a shadow fell across the Gorgorex.
    Angular and deadly, an assassin's blade over the face of the sun.
    Lupercal Pursuivant hove to, so close that the space between it and the Gorgorex danced with borealis light as the remaining void envelopes overlapped. Generator vanes blew out in flaring surges of feedback. Space burned blue and purple and crimson.
    A frigate of Lupercal Pursuivant's displacement normally had no capacity to launch strike craft, but its loading bays opened and three Stormbirds that had spent the voyage from Dwell chained to the deck now fell into space.
    They rammed their engines to maximum thrust and powered towards the their stricken prey. Helpless, the crew of the Gorgorex could only watch and await the inevitable assault.
    Hull penetration came two minutes later.
    
  III
    
    'DON'T THEY KNOW they're beaten?' said Scybale, ducking out from cover to fire down the transverse approach to the main axial. Return fire tore up the bulkhead behind him.
    Shrapnel and flakes of metal drifted from the impacts, spiralling in the zero-gravity chill. Behind them, a melta-cut breach gusted with condensing air from the interior of the Stormbird locked to the Gorgorex s hull.
    Half a dozen Sons of Horus fired back - Marr's honour squad, positioned all around the hexagonal approach. The absence of up or down as relative terms was a benefit of combat in zero-gravity.
    The vox-net crackled as Cyon Azedine replied.
    'Would you yield to an enemy who thought you beaten?' said the champion, his mortuary blade poised behind his combat shield. The Eye of Horus emblazoned upon it glinted with a web of frost in the void-chilled corridor.
    'No, but I'm Sixteenth,' said Scybale. 'Even the Iron Tenth can't match that.'
    'They appear to think differently,' said Azedine.
    'Then it's time we disabuse them of that foolishness,' said Marr, hefting a wide-barrelled weapon he'd appropriated from one of the support squads.
    All cogs, coil-wrapped condensing tubes and a tight ring of focus blades, the volkite caliver was a weapon more suited to lightly armoured targets, but it did have the advantage of being utterly lethal in confined spaces.
    'Since when does a captain deign to wield a caliver?' asked Azedine, a man to whom the protocols of warfare were of paramount importance.
    'When he wants the job done yesterday,' said Marr and depressed the grip-trigger.
    A searing beam of tightly focused energy shot down the transverse approach. It impacted on the far wall of the axial approach and exploded in a billowing cloud of caustic fire. Phosphor-bright trails blazed with sudden, shocking intensity.
    There were no screams in a vacuum.
    'Azedine,' said Marr. 'Go. Now.'
    Cyon Azedine spun out from cover, and his speed was something uncanny. Movement in low gravity was usually slow and painstaking, each step taken with magnetized boots.
    Marr's champion had no truck with that.
    Instead, he bounded from wall to wall, pushing off with limbs like coiled springs. He spun away from incoming rounds and, with a last piston-like thrust from the ceiling, he slammed down onto the deck among the reeling survivors of the volkite blast.
    His boots clamped the metal deck and his sword reaped lives. Sprays of blood hung like red archways in the air.
    Marr released the volkite weapon and left it floating behind him.
    'Let's go,' he said, and the rest of his honour squad followed him towards the enemy. Not that he expected to meet any resistance from here on in, since most of the ship's fighting strength had died in the void.
    All through the enemy ship, breacher squads were converging on strategic targets: life support, reactor cores, engine spaces. The last thing Marr wanted was for the remaining crew to scuttle their vessel in spite. He needed it in once piece.
    A starship had numerous routes through its superstructure, but only one to the command bridge.
    And that target was Marr's.
    By the time he and his warriors reached the main axial, Cyon Azedine had killed everyone there. Six bodies floated in the axial, trailing drifting slicks of vivid crimson. A blob of blood affixed itself to Marr's shoulder guard, painting his Legion marking in red.
    He turned and moved up the axial towards the shuttered bridge interlock. Its defence guns weren't firing, which told Marr they were either out of ammunition or no longer functional. Most likely the latter, the arrogance of the Iron Hands leading them to believe they would never be boarded.
    Crackling voices spoke of areas seized within the ship. Resistance was fierce, but minimal. Clearly this ship had been operating with something less than a skeleton crew.
    That they had managed to fly it and fight at all was to be admired. Schematics overlaid the visor display within his helm, his warriors picked out in pale blue.
    'Avakhol, bring your Breachers to me,' ordered Marr.
    Moments later, he felt the vibration of heavy footfalls along the axial as a demi-squad of Rukal Breachers approached.
    Avakhol Hurr led them, a febrile warrior with a potent love of all things explosive. He carried a gore-smeared thunder hammer, and his iron armour was a filthy mix of ocean green and rust-coloured stains.
    A breacher never cleaned the blood from his battleplate and Hurr was no exception. He'd been a line warrior during the Jubal Secundus Liberation, but earned his command during the bloody ship-to-ship fighting above Isstvan.
    Marr jerked his thumb at the bridge access. 'Get that open.'
    The Breacher sergeant nodded and hefted his thunder hammer.
    'My pleasure.'
    
    MARR STORMED THROUGH the ragged, cherry-red ruin of the entrance to the bridge. The Rukal Breachers followed, fanning out with their shields locked and bolters levelled, ready to annihilate any resistance.
    The bridge was empty.
    Or as good as empty, it made no difference. A single flesh-spare warrior stood at its centre, locked to the deck and with a photonic-edged war scythe. A dozen servitors flanked him, armed with a mix of clubbing weapons and tools adapted to form rudimentary firearms.
    An Iron Father, if Marr wasn't mistaken.
    The machinery around him was smashed and cratered, ruined beyond repair and useless. Deliberate sabotage to keep whatever data this vessel's logic engines had once held from falling into enemy hands.
    But Marr had seen how much information could be retrieved from supposedly irreparable machines by the tech-sorceries of the Mechanicum, and knew something of value could probably still be extracted.
    'I am Octar Uldin,' said the Iron Father. 'Which of you dogs wishes to die first?'
    Marr almost laughed.
    'You and I? We fight an honourable duel to the death? Is that what Shadrak Meduson is teaching you now, even after Arissak?'
    Even a warrior with so little flesh left to him couldn't help but react to the name of the X Legion's new saviour.
    'He teaches us that however we die, it will be with honour,' said Uldin, dropping into a fighting crouch with his scythe held to one shoulder.
    'No,' said Marr, 'It will be screaming in agony when we torment what little flesh you have left, beyond anything even you can stand.'
    He turned away.
    'He's all yours, Azedine. Make him bleed, but don't kill him. The Warmaster will want him alive.'
    
    THEY WERE WAITING for Marr when he returned from Dwell, as he'd known they would be. They'd denied him the Warmaster, but what had they expected him to do? Sit meekly by and accept the judgement of those he knew to be wrong?
    That wasn't the XVI's way of doing things.
    It wasn't his way of doing things. Not any more.
    The Stormbird's engines growled as they powered down, hissing and steaming in the rain. Dwell's atmosphere was paying the inevitable price for a ferocious war fought in low orbit. Numerous space-based gun batteries and dry-docks had finally come down, and the sky over Tyjun was lousy with distortion. Actinic thunder boomed over the mountains and electrical tempests danced on the horizon. The smell of wet plascrete and foaming ocean water was strong. Rain battered the ground and the outer hull of the gunship.
    Marr, Scybale and Azedine stood at the top of the assault ramp as a strobing sheet of purple lightning lit the Stormbird's interior.
    'This could be bad, yes?' asked Azedine.
    'It could be,' agreed Marr. 'We embarked on an unauthorised mission, took ships without the express consent of the Warmaster. Yes. This could be bad.'
    'But what we learned,' said Scybale, 'from the very presence of the Iron Hands, from Uldin, that's got to count for something. Otherwise, what was the point?'
    'That's what I hope,' said Marr.
    'This could be bad,' repeated Azedine, wrapping his too delicate fingers around the hilt of his mortuary blade. 'They could strip us of our rank. Our position. Our honour.'
    'They could do a lot worse than that,' said Scybale. 'You've seen some of the changes in the Legion, the things Erebus brought with him, the old Cthonian ways coming back. I'm not saying I'm against that, per se, but some of those ways were left behind for good reason.'
    Marr straightened his spine. 'We're delaying, and we're better than that. Come on.'
    He set off down the ramp, finding not four warriors awaiting him, but five. Four he'd expected, but the fifth…
    Horus Lupercal, the primarch.
    Encased in glossy black plate of colossal dimensions, he was a titan amongst giants. The glaring eye on his breastplate seethed in amber, the dark slit at its centre seeming to regard Marr with utter indifference. A pelt of resin-stiffened fur mantled Lupercal's shoulders, the long fangs of its upper jaw splayed over one curved shoulder guard.
    He held Worldbreaker in one hand, as easily as Marr might carry a slender data wand. It was of cold iron, its weight unimaginable. His other hand was bladed with reaper's talons, a tearing weapon as far beyond the power of a lightning claw as a legionary was above a mortal soldier.
    But it was his face, a face that was both beautiful and cruel, that drew Marr in. A face that was the fountainhead of the Legion. Hadn't their renaming after Xenobia simply affirmed what they all knew?
    Every one of the Mournival called themselves true sons, as did Marr, but they were pale imitations of the Warmaster's perfection. Only Aximand, with his terrible surgical rebirth, came anywhere close to the essence of the Warmaster.
    Only now did Marr realise just how terrifying that was.
    He dropped to one knee, Azedine and Scybale following his lead a heartbeat later.
    'Sire,' he began, but the sensation of great weight on one shoulder stopped him from saying more.
    Worldbreaker rested on his armour, kept from crushing him only by the Warmaster's great strength. He held the enormous, ultra-dense mace at full extension, a feat none gathered there could match.
    'You've been busy, Tybalt,' said Horus.
    'I have been fighting our enemies, my lord,' he said, keeping his head bowed.
    'So I gather. Drawing up missions of your own and executing them with my ships.'
    Marr finally dared look up, and a tremor ran down his spine as his eyes met those of the Warmaster. Better men than he had quailed before that iron gaze. Armies had laid down their weapons rather than stand against this mortal god. Yet even in the stormcloud fury he saw a glimmer of amusement behind this show of anger. Hoping he was right, Marr knew there was only one way to respond.
    'I did, sire,' said Marr. 'To prove the broken warriors we left in our wake at Isstvan are no longer broken. They are organised, efficient. In contact.'
    Horus removed Worldbreaker from Marr's shoulder.
    'How do you know this?' he asked.
    'Because he is going to tell me,' said Marr, rising and beckoning Avakhol Hurr from the Stormbird. The bloody Breacher and his fellow gutter-killers led Octar Uldin down the assault ramp, his neck clamped in the spiked collar of a man-catcher. Snapping sparks of electrical discharge burned the meat and metal of his neck, and his steps were stiff and ungainly as artificial nerves were stimulated with pain signals.
    'One of the Iron Tenth,' said Horus. 'You took him in this system?'
    'Him and his vessel,' said Marr. 'Lurking out by the Azoth Gate, keeping watch on our comings and goings and passing that information back to Shadrak Meduson.'
    'You can't know that for sure,' said Abaddon.
    'Can't I?' snapped Marr. 'While you were sitting on your complacent behinds, I took action. You were so sure of your own prowess that you never gave any other Legion credit for being as good, as resilient, as tough as us. Well, guess what? They are strong, and they are fighting back!'
    Horus stepped in and took hold of Marr's shoulder guards, pulling him in tight to embrace him in a clatter of plate.
    'Tybalt Marr,' he said as he released him. 'Truly you are a son of the north, the aspect of illumination, discovery, wisdom and understanding. As ancient Polaris was permanent, so too are you a symbol of the eternal.'
    'Thank you, my lord,' said Marr, but Horus wasn't done yet.
    'Yet the ancient peoples of Old Earth looked upon the north as a place of darkness, an aspect regarded with suspicion and, aye, even terror. The great Shakespire spoke of daemons 'who are substitutes under the lonely monarch of the north'.'
    'I don't understand, my lord,' said Marr, as Avakhol Hurr forced Octar Uldin to his knees before the Warmaster.
    'It means that you have been away from your brothers too long, I think,' said Horus, a single killing claw lifting Uldin's battered chin. The Iron Father's eyes were gone, plucked by Azedine's mortuary blade and now nothing more than sliced cables hanging down over his cheeks. 'That you have become the lone wolf, the hunter who works best alone.'
    'What are you saying, sire? Exile?'
    'No, but whether you are right or wrong, Tybalt, you will cost me dearly,' said Horus. 'If you are right, and Meduson is raising a storm in our wake, then I must send warriors to find him and kill him. If you are wrong, I must punish you for your disobedience. So which is it to be?'
    'I am not wrong,' said Marr, certainty filling him.
    Horus regarded him for a moment, as though weighing up which option would cost him the least. But that glimmer of amusement was still there, and Marr wondered if the others had seen it or even knew Lupercal had made his decision long before Marr's Stormbird had landed.
    'Tell me what you want, Tybalt,' said Horus. 'Do you want to hunt down these 'Shattered Legions'? Root them from their shadowed lairs and drive them into the light? Destroy them?'
    'I want to finish what we started at Isstvan,' Marr replied.
    'Then you will be my hunter in the void. I will give you ships and warriors, weapons and power to do what must be done to end this threat.'
    'My lord?' said Abaddon. 'The campaign…'
    'Will succeed or fail with or without Tybalt,' said Horus, lifting his Talon and stopping any further discussion.
    'I go to Molech, Tybalt,' said Horus, fastening his gaze upon him once more. 'Tell me what you are going to do.'
    Marr stood tall and said, 'I'm going to bring you Shadrak Meduson's head.'