+++data-inload suspended. purge routine initiated+++

 	+++FATAL ERROR: CANNOT FIND VARIABLE “ushkul thu”+++

 	+++ERROR+++

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 	+++ERROR+++

 	+++ERROR+++

 	+++ERROR+++

 	+++ERROR+++

 	+++ERROR+++

 	+++ERR–we are the dawn of sanctity. what lives in the eighth shall not die. those that cast down shall sit upon thrones. what changes is eternal. that which writhes in the grave’s womb will be reborn. they who live without shackles shall be freed. we are the footsteps of the new sun. we are the pyre’s children–OR+++

 	+++ERROR+++

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 	+++ERROR+++

 	++WE RISE++

 	+IT BEGINS+

 ~ DRAMATIS PERSONAE ~


 	The XIII Legion ‘Ultramarines’



 	Remus Ventanus, Captain, Fourth Company

 	Kiuz Selaton, Sergeant, Fourth Company

 	Lyros Sydance, Captain, Fourth Company

 	Ankrion, Sergeant, Fourth Company

 	Barkha, Sergeant, Fourth Company

 	Eikos Lamiad, ‘Eikos of the Arm’, Tetrarch of Ultramar (Konor)

 	Telemechrus, The Sky Warrior’, Contemptor Dreadnought

 	Aethon, Captain, 19th Company

 	Octavian Bruscius, Captain, 24th Company

 	Colbya, Techmarine

 	Urath, Sergeant, 39th Company

 	The XVII Legion ‘Word Bearers’



 	Foedral Fell, Anointed commander

 	Hol Beloth, Anointed commander

 	Maloq Kartho, Dark Apostle

 	Eriesh Kigal, Terminator Sergeant

 	Zu Gunara, Dreadnought

 	Imperial Personae



 	Meer Edv Tawren, Server of Instrumentation, Mechanicum

 	Subiaco, Ingenium, Calth Pioneer Auxilia

 	Riuk Hamadri, Colonel, Defence Auxilia

 	Volper Ullyet, Captain, 77th Ingenium Support Division

 	Kadene, Major, Cardace Storm Troopers

 	Bartebes, Corporal, Cardace Storm Troopers

 
 
 


 	I


 	Who will be the last to die?


 	Honorius Luciel’s name is entered in the Operational Records as the first, but who will be the last? The treachery orchestrated by the Warmaster began with the death of an Ultramarine, but Captain Remus Ventanus of the Fourth Company has sworn that it will end with the death of a Word Bearer. Not one of their rag-cloaked rabble of cultist-brotherhoods, not one of the skinless abominations dragged from the empyrean, but with a warrior of the XVII Legion.

 	Ventanus has marked a strip of oath paper with his angular handwriting to that effect. Sydance and Barkha bore witness to this, and Selaton affixed the wax-sealed strip to the hilt of his gladius. Ventanus will be the one to drag the last of Lorgar’s sons to the surface of Calth and tear his armour from him before throwing the bastard to the irradiated ground.

 	He will wait and watch as the caustic rays from the poisoned sun burn the flesh from the Word Bearer’s bones. As layer after layer of skin blackens and drifts away like cinders, the toxic air will scald the traitor’s throat, silencing his screams and causing him to retch up the frothing, disintegrating remains of his lungs.

 	And just at the instant before the sun’s deadly rays finally kill him, Ventanus will put a bolt through the Word Bearer’s skull.

 	The last to die will be a Word Bearer, slain by the hand of an Ultramarine.

 	This is not theoretical.

 	Purely practical.

 	II


 	Lanshear.


 	Once counted among the great starports of Calth, the city-sized facility burned in the fires of a Legion’s wrath. Hol Beloth and Foedral Fell were two names they knew, but there were others – warriors whose deeds might once have echoed with honour in an earlier age, but which were now bywords for betrayal, mentioned in the same breath as Horus.

 	Lanshear is a necropolis, a cemetery city whose streets are choked with scorched hulks of wrecked fighting machines, the planet-wide detritus of battle and tens of thousands of radiation-blackened bodies. The lethal rays of Calth’s sun are burning their bones to ash and irradiated winds blow flakes from the dead in swirling dust devils. Most are the mortal soldiery of the traitors, killed by the retribution of the orbital platforms or poisoned by the sun when the last of the planet’s atmosphere was stripped away. Only a scattered few corpses have the post-human scale of legionaries.

 	Only enemy dead remain on the surface.

 	The fallen of Calth have been taken below and accorded the proper honour.

 	Great siege excavators and Mechanicum construction engines intended for wars of crusade are digging mortuary caverns throughout Calth’s bedrock; vast galleries and deep shafts where the honoured dead will forever be part of the world they died defending.

 	Ingenium Subiaco’s Pioneers have much yet to accomplish, but honouring the dead was the first task Ventanus set them.

 	III


 	Tawren’s purging of enemy scrapcode from the orbital defence grid saved Lanshear from complete destruction, but the thoroughness of her retribution left little standing after the beam weapons, missile stations and barrage platforms pounded the Word Bearers’ assault to dust. The shells of foundries and roofless manufactories spread over the blasted industrial hinterland like the ruins of some long-dead civilisation. Forests of sagging tower cranes and the buckled remains of bulk lifter-rigs list like drunks, and the railhead terminal of the Bedrus Oblique is like a child’s toy-set of rolling stock scattered across the transit lines and engine hangars.

 	Munitions depots and cargo containers stockpiled in anticipation of being raised to orbit burn throughout the starport, and hundreds of ink-black columns of smoke striate the rippling aurora of the sky. The crackle of flames and the screech-metal sound of collapsing structures echo mournfully through gutted transport hulks and the wreckage of a world-conquering army.

 	Ventanus remembers this place.

 	He remembers the sheer violence, the never-ending blitz of enemy fire, the overwhelming force of it all. Mass-reactives in solid hurricanes, las sheeting like neon rain and the thunder of traitor battle engines howling in bloody triumph. Explosions and screams merging to shape the death-cry of an entire world.

 	Compared to that, this nightmarish, flame-lit vision of perdition is almost quiet.

 	Lanshear is dead, but there is yet activity. The distant foundries and cargo depots far to the north of the main fields are wreathed in a mist that is wholly unnatural, and fires burn there that are not the fires of devastation, but of construction and rebuilding. In the midst of this planetary cataclysm, something survives. Fragmentary vox-intercepts suggest Foedral Fell holds the northern foundries, but beyond that supposition, nothing more is known for certain.

 	The aftermath of the battle for Calth has left a great deal of theoretical, but precious little practical.

 	Below the ridge where Ventanus and two hundred legionaries of the Fourth are concealed, the rusted tracks leading from the burning railhead terminal run in arrow-straight lines from the Oblique to the foundry depots.

 	‘Can you see anything, sir?’ asks Selaton, crawling up to join him at the edge of the ridge.

 	Ventanus shakes his head. Whatever is happening in the north remains a mystery.

 	‘I need Vattian’s scouts,’ he says. ‘But...’

 	He waves a hand, leaving the sentence hanging, and Selaton nods in understanding.

 	During their desperate thrust towards the guildhall, Vattian’s pathfinders safely brought them into Lanshear under the watchful gaze of the Word Bearers, but their armour is too light to survive the hostile environment of the surface. Even Mark IV plate can only remain above ground for a limited time before its protective qualities are eroded. Terminators can move with impunity, but Ventanus has precious few of them at his disposal.

 	‘You really think the Word Bearers will come this way?’ asks Selaton, and Ventanus knows that the sergeant shares Sydance’s belief that this is a theoretical without merit.

 	‘I do,’ says Ventanus, nodding towards the railhead terminal. Hundreds of locomotive convoys lie scattered like dead snakes throughout, their fuel tenders split and belching thick, tarry smoke.

 	‘Why?’ asks Selaton. ‘There are plenty more direct routes to the northern foundries.’

 	‘All of which involve crossing large tracts of open ground.’

 	‘Hit it at speed and they could be across before the orbitals got a solution.’

 	‘Without vehicles? Would you risk it?’

 	Selaton considers the question for a moment before answering. ‘Theoretical – if I was trapped on an enemy world with no immediate prospect of reinforcements, I’d want to link up with friendly forces as quickly as possible.’

 	‘Practical – the railhead terminal offers cover,’ says Ventanus, gesturing to the building’s shell-cratered roof. The covering is still largely intact, though shafts of wounded blue light spear through its smoke-fogged interior. ‘Server Tawren’s auspex feeds suggest that whoever’s leading this force is cautious. He’s moving from cover to cover, taking his time.’

 	‘But she lost them,’ points out Selaton. ‘We don’t know where they are now.’

 	‘If he wants to reach Foedral Fell alive, he’ll come this way,’ asserts Ventanus.

 	‘Did the Server happen to mention anything about their numbers?’

 	‘At least five hundred, maybe more,’ replies Ventanus.

 	‘Then I hope you’re right,’ says Selaton with relish.

 	IV


 	They come in ragged squads at first. Tentatively, like thieves in the darkness.

 	Emerging from the gutted shell of a Titan repair facility, two groups of Word Bearers emerge like wary grazing beasts approaching a watering hole frequented by an apex predator. They move swiftly between the burning hulks of derailed shipping containers. Ventanus lets a finger slip beneath the trigger guard of his bolter.

 	He lets out a breath.

 	These are just scouting forces – probing thrusts into the flaming ruins at the edge of the terminus. They hope to provoke any potential ambushers into carelessness, but Ventanus has been specific in his orders. None of his warriors open fire, though each of them dearly wishes to. If this trap is to be sprung completely, then the Word Bearers must fully stick their heads into the noose.

 	Watching the enemy warriors, Ventanus sees the plate of their legionary armour has changed again. First it changed from granite grey to crimson. Now it is a mixture of scorched black, bare-metal iron and a few remaining patches of bruised blood. The first was a choice, but this latest change is not. The light of Calth’s wounded star has robbed the XVII Legion of uniformity, and Ventanus realises he can no longer think of them as legionaries.

 	They are too ragged, too individual to be worthy of such a unifying term.

 	They do not even deserve any force designation such as company or battalion.

 	This is a warband, a haphazard arrangement of survivors.

 	Within the protective environment of his helmet, his lip curls in contempt.

 	You won’t be survivors for much longer.

 	These forward elements of the Word Bearers advance into the railhead terminal, still moving cautiously, still keeping one eye on the sky and the unseen orbital weapons. They pass out of sight, obscured by the banks of smoke, and Ventanus counts the long seconds in time with his heartbeat.

 	He wonders if he has made a mistake. Perhaps the Word Bearers have split into smaller groups, each one making its own way to Foedral Fell. He senses Selaton’s scrutiny, but keeps his gaze fastened on the buckled tracks leading to the terminus. He wills the enemy to show itself.

 	Then the real prize comes into view.

 	A marching column of Word Bearers emerges from the shelter of the repair facility, moving with as much speed as caution allows. Ventanus calculates their numbers to be close to six hundred. All infantry – no vehicle support and no Dreadnoughts. A few light artillery pieces, but nothing that gives him pause or second thoughts.

 	But it is more than their lack of heavy firepower that convinces him that this attack will work. Watching the exaggerated caution in their movements, Ventanus realises that the Word Bearers are in a state of shock. They came to Calth arrogant, confident of total victory. They forgot who they were fighting. That slip allowed the Ultramarines to deliver a stinging reprimand, the gut-punch from a downed fighter that turns the bout on its head.

 	Ventanus waits until he is sure that there are no more Word Bearers yet to emerge from hiding.

 	He rises to his feet and reaches behind him, hand outstretched.

 	Another sergeant, Barkha, hands Ventanus the standard, its haft dented and the fabric of the company colours torn and ragged. He plants it at the edge of the ridge and pulls his bolter tight to his shoulder.

 	‘For Calth!’ he shouts, and two hundred warriors of the Fourth rise up.

 	Bolter fire blitzes down into the wreckage in front of the railhead terminus. The barking volley punches scores of Word Bearers from their feet before they are even aware that they are under attack. A second volley kills dozens more. Now the enemy are moving into cover, returning fire and keeping their heads down. The Ultramarines do not advance, but hold their position, pouring fire into the enemy ranks. Ventanus is a keen-eyed shot and takes his time, picking his targets with care. He scans for officers and sergeants among the Word Bearers. His task is made more difficult by the fact that the scorching of their war-plate has obliterated most symbols of rank.

 	In lieu of conventional markings, he targets those with the greatest disfigurements wrought upon their shoulder guards or helmets, the most heavily scarred or those to whom others appear to defer. He puts a mass-reactive through the helm of a warrior whose breastplate is hung with dagger-like fetishes and whose mail cloak glitters with an oily sheen. He kills another with a jagged star symbol cut into the faceplate of his helm. A warrior with a long chain-glaive and a crackling power claw dies with his chest blown out as he runs between two broken tenders. Any one of these kills would earn him a commendation for marksmanship, had anyone but him seen the shots.

 	Ventanus feels the same rightness to these kills he felt as they first fought their way into Lanshear. At this moment, his bolter is more than just a weapon, it is an instrument of just retribution, the nemesis of all that is faithless and treacherous. He ejects his emptied magazine and slots a fresh one home with smooth ease.

 	A series of explosions bloom along the ridge-line, and the impacts hurl perhaps twenty Ultramarines to the ground. Ventanus recognises the detonations of lightweight field artillery shells. Scavenged Army weapons, not Legion ordnance. All the downed Ultramarines are quickly back on their feet and firing downhill with only a fractional pause in their killing.

 	The Word Bearers are shooting back, but their response is desultory at best. Some enemy warriors are not even bothering to return fire, and it takes Ventanus a moment to realise why. Selaton reaches the same conclusion a moment later.

 	‘They don’t have enough ammunition to fight back,’ he says.

 	That same realisation is spreading amongst his warriors, and Ventanus feels their desire to take the fight to the Word Bearers. They want to look the traitors in the eye as they kill them. They want to spill enemy blood with their own two hands. Like them, Ventanus wants to mag-lock his bolter and advance with his sword drawn, to teach Lorgar’s faithless sons the cost of not finishing the job they started.

 	He checks the thought.

 	The theoretical is glorious, but this practical does not allow for emotion.

 	‘Hold position,’ he says. ‘Maintain fire.’

 	The tone of his voice is unequivocal and locks the Ultramarines in place.

 	The Word Bearers are no longer shooting back. Instead, they are risking the relentless fire of the Ultramarines as they run for the rail terminus. They have abandoned the field guns, knowing they are useless against warriors protected by power armour.

 	Dozens of Word Bearers are cut down as they cross the open ground, but hundreds more survive to reach the smoke-choked cover of the terminal. Thick smoke swallows them and not even Ventanus’s auto-senses can penetrate the chem-rich blackness.

 	Selaton looks at him, waiting for him to give the order.

 	Word Bearers bodies litter the ground.

 	Some will still be alive, and Ventanus is glad. They will know what is coming.

 	He opens a vox-link on a pre-arranged frequency.

 	‘Server Tawren, this is Ventanus. The enemy is in the kill-box,’ he says. ‘You have a solution?’

 	‘Affirmative,’ comes Tawren’s vox-distorted reply. ‘Engaging now.’

 	Her voice is without accent and apparently devoid of emotion – though Ventanus knows her well enough to know that is not true. He has come to like her, as much as any post-human can be said to like a chimeric, fully modified adept of the Martian priesthood.

 	Selaton hears this exchange and turns his gaze upon the railhead terminus as the clouds light up with the approaching storm. A dazzling tower of light flashes from space, briefly linking an orbital lance battery with the surface of Calth. The shell-punctured roof of the terminal lifts off in a rush of explosive kinetic force before vanishing in a cloud of fire.

 	Ventanus does not flinch as the electromagnetic pulse and colossal overpressure wash over him. With one hand on the company standard, he stands immobile as another lance strike pounds the railhead terminus, then another. Twice more the orbital battery unleashes its power, and when the roiling banks of volcanic smoke are blown clear, nothing remains.

 	The ground has been vitrified. Not so much as a single brick or nub of steelwork remains standing within a five-hundred-metre radius of the first impact point.

 	Ventanus nods in satisfaction and returns the standard to Sergeant Barkha.

 	He pre-empts Selaton’s question of the lance strike’s timing before it is asked.

 	‘Because I want the last sight of every Word Bearer to be an Ultramarine,’ says Ventanus.

 	V


 	The caves sit beneath a conurb-ring on the southern transit hub of the Uranik Radial, a once populous region of vast habitation blocks a hundred kilometres west of Lanshear. Its hyperstructures and sprawling mega-towers were toppled by the guns of warring Titans, in a firestorm like the coming of an apocalypse. Heedless of the terrified inhabitants, traitor engines and loyalist forces duelled in a battle that left hundreds of thousands of combatants dead, but saw no real victor as each side’s forces were drawn away to higher-value objectives.

 	The caves are a marvel, a series of naturally occurring subterranean voids that local legends attribute to the mythical serpent said to have honeycombed the bedrock of Calth in the planet’s prehistory. No one believes such things, not even children, but a new serpent has made its lair in the coiling tunnels beneath the Uranik Radial.

 	His name is Hol Beloth, and once he commanded an army of annihilation, a genocidal host that sought not to conquer and enslave but to destroy in the name of Horus. Half a million warriors rallied to his banner.

 	The barest fraction of that force remains.

 	His army has been reduced to less than ten thousand, and even this number is largely made up of the mangy rabble of the brotherhoods: among them the Kaul Mandori, the Tzenvar Kaul, the Jeharwanate, and the Ushmetar Kaul. Bloodied and humbled, the predatory hosts of Hol Beloth take refuge in the Uranik arcology, invisible to the murderous fire of the orbital batteries and sheltered from the deadly radiation scouring the surface, but tarred with failure.

 	As falls from grace go, Hol Beloth’s is all but complete.

 	Hol Beloth is one of the anointed ones, a warlord of vaunted ambition and proven battle-worth. He has led conquests on a thousand worlds, seen the fall of empires and brought ruin to uncounted enemies. He is all this and more, but he fears that his dream of ascending to stand at the side of Lord Aurelian is slipping from his grasp.

 	He still does not understand how they failed.

 	The Ultramarines were broken, scattered and leaderless. Within minutes of destruction.

 	And then the heavens rained fire and killing light, gutting Titans with every hammerblow from orbit and reducing entire warhosts to ash. Somehow, the enemy had regained control of the orbital batteries and turned what should have been his greatest triumph into his blackest defeat. Lanshear was to burn in the thunder of Hol Beloth’s guns, but the storm turned and tore the beating heart from his chest.

 	He broods in a cave that echoes with the heartbeat of the dying world, with nothing but ashes for companionship. At his full height, Hol Beloth is a towering giant in crimson armour, his flesh cut with the words of Lorgar and inked in consecrated blood, but defeat has bowed him. He was chosen for great things, but failed to live up to his end of that bargain, and the forces that empowered him have forsaken his ambitions.

 	For all Hol Beloth knows, his army may be the last alive on Calth.

 	His fellow commanders. Do any of them yet live?

 	Is Kor Phaeron dead or does he still fight to bring the Word to Calth?

 	Hol Beloth has no answers and the sense of loss is paralysing him.

 	The warp-flask sits beside him, the oil-dark liquid stagnant and lifeless, where once it wriggled and slithered with the motion of something foetal and immeasurably ancient. He speaks to it, hoping to hear from his fellow commanders, but receives no reply. The thing that deigned to squeeze a fragment of its consciousness into that many-angled space is gone, and Hol Beloth has never felt more isolated. The Ultramarines control the few remaining satellites, and rad-storms on the surface make a mockery of any attempt at encrypted vox.

 	He looks up as he hears approaching footsteps, legionary footsteps. His mouth curls in a sneer as he sees Maloq Kartho. The Dark Apostle filled his head with visions of power and majesty throughout the approach to Calth and their campaign of extermination. Like all true zealots, he refuses to let their utter defeat diminish his passion. Hol Beloth wants to kill him, but when the nights come to Calth the muttering shadows still attend the Apostle like unseen flunkies.

 	And in the caverns beneath Calth, it is always night.

 	‘What do you want?’ demands Hol Beloth.

 	‘To take the Word to the Ultramarines,’ says Kartho. ‘As you should.’

 	‘You want to fight?’ snaps Hol Beloth. ‘Go ahead. Make your way to the surface and see how long it takes the orbital guns to end you.’

 	Kartho is a bleak presence – similarly marked, but thrice favoured. He has the blessing of the primarch, the empyrean and the beasts from beyond the veil. His armour glistens, as though freshly daubed with blood, and the runic inscriptions carved into every plate writhe in the azure bioluminescence of the cave. His helm bears a single horn at his right temple that curls around his head to an iron-sheathed point at his left cheek. At his back is a long staff, black-hafted and trailing smoky shadows that etch themselves upon the air.

 	His face is angular, swathed in darkness and hard to read.

 	Hol Beloth suspects this to be deliberate artifice on Kartho’s part.

 	‘You think your work on Calth is done, Beloth?’ says the Dark Apostle. ‘Do you really believe your task was simply to fight a mortal war? The Warmaster and Lorgar Aurelian require you to do more than spill blood with bolt and blade. They require you to transform the canvas of the galaxy, to bring great truths to those who have been blinded by the Emperor’s empty promises. You are an avatar of the new age.’

 	Anger touches Hol Beloth and he rises from his torpor with one hand hovering near the hilt of his war-blade, the other curled in a fist.

 	‘You spoke those words before,’ he says. ‘When I marched at the head of an unstoppable army. They put fire into the hearts of all who heard them, but I understand their truth now. They are as hollow as a Colchisian promise and just as meaningless.’

 	Maloq Kartho unhooks the spiked staff from his back, and Hol Beloth thinks for a moment he means to attack him. Instead, Kartho plants it into the ground and the muttering shadows swell at his back. The staff’s length is scrimshawed with catechisms and blessings copied from Lorgar’s great book and topped with a circular finial, the eight spines of the Octed radiating from its centre.

 	‘You are weak, Hol Beloth,’ says the Dark Apostle. ‘Weak and stupid. A petulant child who weeps and wails and gnashes his teeth the first instant his desires are thwarted.’

 	Hol Beloth reaches for his sword, but before the blade is even half drawn, the dark smoke around Kartho’s staff whips out to slap his hand from the hilt. Kartho is in front of him an instant later, moving without seeming to move, as though the muttering shadows have borne him aloft.

 	Hol Beloth takes a backward step, surrounded by a veil of darkness that ripples with undulant motion, like a slick of oil in the air. Shapes move within its depths, infinitesimal fragments of immense presences from beyond space and time, pressing at the meniscus that separates this reality from theirs. They have no form, save that which he imprints upon them; a multitude of eyes, fanged mouths and curving horns that manifest and fade as soon as he looks.

 	They are hungry. They feel the beat of his heart and crave the taste of his lifeblood.

 	He is powerless to stop them if they attack.

 	Kartho steps in close, and the darkness parts before him. It wraps itself around him like a shroud, slithering over the curved surfaces of his war-plate, its lightless form lingering at his back like an acolyte.

 	The sight disgusts Hol Beloth.

 	‘To think I anointed you and set your feet upon the path to glory,’ says the Dark Apostle with a disappointed shake of his head. ‘Lorgar brought us truth from the place where gods and mortals meet, but you do not see it. You are too ignorant to see it. You have a chance to leave your mortal shell behind and rise to glory, but your moment is passing with every second you spend in wretched self-pity.’

 	Hol Beloth does not fully understand Kartho’s words, but he feels the terror of everything he was promised slipping beyond his reach, never to come again. He drops to one knee before the Dark Apostle, head bowed as a supplicant.

 	‘Tell me what I must do,’ he says.

 	The notion of submitting to the Dark Apostle’s designs is abhorrent to him, but now he knows he will say or do anything to hold on to his ambitions. So badly does he desire to stand at the side of Lorgar and Horus that he willingly begs for Kartho’s scraps.

 	‘The galaxy is changing, Hol Beloth,’ says the Dark Apostle. ‘The old ways are passing, and a new order is establishing itself. What was is no more, and what will be is just taking shape. Those who embrace that truth will prosper. Those who do not will perish.’

 	‘Tell me what I must do,’ he asks again. ‘What do the powers require of me?’

 	Kartho leans down and his hooded eyes are alight with a passion only bloodshed ignites.

 	‘Atrocity,’ says Kartho. ‘They require atrocity.’

 	VI


 	Geologists once came from far distant corners of the Imperium to study the cavern arcologies of Calth. Magi from the forges of Mars and the master masons of the Terran Guilds marvelled at their self-sufficiency and remarked often on how seamlessly the artifice of man blended with the vagaries of natural formation.

 	Horus himself once came to Calth as Guilliman’s honoured guest, though no one now remarks on that particular visit. Ingenium Subiaco pauses in his labours and wonders what those magi and masons would make of what has been done beneath Calth’s surface now.

 	A tall man with a permanent stoop that comes from spending endless days bending over highly detailed schemata, the ingenium’s craggy face is crowned with a thinning crop of corn-coloured hair. A set of brass-rimmed goggles, complete with noospheric MIU and a full sensorium suite, is clamped to Subiaco’s haunted face like some form of surgical device. In the fine tradition of the Ingenium from Calth, he cultivates a long moustache with its ends waxed to points that curl over his florid cheeks.

 	Long days and restless nights have given him an unkempt look, one at odds with his station as a senior ingenium of the Calth Pioneer Auxilia. A wave of tiredness washes through him and his eyes flutter closed for an instant, but he quickly blinks them open. He has too many nightmares in his sleep to wish for more in his waking hours.

 	Subiaco stifles a yawn and watches as yet another opening in the bedrock is gradually sealed up. This one is a dead tunnel that delves a thousand metres from a lower branch cavern of Arcology X. The cartographae drones that returned tell him the tunnel is a dead end, but the violence of the war has made accurate readings of the deep caverns next to impossible.

 	A pulse of thought fades up a noospheric projection of the tunnel’s dimensions before his eyes. Subiaco dials down the magnification to view its entirety. The tunnel is five metres wide and curves downwards in a gentle arc for another three hundred metres, twisting through a series of sharp bends before arriving at a water-filled corrasional cave. The deeper reaches of the tunnel are hazed with error-signifiers. Subiaco wishes he had the time and manpower to map them with greater accuracy.

 	The cavern in which he stands is filled with the tools of the ingenium: blue and grey earth-moving machines, each with dozer blades tens of metres high, bulk crawlers with pneumatic arms capable of lifting a super-heavy battle engine with ease, drilling rigs with conical snouts, and a lone construction engine of the Mechanicum. The noise they make is cacophonous, and but for the aural baffles worked into the mechanism of his goggles, he would long since have been deafened.

 	Hundreds of men and women of the Pioneer Auxilia are manoeuvring the last of the blast shutters into metres-deep caissons at the mouth of the tunnel, while lumbering tankers of permacrete stand ready. The Pioneers wear heavy, tear-resistant coveralls and bulky respirators, but toil without complaint in the heat, dust and gloom.

 	They are bent to their labours with pride and determination.

 	Subiaco understands that pride, it is Ultramarian to the core.

 	To strive for excellence is the bare minimum expected of Lord Guilliman’s people, and to be born in the Five Hundred Worlds is an honour and privilege that must be repaid every day.

 	The world above is no more, but he and his Pioneers will be builders of the world below.

 	Subiaco watches the work with bloodshot eyes, but he needs offer no suggestions nor make any corrections. His subordinates know their craft and his instructions are precise, needing no further explanation. Instead, he calls up a fuller rendition of Arcology X, smiling as he realises that Captain Ventanus’s hurried marking of a map has effectively renamed this cave complex forever.

 	Thinking of Ventanus, Subiaco looks up as an Ultramarines sergeant in a battle-damaged suit of power armour approaches him. He does not know this warrior, but the deep blue of his armour is heavily abraded across the breastplate and pauldrons with bullet impacts and blade scars.

 	Only his helmet is unscathed, painted a fresh crimson that seems oddly fitting.

 	‘Sergeant Ankrion,’ says Subiaco, optical filters reading the warrior’s name beneath a patina of las-burns on his right shoulder guard. ‘Is there something I can do for you today?’

 	‘How long until the tunnel is sealed?’ asks the giant.

 	Ankrion’s tone is brusque, but Subiaco understands his urgency. Subiaco calls up a host of data-streams and sifts graphs of work completion sigils with haptic implants in his fingertips.

 	‘The shutters will be in place momentarily. Once the integrity checks are complete, we spray the permacrete and I will implant the locking seal. All things being equal, the tunnel will be secure within the hour.’

 	Ankrion nods, though he is clearly unhappy with the answer.

 	‘You can’t do it quicker?’ he asks.

 	‘Not if you want an Ingenium Mark on the work, no.’

 	‘Would more machines speed the process?’

 	‘Of course, but we don’t have any more machines,’ says Subiaco. ‘We’re lucky to have the ones we’ve got.’

 	‘Clarify.’

 	Subiaco waves a hand at the construction engines and earth-moving machinery, causing his holographic graphs to spin away.

 	‘None of these machines should be here, Sergeant Ankrion. They were all due for orbital transit when the traitors attacked.’

 	‘So why are they here?’

 	‘My understanding is that we have the Word Bearers to thank for that.’

 	‘I’m not in the habit of thanking those bastards for anything,’ says Ankrion, and Subiaco hurries to explain himself as the Space Marine exudes a looming threat.

 	‘You misunderstand. The corruption they used to infect the orbital defence systems,’ says Subiaco. ‘It appears it caused a cumulative arithmetical overflow in the scheduling subroutines of a Defence Auxilia calculus-logi, which saw these engines sit idle on the embarkation platforms while the rest of Calth was being shipped into orbit. Lucky for us, eh?’

 	Ankrion does not reply, and looks up as the last of the blast shutters is lowered into position with a heavy impact of metal on stone. A squad of riveters move into position, their whining guns securing the shutter in place. Sparks rain down from their work, and the permacrete hoses lift with a hiss of pneumatics.

 	‘This would go quicker if we didn’t have to seal off all these dead branches,’ observes Subiaco, projecting a holographic representation of the tunnel’s structure from the surface of his data-slate. ‘For example, this tunnel terminates hundreds of kilometres from the nearest arcology or shelter. There’s really no need to expend resources to seal it.’

 	Ankrion takes a moment to study the gently rotating image.

 	‘Did you find a source for the water in the chamber at the tunnel’s end?’ he asks.

 	‘No, implying that it is an opening of negligible proportions.’

 	‘In other words, you don’t know where the water is coming from?’

 	‘Not as such, but–’

 	‘Captain Ventanus’s orders are unambiguous,’ interrupts Ankrion. ‘Any tunnel the termination of which cannot be confirmed absolutely is to be sealed.’

 	‘Sergeant, you need to understand that only a very few of Calth’s cave systems are linked. The vast majority spread through the planet’s crust in splendid isolation.’

 	‘If Calth is to survive, that’s going to have to change,’ says Ankrion.

 	VII


 	Shelter CV427/Praxor sits fifteen hundred kilometres to the east of Lanshear, a series of hardened bunkers and armaments storage facilities. It is designed to hold up to a hundred thousand fighting soldiers and a further twenty thousand ancillary staff, together with three battalions of Defence Auxilia personnel.

 	Its maximum occupancy is listed as one hundred and fifty thousand souls.

 	In the wake of the XVII Legion’s attack it is currently home to over twice that number. Its enlarged caverns and deep constructions are nightmares of overcrowding, yet there is little anger amongst its inhabitants, save that directed at the warriors of the Word Bearers who have driven them here.

 	This is to be expected.

 	The gates of Praxor have been closed for nearly two weeks, and tens of thousands of refugees fleeing the war and the doomed sun’s radioactive spasms have sought sanctuary within. The shelter’s accommodation is beyond its capacity, and the security of a weapons storage facility requires that every individual be identified. Once a full inventory has been taken of human and weaponised resources, a detailed campaign of resistance and reconquest can be developed.

 	Every entrance to the shelter, and there are many, has been sealed – some with permacrete shuttering and some with warriors bearing guns. Elements from five different companies of the Ultramarines are now based here: five hundred and sixty-seven legionaries. They do not guard the entrances to the arcology. They train, they re-arm, they mount sorties onto the surface when word comes from Arcology X that enemy forces are nearby.

 	The security of the gates falls to the Imperial Army – of which there are sixteen separate regiments present locally – and skitarii elements swept into the arcology by the star’s radiation. Command protocols and communications are still in disarray as the Mechanicum adepts try to mesh Army vox-systems with their own and those of the Legiones Astartes. Different systems, hundreds of encrypted networks and trillions of code combinations have brought a special kind of hell to operational co-ordination.

 	It is this that is giving Major Kadene a headache that is only getting worse.

 	She and her squad of Cardace Storm Troopers occupy one of the smaller routes to the surface, more accurately described as a sinkhole filled with hardscrabble that has been pulled apart by millennia of tectonic movement. It is, nevertheless, a passageway that connects the caverns below with the surface and must be guarded.

 	Temporary shuttering sprayed with rad-proof sealant allows unprotected humans to occupy the prefab guard post and barricades that watch for infiltrators from the surface. Twenty soldiers occupy the position: battered, war-brutalised veterans who have seen their world torn apart and broken into pieces that can never be put back together. Major Kadene’s men have fought the good fight, and only these twenty of her seven hundred remain. They fought at the Pasuchne Bridge, and held it long enough for the 86th Company of the Ultramarines to cross. Along the Marusine Highway, a ten-thousand-strong rabble of cultist scum chased them for a hundred kilometres before they reached the regimental strongpoint set up at the Talanko Arterial.

 	Hol Beloth’s flanking forces, moving to encircle Lanshear, were on the verge of forcing them to abandon the strongpoint. But then came the fiery rain from orbit, burning the Word Bearers and their rabble to vapour ghosts.

 	Leaving her company colours flying proud at Talanko, Major Kadene followed Colonel Rurik as he brought the scraps of their regiment to Praxor.

 	Kadene knows she will never see the surface of Calth, but hopes that some remnants of the enemy forces will try to fight their way into the shelter. She dislikes being underground, having discovered a mild claustrophobia, but she is a Storm Trooper, and to acknowledge weakness is not in her nature. She sits in the guard post’s single structure, a reinforced tin shack, with a vox-caster and her unit’s stock of anti-radiation pills, ammo, food and water. This is what has become of her once elite unit

 	She flinches as a squawk of interference barks from the speaker horn of the vox-caster.

 	‘Bloody Mechanicum,’ says her adjutant, Corporal Bartebes. He smacks the grey-steel box with the heel of his palm. ‘Bloody bastards never get anything bloody right.’

 	‘I thought they were supposed to have this fixed by now.’

 	‘And you bloody believed that, major?’ says Bartebes, fishing a lho-stick from his pocket and lighting it with the ease of a professional. Oily smoke lifts from his mouth.

 	‘I thought you quit,’ says Kadene.

 	‘I survived the surface,’ replies Bartebes. ‘If that ain’t killed me, these bloody won’t. It’s boredom that’ll do for me first.’

 	Kadene can’t argue with his logic, and though she could order him to put it out, she won’t. They have suffered too much in the last few weeks to deprive Bartebes of his vice. Besides, he’s probably right.

 	She shrugs, turning on her heel as she hears the rumble of an engine. A big engine, something industrial. She wonders if there’s something wrong with the sealant or the shuttering that requires a Pioneer work team. She doesn’t feel any effects of surface radiation, but supposes that’s probably why it’s so dangerous.

 	‘Now what’s this bloody noise?’ wonders Bartebes as a heavy industrial carrier lumbers around the corner. Its cargo compartment is draped with a blue tarpaulin, roped down and covering several objects, bulky and oblong in shape. Work tools? Engineering equipment?

 	‘We expecting anyone?’ asks Kadene.

 	‘Not that they bloody told us,’ replies Bartebes, giving the vox another clout. ‘Not that we’d have heard on this piece of junk.’

 	The driver’s Army, but she can’t see his unit insignia. Thirty men accompany the carrier, some riding shotgun on the running boards, some marching alongside. They look bored, and Kadene can sympathise. There’s something... ragged about these soldiers, but that’s nothing unusual. Everyone looks a little ragged these days.

 	But her soldier’s instincts are telling her there’s more to it than that.

 	‘Find out what they want,’ says Kadene, lifting the vox-horn. ‘I’ll see if I can get some word from on high.’

 	Bartebes nods and reluctantly stubs out his lho-stick.

 	As he shoulders his hellgun, Kadene says, ‘Eyes on.’

 	Bartebes understands immediately and his demeanour instantly changes.

 	He leaves the guard post and waves four soldiers to accompany him, bulky in glossy plates of ablative carapace. Each Storm Trooper wears the regimental insignia of crossed lances over a skull on one shoulder plate, a hand-painted black X on the other. With Bartebes at their head, they march out in front of the new arrivals. Bartebes waves his arms in front of him like a crew chief on a landing platform.

 	‘Right, who the bloody hell are you?’ he demands with his customary wit and charm. ‘This is a Cardace post.’

 	A man in a uniform that hangs strangely on him detaches from the soldiers escorting the vehicle. He carries an old-style data-slate and holds it out to Bartebes. He says something she can’t hear. Kadene lifts the vox-horn and twists the dial to the assigned command frequency.

 	As she does so, her eyes alight on a man partially obscured by the tarpaulin-wrapped cupola of the cargo vehicle. He wears armour, but it takes her a fraction of a second to realise what’s wrong with it.

 	The man is dressed as a Cardace trooper, but she has never seen him before.

 	Her mouth opens to shout a warning.

 	A scream of dissonant noise erupts from the vox-horn, a blast of a million terrorised screams that comes from a place of horror and blood. It paralyses her. Literally paralyses her. Her every nerve is shrieking in pain, but she can’t move.

 	Something pours from the vox-horn, a rush of stinking black fluid. It spatters the wall like an oil-filled balloon has just been thrown at it. She sees the men talking to Bartebes pull out flasks of black liquid and throw them to the ground.

 	She can’t move. Fluid shapes leap from the black oil. She still can’t move.

 	More glass breaks. More viscous darkness erupts like tarry geysers.

 	Shifting, formless things of grasping arms, gaping mouths and tearing claws slam into her soldiers and bear them to the ground. The rest of the men in her command drag their rifles to their shoulders, but there are shadows for them all. They slither over the floors, stretch and swell over the walls and loom down from the cavern roof. Men are plucked from the ground and black filth pours into their screaming mouths. It stops up their ears and noses, presses its way into their skulls through their eyes, and invades the entirety of their bodies in the space of a heartbeat.

 	Kadene sees all of this, but she still can’t move. Her entire body is shocked rigid by the squalling blast of nerve-paralysing sonics. The vox is laughing at her. The spatter of oil on the wall is pushing itself into a semblance of form. Human, but larger than any man she has ever seen. Bulked out beyond mortal norms, she recognises the fluid-formed outline of Legion plate. The helmeted head has a horn that curls around it, and is formed from glistening matter that stinks like a mass grave.

 	It turns its gaze on her and she wishes she could close her eyes. She wants nothing more than to shut this abhorrent monster away.

 	The door to the guard post is thrown open. The man Bartebes was talking to enters.

 	‘They’re all dead,’ he tells the horned black torso extruded from the wall.

 	Behind him, Kadene sees her men being stripped of their armour and uniforms. The killers garb themselves in the colours of a regiment that, but for her, is now extinct. The dishonour is beyond insult. It is violation.

 	‘You know where to take the device?’ asks the monster, its voice a gurgling wet horror of liquid vowels and drowning consonants.

 	The man nods. ‘The statue of Konor in Leprium. Rendezvous at zero-dark-thirty.’

 	Kadene wants so badly to reach down for her holstered laspistol. Sweat beads on her forehead. Her hand trembles and, incredibly, she feels a tingling sensation in her fingertips.

 	‘Take three men and dump the corpses at least five kilometres out,’ says the black apparition. ‘The defenders must not learn what was taken until it is too late.’

 	‘It won’t be long before a relief force turns up.’

 	The black shape gurgles with what Kadene realises with sick horror is laughter. ‘You wear loyalist uniforms. Welcome them and share the camaraderie of brothers. Then kill them.’

 	The black shape on the wall turns to her. A slit of a mouth forms in its impossible helm, a leering grin of anticipation. She feels warm leather at her fingers. The holster is open; she never keeps the press-stud closed. Sweat pours down her face, veins stand out. Her hand shakes as she slides it around the weapon’s grip.

 	‘Such gross betrayal of trust has power beyond measure,’ says the horned monster.

 	Kadene draws and fires her pistol with a scream of pain and grief. All she has already suffered and all she has just lost is distilled into this last act of defiance.

 	She shoots the monster again and again. Her bolts burn it like a solder through plastek and ignite it like promethium. It burns away into a stinking mist. A sulphurous reek fills the guard post, the stench of voided bowels. She tries to turn her pistol on the mortal traitor, but the weapon is slapped from her hand. A rifle butt slams into the side of her face. Bone breaks and she falls to the ground. Pain shoots around her body and a gut-cramping nausea stabs through her paralysis.

 	The traitor drops on top of her, one knee in the chest, another over her throat. He has a black-bladed knife in one hand, the tip scratching the surface of her eyeball. Fluid oozes out over her cornea. His palm rests on the dagger’s pommel, ready to drive it home.

 	‘Just for that, I think you’re gonna come with us,’ he says. ‘Be interesting to see what your new sun does to one of its own.’

 	VIII


 	The heavy adamantium gates of Arcology X rumble closed on rollers the size of Land Raiders, blotting out the venomous blue light of the system star. Booming locks hammer home, shutting the subterranean complex off from the upper world. Thundering recyc-units purge the contaminated dust from the vast airlock chamber.

 	Remus Ventanus and the warriors of the Fourth Company stand immobile in the roaring winds as a Mechanicum adept and a host of servitors with hostile environment augmetics come forward with high pressure hoses, to scour them with electrolysed water that runs into specially dug sluices.

 	Ventanus has little patience for such processes, but with so many mortals packed into Arcology X, decontamination is a necessary evil of any mission to the surface.

 	Selaton and Barkha stand behind him, Barka still clutching the battered pole of the company standard that Ventanus retrieved from the slaughtered honour guard at the Numinus starport. Water drips from the eagle and the Ultima, making both shine brightly in the gloom of the gateway. The symbolism pleases Ventanus and makes the time taken to cleanse their armour feel worthwhile.

 	He could have the indentations of the dead warrior’s grip worked out of the metal, but he will not. The dying grip of the Ultra-marine whose name he never knew will be a constant reminder of the Word Bearers’ betrayal.

 	Wherever this standard ends its days, it will forever display the mark of its former bearer.

 	With the closing of the gate and the completion of decontamination procedures, the defence protocols ease a fraction and servitor-crewed turrets switch their macro-weapons from armed to safe. An internal bulkhead the size of a jungle escarpment rumbles down into the floor with the sound of tectonic plates grinding together. The Mechanicum adept waves the Ultramarines in and leads his servitors away.

 	Ventanus marches from the decontamination barbican into Arcology X.

 	IX


 	Captain Octavian Bruscius makes his way through the neatly arranged lines of beds and temporary shelters housing the groups of civilian survivors packed into CV427/Praxor. Bruscius is a gene-forged post-human, and they are but mortals, yet they are all warriors of Ultramar.

 	He feels proud to number himself among them.

 	He has fought in the Legion’s battle lines for a century and a half, but fighting within the bounds of the Five Hundred Worlds is something he never expected.

 	There has never officially been a theoretical for a war between the Legions, and though Bruscius understands he is simply a line officer, even he recognises that the Ultramarines will never be the same again.

 	The Warmaster’s treachery has upset the order of the galaxy, and nothing will ever be the same. He and his battle-brothers of the 24th Company are based in Praxor. Warriors from the 56th, 33rd, 111th and 29th Companies are here too. His group is the largest, boasting two hundred and nine warriors, whereas the 111th has been reduced to a single squad.

 	Cut off from the fighting, they are isolated beneath the tumbled ruins that are all that remains of the Persphys and Caela Praefecture conurbs.

 	Techmarine Colbya has established contact with sixteen other nearby shelters, as well as Captain Ventanus in what is now known as Arcology X. Bruscius does not know why its name has been changed, and is just glad that Lord Guilliman saw fit to place Ventanus in control of the fight-back.

 	The Word Bearers have taken the surface, but the war beneath belongs to the Ultramarines.

 	Bruscius forces himself to keep such thoughts tamped down.

 	He has more immediate concerns.

 	Registration areas have been set up in each of the largest caverns, manned by the few Administratum personnel who escaped below ground. It is a thankless duty, but the citizens of Calth form snaking lines as they await their turn to be processed without complaint. Well over ten thousand people are crammed into this cavern alone, with more pressing in behind. Motorised gurneys drive along cleared lanes between the queues, bearing reams of accumulating paperwork and identity confirmations from the registration booths. The drivers are all Army-helmeted and with rifles slung across their backs.

 	Bruscius and twenty of his warriors are here to oversee the registration process and watch for any security breaches, but his company will be rotated onto surface patrol soon. He recognises the importance of this work, but Bruscius wants to kill Word Bearers.

 	His eyes roam over the thousands of people in the cavern, pleased to note the stoic determination on every face. These people have seen their world virtually destroyed, but there is no trace of panic or psychosis. They came with nothing but that which they could carry on their backs when the evacuation order came through, yet still stand proud and ready to serve.

 	What other citizenry of the Imperium could rally so magnificently?

 	Almost all are young. All are ragged and grimy. But no amount of dirt can hide the mottled purple radiation burns with which almost every man, woman and child’s skin is afflicted. The medicae call it the ‘Mark of Calth’, and it is as much a badge of honour as it is an injury.

 	Bruscius moves on, traversing the echoing cavern and counting the hours until he can turn his weapons on the enemy. Everywhere he goes, people turn to stare at him, and he finds the attention faintly discomfiting. He is a warrior, pure and simple, yet these people invest him with all their hopes of a better tomorrow.

 	It is a heavy burden to bear, one he had not known he shouldered until this moment.

 	A woman with a babe in arms clutched tight to her breast approaches him and she reaches out to touch his vambrace. Under normal circumstances, Bruscius would never allow such contact, but these are far from normal circumstances. Another two children hold tight to the hem of her skirt, both so young and fragile looking that Bruscius finds it hard to believe they survived the horrors above.

 	‘Emperor protect you,’ she says.

 	Bruscius does not know how to respond and gives the woman a nod. She smiles, and he knows she will treasure the memory for the rest of her days.

 	The Ultramarines have become touchstones of hope, living proof that Calth will rise again, that its people will one day reclaim what was taken from them. It has been a humbling experience, and a salient reminder of why the Great Crusade was fought in the first place.

 	The woman holds out her hand, and Bruscius sees a small aquila pendant on a silver chain lying flat against her palm.

 	‘Take it,’ she says. ‘Please. You have to.’

 	The Ultramarines have standing orders not to accept gifts from civilians. Despite that, their muster spaces and arming points are surrounded by offerings, tokens of gratitude and handwritten messages declaring a readiness to fight for Calth.

 	‘My thanks, but it is not permitted,’ he says, turning away to move on.

 	‘Please,’ says the woman, more insistently. ‘She needs you to have it.’

 	Something in the woman’s tone makes him stop and turn back to her.

 	‘Who needs me to have it?’ he asks.

 	The woman tilts her head to the side, as though confused at his question.

 	‘The saint,’ she says, almost in tears. ‘You need to see. Before it is too late.’

 	Bruscius finds himself reaching for the aquila, though he knows he should not. The woman sighs as though a pent-up breath has just been expelled from her lungs. She looks up at him, and though Bruscius does not easily recognise conventional human expressions, he sees she is surprised to find herself face to face with a Space Marine.

 	As his hand closes on the silver pendant, combat reactions surge within his post-human body as chem-shunts within his battle armour flood his system with combat stimms in expectation of battle. His bolter snaps up and his visor is suddenly overlaid with tactical schemata, spatial signifiers and topographical data.

 	A vox-link instantly activates between him and his battle-brothers.

 	Bruscius has no idea what has triggered this reaction and the woman backs away from him in fear as he goes from heroic saviour to lethal, bio-engineered killer in the blink of an eye. He scans for any sign of threat and immediately sees the motorised gurney bearing boxes of administrative documents and the like.

 	Two things are immediately obvious.

 	First, the gurney is laden with heavy boxes, but is heading towards the registration booths.

 	Second, its driver wears Army fatigues, but they are ill-fitting and clearly not his own.

 	Bruscius sets off at a run towards the gurney, bellowing for people to get out of his way as a terrible foreboding fills him. The driver sees him coming and grins with zealous fury as he halts the gurney in the centre of the cavern.

 	Bruscius pulls his boltgun tight to his shoulder. A targeting reticule fastens on the man’s centre mass. It flashes red in full expectation of a lethal shot. The man stands and shouts at the top of his voice, with his rifle and a black-bladed dagger held aloft.

 	‘Hear the Word of Lorgar!’

 	It is all he manages before Bruscius’s mass-reactive blows out his chest and entire upper body in a wet meat explosion. People duck for cover, clearing a path for Bruscius as his warriors close on his position.

 	‘Get back!’ shouts Bruscius, kicking the dead man’s remains from the driver’s seat and hauling boxes from the back of the gurney. As he feared, they were concealment for something hidden behind them – a long, crudely-machined tube of thick metal, sealed at both ends by seamed welds and pierced by a multitude of sheathed connection jacks, electrical buffers and decoy wires. Behind a crystalflex panel, Bruscius sees a pair of brushed steel casings marked with the symbols of his Legion.

 	His armour registers a blazing spike of radiation, but it is the only warning Bruscius gets.

 	The stolen atomics detonate a second later, filling the cavern with nuclear fire that spreads through the entirety of Shelter CV427/Praxor and kills every living soul within.

 	It is the first of three such atrocities that murder two million civilians in one night.

 	X


 	It still amuses Ventanus that a mark he made in haste upon a wax-paper map has become so synonymous with the defenders of Calth. With Lanshear laid waste by the orbital batteries, the defenders had needed a place to rally. With virtually every data-engine on the planet dead, a pict scan was made of Ventanus’s map with a rally point marked with black ash.

 	That scan was broadcast through every civilian pict-caster and Legion slate within reach of Lanshear, and thus was named this bastion of resistance.

 	Arcology X.

 	Two quick, crosswise slashes on a map and an element of geography became a piece of history.

 	A symbol of resistance and a talisman to brandish in the face of the enemy.

 	XI


 	The caverns are dim. Power consumption is carefully controlled. The few Mechanicum adepts have yet to stabilise a link to the geothermal grid at the heart of Calth. Flickering lumen globes in protective caging are strung from brickwork supports on looping cables like jungle creepers. This close to the surface, the architecture has a martial character, but with every sub-level they traverse, the more civic and functional it becomes.

 	The walls are etched with metres-high Xs, and hundreds more on every archway and lintel. Among them, Ventanus sees pictures drawn on the walls, serpentine creatures with dark wings and fanged mouths. Draconis. He sees a childishness to the scratched lines and wonders if these nightmares have been drawn on the walls as a means of expelling them. Are they memories of the monsters brought forth by the heinous pacts made by the Word Bearers or visions drawn from the nightmares common in the wake of the attack?

 	News of Ventanus’s mission has already reached Arcology X, and the return of the Fourth is greeted with cheers and loud huzzahs from the thousands of civilians packed into its sprawling sub-levels. Someone shouts the word saviour, and the cry is taken up by the multitudes packed into the caves. It follows them down the levels as they plunge deeper and deeper into the bedrock of Calth.

 	Sydance is waiting for them at the gateway to the administration levels.

 	His cobalt-blue armour is clean and polished. Some of the Legion have made oaths not to remove the dust and blood of war until Calth is reclaimed, but like Ventanus, Lyros Sydance wants the Word Bearers to see the Ultramarines are still the regal Battle Kings of Macragge.

 	No amount of treachery and no grief will ever change that.

 	But even Sydance has adopted the black X on his shoulder guard, carefully etched between the curved arms of the marbled Ultima. It looks like a Chapter number or a company designation, but it is something far more important.

 	‘You’re making a name for yourself down here, Remus,’ says Sydance as the chants continue behind them.

 	‘Nothing to do with me, Lyros,’ replies Ventanus. ‘This has your fingerprints all over it.’

 	Sydance shrugs and grips Ventanus’s wrist. ‘A bit of hope and glory never hurt anyone.’

 	Ventanus does not release Sydance’s arm. ‘I want it to stop.’

 	‘Why? What you’re doing, it’s giving people hope.’

 	‘I’m not a saviour,’ says Ventanus. ‘And I don’t like the connotations of the word.’

 	‘You don’t have to like it, you just have to endure it.’ says Sydance, turning and making his way down the ramp into the cavern. ‘Come on, the Server’s waiting for you at the Ultimus.’

 	The war for Calth is being co-ordinated from the lowest level of Arcology X, a cavern seared from the lithosphere by melta drills and seismic charges. Beneath the levels of habitation, engineering and hydroponics, it is a rock-clad dome, some three kilometres in diameter, with numerous branching passageways, sub-galleries, and twisting dead ends radiating from its central void. At its heart stands a structure of polished marble and glass, utilitarian in elevation, but designed in the shape of the XIII Legion’s sigil. Armoured panels encase its lower levels, and Techmarines aboard Tekton-pattern Rhinos work side by side with Mechanicum servitors to transform it into something resembling a strongpoint.

 	Before the invasion, the building was owned by a trading cartel founded in the time of Guilliman’s adoptive father. It is named Konor’s Arch, but is now known as the Ultimus. Its robust infrastructure and powerful data-engines – designed to link subsidiary operations across the Five Hundred Worlds – make it the perfect base from which to conduct offensive operations against the remaining Word Bearers.

 	Such concerns are vital, but once again the symbolism of the structure is paramount.

 	Hundreds of temporary structures surround the Ultimus, overspill from the levels above. So great were the numbers of refugees fleeing Lanshear that the upper levels quickly filled, and Ventanus had no option but to allow billets to be set up around his command post. He doesn’t like it, but has little choice in the matter. There is simply nowhere else for them to go.

 	Word of their coming has reached the refugees, and people cluster at the edge of the clearway that leads to the gates of the Ultimus. People cheer and wave and clap. They shout his name, and once again call him saviour. He keeps his expression neutral, but catches sight of Sydance’s amusement.

 	‘You might not like the connotation, but The Saviour of Calth has a nice ring to it,’ says Sydance. ‘It’s a title that’ll stick, mark my words.’

 	‘So what do they call you?’

 	‘I haven’t decided yet,’ says Sydance with a grin. ‘But we’ll all have titles by the end of this.’

 	Ventanus walks on. He knows Sydance is right, but it still irks him to have the mantle of saviour thrust upon him. He dislikes the self-aggrandisement and its faintly theological undertones, but is canny enough to know that nothing he can do now will stop its spread.

 	‘So, are you going to say it?’ asks Sydance.

 	‘Say what?’

 	‘That you were right after all, and that I was wrong.’

 	‘I don’t need to,’ says Ventanus. ‘The truth is self-evident. Six hundred Word Bearers dead without the loss of a single warrior.’

 	‘Yes, very impressive,’ agrees Sydance, placing two fingers to his forehead and narrowing his eyes as though in a trance. ‘I see many laurels in your future, great statues built in your likeness and a name that echoes through eternity.’

 	Ventanus allows a thin smile to surface. ‘I will shoot you if you use those psychic powers again.’

 	Sydance laughs and turns from Ventanus and addresses the two sergeants behind him.

 	‘Barkha, Selaton, good job.’

 	The sergeants acknowledge his words, but do not reply.

 	Ventanus looks up and sees Server Tawren and her newly-acquired retinue of lexmechanics, calculus-logi and data-savants approaching. He is still learning the nuances of human interactions – something forced upon him by increased contact with the populace of Calth in recent weeks – but has become familiar with the hybrid machine/flesh expressions of the Mechanicum.

 	Tawren has the chimeric qualities common to the members of the Martian priesthood – detachment, aloofness and a disconnect that some see as cold – but right now Ventanus sees nothing of detachment, nothing of disconnect.

 	What he sees in Tawren’s face is an abyss of all too human despair.

 	‘Something has happened,’ he says. ‘What is it?’

 	‘CV427/Praxor is gone,’ says Tawren. ‘Two others as well.’

 	‘Gone?’ he says. ‘What does that mean?’

 	‘It means that they are radioactive craters hundreds of kilometres wide,’ says Tawren.

 	XII


 	Theoretical: deny the Word Bearers the chance to regroup.

 	Practical: achieve the same for the defenders of Calth.

 	Result: bring the Ultramarines back into the fight against the Warmaster.

 	These are the prime directives by which the XIII are operating, but knowing them and achieving them are two very different things.

 	Gathered around the central plotting table in a gleaming conference chamber that now serves as Calth’s command centre are the men and women Ventanus needs to turn that theoretical into a workable practical.

 	Sydance and Urath stand shoulder to shoulder, his fellow Fourth Company captain half a head taller than the sergeant of the 39th. Though his rank is inferior to that of Sydance, the hard-faced Urath has given fresh purpose to the scattered survivors of Sullus’s company.

 	Ventanus will see to it that he receives a captaincy for that.

 	Server Tawren consults with her Martian acolytes. He cannot see it, but knows there will be a haze of noospheric information buzzing around their heads in veils of data-light. She sifts invisible information with her hands. Behind her, a brutish skitarii clan chief stands, hulking and primitive looking. He has nothing of the calm poise of Cyramica, and is clearly a much lower ranking battle leader. His limbs are sheathed in metal and the lower half of his skull is a tusked, metallic trap like a greenskin’s jaw.

 	Colonel Hamadri consults a data-slate, her face set in an expression of cold determination. She has a son in the Numinus 61st, but has no knowledge of whether he is alive or dead. Statistical probability favours the latter, but until such time as his death can be confirmed, Hamadri will believe him alive.

 	This is good. Ventanus needs people around him who can hope against the odds.

 	Across from Hamadri is Captain Volper Ullyet of the 77th Ingenium Support Division, a heavily-built career officer who in fifty years of service has never left Calth or seen combat before the last few weeks. At first glance, he is an unlikely choice for the command table, but Ventanus sees beyond his service record to his actions during the initial phase of the attack.

 	Where the shock of the Word Bearers attack left others stupefied, Ullyet reacted in moments. Within four minutes of the attack’s commencement, his battalions of construction engines and earth moving machines were raising redoubts and defensive bulwarks around the main gates of Lanshear’s central arcology.

 	This, too, is good. Ventanus needs people who can react with speed.

 	Ingenium Subiaco stands close to Tawren, and his pleasure at being in the presence of a Mechanicum adept is obvious. Subiaco has only the most superficial augmetics, none that cannot be easily removed, and he hero-worships those who commune so directly with the Machine-God. Ankrion tells Ventanus that Subiaco is doing good work in the tunnels, securing the multitude of potential entry points to Arcology X.

 	The man is exhausted, but refuses to take his rest.

 	All the mortals are tertiary forces, reservists or commands designated to be rear-echelon units. Most are filled with raw recruits, soldiers raised specifically for the campaign against the Ghaslakh xenohold, a campaign Ventanus now understands to be entirely fictive. The forces still at Lanshear port when the sun died were the last to be embarked, fresh regiments, engineering units or logistical support elements.

 	Almost none are front-line certified.

 	Sydance tells Ventanus repeatedly that they are not ready for what he asks of them, and the stark light of the chamber only seems to confirm this. Every face is pinched and knurled with loss and shock. Sydance is right, they are not ready, but Ventanus believes that treachery has honed their previously unfinished edge. Complacency has been purged from their bones by the devastation above.

 	None beyond the Legion warriors were known to Ventanus before he made Arcology X his base of operations, but he knows them all now. He has made it his business to learn their strengths, their weaknesses and all the human foibles he must factor into his plans. Some think he wastes his time in attempting to understand mortals, but Ventanus knows better.

 	The only way Space Marines can now function alongside mortals is to understand them.

 	‘Server?’ says Ventanus. ‘Apprise me.’

 	Tawren nods and subcutaneous light shimmers through her fingers as she manipulates the plotting table with quick haptic gestures. A static-washed holographic of a giant, smoke-filled crater appears on the table, a hundred kilometres across. It blights the landscape and always will. Pixelated vapour clouds the size of cities are tugged by rogue thermals and atomic vortices.

 	‘You have all heard the news from CV427/Praxor,’ she says.

 	‘And the others,’ says Colonel Hamadri, her thin face blotchy with untreated rad-burn. ‘We lost more than two million people last night.’

 	Heads nod; the scale of death too terrible to contemplate. Such a vast number is difficult to visualise, too enormous for proper comprehension. Hamadri is a Defence Auxilia colonel, young to hold such rank. Ventanus sees she has heart and that will count for a great deal in the coming years. Hamadri kept her units on the surface as long as possible to allow the greatest number of refugees access to the arcology.

 	‘Do we know what happened?’ asks Sydance.

 	‘CV427/Praxor was an armaments stockpile for the orbital platforms and Legion warships,’ says Tawren. ‘Given the electro-magnetic signatures and recorded yields from the three blast sites, it seems likely that enemy infiltrators were able to modify and detonate a number of warheads from the cyclonic torpedoes stored there.’

 	‘How is that possible?’ demands Hamadri. ‘Those weapons are under Mechanicum protection. Don’t you people have security systems in place to stop that kind of thing? It’s your fault they’re dead!’

 	Tawren is visibly distressed by Hamadri’s accusation and her knuckles whiten as she grips the edge of the plotter table. Holographic clouds bend towards her in response.

 	‘That’s enough, colonel,’ says Ventanus. His tone leaves no room to argue, but Tawren raises a hand. She does not need him to defend her and answers Hamadri with remarkable calm.

 	‘Yes, we have ritual protocols to prevent such breaches, but the systemic corruption introduced to the planetary noosphere compromised a great many of our liturgical security systems.’

 	‘I thought your killcode got rid of it,’ says Hamadri.

 	Tawren nods. ‘The killcode of Magos Hesst burned the enemy scrapcode in a firestorm of numerical carnage, yes, but one that was indiscriminate in its purging. Many of our own systems were left crippled in the wake of the restoration of command authority. Those systems are even now being restored.’

 	‘So could this happen again?’ asks Ullyet.

 	‘I have personally inspected the security protocols at all other such weapon caches,’ says Tawren.

 	‘That’s not what I asked,’ says Ullyet.

 	‘Yes, it is,’ replies Tawren and her certainty is palpable.

 	Ullyet nods, the matter settled.

 	‘So how do we answer this atrocity?’ Sydance asks. ‘We’ll hit the bastards hard for this.’

 	They respond to Sydance’s words, and Ventanus sees the desire for vengeance in every face. He remembers his fellow captain espousing the same retributive mantra upon his arrival at Leptius Numinus. It is a primal and eminently understandable urge to strike back at those who have wronged them, but it is as ill-advised now as it was then.

 	Ventanus leans forward and places both hands on the edge of the table.

 	‘We answer by staying alive to finish the fight,’ he says. ‘We continue co-ordinating what forces remain combat-effective and devise a practical from that. The dead of Praxor are gone, and nothing will bring them back. Grieve when Calth is free, but while you are in this room, you all belong to me. Understand and accept that or get out.’

 	Stony silence greets his words. They hate his cold objectivity, his apparent lack of concern for the dead. Ventanus cares nothing for their approval. But he has to give them something, some spark to light the fire in their hearts. He is not good with such words, and these are the best he can do.

 	‘The Word Bearers will pay for this, but this war will not be won with impulse, it will be won with cool heads and solid practical. We fight for the living and we kill for the dead. Say it with me.’

 	The silence stretches.

 	‘Say it with me,’ he says again.

 	Heads nod, fists are made over hearts.

 	‘We fight for the living and we kill for the dead!’

 	XIII


 	Radioactive winds howl across Leprium, sounding hot and crackling in his helmet. The counter reads high, but his war-plate can withstand this intensity for days before its systems will need time to recharge. Maloq Kartho looks up into a sky laced with a poisoned borealis and heartsick rainbows of stellar fallout. The cascade of exotic particles and heavy metals will leave Calth a polluted wasteland from now until its star finally burns out and engulfs the entire Veridian system.

 	For all Kartho knows, that could be in millions of years or it could be tomorrow.

 	He cares not either way. He will never return to Calth.

 	It is reckless to stand so brazenly on the surface, but the powers to whom he owes fealty demand no less. Devastation surrounds him, the sprawling ruin of a dead city: twisted steel, shattered permacrete and broken glass. Upturned tanks and supply containers that fell from the ruptured bellies of bulk tenders straining for orbit are scattered everywhere.

 	Amidst the destruction, a statue fashioned from bronze, but now heavy with grey ash, stands at the end of a grand processional. It is a heroic representation of the mortal who raised Guilliman as his own.

 	Konor, the first Battle King of Macragge.

 	Bodies lie in drifts around the statue, as though the doomed populace of Leprium believed his legacy might somehow protect them from the slaughter. Kartho pities them their ignorance of the galaxy’s true divine masters.

 	A wrecked Imperator Titan stands sentinel over the ruins, hot, neutron-rich vortices gusting between its legs and sagging carapace. Its chest battlements are blown out and half its head section is missing. Grey dust falls in drifts from its listing carapace, but it is impossible to tell whether its loyalty was to Horus or the Emperor.

 	‘One of ours or one of theirs?’ asks Hol Beloth, emerging from the shelter of a tumbledown ruin of flooring plates and corrugated roof slabs. The commander has embraced his duty of atrocity with all the zeal one would expect of one of Lorgar’s sons. The murder of the civilian shelters has galvanised him, and the touch of the Bloody One fills his body with power.

 	That he thinks such banal deaths will be enough to save him makes Kartho’s lip curl in a mixture of amusement and contempt.

 	‘Who knows?’ says Kartho. ‘At this point it hardly matters.’

 	‘Could it be salvaged? Turned against the Thirteenth?’

 	Kartho shakes his head in disbelief. Hol Beloth mistakes this for his answer.

 	‘I suppose it is too badly damaged,’ says Hol Beloth.

 	That the fool believes there is still a war to be won on Calth is laughable. The Word Bearers’ victory has already been achieved and the fate of this rock is irrelevant.

 	Yes, the Ultramarines were not as humbled as Kor Phaeron desired, but they are broken as a fighting force. Spent. They will waste their efforts to reclaim a world that has no value. Lorgar has likely already forgotten Calth.

 	The powers beyond the Great Eye have their gaze turned upon the Golden One, and the burning of Ultramar is just the beginning of his grand schemes.

 	Maloq Kartho has ambitions of his own, and what he does here is simply the next step on his path to glory. He already feels his unnamed shadow moving through the darkness, an ink-black leviathan that swallows worlds and exterminates species for its fleeting amusement. He senses it hunting fresh prey even now, mortal beings who have somehow managed to escape Calth by means that should be impossible.

 	His hand slips over the glass surface of his warp-flask as he senses its squirming, reptilian hunger. Whoever it hunts must be special indeed to have elicited such pleasure in one so vast as to be beyond human understanding.

 	‘We shouldn’t be out here,’ says Hol Beloth, breaking into Kartho’s thoughts. The commander looks up into the wide sky. He feels too exposed to enjoy its technicolor death-throes. ‘You saw what happened to Lanshear.’

 	‘I did,’ agreed Kartho. ‘And it was wondrous. But still we wait.’

 	‘You will see us all killed,’ says Hol Beloth, lapsing into uneasy silence.

 	Hol Beloth feels acutely vulnerable here without his army, but to bring such numbers to the surface would bring the wrath of the Ultramarines orbital guns down upon them within moments. Besides, thinks Kartho, the brotherhoods will soon serve a much grander purpose where they are.

 	Kartho cast his augurs wide in choosing the legionaries who would accompany them. To achieve his goal, only the deadliest warriors could hope to survive. Only the most devoted and ruthless.

 	There are few as single-minded in their adoration as Eriesh Kigal.

 	Encased in a war-scarred suit of Terminator armour, Kigal stands head and shoulders above Kartho, his arched pauldrons and slab-like breastplate dancing with static and irradiated dust. Each fist is a lightning claw and his daemon-visaged helm now bears two curling horns. Six similarly clad warriors stand with Kigal, armed with a mix of combi-bolters, lightning claws, chainfists and energised warhammers. They bear the mark of the Octed upon their shoulders, and Kartho has inscribed each veteran’s scarred faceplate with his own personal sigil.

 	Towering over them all is a silent Dreadnought with a casket-plate bearing the etched name of Zu Gunara. Kartho knows nothing of that warrior; whatever flesh-scraps once sloshed in amniotic grease within have now been devoured by a void-hard darkness with teeth and eyes. The hulking war-machine is no longer simply a Dreadnought, but a thing of the night with iron fists.

 	‘So what are we waiting for?’ asks Hol Beloth, pacing back and forth in the shadow of a soot-blackened metal pressing plant.

 	‘For the bringers of a mighty gift,’ says Kartho, seeing a dust cloud threading its way through the ruins. The coughing splutter of a labouring engine echoes dully across the ashen remnants of the broken city. Hol Beloth hears it too and his hand goes to the crowned hilt of his sword.

 	‘Ultramarines?’ he asks.

 	‘No.’

 	‘How can you be sure?’

 	‘Because we are still alive,’ says Kartho as a wide-bodied industrial vehicle with a transport compartment at the rear comes into view. It ploughs through the knee-high dust between the gutted buildings, riding low on its suspension, heavy with potential. The remains of a spread-eagled skeleton are lashed to the roof of the vehicle. Only the pitted, corroded plates of carapace armour and shreds of uniform hold the body together. No flesh remains on the skeleton, the bones bleached the pallor of ash.

 	‘Major Kadene, I presume,’ says Kartho with a throaty chuckle.

 	Hol Beloth looks strangely at him, but he doesn’t satisfy his curiosity.

 	Though he has dismissed Hol Beloth’s concerns, Kartho looks up for any sign of their having been discovered. He has chosen his moment carefully. The clashing electromagnetic storm should render any geo-sats overhead blind to this portion of the city.

 	‘Come,’ says Kartho, and he and Hol Beloth step from the shelter of the covering structure.

 	Kigal’s Terminators and Zu Gunara follow them through the detritus of the flattened metropolis. Structures designed to withstand earthquake, fire and flood have been brought low by war, and the sight pleases Kartho greatly.

 	The vehicle wheezes towards them, finally stopping in the shadow of Konor’s statue. Its blue paintwork has flaked off, as though burned away from the inside. The bare metal of its frame and panels is already corroding. The Terminators lock the double barrels of their guns on the driver’s window. Kartho hears the buzz of target acquisition lasers and ranging motors over the city’s groaning lament of steel and the dusty susurration of the wind.

 	The vehicle’s crew doors open and Kartho smells the rich aroma of decaying meat. A man bearing the mark of the Brotherhood lurches from the cab’s interior and Kartho sees death upon him. He wears it proudly, a mass of rotten tissue that weeps milky fluid from the rampant sores covering every visible centimetre of his skin. His eyes are yellow, veined with ruptured capillaries and virtually blind with cataracts.

 	Hol Beloth draws his sword as he sees the man wears the uniform of the enemy.

 	He has not yet realised that this man is one of their own. Another brotherhood acolyte emerges from the opposite door, and his afflictions are even worse. Blood leaks from every pore and wind-borne dust abrades the flesh from his bones with every gust.

 	Kartho sees a third man through the warped glass of the canopy. His skin has peeled from his skull and he stares sightlessly at the Dark Apostle through fluid-filled sockets. His hands are fused with the steering column in some strange biological symbiosis. Blind, and enduring unspeakable torment, he has been guided here by the dark monarchs of the warp.

 	Hol Beloth reaches into the vehicle and rips the driver’s insignia from his uniform. A flap of wet meat comes with it and flops to the dust. He looks at the insignia, and it takes him a second to make the connection. Kartho steps around the vehicle, to where the dying men are pulling back a heavy tarpaulin. Hol Beloth appears at his side as the weapon they have come for is revealed.

 	It is spherical in shape, and smaller than Kartho had expected. A metre long, including the protective metal case. Its surfaces are smooth, the blue paint gone, leaving its body a dull grey that matches the former colour of the Word Bearers.

 	An unambiguous warning symbol is acid-etched onto its side.

 	A circular ring, with three splayed arms radiating from its centre to form three circles in a pyramid form. Since the earliest days, this has been the sigil of an elemental power, an unknowing rendition of the fear of pestilence carried in the hearts and minds of mortals since the dawn of time.

 	Hol Beloth holds up the driver’s insignia. ‘These men came from the Praxor shelter before it was destroyed.’

 	‘That they did,’ agrees Kartho.

 	The shadow of Zu Gunara falls over them as the Dreadnought lifts the warhead from the transport compartment. It is heavy and the vehicle visibly lifts from the dust. The men whose flesh is slipping from their frames like wet cloth sigh in pleasure.

 	‘Is this what I think it is?’ asks Hol Beloth.

 	Kartho nods.

 	He feels the warp-flask at his hip squirm with agitation. With the acquisition of this weapon of total destruction, his union with the immaterial creature grows ever closer. Kartho feels its resistance. It wants to finish its hunt, but the fates have decreed their joining and nothing will prevent it.

 	‘We cannot fight the Ultramarines conventionally,’ says Kartho. ‘We are newborn Catachan Devils in a bottle, each capable of killing the other, but only at the risk of his own life.’

 	The Terminators level their guns at the brotherhood warriors.

 	‘That is not how we will fight,’ continues Kartho.

 	The dying men drop to their knees and spread their arms in gratitude. Bare bone gleams. Ribs shine wetly through sloughing flesh. A bark of gunfire tears their dissolving bodies apart in an explosion of rotten matter. Flaming lumps of meat spatter the buildings nearby.

 	Eriesh Kigal affixes melta-charges to the vehicle. There must be no trace of it left for the geo-sats to discover. The intense heat will vaporise the transport and kill off any traces of biological taint. The Ultramarines must have no warning of the new threat that has emerged from the weapon stores of CV427/Praxor.

 	‘How do you intend to use it?’ asks Hol Beloth.

 	‘How do you think?’ says Maloq Kartho. ‘I am going to use it to kill Calth.’

 	XIV


 	A haze of light lies over the plotting table’s surface like a low-lying fog. Drifting particulates are caught in the diffuse light of the holos, causing flickering refraction errors in the topography displayed. It is Calth’s surface, rendered in greens, browns and yellow. Icons representing Ultramarines positions and their allies are marked in gold and blue; known Word Bearers and cultist positions in hostile red.

 	Two consistent red icons are of greatest concern to Ventanus – one in the heart of the foundries north of Lanshear, the other within the Uranik Radial.

 	‘How often do the geo-sats initiate a surface augur?’ asks Sydance as Tawren zooms in on each icon, friendly and hostile. Time stamps appear above each one.

 	The most recent is six hours old.

 	‘Access to orbital auguries is still sporadic,’ she says, shifting the map around with thought impulses through the MIU cabling plugged into the table. ‘Most of the geo-sats were knocked out in the first moments of the attack. The few that remain are slaved to the orbital weapon platforms to alert us to any surface movements of Word Bearers forces.’

 	Ventanus repeats Sydance’s question. ‘How often?’

 	‘Every ten hours,’ says Tawren. ‘That’s as much inload as the Ultimus noosphere can accommodate until more powerful data-engines can augment its capacity.’

 	‘That’s a long time,’ says Hamadri.

 	‘A long time?’ snaps Sydance, shaking his head. ‘It’s a lifetime. This map is worthless. Remus, we can’t devise theoretical, let alone practical, from data that’s ten hours old.’

 	‘Six hours,’ says Ventanus.

 	‘It could be six or ten minutes and it would be just as bad,’ says Sydance.

 	‘The map is as accurate as circumstances allow,’ responds Tawren, as the map zooms out.

 	‘You’re overlooking one thing, Lyros,’ says Ventanus.

 	‘I am? What?’

 	‘There are more gold icons today than there were yesterday,’ he says. ‘Every day our forces grow. The Word Bearers can have no such expectation. Server, how many more loyalist forces have you established contact with since the last update?’

 	‘Thirteen more underground shelters and sealed cave systems are now confirmed,’ answers Tawren, and the new additions bob like eager children on the map.

 	‘Two weeks ago we were broken and scattered, on the verge of extermination,’ says Ventanus. ‘Now we have co-ordination with nearly forty thousand of our Legion brothers, a quarter of a million Army and Mechanicum assets and sixteen Legio Titanicus engines. Every day brings us closer to becoming a globally unified force. The Word Bearers are alone, cut off from every hope of aid. They are fighting just to stay alive, but we fight for Calth.’

 	Ventanus spreads his hands to encompass the gold icons on the table.

 	He sees renewed hope. His words promise them a victory, but they think the war will be won in a matter of months. They think the Word Bearers will be pushed from Calth without difficulty.

 	They are wrong, and Ventanus needs to bring some cold reality to the table.

 	Using the manual controls, he highlights the area of the map that shows the two red symbols that trouble him the most. Force disposition icons and unit identifiers flicker to life as he manipulates the controls. The data is old and incomplete, but together with what he has seen with his own eyes, it is enough.

 	‘A Word Bearers commander named Foedral Fell is building a fortress in the northern foundry districts,’ he says. ‘And Hol Beloth, the warlord who razed Lanshear, has regrouped beneath the Uranik Radial. Beloth seems to have adopted a holdfast position, so we can discount him for now, but we can’t allow Fell to establish a secure base in the north.’

 	‘You have a theoretical?’ asks Sydance, eager to be unleashed.

 	‘I do,’ grins Ventanus. ‘We march north and kill the bastard.’

 	XV


 	The tunnels around Ingenium Subiaco are gloomy, and lit by dancing flames that he cannot see. Each passage bears the hallmarks of being naturally formed, but their dimensions are too perfect, too geometric to be anything other than artificial. The underground structures of Calth are an ingenium’s idea of paradise, a realm where geology, engineering and art come together. There are few underground cavern systems he has not visited, mapped and devised great schemes for linking.

 	An entire underground planetary ecology: self-sustaining and self-perpetuating.

 	His plans are even now being put into action – designs, philosophies and practical means of achieving their completion have been transmitted to most of the largest subterranean shelters for implementation.

 	The cavern is a glistening silver colour, suggestive of the eastern arcologies, the walls wet and dripping. Ingenium Subiaco has never feared solitude. He has found peace in the quiet times spent at a drafting slate, buried in a technical librarium or immersed in the design theory of the great thinkers of previous ages. He enjoys time spent with friends and family, but he acknowledges that he quickly reaches a point where he wishes to be alone.

 	Those closest to him know this about him and recognise the signs of his wandering attention and nascent irritability. They make allowances for him and Subiaco is grateful for their understanding of what he knows is a flaw in his character.

 	Subiaco relishes solitude and the chance to immerse himself in his work.

 	But this is something else entirely; he is utterly alone.

 	This is not just the absence of people, but the absence of the existence of other people.

 	Ingenium Subiaco understands with total clarity that he is the only man alive on Calth.

 	He does not know where he is and has no memory of coming here.

 	Each cave mouth is a yawning abyss, a pathway to horror or a gateway to some dreadful terror, locked away in ages past and now free to climb to the surface.

 	Caves and their exploration hold no terror for Subiaco. He has squirmed through the tiniest of cracks and pushed his wiry frame into some of the most inaccessible cave systems this planet has to offer, but these yawning entrances scare him more than anything.

 	He cannot count how many there are; every time his gaze shifts, the cavern seems to rearrange its walls and the black-limned cave mouths constrict without appearing to move. Subiaco feels hot breath exhale from the nearest cave, and backs away.

 	Which route leads to the surface? Do any of them?

 	He can see none of the cave markings etched by the earliest explorers, designed to aid the lost in finding their way back to the surface. It is as though this cave has never been trod by Calth’s people. Laughter drifts from somewhere and he spins around as shadows chase one another over the walls.

 	Drifts of steam sigh from cracks in the floor, but there is no heat to them. In fact, the cavern is like a storage chiller. His breath mists the air and he sees crackling daggers of ice form on overhanging crags of rock.

 	‘This isn’t real,’ he says, finally making the intuitive leap to realise that he’s dreaming.

 	But Subiaco is wise enough to see that understanding this and ending it are two very different things.

 	Orange light seeps into the cavern, the glimmer of distant fires. Subiaco remembers a crumbling text borne to Calth from Terra itself and said to be tens of thousands of years old. Its stasis-sealed pages spoke of a place far below the ground where all the devils and evil-doers of the world would be sent upon their deaths. This was said to be a place of fire and torment. With the sky above him and the light of the sun on his face, Subiaco scoffed at such ancient superstition, but here in the darkness, his animal core quails in fear.

 	The deep flames are growing hotter and the walls of the cavern begin to drip, sloughing their substance as though shaped from wax and not solid rock. The entire cavern structure is disintegrating, coming undone with the speed of an unmasked lie. The walls flake and peel away like cinders in a fire, the ceiling falling in a rain of blood-soaked ash.

 	And behind that waxen veneer, a swaying mesh of iron lath and haphazardly constructed supports. It is a madman’s structure that cannot possibly support the burden being placed upon it.

 	And beyond that, a howling void of utter emptiness.

 	No... not empty. Not empty at all.

 	Unimaginably huge shapes move within the void, leviathans that have outgrown the paltry scale of the word.

 	It horrifies Subiaco that this fragile lattice is all that stands between him and these monsters. He backs away from the nearest chain-link wall as a vast eye blinks before him. Subiaco only knows it is an eye because a pupil the size of a small moon dilates as it notices him. The structure around him trembles, and the shockwaves spread to the farthest reaches of the caves. He hears the sound of groaning steelwork and the grinding squeal of metal on metal. Something breaks over to his left and Subiaco hears the tap, tap, tap of steel claws at the iron lath. Hears it buckling and pulled apart.

 	Cackling laughter bubbles from somewhere that could be a thousand kilometres away or could be right behind him. Subiaco does not wait to find out and runs in what he hopes is the opposite direction. He hears the scrape of metal-sheathed bodies pushing their way through tears that are too small for their impossible forms. He hears the shrieks of their pain and the howls of their hunger. He keeps running, knowing better than to look back and see what is chasing him.

 	All he knows is that he has to get away.

 	He runs, and the sound of hundreds of polished steel blades echoes around him. They shed sparks that light the unravelling reality in strobing flashes and throw out elongated shadows of malformed limbs, distended jaws and gutting fangs.

 	Subiaco screams as he hears thousands more of the amorphous, bladed things beyond the lattice pushing their way into the collapsing cave structure. They will kill him if they catch him, but he fears that what will come after will be far worse.

 	Then, ahead, a miracle.

 	A great adamantium door, a towering portal that more accurately deserves – and utterly owns – the title of gate. It alone has resisted the dissolution of the caverns. It alone retains its solidity in the face of the corruption from beyond that unmakes all it touches. The gate is black and glossy, built from cyclopean blocks of titanic stone hewn from the depths of a lightless ocean. It is sealed at its centre by a great golden circle upon which is wrought a complex alchemical and mathematical equation.

 	The Clockwork Angel.

 	It is an ancient problem, but one that is known to Subiaco. He understands with the clarity only terror can impart that its solution will open the gate. An ornate keyboard of brass and jet sits at the centre of the great seal and his fingers make quick stabs at the black keys.

 	Gears spin, pins unlock and interleaved discs of gleaming metal separate as the lock disengages and the seal splits down the middle. Golden light spills through the gap between the leaves of the gate as it opens. It is cleansing and purifying, so bright that it threatens to blind him.

 	Subiaco shields his eyes from the radiance, feeling its welcoming heat spread over him.

 	Behind him, he hears the screams of the bladed beasts pursuing him. The light is lethal to them, it burns and unweaves the dark power holding their bodies. The golden light spreads, undoing the damage done to the fragile walls of reality. Its healing energy is wondrous and the corruption beyond the veil is helpless before it, driven back beyond the barriers that keep it from invading the realms of sanity and order.

 	The light envelops Subiaco, and he lets it...

 	...and his eyes open to find his wife standing above him, her face lined with fear. He sits up, and winces as a spasm of pain shoots up his spine. The cot-bed is uncomfortable, but is a great deal softer than a bedroll on the ground. He sees his daughter curled in the corner of their assigned room, her blanket pulled up around her knees. She looks at him with wide, frightened eyes.

 	‘I was having a nightmare,’ he says, letting out a shuddering breath.

 	‘Everyone’s having nightmares,’ says his wife, slipping her arms around him and resting her head on his shoulder.

 	‘I’m not surprised,’ he says, looking at the walls of their quarters as though they might disintegrate at any moment and reveal the horror behind them. He listens and thinks he can hear the faint tap, tap, tap of polished steel claws.

 	‘What was it about?’ asks his wife. ‘Your nightmare.’

 	‘I don’t remember,’ he says.

 	XVI


 	The Ultramarines move out in force. Fifteen hundred warriors leave Arcology X in a kilometre-long column of heavy armour. The armoured gates open onto the blue-lit wastelands and Legion strength – enough to subdue a world – rides out to war. Ventanus leads them, shuttered within the commander’s compartment of a Shadowsword. The super-heavy’s interior is not designed for post-humans, but he has found a way to press his bulk into a space designed for a mortal body.

 	The interior of the super-heavy smells of grease, engine oil, sweat and sickly-sweet gusts of pine-scented incense. He hears the crew chatter over the vox, but tunes it out. He does not need to hear their operational back and forth. Not yet.

 	Though he holds no belief in the Machine-God of Mars, Ventanus gives a curt nod to the skull-stamped cog symbol on the bulkhead beside him. Though it goes against his grain, he touches the image with his fingertips. Not for luck, but to honour the Mechanicum forces that helped bring Calth back from the brink.

 	Hesst, Cyramica, Uldort and the thousands of others whose names he will never know.

 	As if in acknowledgement of his gesture of respect, the slates around him chime with inloading data. Reels of waxy paper spit from chattering ticker-tapes, Tawren’s feed from the cogitators of Arcology X. Geo-sat imagery fills the slate before him, a haze of information four hours old that bathes his cut-glass features in a ghostly ochre light.

 	Their attack will reach the outer edges of Foedral Fell’s foundry strongpoint in around another five hours. Ventanus plans to launch his attack immediately after the geo-sats pass overhead and paint the most up-to-date picture of the tactical situation. Nearly a hundred Land Speeders with enclosed crew compartments skim the ruins before them, feeding back more immediate intelligence on the ground ahead, optimal attack vectors and revisions to the proposed route.

 	It is not the way Ventanus would want to launch such a vital assault, but he suspects that few engagements in the coming war will be fought in ideal circumstances.

 	The landscape around Ventanus is bleached of colour by the display, but even rendered in monochrome the horror of such planetary holocaust shocks him. He saw this devastation unleashed first hand. He knows how terrible it was, but to see the surface of Calth like this is a stark reminder that this is not a warzone that nature will eventually reclaim.

 	This is all that Calth will ever be.

 	Lanshear is a skeletal steel ruin, its acreage of efficient platforms and guildhalls now a blackened, shadow-haunted wasteland. Numinus fares little better, and the spaces between them are littered with the detritus of wounded strato-carriers: flattened supply crates, ruptured barrels and upended cargo containers. Most split apart on impact, spreading their contents over thousands of square kilometres of the surface. Rifles, uniforms, food packets, boots, medicae supplies and the millions of other items required by campaigning forces at war.

 	It is as if a dozen armies marched through and discarded everything they were carrying before vanishing. None of the scattered items can be salvaged. All are too irradiated now to be of use. The crumpled spine of the Antrodamicus groans on the plains beyond Numinus City. The starship’s plated hull is buckled and holed in a thousand places. Ventanus remembers watching it fall from the sky, a sight no sane mind could have imagined. Smoke still billows from its gutted interior, weeks after it crashed into the surface like an extinction-level meteorite.

 	It reminds Ventanus of a great plains-dwelling leviathan brought down by rapacious predator packs. A marvel of technology that once travelled between the stars in service to the greatest vision of mankind, reduced to rusting wreckage. A mighty king of the void brought low by treachery and left to rot on the world that most likely saw its keel first laid down.

 	Towers stand on the horizon like broken teeth in a rotten gum, backlit by flames from the raging fires of the refinery wells. Towering drilling rigs sway, their surfaces corroding in the stellar radiation. Ventanus sees the death of a world in all directions, cities reduced to ashen deserts, proud hubs of industry shattered beyond reclamation and entire habitation rings pounded to glassy ruin.

 	Calth was never the most beauteous planet of Ultramar, but Ventanus has seen enough of the galaxy to know it was a handsome one. It had not the wonder of Prandium, its cities were not the architectural marvels of Konor, and its oceans were not as majestic as those of Macragge.

 	Yet few worlds can match the industry of its people. Every inhabitant of Ultramar is hard-working, but the people of Calth are fiercely proud of their reputation as the hardest workers in the Five Hundred Worlds. Its shipyards on the surface and in orbit constructed more warships than many dedicated forge worlds, and no vessel bearing the stamp of a Calth shipwright ever failed in combat.

 	All of that is gone.

 	Calth’s people endure, but the world they fight for no longer exists.

 	Ventanus remembers the Calth that was.

 	The dead world around him is the Calth that is.

 	XVII


 	Ventanus splits his Ultramarines into four spearheads, the faster vehicles moving on the flanks while the super-heavies and Dreadnoughts advance up the centre. Ventanus commands this element. Selaton commands the left, Sydance the right. Urath of the 39th will rendezvous with them at the Malonik Transit, and the strike force will swell as more of their scattered brothers bleed in from each of the Lanshear Arterials.

 	The Burning Cloud, the Titan that killed the traitor engine Mortis Maxor, marches over the buckled superhighway of the Tarxis Traverse, its warhorn echoing mournfully over the ruins. Captain Aethon’s warriors are sweeping down from the north, but his force will only join with Ventanus when they meet in the middle of Foedral Fell’s ruined fortress.

 	The last element of the assault force is Eikos Lamiad.

 	Tetrarch of Ultramar, Primarch’s Champion. Eikos of the Arm they call him now; his army is an eclectic muster of forces stitched together from the survivors of the parched deserts and burning muster fields around the Holophusikon. Army, skitarii and Defence Auxilia rally to his banner, together with the great Telemechrus – the Sky Warrior, the twice-birthed.

 	With his arm lost to Word Bearers bolts, Lamiad’s warriors have declared themselves his Shield Bearers. Already the survivors of the attack are building a mythology.

 	Perhaps there is something to Sydance’s assertion that they will all have names of legend by the time this war is done. Something to inter in the museum of the future.

 	Ventanus drags his thoughts from potential futures to the present.

 	He has brought together a force greater than any assembled since the muster. This is an appropriate response. What little information Tawren was able to collate from the brief link with the Word Bearers cogitators before the betrayal indicates that Foedral Fell is a war-leader of great prowess and charisma.

 	If he is allowed to effectively rally the Word Bearers, the war for Calth will take decades.

 	That cannot be allowed to happen.

 	His fortress stronghold in the foundry districts must be razed to the ground.

 	The going is slower than Ventanus would like, but his time-table has allowed for this. A number of paths thought clear from orbital pict-capture are proving to be impassable on the ground. The Land Speeders are creating passage with their guns or feeding back updated routes.

 	In five hours the co-ordinated arms of the Ultramarines assault will be at the outskirts of Foedral Fell’s stronghold, within minutes of the fresh telemetry from orbit.

 	And armed with the most up-to-date information at his disposal, Ventanus will wipe Foedral Fell from the face of Calth.

 	XVIII


 	Hol Beloth follows Maloq Kartho into the ruins of a Lanshear starscraper whose spine has been broken. The towering structure lost its upper three hundred storeys when the portside void array of the Antrodamicus sheared them away with the precision of a thousand-metre blade. The shock of that impact buckled the ventral pier and robbed the building of its structural integrity. The starscraper creaks and groans in the howling winds, and wide cracks have spread from the floor to the metres-thick support columns.

 	It is only a matter of time until the tower collapses.

 	Neither this nor their proximity to a known Ultramarines stronghold seems to bother Maloq Kartho, who leads their small warband into the corpse-choked atrium. Concussive force from an engine engagement three kilometres away on the Niansur Lateral blew out the building’s heliotropic windows, and the scorched bodies are shrouded in ash-stained glass with brittle reflections.

 	Eriesh Kigal and his Terminators have said little since they took possession of the weapon from the disintegrating cult-warriors. Zu Gunara is even more uncommunicative, and Hol Beloth is beginning to feel like less of a commander, and more of a passenger.

 	‘Why are we here?’ he asks, stopping in the midst of the corpses. A flaking skull, black and pitted, stares up at him, the jaw sagging open with the vibration of his footfall. He crushes it beneath his boot.

 	‘You ask a question that has vexed the greatest minds since man first learned to walk upright,’ replies Kartho. He puts a hand out to support himself, as though weary from their trek across the shattered hinterlands of Calth. Their armour is straining to keep the worst of the radiation at bay, and the power capacitors in their backpacks will need to be charged soon.

 	Yet what they have endured is nowhere near enough to tire the Dark Apostle.

 	Only now does Hol Beloth realise that Kartho no longer has his Octed staff.

 	‘You know what I mean,’ says Hol Beloth. ‘Here. This building. Why?’

 	Kartho cranes his neck upwards, looking through the great void at the building’s heart. Hol Beloth follows his gaze. Dust and particles of glass spin in light filtered through the broken windows. They form strange patterns, spirals, loops and hints of suggested forms just out of reach. For the briefest moment, Hol Beloth sees something in the dancing motes, but it slips from perception even as he thinks he sees it.

 	‘We are here to witness something,’ says Kartho, as though that explains everything.

 	‘Witness what?’ demands Hol Beloth, his hand curling around the leather-wrapped grip of his sword. He no longer cares if the muttering shadows attack him, he simply wants answers.

 	‘A moment in history,’ says Kartho, holding up his hand to forestall another angry outburst at his cryptic answer. ‘Contrary to what some believe, the universe is not a sterile place. It is a grand melodrama, a tapestry of consequences, both man-made and celestial. Most are minor things, easily missed, but some are of galactic significance, universal even. And these dramas must be witnessed if they are to register in the universal paean to the dark monarchs. A number of such dramas are close, and we are here to bear witness to one.’

 	‘What’s going to happen?’ asks Hol Beloth.

 	Kartho sighs and says, ‘Climb with me and we will witness it together.’

 	Hol Beloth looks back up the atrium. Even with its top sliced away, the starscraper still soars to a height of nearly a kilometre and a half.

 	‘I suppose it’s too much to hope that the transit lifts still have power?’ says Hol Beloth.

 	Kartho laughs, a mockery of the sound.

 	‘Good drama is earned,’ he says, setting off towards a dust and corpse-choked stairwell. ‘And, trust me, you won’t want to miss this.’

 	XIX


 	Like everything to do with the war on Calth, Foedral Fell’s stronghold is a thing of ugliness. Dismantled manufactoria have provided the raw materials for his fortifications: sharp-edged bastions, low-lying artillery deflectors and sunken blockhouses. It is a cancerous blight on the landscape, a fog-wreathed, orange-lit vision of damnation. Tar-black smoke streams up like claw marks on a canvas, and the air stinks of petrochemical fires.

 	Ventanus remembers a Word Bearer who called himself Morpal Cxir who claimed that Foedral Fell’s warhost numbered in the tens of thousands. Those numbers will have been decimated by Tawren’s orbital strikes, but by how much is the real question.

 	‘Come on...’ he mutters, watching the counter on the main slate diminish.

 	At last it reaches zero, and heart-stopping seconds pass before the combat logister flickers to life. Real-time data inloads from the geo-sats. Information pours in. Ventanus processes it instantaneously, parsing tactical feeds on avenues of approach, heat signatures, topographical layouts and enemy troop dispersals. He had feared that the Word Bearers might have their own scouts in place and be ready for them, but it now appears that he was wrong to credit the enemy with such foresight.

 	Readiness icons flash on the logister as the information passes down to his force commanders. They have seen what he has seen, they are hungry for this fight: dogs of war, straining to be let slip. Even Lamiad defers to his command. It is Ventanus’s right and honour to give the word.

 	His theoretical is solid. The practical is in place. They all know it.

 	‘All commands, unleash havoc,’ orders Ventanus.

 	XX


 	The plotter table within the Ultimus is not designed to handle military-grade inloads. Its Lexaur-Kale photon arrays were designed to distribute system-wide shipping timetables and manifest lists, not co-ordinate Legion war-planning. Server Tawren has been forced to make numerous alterations to its bio-organic cognitive centres.

 	Most are sanctioned modifications, but a few are those taught to her by Koriel Zeth during her apprenticeship at the Magma City. Not forbidden, per se, but frowned upon. Hesst would have approved, and the thought of her binary life-partner observing her work makes her smile.

 	Colonel Hamadri and Captain Ullyet are present, but they are ghosts to her. Unaugmented and without noospheric enablement, little more than blurs in her peripheral vision. All she sees is data. They are speaking softly, but she does not hear them.

 	Calth’s atmospherics are lousy with rad-squalls, but Tawren has learned to compensate for this. She adjusts her filters and the optics of the geo-sats respond to her commands. Static blurs. Holographics waver. Resolution refreshes and she sees what she needs to see.

 	She reads the energy signatures of buried power sources, thermal blooms from what are most likely barrack structures. Everything the Word Bearers have tried to hide is laid bare before her and she relishes the godlike aspect to her current position.

 	Everything she is seeing is consistent with the deployment characteristics known of the Word Bearers. Heat patterns are consistent with Legiones Astartes power plants, and this reassures her that nothing significant has changed since the last exload from the geo-sats.

 	Half a dozen savants and logi are plugged into the table, each assigned to a command element of the assault force. The geo-sats send their findings back to Arcology X in compressed data blurts, which are then passed to the attacking Ultramarines. Each Space Marine commander has his own dedicated battle-savant to break the data inloads into packets of information more easily digested by those without cognitive process augmetics.

 	The bio-architecture of Space Marine brains is greatly enhanced compared to mortals, but they are not Mechanicum.

 	‘Geo-sats will remain overhead for another fifty-three seconds,’ says a savant with dark skin and warm eyes that are still his own. ‘Five three seconds.’

 	His accent is equator-thick, and Tawren likes the flexing epenthesis of his words.

 	She watches the inloading data spread through the plotting table, the gold icons moving in a carefully orchestrated ballet. Everything moves with precision. Every sweep and thrust made by the warriors of the XIII is perfectly co-ordinated.

 	It does not feel like watching a battle, it feels like watching a replay of a battle.

 	Her eyes flick to a noospheric countdown hovering over the rune indicating the force element containing Captain Ventanus.

 	XXI


 	The Shadowsword fills with crackling electrical feedback as its main gun fires. Static charge lifts energised dust fragments from armour plates and makes the hairs on the back of his neck stand to attention. Ventanus could have ridden into battle within a Land Raider, but the awesome destructive potential of the Shadowsword was too great to resist.

 	On the grainy pict-slate before him, a wall disintegrates as the super-heavy’s main gun obliterates it. This is a tank capable of killing battle engines. An ad-hoc fortification has no chance. Bodies tumble from the wreckage, cultist bodies. Those that are still recognisable as human are on fire.

 	Ventanus cannot hear their screams, but wishes he could.

 	His capacity to enjoy the suffering of his enemies has become something feral.

 	Ventanus activates the pressure seals that isolate his forward station from the rest of the super-heavy. He wants to see Foedral Fell’s stronghold laid waste with his own eyes.

 	A green bulb lights up beside him. Pressure seals secure.

 	He enters his command code onto an oversized keypad. The hatch above unlocks with a snap of vulcanised seals and durasteel locking bars. It slides back and Ventanus pushes himself upright.

 	Flames surround the tank as it bludgeons its way through the outer reaches of Foedral Fell’s defences. Bands of brotherhood warriors in scavenged exo-suits run from the Shadowsword. None of their weapons are capable of denting its thick armour, and they know it.

 	Banks of heavy bolters mow them down as they flee. Streams of las and solid rounds saw through their disordered ranks. Plumes of hot blood puff from their exploding bodies like geothermal geysers.

 	Ventanus slews the pintle-mounted combi-bolter around and hauls back on the arming lever. The magazine engages with a satisfying clatter and he mashes the trigger. The recoil of a combi-bolter is ferocious, more suited to the man-capable tanks that are Terminators, but the Shadowsword’s assembly and his genhanced strength keep his rounds on target.

 	Bodies detonate, reduced to meat and gristle.

 	Here and there a warrior band holds its ground. Ventanus has brief glimpses of iron masks, ragged robes and wholly inadequate rad-shielding. They fire weapons that are sub-Army in quality and effectiveness. He wonders how such rabble ever gained a foothold on Calth. He kills them as soon as he sees them.

 	There are no Word Bearers amongst the cultists, but everything he saw of the fighting before the retreat below ground displayed total disregard for their mortal allies. The humans are here only to slow the Ultramarines’ advance, to soak up their fury. If that is Fell’s plan, then he has sorely underestimated the well of fury from which the XIII Legion can draw.

 	Ventanus savours the sight of hundreds of Ultramarines tanks thundering over the hellish wasteland of Fell’s outer fortifications. To either side of him, Land Raiders rear up over hastily-raised berms of scorched earth, slamming back down with thunderous force. The enemy warriors who have held their ground are crushed beneath their tracks or buried in the dust. Squadrons of Predators fire syncopated volleys of heavy las-fire and the fiery contrails of Whirlwind missiles arc overhead in dizzying numbers.

 	Squadron upon squadron of Land Speeders flit like murderous raptors over the battlefield, strafing exposed enemy formations. Their multi-meltas breach bunkers, and Assault squads drop in their wake to end pockets of resistance with shrieking chain-blades and pistols.

 	The Burning Cloud strides in from the east, its guns wreathed in smoke and light as it sears the sky with magma blasts. Mushrooming explosions erupt in the centre of the fortifications. Adamantium walls are turned to slag with each impact. Air-bursting rockets flare from the Titan’s void shields, and its warhorn sounds like booming laughter.

 	Ventanus brings a tactical overlay onto his visor. Gold icons close like a fist on Fell’s fortification, but these are just the outer layers. Easily overcome. The real defences are a kilometre ahead, towering walls that can withstand a Titan’s guns, hellish bastions of dark steel and sunken bunker complexes that even a Shadowsword will struggle to breach.

 	But he has bigger guns than even a Reaver or a Shadowsword can mount.

 	Ventanus opens a vox-channel to Arcology X.

 	‘Meer Edv Tawren,’ he says. ‘Just like before.’

 	XXII


 	Tawren links with the orbital guns and disengages their safety protocols with an outward sweep of both hands, like an actor parting a curtain and taking the stage. It takes a moment for the multiple layers of security put in place since the invasion to disengage, but each platform comes under her command without issue.

 	Every orbital gun is now slaved to Arcology X.

 	She has control.

 	‘Brace for full bombardment,’ says Tawren.

 	XXIII


 	For a single, beautiful moment, Calth’s night ends.

 	The poisoned air lights up. Daylight returns.

 	But it is a false dawn, heralding not the promise of fresh beginnings, only endings.

 	The undersides of clouds heavy with acid rain glow for an instant as high powered lasers burn through them. Meson trails flash-burn the volatile, chemically-rich bands of vapour that have gathered above the strongpoint. The landscape is lit up for hundreds of kilometres as the sky catches fire.

 	All of this happens in an instant. Fractions of seconds later, searing beams of energy slice down from space like arrow-straight lightning. The beams make no sound in themselves, but the atmosphere ignites with their passage. Each impact is swiftly followed by a hard bang of displaced air.

 	Ventanus watches it through the filtering insulation of his armour’s auto-senses. Aural dampers resist deafening cracks of thunder that would otherwise rupture his eardrums. Visual protection keeps him from being blinded. Ceramite plates protect him from heat that would sear the flesh from his bones.

 	The exposed cultists have no such protection and their formations are reduced to swirling banks of meat-smoke. Skeletons have the flesh burned from them, blood boils and impregnable walls are left as little more than heaped rubble.

 	The first wave of overpressure hits and the ground quakes. The Shadowsword rocks back on its suspension as the percussive blast slams into it like an army of Contemptors slamming its hull with graviton hammers. Ventanus leans into the blast wave, riding out the pummelling force. His link with the super-heavy tells him that numerous onboard systems have failed. Feed lines rupture, hydraulics burst and delicate systems overload.

 	A kilometre from the nearest impact point, and still they are too close.

 	Laser lances and kinetic rounds all slam down on Foedral Fell’s stronghold, blowing out its pathetic blast shielding and rudimentary void fields. There is nothing left of the fortifications. Its soft underbelly has been exposed and Ventanus has the harpoon ready to thrust.

 	Excited chatter bursts over the vox. A hundred voices all saying the same thing.

 	‘Did you see that?’

 	‘Throne!’

 	‘There can’t be anything left alive in there!’

 	Ventanus knows there will be survivors. The Word Bearers will not be dug out so easily.

 	He cuts across the vox-network.

 	‘We still have a practical to achieve,’ he says. ‘Carry out your orders.’

 	The Ultramarines obey.

 	XXIV


 	Hol Beloth watches in horror as the horizon lights up from end to end. He knows what he is seeing, a holocaust of orbital fire concentrated in one place. He has memorised the geography of Calth and knows exactly who the wrath of the Ultramarines guns is striking.

 	‘Fell,’ he says.

 	Maloq Kartho nods.

 	Hot winds whip around the headless tower, billowing Hol Beloth’s cloak and filling his mouth with grey grit. The swaying motion of the tower forces him to keep his stance wide as the ground tilts alarmingly below him. He feels as though he stands upon the deck of a primitive longship. The sensation is not a welcome one.

 	The devastation of Calth is even more apparent from up here. It is a radiation-lashed death world that will always bear the mark of the Word Bearers. Despite what he is seeing, he takes a moment of pride in that fact, even as his own skin blisters.

 	More impacts slam into the ground, more fire lights the horizon. The first seismic shocks shake the tower. Glass fragments rain from gaping frames. Structural supports buckle and tumble earthwards. The tower slumps into its splitting foundations.

 	Collimated lance battery fire strikes the horizon. The hellish radiance it provides illuminates one stark fact.

 	‘You knew this was coming,’ says Hol Beloth.

 	Kartho shrugs and Hol Beloth hates the gesture. It is a gesture of giving up, of not feeling enough to care that something precious is dying. That shrug tells him that Maloq Kartho is no longer truly one of Lorgar’s sons, but is becoming something else entirely.

 	‘Fell had the biggest army,’ says Kartho, ‘and the grandest ambition.’

 	Hol Beloth tries not to feel slighted, knowing it is absurd in the face of such destruction. He tries to follow Kartho’s words to a logical conclusion, but those he reaches make no sense. Only one factor remains constant in his thoughts.

 	‘You engineered this, didn’t you?’ he says.

 	‘Of course,’ replies Kartho.

 	‘Fell and his warriors are gone, aren’t they?’

 	‘Not yet,’ replies Kartho, struggling with the gorget seals at his neck. ‘But soon.’

 	‘Why?’ asks Hol Beloth, knowing now that he will have to kill the Dark Apostle. Kartho has crossed a line, though for what purpose, he does not know.

 	‘Service to the Dark Monarchs requires a degree of sacrifice,’ says Kartho. ‘And the Ultramarines needed a target tempting enough to draw them from their cowardly bolthole.’

 	Kartho reaches up and removes his helmet. More accurately, he snaps his helmet apart in order to remove it. Zephyrs of dark smoke gust from within and Hol Beloth sees just how far the Dark Apostle has come in his service to Lorgar’s vision for the galaxy.

 	XXV


 	An electromagnetic haze hangs over the landscape. Dust swirls like ashen rain and heat blooms ripple the air over terrain that has been boiled to glass by the heat of multiple lance strikes. The Shadowsword crunches through the shattered remains of Foedral Fell’s strongpoint. The orbital weapons have destroyed his sheltering walls with horrifying ease.

 	Ventanus climbs down from the Shadowsword. Its hull is hot to the touch and the reactor ticks over noisily as it cools. Shapes move in the mist, but they are armoured in cobalt-blue and gold. They are Ultramarines, and they are marching alongside him.

 	His armour’s external pickups register a wide spectrum of exotic radiations and a lethal cocktail of poisonous elements in the air. This is only to be expected when such potent energies have been unleashed. Staggered lines of Legion warriors advance into the molten remnants of the enemy fortress, boltguns locked to their shoulders. They are blurred giants moving through a chemical fog that would dissolve the lungs of a mortal man with one breath.

 	Ventanus has his bolt pistol drawn and his sword unsheathed. He does not expect to use either in the immediate future, but a captain must be seen to be ready to fight. He sees no sign of the Word Bearers, but he knows that they will be here somewhere. They are Legion trained and Legion blooded. They will have survived this bombardment and will even now be readying a counter-attack.

 	Ventanus leads the Ultramarines deeper into the smoking, debris strewn wasteland. The Shadowsword rolls behind him, its engine a bone-deep rumble that he feels in his marrow. As the circle of Ultramarines tightens on the stronghold’s centre, a nagging suspicion takes shape in Ventanus’s head. Nebulous and unformed, but insistent.

 	Scattered groups of brotherhood soldiers have miraculously survived the barrage. They are blind and deaf, burned and desolate. They are slaughtered without mercy. The Ultramarines do not waste mass-reactives on them. Who knows when they will be resupplied? Chain-blades and fists put the enemy down, but there is little satisfaction in such wretched targets.

 	‘This is Ventanus,’ he voxes to his force commanders. ‘Report any sightings of enemy Legion forces.’

 	There are no reports of contacts beyond the scalded, crippled forms of the enemy’s mortal soldiery, and Ventanus feels a gnawing worry that something here is very wrong.

 	‘Where are the Word Bearers?’ he asks himself.

 	If Foedral Fell is not here, then where is he?

 	At the heart of the fortress the Ultramarines find a vast crater, a nightmarish hell of electrical fires and scorched meat. Almost nothing is left standing, and what the barrage did not level in the opening moments, secondary explosions and burning ammunition depots have knocked flat. Here and there, Ventanus sees evidence of retrenchments and redoubts, but it is hard to make out anything for sure any more. Tawren’s precision strikes have seen to that.

 	The Shadowsword’s main gun traverses over his head, searching for a target, but finding nothing worthy of its fire. The Burning Cloud is silhouetted in the flames, a great engine of destruction standing over the doom of its foe.

 	A dust- and grime-coated warrior emerges from the haze and raises a hand.

 	‘I thought there’d be at least someone left alive to fight,’ says Sydance.

 	‘So did I,’ replies Ventanus, sheathing his sword and mag-locking his pistol to his thigh.

 	‘You think they died in the bombardment?’

 	‘It looks that way,’ says Ventanus, though it seems too convenient an explanation.

 	‘Not much of a fortress then,’ says Sydance. ‘Lord Dorn would have words.’

 	Ventanus says nothing in reply, his friend’s words striking at the nagging suspicion that has been building ever since the first shots were fired. He stops in his tracks as his thoughts cohere on an inherent flaw in what has happened here.

 	‘This fortress could never have stood,’ he says. ‘It’s completely ridiculous.’

 	‘What are you talking about?’

 	‘Why build anything we could level from orbit in moments?’ says Ventanus. ‘Why build it above ground at all? It doesn’t make any sense.’

 	‘Maybe they couldn’t find anywhere underground?’

 	‘They could have found somewhere to get underground,’ says Ventanus. ‘This isn’t making any sense. Damn it, what are we missing?’

 	The winds are clearing the smoke and haze, and Ventanus has something of an answer when he sees the cracked structure at the very heart of the fortress. Like the hardened structure of an aircraft hangar, it has withstood the barrage enough to remain standing. Sections of its roof have caved in where the supporting walls have collapsed. Ventanus can see no defensive works in its construction.

 	It is a giant dome, embellished with elaborate carvings, a pair of decorative towers and a wide entrance without gates. Its construction is grandiose and Ventanus realises he has seen its like before.

 	‘What do you think that is?’ asks Sydance. ‘A keep? Somewhere to make a last stand?’

 	‘No,’ says Ventanus. ‘It’s not a keep, but I know what it is now. I’ve seen buildings like this before.’

 	‘Where?’

 	‘On Monarchia,’ says Ventanus. ‘It’s a temple.’

 	XXVI


 	Ingenium Subiaco does not remember falling asleep, but that is surely what has happened.

 	It is understandable. Toiling in perpetual twilight, with no rest in the darkness and no respite from the task in hand, no one could remain awake for as long as he has. He is dreaming, of that he is sure, for he travels the same silvered caves of his nightmares.

 	He has come here night after night, dragged down into horrors that play out in an endless loop. That the experience never changes offers no respite, only dark foreknowledge of the nightmarish flight from the multi-jointed creatures with the polished steel claws that tap, tap, tap upon the rock.

 	The cave is the same strange silver, glistening with moisture and with the now omnipresent threat lurking just out of sight. He knows the apparently solid walls of the cave are nothing of the sort. He knows what lurks behind the fragile skin of reality and, as much as he wishes to, he cannot unknow it.

 	Half-glimpsed forms flit around him like darting smoke.

 	He moves through the caves hurriedly, expecting that at any moment the walls will start peeling back to reveal the corruption beneath. He hears voices, but they are meaningless to him and he cannot answer them. At every step he feels as though he is being guided, but by who or what, he cannot say.

 	The sense of expectation is almost unendurable, like a guillotine blade suspended a hair’s breadth over the back of his neck. Subiaco wills himself to wake, but he has long since learned that he is powerless to control the inevitable progression of this terror.

 	Sure enough, he hears the faint sound of tapping, like rats in the walls.

 	Tap, tap, tap...

 	Subiaco breaks into a run as he hears the clack of claws again and again.

 	Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap...

 	Louder now, coming from all around him. This is new, this is his nightmare moving to a higher level of terror. Then, as though a flame has been taken to the papier-mache backing of the walls, they begin to disintegrate, blackening and spiralling away like dying embers. The walls slough from the familiar rusted lattice supporting them and the terrible void behind is revealed once again.

 	It churns like the depths of a hideously polluted ocean, saturated with the filth and mire of an entire species. What is in there is not alien. It is not the horrific by-product of some race inimical to mankind. With unasked-for clarity he understands that this ocean of madness belongs to his people. Humanity creates this realm of insanity, and Subiaco runs as he hears the claws of his daemonic pursuers tearing their way through once more.

 	This time they are not just behind him. They are all around him.

 	The wall ahead of him bulges as something presses its unnatural bulk against the lath, and Subiaco sees gleaming fangs and amber eyes, each slitted with a dagger slash of onyx. The tear splits wider and a brood of beasts with claws of polished steel spill into the hollow cavern. Their blades gleam with murder and their flesh is fashioned from the skinless bodies of everyone he knows and loves. Screaming faces howl in torment from heaving, animal flanks, and their limbs are the beasts’ limbs, fused together in some awful biological abortion. The skulls of the beasts are metallic, gleaming wetly through pasted-on skin. Even stretched out he recognises the faces there, and his scream is one of abject loss.

 	Subiaco runs, and the beasts are hard on his heels, stalking him, toying with him.

 	They could catch and kill him any time they want, but there is too much pleasure to be taken in the hunt. He feels their hot breath upon him, rancid and empty.

 	Subiaco knows there is only one way out and he races onwards, hoping with every breathless stride that he will reach the great cyclopean gateway with its golden seal.

 	Only the gateway offers sanctuary.

 	Subiaco wakes, the cries of the daemons ringing in his ears.

 	And nothing has changed.

 	XXVII


 	The interior of the temple is a slaughterhouse, and Ventanus can make no sense of it.

 	It is cold inside, freezing even. The heat from the dying star and the bombardment does not penetrate here, and steam rises from every legionary’s backpack. Columns of light stab down from the cracked roof and the poisonous fumes of burning war materiel linger at the openings in the wall, as though unwilling to enter.

 	Ventanus smelled the blood before he took one step within, and now he has an answer as to what has become of the Word Bearers.

 	They are in the temple and they are all dead.

 	Their bodies are arranged in what is clearly a pattern, each one apparently still standing.

 	This is an illusion created by the fact that each enemy legionary is held upright by a sharpened spar of blackened iron. Several thousand Word Bearers have been impaled here, their bodies arranged in a form that clearly has some significance. What that might be is a mystery to Ventanus.

 	Eikos Lamiad and Kiuz Selaton lead their warriors through the columns of dead Word Bearers. Selaton carries the Fourth Company standard, that glorious, dented reminder of all they have lost and all they fight to keep.

 	The Contemptor, Telemechrus, keeps pace with Lamiad, as though he is the tetrarch’s personal bodyguard. The spinning barrels of his assault cannon whine as the weapon sweeps left and right in search of a living target.

 	Sydance stays at Ventanus’s side. His expression is unreadable behind his helm’s visor, but his body language is unambiguous.

 	‘Who did this?’ he asks. He doesn’t understand yet, but Ventanus does.

 	‘They did it to themselves.’

 	Sydance’s head snaps around. Ventanus does’t know whether the other captain is more horrified at the idea of warriors doing this to themselves or that Ventanus has understanding enough to know it. He shakes his head and moves on. Nearly a thousand Ultramarines stand within the temple, shocked beyond words at this latest atrocity. None of them can make sense of what they are seeing. It is too alien to their understanding and fits no model of war they have been taught.

 	Ventanus approaches the nearest Word Bearer and lifts his head. The dead man wears no helmet and his face has been cut open with hard slashes from a sharp blade. His features are contorted with a mixture of horror and devotion. The symbols are oddly geometric and unpleasant to look at in ways beyond the obvious.

 	The pattern of impaled bodies becomes clearer the closer Ventanus gets to the centre of the temple. The groups of Ultramarines are naturally funnelled together as they approach the middle of the vaulted chamber. Ventanus feels the temperature drop still further.

 	‘They are arranged in equidistant columns,’ says Lamiad, his half flesh, half cracked ceramic face managing to convey the disgust they all feel. ‘They radiate outwards from a central point.’

 	‘Suggesting that what’s at the centre is important,’ says Ventanus.

 	‘A fane’s nave is designed to lead to a central altar,’ agrees Lamiad. ‘The place of worship.’

 	‘Worship?’ Sydance spits the word. ‘I thought we’d cured them of that half a century ago.’

 	‘Clearly the lesson did not take,’ says Lamiad, gesturing with his one good arm to the sacrificial massacre around them. The limb he lost early in the conflict could be restored, his face repaired. The technology and the craftsmen required are available, but Lamiad has chosen to remain as he is. His mythology has become important to Calth and it is a sacrifice he bears willingly.

 	Ventanus has the utmost admiration for Eikos Lamiad, and hopes he will be as strong as the tetrarch when the time comes for him to make such a sacrifice.

 	‘So what’s at the centre?’ asks Selaton, holding the standard at his side. ‘I don’t see an altar.’

 	Selaton is right. There is no altar, merely a sunken pit, from which issue tendrils of drifting mist. Ventanus leads the way, his fingers closing over the hilt of his sword. Everyone here is already dead, but the reassurance of a weapon in his hand is always welcome.

 	As Ventanus approaches the pit, he sees that it goes down for three metres, and at its centre is another impaled body. A Word Bearer, one clad in crimson armour bedecked with fluttering oath paper and stamped with golden scriptwork.

 	This is no line warrior. Every plate and edge has been crafted by hand, shaped by a master artificer and polished with the devotion that only a high-ranking war leader could earn.

 	The parchment-white face is that of a cannibal ghoul, a lipless horror of gaunt cheekbones, sunken eyes and a hairless scalp. More of the geometric symbols have been cut into the bone of his exposed skull where the skin has been peeled away. A ragged hole has been smashed through into the empty void of his brainpan.

 	‘Foedral Fell, I presume,’ says Ventanus.

 	Bodies are heaped around Fell’s corpse: cultist warriors, their bodies cut open and emptied. They are staged in poses of devotion, arms chained to the spike-topped staff upon which Fell is impaled, mouths slack with praise, eyes stitched open in adoration.

 	‘What’s that he’s stuck with?’ asks Selaton. ‘It’s different from the others. That symbol...’

 	‘I saw the same thing over and over again,’ says Sydance. ‘I’d always thought it was some kind of unit marking. A load of the rabble we broke through to get to you at Numinus carried staves just like it.’

 	‘No,’ says Eikos Lamiad. ‘It is not a unit marking, not as we understand it. It is a totem, an icon of their new masters. As we still carry the aquila, our enemies now carry this. They call it the Octed.’

 	Ventanus feels a spasm of revulsion at the word. He looks at the staff, its thick, inscribed haft and eight radiating spoke blades mirroring the arrangement of the dead Word Bearers. He has seen enemy champions carrying this symbol before them, brandishing it like a holy relic.

 	‘We should get out of here,’ says Ventanus. ‘Let Tawren’s guns level this place.’

 	Foedral Fell’s head snaps up and his lipless sneer pulls tight over his skull.

 	‘Guns won’t save you now,’ says a bleak voice that tears from the corpse before a froth of tar-black fluid vomits from its mouth onto the corpses at its feet. ‘The Neverborn are coming for you all...’

 	The Ultramarines step back from the pit, revolted and shocked. Foedral Fell’s body spasms – a series of bone-snapping convulsions that would surely have killed him had any life remained in him. The Word Bearer dances in his impalement as a tidal wave of black bilious fluid, noxious and viscous, continues to pour from his mouth.

 	It is an impossible amount, more than a body could possibly contain. It squirts from his eyes and ears. It flows from his nose and jets from his mouth like a pressurised hose. The pit fills with piceous fluid, a seething cesspool of the darkest corruption. Foedral Fell’s skull is now fully submerged, but Ventanus can still hear his gleeful mantra.

 	The Neverborn are coming...

 	The Neverborn are coming...

 	Only the bladed finial of the Octed staff remains above the oily liquid. Inky smoke coils from its spiked tips. Ropes of it writhe like mating serpents, spreading overhead like a veil of shadows, reaching out to the impaled corpses spread throughout the fane.

 	‘Back!’ cries Ventanus, now understanding that they have been lured into a trap; the very doctrines that saved them from destruction now turned against them. ‘Get to your vehicles and withdraw. Go! Now!’

 	The pit bubbles over, the protoplasmic black ooze spreading over the bloody ground like an unstopped oil well. Bubbles of unnatural matter form and burst, carrying the stink of the charnel house and the buzz of a million corpse-eating flies.

 	The Neverborn are coming...

 	The Ultramarines retreat in good order from the growing pool of darkness at the heart of the chamber. A miasma of black smoke fills the temple, the vile breath of corrupt and daemonic gods.

 	The Neverborn are coming for you all...

 	And the dead warriors of Foedral Fell open eyes of blackest night.

 	XXVIII


 	Hol Beloth steps away from the Dark Apostle as he sees the curling horn was not some ornamentation wrought upon his helm, but a part of Maloq Kartho’s skull. The ridged appendage of bone extrudes from a swollen mass of necrotised tissue, veined with blood and coated with sticky, foul-smelling fluid.

 	Nor is that the only change in Maloq Kartho’s appearance.

 	His skin has taken on a rugose quality and his eyes are now opaque orbs of sickly orange.

 	‘Do you know Sorot Tchure?’ asks Kartho, his mouth a rip across a yellow skull. His lips are bloody where serrated, triangular teeth have torn them. ‘He understands many of the hidden truths of the universe, not at least of which is the power of betrayal. He knows something of the potency of its impact in the immaterial realm. To betray a friend is one thing, a trusted friend even more so. He took that lesson to heart when he began this.’

 	Hol Beloth had heard the name, a whisper of one destined for great things.

 	‘But Lord Aurelian taught me that to betray a brother... ah, now that holds the greatest power of all,’ continues Kartho. ‘Their screams were like the Phoenician’s sweetest wine, their blood a baptism richer than any rained down by Angron himself. Fell was the greatest prize, a warrior whose dreams were on the very cusp of being realised when they were snatched away. Such towering desire unmade and dashed before his very eyes...’

 	Kartho gurgles with laughter at the memory.

 	Hol Beloth’s hand slides around the grip of his sword.

 	‘Fell is gone,’ says Kartho, ‘but you can still claim what he desired.’

 	‘Why should I trust you?’

 	‘Because you have no choice,’ says Kartho, pointing towards the horizon with a hand that looks a lot less like a hand with every passing moment.

 	‘Watch the melodrama of the universe at play,’ says Kartho as a darkly radiant light erupts on the horizon. Hol Beloth lifts a gauntlet to shield himself from the new sun that boils up in a mushrooming cloud of atomic fire. He knows where that sun has touched down and scorched the world to glass.

 	‘What have you done?’ he gasps.

 	The Dark Apostle does not answer, dropping to one knee and gasping in dark rapture.

 	‘What have you done?’ demands Hol Beloth again.

 	‘The old beliefs pass away, and a great light shows us the way,’ says Kartho, looking up at him with a predatory grin as he quotes from the Book of Lorgar. ‘Now brace yourself.’

 	Horrified, Hol Beloth can only shake his head.

 	‘For what?’ he asks.

 	‘A fall.’

 	XXIX


 	The conference chamber of the Ultimus is a hair’s breadth from panic. There was no warning, no hint of yet another disaster, but when it came it was as sudden and shocking as the moment the Word Bearers first opened fire.

 	Another underground shelter is gone, transformed into a seething atomic cauldron of death. Even without the geo-sats, Arcology X’s surface augurs are more than able to read the unimaginable spike of radioactive energy from the west. Picters and rad-counters combine their data on the plotting table, and Tawren watches as the towering pyrocumulus of fire-lit smoke takes shape on the western horizon.

 	‘The Emperor protects,’ weeps Captain Ullyet, clutching at something hung around his neck. ‘He is the Light and the Way.’

 	‘We just lost another one, didn’t we?’ says Hamadri, gripping the edge of the plotter tightly as the first shockwaves transmitted through the lithosphere shake the walls of the Ultimus.

 	Tawren nods, too busy sifting the myriad inloads from her linked surveyors and augurs. Orbital scans combine with surface readings to build a more complete picture of what they have just lost.

 	A bone-deep rumble fills the room as the surface of Calth is wrenched and torn by the force of what Tawren now understands is a subterranean detonation powerful enough to have ripped its way to the surface. These are just the first shockwaves racing from the blast; there will be worse to come.

 	‘Which one?’ asks Ullyet, the steel in his voice unwavering as dust and shards of ceiling tiles fall to the floor in a clatter of stone fragments. ‘Magnesi? Gabrinius? Which one, damn it?’

 	His lapse into catechism has passed and he is barking orders like a soldier again.

 	‘Triangulating now,’ says Tawren.

 	The image of the atomic storm cloud fades from the plotter and a base-level topographical map of Calth’s surface takes its place. Data coheres, readings correlate. An icon to the west begins to blink furiously.

 	Hamadri and Ullyet look up in puzzlement, but Tawren is just as surprised.

 	‘Uranik Radial,’ she says, as though not yet ready to believe her own incontrovertible data conclusion. ‘It’s gone. Destroyed.’

 	‘But...’ begins Ullyet.

 	‘That’s Hol Beloth,’ finishes Hamadri as the main blast wave hits Arcology X.

 	XXX


 	They haul themselves from the spikes impaling them to the ground. Armour splits, dead flesh tears. Ventanus doesn’t see any blood pour from the huge holes in their bodies. Any fluid left in them has long since curdled in their veins. They move stiffly, as though they have forgotten how to walk.

 	Or they’re just learning.

 	The Neverborn. Ventanus does not know the term, but he immediately understands its substance. These are the fleshless horrors the Word Bearers brought forth from the warp. Nightmarish xenos things from a dimension shut away from the eyes of humanity for good reason. They look out from dead men’s skulls and he feels their insatiable hunger.

 	He doesn’t need to issue an order. The horror of the situation demands individual response.

 	Bolter fire rips through the reanimated Word Bearers, each one bleeding black smoke from the exploded meat of their bodies. Wounds sufficient to put down two legionaries barely slow them. They come on with limbs hanging off, bones shattered.

 	The warriors in red crash against the warriors in blue, all adaption complete. These are no sluggish revenants, but warriors as strong and fast in death as they were in life. The numbers are nothing like even, but the daemon things squatting in the Word Bearers’ skulls do not take up their hosts’ weapons to fight. Claws and teeth are their killing tools, not guns. An eternity of war in a timeless dimension has seen to that.

 	It is the only advantage the Ultramarines have.

 	Ventanus shoots with pinpoint accuracy. None of his shots are wasted.

 	Kill shots to the head every time.

 	Inside every skull a squalling mass of shrieking darkness, solid and gelatinous. A daemonic parasite taken up residence in the body of a dead man that vanishes in a screaming implosion of displaced matter. He shoots until the hammer strikes an empty chamber, ejects the magazine and reloads with a fluid economy of motion. He shoots until his last magazine is expended and then draws his power sword.

 	The Neverborn throw themselves at him, driven by desperate hunger and loathing. Ventanus sees the hatred in their dead eyes and does not know what he has done to earn it. His sword cuts through armour made heavy without power. Kinetic shock travels up his arm with every blow, but he is energised and ready for this fight.

 	He came here to kill Word Bearers and, damn it, that is what he will do.

 	The Neverborn are not silent. They scream as they claw at the Ultramarines and they shriek as they die. Their cries are tormented, but Ventanus has no pity left in him. Not for himself and certainly not for the Word Bearers.

 	Strobing flashes of gunfire light the dark umbra spreading overhead.

 	Ventanus and Sydance fight back to back. Both have exhausted their stock of ammunition.

 	‘A few more than twelve this time,’ grunts Sydance as he hacks his chainsword down through a Word Bearer’s collarbone and sternum with a two-handed grip.

 	‘You mean thirteen,’ says Ventanus.

 	‘No, only ever twelve,’ replies Sydance with a grin.

 	Ventanus understands that grin.

 	They are brothers and they are equals, and there is a purity to this fight. There are no lofty ideals at stake, no grand strategy in play. It is simple life or death, and there is something to be said for such simplicity.

 	Ventanus cuts heads from shoulders, opens chests and hacks legs from hips. His blade is always in motion. He employs every move he knows to stay alive; those learned from the blademasters of Macragge and those picked up in a lifetime of desperate brawls in almost two hundred years of war.

 	Telemechrus slaughters the Word Bearers by the dozen. His assault cannon shreds bodies into their constituent atoms and renders even a corpse warrior unable to fight. They claw at his body, beating broken fists to pulp against his casket. The Contemptor relishes this melee, fighting alongside Eikos of the Arm and his Shield Bearers.

 	The Tetrarch of Konor is no less lethal with only the one fighting limb. He has fired his pistol empty and kills with the precise strokes of a master fencer. He too has learned the lesson that the only way to put the enemy down for good is to make the decapitating strike.

 	Selaton and his squads are carrying the banner towards the arched portal through which they entered. He is not withdrawing, he is clearing a corridor for the rest of them to use.

 	Ventanus shouts the order to fall back.

 	Something huge and crimson slams into him, knocking him to the ground. He rolls as an armoured boot slams down. He swings his sword for the warrior’s centre-mass, but the blade clashes against the bladed Octed finial of a rune-inscribed staff.

 	‘Death has come to you,’ says Foedral Fell, still skewered.

 	‘Death will come when I’m good and ready,’ answers Ventanus.

 	XXXI


 	The world spins. Up becomes down and the ground falls away from Hol Beloth.

 	The starscraper, already on the brink of collapse, needed only a nudge to come crashing down. The blast wave from the cyclonic warhead’s detonation at Uranik Radial shatters what uneasy arrangement of vectors still holds it erect. Its foundations break apart and the structural members at its base buckle like wire in the face of the pounding shockwave.

 	Ten floors collapse in an instant, blown away like dust in a hurricane.

 	The building slumps, its own weight crushing it and dragging it down.

 	Hol Beloth grabs onto an exposed rebar, but it won’t be enough to save him. His stomach lurches and he feels momentarily weightless. He hears Kartho’s crazed laughter over the crescendo of shattering steel and exploding permacrete. Floor slabs snap like tinder and plasteel stanchions capable of holding up a building kilometres high unravel like twine.

 	Debris cascades around him, battering him and threatening to tear him from his handhold. The building itself wants to murder him, but he won’t let it. Hol Beloth has to stay alive long enough to kill Maloq Kartho.

 	The sky falls away. Through a break in the flooring slab that was once over a thousand metres above ground, he sees the surface of the world opening up.

 	Wide chasms rip jagged traceries through Lanshear’s outskirts. Hair-fine fault lines tear open and abyssal canyons gape like gateways to the underworld. Vast clouds of dust and smoke jet into the sky in a cloud to match that above the fiery crater that once housed his army.

 	Hol Beloth can see nothing of the world around him.

 	Everything is noise and fire, dust and impacts.

 	Then he hits the ground. The starscraper doesn’t stop.

 	Metres-thick columns smash through the surface of Calth like piledrivers slammed down by an angry god. The starscraper’s colossal mass and momentum plunge it through the rock like a sword thrust. Hundreds of metres down, previously unknown cave voids are broken into. Unconnected galleries and sinkholes appearing on no map are suddenly open to the sky.

 	Hol Beloth sees nothing of this. Hundreds of thousands of metric tonnes cascade down into the revealed cave systems. He is a speck of mortal flesh in a hurricane of aeons-old rock. The plates of his armour shatter like glass. Bones break and he feels the shock of furnace heat as his biological repair mechanisms fight to keep him alive.

 	He loses his grip on the rebar and drops through a storm of bludgeoning rock.

 	He falls, spinning downwards from impact to impact. Blood fills his helmet, threatening to drown him. He slams into a rock wall and it is torn away. He cannot see anything but darkness and a blitzing torrent of debris. Steel and glass fall with him in a shimmering rain.

 	Over the unending fury of deafening noise, Hol Beloth still hears the maddening laughter of the Dark Apostle.

 	At last his fall ends.

 	His broken body plunges into an icy lake of dark water. It is deep and the fortunate angle of impact means he only breaks six of his ribs and not his spinal column. Freezing water enfolds him, pouring down his throat and into his lungs. He gags and coughs, the deep cold shocking him from the disorientation of his fall.

 	Autonomic responses take over. His throat seals his primary lungs off. Implanted breathing organs alongside his genhanced ones take over. They siphon what little air is left in them and shunt that oxygen directly to his brain. Electrochemical shocks throughout his body jolt him into life, self-induced fibrillation to get his limbs working again.

 	Hol Beloth thrashes uselessly. He has no buoyancy, his armour is dragging him down.

 	Legionary armour is airtight and therefore watertight, but his has been broken open and shattered. Water rushes to fill it and the weight is enormous. He struggles to fight its sucking ballast, but his body is too badly hurt, his soul too grievously broken.

 	Hol Beloth sinks deeper, a stream of bubbles spuming from his lips.

 	An arm plunges into the water and a clawed hand grips the broken edge of his pauldron. It is bestial and scaled. Yellowed talons score deep grooves in the ceramite as he is dragged back to the surface.

 	Hol Beloth is hauled onto a shore of debris and rubble, gasping for breath. He rolls and vomits twin lungfuls of water so cold it burns his throat. He retches until his body is empty of fluid, tasting blood and bile in his mouth. He feels the intramuscular sphincters of his airways switch as he shifts back to his regular breathing pattern.

 	Cold air has never tasted so good.

 	Steam rises from his body, his skin hot to the touch. His incredible physiology is repairing damage that should have killed him outright. That he is alive at all is a miracle, and he looks up to see just how far he has fallen. Dust fogs the air and a rain of debris tumbles into the cave from the jagged tear in its ceiling. Latticed steelwork from the collapsed starscraper webs the opening torn in the rock like crude stitches, and sparking lengths of high-tensile wire and data cabling dangle like jungle creepers.

 	The gloom makes it hard to judge the cave’s dimensions, but it is not large. Perhaps a hundred metres at its widest. The water level of the lake is rising as more debris falls into it.

 	Maloq Kartho squats at the edge of the lake, impossibly unscathed by their fall. Icewater laps at his feet. Hol Beloth sees there is something wrong with the Dark Apostle. Darkness clings to the warrior, but it looks like there are too many joints in his legs.

 	Kartho turns his horned head and says, ‘You live,’ as though he is surprised.

 	‘You destroyed my army,’ says Hol Beloth.

 	Kartho nods. ‘Rabble,’ he says. ‘Fodder. A meat price.’

 	‘Why?’

 	‘You had no need of them,’ says Kartho. ‘You have a higher purpose than marching at the head of debased mortals.’

 	‘What purpose?’ asks Hol Beloth, hating that he cannot hide his urgent desire.

 	The Dark Apostle cocks his head to one side, as though the answer is self-evident, but furnishes him with no reply. He looks towards the broken ceiling of the cave, expectant.

 	‘And though the heavens rain fire upon the Bearers of the Truth, yet shall there be a greater boon given unto them,’ says Kartho, pulling himself erect. He is taller now, his body swelling with vitality. The Dark Apostle is on the verge of something incredible, a trans-formation or an ascension. Darkness seethes within him, a dangerous energy only kept in check by a monumental effort of will.

 	The coming hours will either transform Kartho or destroy him.

 	Hol Beloth does not know which he would rather see.

 	XXXII


 	Ventanus raises his sword in a two-handed block as Foedral Fell – or whatever dark force is animating his body – swings a toothed falchion in a diagonal cut. The force behind the blow is enormous. Energised sparks spray from the impact of the blades, and ozone stink fills his nostrils as the servos of his battle armour augment his strength. He rolls his wrists, letting the roaring teeth scrape down his power sword.

 	He sways aside from a blindingly swift return stroke and thrusts for Fell’s groin. It is a good strike, powerful and well-aimed. The point lances the crimped joint between Fell’s pelvis and thigh.

 	Ventanus twists, and wrenches the blade clear.

 	Black blood spills out. The stench is awful. The worst thing in the world. Even the filters of his helm cannot keep it out. He gags, retching dryly.

 	The blood stops flowing and Fell is not even slowed.

 	‘You kill my kin,’ says the Neverborn, a froth of disintegrating matter spilling over its lips.

 	Ventanus does not answer and attacks again.

 	They trade blows back and forth, and though his skill is the greater, the speed and strength of his opponent is phenomenal. Three times he avoids death by the narrowest margin. He hears his name called, but can’t spare a moment’s concentration to see who is shouting to him.

 	The sound of gunfire is a distant echo. The flash of mass-reactive detonations barely registers. He is in the middle of furious battle, but all he sees is the daemon creature trying to kill him. Fell still has the Octed staff piercing him, though it has snapped inside his body. Only the top half remains.

 	Two warriors in cobalt-blue and gold appear beside Ventanus. One has a face of broken porcelain and flesh, the other is in the battle colours of a Fourth Company captain. He knows them and loves them as brothers. Eikos Lamiad fights with economical grace, Lyros Sydance with vengeful fury. His brother captain was always a man given to passionate rages, most of which needed tempering, but Ventanus is grateful for this one.

 	To face a single Ultramarine is daunting. Three is certain death.

 	Foedral Fell laughs in their faces. His falchion is a blur, blocking, parrying and attacking with a speed that should be impossible. Liquid black fire leaps along the length of his blade and where it touches it burns Legion plate like dry wood.

 	‘The Saviour, the Lancer and the Cripple...’ giggles Fell, spinning and slamming an elbow into Lamiad’s cheek. Facial plates crack further. ‘The warp knows you...’

 	‘Bastard!’ cries Sydance, lunging forward. His sword cuts down through Fell’s left arm. A spray of the foul blood washes out, along with a host of wriggling things, segmented and waving like worms. Corpse feeders. Sydance gags on the stench and Fell’s falchion sweeps up to take his head.

 	Ventanus blocks the blow and hammers his boot into Fell’s gut. The Word Bearer staggers under the force of it, the bladed finials of the staff reflecting the light of gunfire. Something fast moving and powerful strikes it – a rogue shell or a ricochet.

 	The daemonic face behind Fell’s eyes shudders. Pain wracks its body and a gout of boiling black fluid jets from its mouth. It staggers and Ventanus sees his opening. He spins inside Fell’s guard and rams his sword through his breastplate.

 	Lightning streams the length of the blade as it punches through ceramite, flesh, bone and the stuff of night. The tip breaks through the backplate of Fell’s armour, but the metal of the blade has aged a thousand years.

 	Silvered steel is now corroded rust that flakes to ash within moments of exposure to the real world.

 	A pistoning fist slams Ventanus back as he hears his name being shouted again. He hits the ground hard and tries to rise. Something is holding him down.

 	Eikos Lamiad, his face a horror of ruined flesh where his mask has been shattered, has him pinned to the ground.

 	‘Tetrarch!’ shouts Ventanus. ‘What–’

 	Lamiad shakes his head as a towering shadow falls over them.

 	A giant in tar-slicked ceramite. A titan who fell from the skies and lived to tell of it. One arm is a crushing fist, the other a colossal cannon of spinning barrels. A hurricane of fire roars from its muzzles. Hundreds of shells expend in moments.

 	Foedral Fell’s body explodes.

 	The assault cannon’s fire is relentless. Unforgiving.

 	Its aim never wavers and the wretched matter of the Neverborn is atomised.

 	‘You will not. Harm. Him,’ says Telemechrus the Contemptor.

 	XXXIII


 	Maloq Kartho squats by the water’s edge. Waiting.

 	Time passes, but without his helmet Hol Beloth has no way to accurately measure it. Hours – two, maybe three. He drifts in and out of consciousness as his body diverts energy from his thought processes to healing.

 	There is no change in the light.

 	They have survived a fall that ought to have killed them instantly, which tells Hol Beloth that the Dark Apostle still has an endgame in mind. Yet they have wasted time in this cave doing nothing. If there is mayhem to be made, then Hol Beloth wishes to be about it.

 	Determined to take action, he looks for a way out.

 	Fifty metres to his left, a wide fissure in the walls leads deeper into the rock. Something metallic gleams on the ground next to the opening.

 	Hol Beloth forces himself upright. Pain from numerous fractures shoots up his legs. He forces it down as he limps around the edge of the lake to the fissure. Stagnant air wafts from the opening. He takes a long breath, his neuroglottis picking out chemical traces of welded steel and setting permacrete.

 	He squats at the opening and lifts the gleaming object from the ground, turning it around in his hands like a precious relic.

 	It is a cartographae drone, a bulbous cylinder equipped with a repulsor field and numerous auspex arrays. Its power cells are virtually exhausted and its calliper limbs twitch like the feelers of a dying insect. A blinking red gemlight on its frontal lobe tells Hol Beloth that it is trying and failing to link back to its control station. A Techmarine could easily repair it, but he has no skill with machines.

 	It takes a moment for Hol Beloth to realise the significance of this find.

 	He turns as booming splashes, like boulders falling into the lake, fill the cave with spray. Maloq Kartho rises on his oddly-jointed legs. He wipes cold water from his face as more huge objects splash down into the water from above. The surface of the lake churns and slaps the rock. A trail of bubbles moves towards to the shore.

 	Hol Beloth watches as Eriesh Kigal and his Terminators rise from the dark waters like drowned sailors returned to unnatural life. Water pours from the battered plates of their armour and as each one reaches the Dark Apostle, he is anointed with three crosswise slashes across his breastplate. Without knowing how, Hol Beloth senses a significance to the thrice clawed mark.

 	Then a bloated shape of hard red metal emerges from the water, a leviathan of the deeps. The Dreadnought Zu Gunara. Its casket drips black water and what look like molten scads of metal that are running in rivulets from its armoured flanks. It is as though the Dreadnought is melting, as though the void-dark within is consuming the matter containing its substance.

 	It still carries the weapon stolen from CV427/Praxor, its bio-hazard symbol like a beacon of hope in the gloom of the cave.

 	‘And the devourer of life shall be borne into the belly of the Beast,’ says Kartho, turning to Hol Beloth. The Dark Apostle gestures to the fissure in the rock where Hol Beloth found the damaged drone. A forked tongue of corrugated flesh licks jagged teeth. Hol Beloth knows the Dark Apostle tastes what he has tasted.

 	Turned earth, blasted rock. Construction.

 	A way in.

 	‘The Unveiled One shall open the way,’ says Kartho, ‘and he that was lost shall lead the faithful to the slaughter.’

 	Hol Beloth holds up the cartographae drone. Purpose fills him and he throws the machine out into the water. It drops into the darkness, the red gemlight fading as it sinks to the bottom of the lake. He looks back at the fissure that leads to the heart of enemy’s lair.

 	‘The belly of the beast?’ says Hol Beloth, the pain of his many wounds forgotten.

 	‘We are the blade that opens it,’ promises Maloq Kartho.

 	XXXIV


 	Subiaco cannot escape the grip of his nightmare.

 	He is awake. He knows this, but wishes he were not.

 	His nightmare has followed him into the waking world.

 	His wife’s face, the skin ruddy and gracefully aged, is crumbling parchment, flaking and diseased. Even his children, youngsters barely of age to stand in the Youth Auxilia, bear the scars of time’s assault.

 	He flees his hab, barely dressed, and sees that everything he has feared has come to pass. Beyond the walls of the Ultimus, the billions of tonnes of rock that keeps them safe is no more than a paper-thin veneer of flaking ash and wire, a structure so fragile he cannot bear to look at it or the unimaginable, ocean-dark presences uncoiling behind it.

 	The planet shifts and creaks as void-born gales strip the world’s substance away with every breath. Subiaco screams, but his words are snatched away by cold winds whose origin has no place and no time. Thousands upon thousands of faces surround him, but he sees them for what they truly are: rotting puppets that degenerate with every passing second. A multitude that does not know how close their death really is.

 	Tap, tap, tap...

 	Subiaco hears the polished steel talons of the beasts once again. They have broken the walls of sleep and are coming for him. The ragged, cloth-tear sound of dread claws being ripped through dimensions grates down his spine and he breaks into a run.

 	Wounded faces turn and question him. Their words are gurgling death rattles. He pushes past them all, knocking many to the ground. Wet claws and lamprey-like mouths press up from the ground, sensing the nearness of prey. Nobody sees them, and Subiaco’s warnings fall upon deaf ears.

 	Subiaco runs, down into the deeps, away from the masses of the dead-in-waiting.

 	He runs past the places he has worked since finding sanctuary in Arcology X. He runs until the acid burns in his limbs and his lungs fill with bile. The hunting beasts are close. He feels their nearness. He dares not look back. The very sight of them will paralyse him, and there is only one escape.

 	He hears voices behind him and ignores them.

 	At last he reaches his salvation, the cyclopean gate with the Clockwork Angel puzzle sealing it shut. He is almost hysterical with relief. There are giants here, warriors whose bodies are just as rotten as those above, but which are locked in an eternal battle with the forces that drive their flesh to its doom.

 	Subiaco ignores them. They are just as dead as the thousands of people above.

 	Tap, tap, tap...

 	He has no time. None.

 	Subiaco climbs to the Clockwork Angel, and it seems that its wings reach out to enfold him. He hears his name barked in the booming tones of a being whose physiology has been so altered and enhanced that it barely qualifies as human.

 	The authority and warning are unmistakable, but he is too far gone to stop now.

 	He punches the solution to the age-old riddle of the Clockwork Angel into the ornate keyboard of brass and jet. The mechanisms of the door break apart as command codes of the Ingenium are accepted by the locking seal. Resonant harmonic frequencies blast through the permacrete, turning it to powder in the blink of an eye.

 	A falling curtain of dissolving permacrete is the last thing he sees as his chest cavity detonates explosively in a fan of shattered bone.

 	Sergeant Ankrion’s mass-reactive kills Ingenium Subiaco instantly.

 	His body falls from the platform before the locking seal as whetted chainfists, lightning claws and thunder hammers tear through from the other side.

 	XXXV


 	Eriesh Kigal kills the first Ultramarine with a spray of bolts from his combi-weapon. He kills the next one too. His warriors fan out around him. Those with guns fill the space with explosive bolts. Ricochets and splintered rock fly through the air. Answering gunfire spanks from the massive plates of their Terminator armour. Las-rounds are ineffective and mass-reactives only marginally less so.

 	Hol Beloth has only his sword and wades into the fight like one of Angron’s gladiators. Aside from a few Ultramarines who are even now falling back, there is little sport to be had here. His blade is wet and red, but it is the thin blood of mortals. It drips from his blade as Maloq Kartho squeezes his growing bulk through the hole torn in the shuttering that sealed this tunnel off from the underground lake.

 	Zu Gunara comes next, still carrying the world-killer in his mechanised arms.

 	Word of their coming will already be racing to the heart of this arcology.

 	Fear will strike at the hearts of its people. They will know that death has come to them.

 	Hol Beloth’s body is a searing furnace. His skin smokes with it and the rotten smell of sulphur fills his nose and mouth. It seems the Dark Apostle is not the only one on the verge of a transformation. Hol Beloth has longed for this moment since first he set foot on Calth, and he can literally taste his reward.

 	Eriesh Kigal and his Terminators lead the way, climbing higher with every passing moment. The cave is wide and filled with gunfire. A squad of Ultramarines and some uniformed mortals in the colours of the Defence Auxilia are shooting at them. They cower in hastily-erected barricades. He sees that each man has a black X daubed somewhere on his armour. He does not understand the significance of this, and dismisses it as irrelevant.

 	Hol Beloth feels a stinging sensation at his chest and sees a black burn scar from a las-impact. The skin is curdled and scorched, but he feels no pain. None at all.

 	The tunnel turns and widens, its ceiling rising up to almost thirty metres. More soldiers are moving to intercept them. Gunfire intensifies. None of it matters. Three Ultramarines attempt to impose order on the few soldiers at their disposal. A pair of armoured vehicles rumble into view, a Rhino and a civilian cargo transporter with a pair of heavy stubbers welded onto a primitive turret.

 	The Rhino’s guns hammer the Terminators, and one of the mighty warriors stumbles as the heavier weight of fire finds a weak spot. Hol Beloth wonders why it is taking so long for the Ultramarines to respond to the terrible threat in their midst. Then he understands the sacrifice of Foedral Fell.

 	The Ultramarines are not here. Not in any numbers of significance.

 	The gunner of the Rhino brackets the wounded Terminator and hammers him again and again. It is a successful tactic, as the percussive chain of explosions eventually cracks the armour open. The warrior within is cut apart and his armour sags with his death.

 	Maloq Kartho leaps into the air, his reverse-jointed legs powering him over the heads of the Ultramarines. He is in amongst them, his clawed arms like threshing blades. He rips them apart, tearing war-plate open with his bare hands and hurling body parts aside like butcher’s waste. Bolt rounds flatten upon his iron-hard flesh, blades bounce off him; his laughter is that of a being who has achieved his heart’s desire and found it more wondrous than he ever hoped.

 	The Ultramarines are dead, and Kartho charges the Rhino. Its driver sees the danger and guns the engine. The tracks spin furiously, but not fast enough – Kartho smashes into the vehicle like a wrecking ball. The hull of the Rhino buckles inwards explosively. Flames rip from within and the engine gives out with a hard bang of combustion.

 	Kartho’s charge has broken the tank in two. A sweep of his bulging arms hurls the wreckage away.

 	Eriesh Kigal kills the up-armed civilian transporter. A hail of high-impact rounds blows its engine block apart and the explosion lifts it ten metres into the air.

 	His Terminators are unstoppable juggernauts; small-arms fire is an irrelevance and they are proof against most blades. Storms of fire batter the curved plates and layered plastrons, but none of it has any effect. An unstoppable line of armour pushes inexorably forward, climbing higher into the arcology with every passing moment. The armed forces that remain here will be mustering above, but they will be too late to prevent the wholesale destruction of Calth.

 	There are too few defences here to stop the Word Bearers. In their arrogance, the Ultramarines think they are secure, that their way of doing things is the only way. Blind to the virtues of free thinking, the XIII have sealed their fate by clinging to an outmoded way of war. The old ways are gone, and a new order is rising.

 	The Ultramarines have failed to embrace that. It will be their undoing.

 	Hol Beloth grunts in sudden pain. The enemy has not wounded him. This is not the already forgotten pain of a gunshot or a sword cut. Things are breaking inside his body. Bones shift, elongate. Organs squirm and reshape themselves. Blood grows sluggish as its composition alters. His vision blurs as nictitating membranes form over his eyes. Old pain diminishes and new pain replaces it.

 	Hol Beloth throws away his sword. The blade is broken just above the hilt, but he has no memory of it snapping. He has a dagger at his hip, one of the crude, flint-bladed things Erebus presented to the anointed ones. He does not draw it.

 	He has no need of it now, for his fingers sprout claws like sword blades.

 	Flames and the cries of the dying are all that they leave in their wake.

 	More slaughter awaits ahead.

 	Hol Beloth ascends into the administration level of Arcology X.

 	He sees thousands of mortals cowering here, clustered around a building of polished white marble. He no longer sees as he once did. His sight is that of a voracious predator.

 	His world is blood hues, flesh smells and fear-stink.

 	It is good.

 	XXXVI


 	The Defence Auxilia and Ingenium Support Division are responding with incredible speed. Army units integrated into the chain of command are already in place, but Hamadri fears it is too little, too late. She watches the Word Bearers fight their way into the sprawling administration level from the upper hatch of a Chimera.

 	‘How they can be here?’ she asks herself, knowing that the question is meaningless now.

 	Captain Ullyet is already fighting, his Salamander command vehicle racing back and forth at the entrance to the sub-caves. No sooner had Sergeant Ankrion’s warning of the breach in the lower levels gone out over every active vox-network than the tanks of the 77th Support Division roared into action.

 	His vehicles are cargo carriers, engineering rigs and combat support tanks – armed with anti-personnel weapons, they are no match for Space Marine Terminators. The Defence Auxilia moves to assist, Hamadri’s orders sending her tanks around the flanks to keep the enemy boxed in.

 	Her Chimera bounces over the uneven ground and Hamadri sees how few enemy warriors there are: six Terminators and a Dreadnought, and two monstrous things to which she can give no name. One is taller than the Dreadnought, its flesh blackening even as she looks at it, as though it burns in a fire she cannot see. The other is a hunched, swollen thing with scraps of blood-red plate embedded in the mass of its body. Its engorged muscles expand like overfilled fuel bladders and its arms end in flailing bone-swords.

 	It would, on paper, be a paltry force with which to invade Arcology X.

 	But it may well be enough.

 	‘Bring us in on the right,’ she orders her driver.

 	The Chimera slews around, its tracks spitting rock fragments. Hamadri brings the rotor cannon around and depresses the firing triggers. Thudding recoil slams back against her palms, but she keeps the weapon on target. A stream of bullets strikes the monster with the bone-swords, and her shots only falter when the thing looks up at her with eyes that are windows into madness.

 	The beast vaults into the air, an impossible leap. Hamadri cranks the pintle-mounted weapon around and opens fire. The angle is too steep, her shots too low. The creature lands on the Chimera’s frontal section with a ringing hammerblow. The impact is colossal, its weight out of all proportion to its size. The Chimera’s hull is crushed and the tank turns end over end like a flipped aquila coin.

 	Hamadri has a fraction of a second’s life left.

 	She wonders if her son in the Numinus 61st is still alive. Better that he is dead than have to fight a war against such monsters.

 	The Chimera slams down on its topside and Colonel Riuk Hamadri joins the long list of those killed in action.

 	XXXVII


 	The change is upon him.

 	His flesh is becoming. The rituals have been observed, the sacrifices made.

 	Maloq Kartho has attracted the eye of the gods and he feels the immense power that awaits him. He awaits the judgement of his worth. The muttering shadows are gone, drawn to the trap in Foedral Fell’s stronghold, but he has no need of them now. He will be his own shadow now, shedding his old identity and clearing out what could have been.

 	The last piece of him awaits his final offering.

 	He still senses the warp power’s unwillingness to give up its hunt. It has its prey practically in its jaws, but his need is the greater. Without that power his frame will explosively mutate. It will be cast down in a wallowing pit of mindless depravity. A worthy fate for some, but not for him.

 	He watches Hol Beloth kill with ferocious abandon.

 	The commander’s mind has fractured and this last betrayal is the pact with which he seals his bargain with the monarchs of the warp. Eriesh Kigal’s Terminators are still in the fight, though another one has been brought down. The enemy is rallying and bringing their heavier guns to bear. They still think the Word Bearers are here to conquer, to capture.

 	He laughs, and those mortals who hear him fall dead instantly.

 	Kartho turns to Zu Gunara.

 	That name is meaningless. Zu Gunara died for the second time weeks ago. The Dreadnought that once housed his flesh still carries the bio-weapon and now it holds it out to him like an offering. He supposes that is exactly what it is.

 	The life eater virus is a gift from the gods.

 	The fighting continues behind him, but he no longer cares.

 	Kartho opens the arming panel and enters the codes he memorised long ago when the scrapcode attack first compromised Calth’s defence network. The virus bomb’s circuitry comes to life and a green light bathes the interior of its arming mechanics. The cog-skull insignia of the Mechanicum and the Ultima of the XIII Legion flash baleful warnings. No provision exists for instant deployment, only a preset countdown. It will make no difference.

 	More warnings chime from the interior of the bomb as he unlocks each security protocol. He ignores them and turns the final arming trigger before snapping it off. Numerous failsafes and redundancies exist to reset the countdown. Kartho destroys them all.

 	The bomb broadcasts a final countdown signal across a multitude of vox-bands and sets off an unmistakable alarum bray. Such warnings are pointless. Anything close enough to register them will be killed by the release of the virus within minutes.

 	He sees the realisation of what he has done spread through the Imperial soldiers. Those who don’t recognise the threat of the virus bomb’s shrieking warning learn through the vox what he has brought into their midst. Soldiers turn and flee. Armoured vehicles blow their engines as they throw their tracks into reverse. The panic and terror is almost overwhelming and Kartho roars with laughter as he sees the vaunted Ultramarian discipline collapse in the face of certain death.

 	A few braver souls run towards the bomb, perhaps thinking they can disarm it. They are deluding themselves.

 	He feels his bargain with the warp sealed in the depths of his transforming flesh.

 	His body has been prepared and now the communion of material and spiritual can take place.

 	Kartho lifts his hand and sees a glimmer of silver wreathe the tips of his claws.

 	His very flesh is a knife with which he can cut through the dimensional walls. He senses this is borrowed power, a fleeting gift to enable his union with the warp.

 	Kartho slashes his hand down through the air and the material wall of the universe parts before him. A poisoned wind gusts from the deep wound, a gateway to the domain of gods and monsters. Soon he will be both.

 	He feels another of Kigal’s Terminators die.

 	His senses are beyond anything he has known before, and this is just the beginning of his ascension. He pulls the wavering tear in the universe wider, tasting the dark promise of the miasmic void beyond. This will be his realm now, not the tasteless material plane of mortals.

 	But just before he steps through, Maloq Kartho experiences something he thought long since bled out onto the sands of Colchis.

 	He knows doubt.

 	He turns from the howling gate in time to see a pair of rad-scarred Land Speeders streak into the cavern. Their engines are overheating and flying on fumes. They have been pushed far beyond their limits to get here.

 	A pointless gesture.

 	This bomb will detonate. Nothing now can prevent that.

 	Riding tall in the lead skimmer is an unhelmed warrior in blue and gold. Maloq Kartho has never seen him before, but his transformed senses recognise him immediately.

 	Remus Ventanus.

 	XXXVIII


 	The administrative level is in chaos. Civilians and soldiers alike flee in terror from the figures standing at the heart of the cave – a Dreadnought, and a thick-limbed figure of black scales whose body seems to flicker with dark flame. This is the leader of this dark host.

 	Ventanus knows it in his bones.

 	The Dreadnought carries the screaming bomb in its hands, and every frequency is telling him that the life eater warhead is on the verge of detonation. A Word Bearers Terminator is still fighting, but Sydance’s speeder is diving towards him. The Terminator has armour that can survive impact with a super-heavy.

 	Sydance has a multi-melta.

 	He sees a flash and hears the roar of superheated air, but he doesn’t see what happens to the Terminator. The speeder lurches, its engine spluttering its death rattle. That it has brought him this far is nothing short of a miracle.

 	Selaton has pushed the engine as hard as he can and now it is done.

 	‘Take us down,’ Ventanus yells over the screams and chatter of gunfire.

 	Selaton nods. ‘Don’t think we’ve much choice, captain.’

 	Before the speeder can descend, Ventanus hears a bestial roar. An abominable creature with sword blade arms vaults from the back of a crushed Rhino. It is coming straight at them.

 	‘Incoming!’ he yells.

 	The speeder heels over as Selaton wrenches it around, but even legionary reflexes aren’t quite fast enough. The creature’s bladed arms slice the vehicle in half, taking Selaton’s legs at mid-thigh. Ventanus leaps clear as the speeder ploughs rock and wrecks itself in an explosion of flying steel.

 	He lands at the run and has his bolter out a second later.

 	He does not know if Selaton has survived the crash, and has no time to check.
The beast that brought them down rears up, a wall of expanding tissue and claws. He sees it was once a man, a legionary like him, but whatever hypermutations are wracking its frame are completely out of control. Limbs burst from gristly tumours and fanged mouths erupt across its malleable flesh.

 	Ventanus empties a magazine into the creature. His shells punch through its metamorphosing body. He hears the detonations, but the creature does not even appear to feel them. He reaches for another magazine, but a heavy paw the size of his chest slams him to the ground. Its bulk is enormous, swelling and evolving in an uncontrolled frenzy.

 	He reaches for his sword, a chain-weapon taken to replace his lost powerblade.

 	The creature is screaming. He cannot tell if it is in anger or pain.

 	Ventanus thrusts the sword into the rippling folds of new flesh and the suction is so great that it tears the blade from his grip. The monster’s body swallows the chainsword whole and Ventanus reaches for his next weapon – he unclips a pair of frag grenades from his belt, one in each hand.

 	Part of him knows that this is folly.

 	The life eater virus will destroy the monster, regardless of this fight’s outcome, but it matters to Ventanus that it dies by his hand.

 	He punches the grenades into the thing’s body, releasing them before his arms suffer the same fate as his sword. Both grenades detonate with a wet thump, showering him with rancid flesh as raw as protoplasm. Open wounds gape, bloody and stringy with unformed matter.

 	The creature doesn’t die. It is too large now, but he has hurt it.

 	It shrieks from its hundreds of mouths. He has a moment at best to capitalise on its pain.

 	Then he sees it.

 	In one gaping wound is a grey-bladed dagger, a weapon clinging to a leather belt that has been subsumed by the expanding flesh of the monster.

 	He knows what it is. He has used such a weapon before.

 	Hating that he has no choice, Ventanus reaches in and drags the dagger from the sopping, fleshy wound. He feels the legacy of murder imbued in the glitter-sheened blade. This weapon has a bloody history, but it also has power and he needs that now.

 	It is a pitifully small thing to wield against so bloated a foe, but Ventanus has first-hand experience of what harm such weapons are capable of wreaking.

 	The monster’s face looms over him, a bloated mass of gibbering mouths, lunatic eyes and lashing tongues. Whoever this once was, he is long gone. Ventanus wonders if he understands what he has become.

 	A wide mouth of erupting fangs and acidic bile snaps towards him.

 	‘For Calth!’ shouts Ventanus and rams the blade up into its throat.

 	The effect is instantaneous and horrific.

 	The monster tears open, folding in on itself in unravelling slabs of blood-soaked flesh and fat. Hybrid organs necrotise in seconds and its expanding matter blackens in the space of a breath. The reek of a mass grave gusts from its instantaneous decomposition and gouts of stinking black fluid jet from nameless masses of diseased flesh.

 	Ventanus staggers back, repulsed beyond measure at the creature’s death. Somewhere in the midst of its unmaking, he sees hints of a post-human body, but they too disintegrate before his eyes.

 	He spits a gobbet of rank fluid and switches his gaze to the immobile Dreadnought that holds the virus bomb.

 	The scaled black figure with the curling horn stares venom at him. It turns and vanishes through a shimmering hole in the world. Ventanus feels nauseous at the sight of such a violation, at the sickness he sees through the cut. The tear is already growing smaller – the fabric of the world is healing itself, and in seconds the opening will be gone.

 	The dagger in his hand tugs at his grip. It wants to return to that unclean realm, to go back to where it was made.

 	‘Sydance!’ shouts Ventanus, calling up the bomb’s countdown to his visor. ‘To me!’

 	A blue speeder slews around behind him.

 	‘How long?’ asks Sydance.

 	‘Ten seconds. Now get out!’

 	‘What? No! I’m going with you.’

 	‘Not this time,’ says Ventanus. ‘This time there is no thirteenth eldar.’

 	He kicks Sydance from the speeder and drops into the pilot’s seat. The engine belches a plume of irradiated smoke and the skimmer lurches forward, Ventanus coaxing it to one last ride.

 	The speeder vibrates as though it’s about to shake itself apart. The harsh bangs of engine misfire sound behind him, and a plume of flame billows in his wake.

 	‘Come on, fly, damn you!’ shouts Ventanus.

 	The speeder is descending on failing grav-plates, its power almost exhausted, its engine dead. He fights to keep it in the air, hauling the control column back and feeding his every last scrap of will and belief into the machine.

 	The Dreadnought looms before him, like some immovable leviathan.

 	Ventanus drops the warp-tainted dagger onto the gunner’s seat.

 	‘For courage and honour!’ he shouts. ‘For the Emperor!’

 	A last surge of power fills the engine and Ventanus triggers the forward guns as he throws himself from the speeder. He hits the ground hard and rolls as the skimmer smashes into the Dreadnought at full speed. The collision is ferocious, the speeder’s momentum unstoppable.

 	The Dreadnought rocks back on its piston legs. Then the engine block explodes and the blast throws it back.

 	Its gyroscopic stabilisers fight for balance. They fail.

 	The Dreadnought falls and is swallowed by the sucking wound in the world. It vanishes from Calth and the tear seals up behind it.

 	Ventanus holds his breath, counting the seconds. He waits for an explosion that never comes. He doesn’t know where the bomb with its lethal life eater virus has gone, but it is not on Calth. That is good enough for him.

 	He turns to the sound of cheering. It takes him a moment to realise that it is for him.

 	The people of Arcology X are shouting his name.

 	No, not his name, his title.

 	Saviour of Calth.

 	And for the first time, Remus Ventanus feels that he has earned it.