THE TRIBUTE OF FLESH

David Annandale

It would be wrong to say that he woke. That would imply that his prior state had been something as simple, and as human, as sleep. It would mean that he opened his eyes. Neither was true. He had not slept in the mortal sense of the word for centuries, and there was nothing peaceful about the sus-an membrane coma. It was not a restorative slumber. It was the last stand against death.

Nor could it be said that he opened his eyes. Though he suddenly had sight, he did not know if he still had eyes.

He did have a body. That much he knew, just as he knew the stars existed. It was a stranger to him now, a weak, shattered thing. He realized, as consciousness and full thought returned to him moment by moment, it was encased in something that was both his new body and his coffin. As he achieved complete awareness, he felt a sharp pang of gratitude and loss. He had asked for this and his wish had been granted. But at the cost of all flesh.

He had known this would be so. Now he experienced the reality of his new being.

‘Are you with us, Brother Nithigg?’ Volos asked. Nithigg’s gaze focused. His first sight was his old friend. Volos looked different. He had new markings on his armour: the sergeant had become captain in name now, and not simply in action. On the left of his pauldron hung a new honour badge. It was the aquila framed in dragon’s flame. Nithigg wondered how long his coma had been.

Volos also looked smaller. That was odd. He towered over all the other Black Dragons of the company, but for the first time Nithigg was looking down at him. It took Nithigg a moment to understand that it was his own perspective that had changed.

He spoke. His brain sent the signals that would move lips and tongue, but the withered thing that had been his body did not respond. Instead, sounds emerged from the vox-casters. ‘I see…’ he began, then stopped. Is this me? Nithigg wondered. The words were his. But the voice belonged to thunder and iron. He tried again. ‘I see your actions against the traitors have been recognized, brother-captain.’ The reverberations in the chamber changed his jest into a god’s edict.

Volos smiled. ‘Our actions,’ he said. ‘Our victory.’ And he added, ‘Brother Dreadnought.’

Brother Dreadnought. The appellation was an honour. Nithigg wondered if he was worthy of it. The honour of the Second Company, and of the Chapter, demanded that he be so. He had never thought of himself as a suitable candidate to bear the mantle of a Dreadnought. But he remembered lying on the floor of the xenos temple on that cursed moon. He’d been dying. As he’d slipped towards darkness, he had pleaded with Volos, ‘Let me serve.’

The decision to continue his service was not his to make. Nor was it Volos’s alone. And the use of the revival chamber in which they now stood would have been beyond the means of the depleted Second Company. ‘We have met with other companies,’ he realized.

Volos nodded. ‘The Fourth and Sixth. Their fortunes have not been as hard as ours. Their aid was welcome. The Immolation Maw is renewed as are you. As are we all.’

‘Though reduced in numbers.’

Volos’s horned head bowed to that truth. ‘But strengthened in purpose.’

Purpose. As Nithigg raised an arm experimentally, listening to the whirr of his power fist, he thought about purpose, and what his would be. Before, he had thought of himself as the memory of the Second Company. He had spent every moment he could in the librarium, combing the histories, pursuing, among other things, those precious hints that might pierce the fog of the past and lead the Black Dragons to their home world. Now, he would not be able to fit though the librarium’s doors, much less move through the stacks without destroying the precious manuscripts.

But I can fight.

Before, his body had been integral to his identity as a Black Dragon. Bless the curse, went the prayer. So he had. His deformities had become weapons in the service of his company, his Chapter, and his Emperor. The three jutting horns on his forehead, the curved bone blade that extended down his forearm, never to be retracted. Gone now. And what of the war cry? What of ‘fire and bone’? There was no bone about him anymore.

There is still fire. And this is a new curse to bless.

Then he realized that a trace of his bodily identity still lingered. The weaponized sarcophagus that was his home and his self had received alterations of its own. His boneblades had been severed from his ruined body, and attached to the arms of the machine. His mutations marked the armour as himself.

He took his first step as a Dreadnought. His massive foot struck the floor like the toll of a great bell. ‘Brother-captain,’ said Nithigg, ‘I hope you have found us a war.’

The Universe-class mass conveyer Absolution plied the Maeror subsector on its own. This had not always been so. Once, it had had a twin: the Benediction. Together, they had been the pride of the fleet owned by a family of the merchant nobility on Supplicium Secundus. That family had fallen millennia ago. Its fleet had broken up, many of its ships being absorbed into other trading organizations. But the Absolution and Benediction had followed different destinies.

The Benediction had, a century before, fallen into the grasp of the orks of Octavius. The Absolution had continued on its endless path, criss-crossing the subsector. Trade was no longer the gigantic ship’s reason for being. Rather, it was now the means to the end of supporting the community that it carried. Over dozens of centuries, the ship had become a world unto itself. It was twelve kilometres long. Its crew of 60,000 had become a city of eight times that population. Most of its inhabitants had never been planetside. Its culture had developed around a core theme of pilgrimage. Every cycle, and every leg from system to system, was part of the long journey to the ultimate light of the Emperor. Pilgrimage gave life on the Absolution purpose, and it gave it unity. Even so, like any city of its size, it knew strife. It experienced crime, feuds, and factionalism. But it did not know war.

Until now.

The weight of Hannah Sifry’s eight decades pulled at her. The gravity of age fought her with every rung that she climbed. She had never thought of herself as frail, but she had never tested her strength as she did now. The clarity of her situation burst upon her mind’s eye. She was an old white-haired woman bent on making the final minutes of her life as difficult as possible.

She was inside the central tower of the midship augur array. She wore a rope harness, from which hung a generator. The device was barely portable and barely functional. It was jury-rigged, the product of desperation. Much had been risked in the theft of its components and much had been lost. There was as much blood as there was hope in the generator.

She paused, resting for a moment. Another twenty metres to go. Her arms trembled.

Hope. Did she feel it? Was it driving her climb? She didn’t know. Perhaps it wasn’t a question of hope for any of her fellow survivors. Regine Sorina’s face was hard with determination. That was what kept her going. Sifry grimaced and began climbing again. She didn’t feel determined. She felt angry. Spite was her ally. She knew she was going to die, but she would do all in her power to hurt the monsters who had taken over her home.

It took her another half-hour to reach the top. She perched on a narrow ledge and hauled the generator up. Her breath rattled like stones on metal. Her arms were heavy, awkward, their cold ache the only sign that they were still part of her body. She clutched her spite close and squeezed a few more drops of strength from it. Her fingers were curled and shaking, but the cable attachments were simple. She fixed the generator to the array and threw its switch.

The generator was really a battery with a single charge. It expended its power on a solitary burst from the signal beacon. The astropaths had all been crucified. Activating the beacon was the only way that the Absolution could cry out its distress. There were no sensors to tell Sifry whether the beacon had been activated. She knew it had been, though, when, a few minutes later, the enemy came for her. They raced up the shaft of the tower. She couldn’t tell if she was seeing their shadows or their bodies. Perhaps there was no real difference between the two. They were climbed with all their malevolent grace, that perfection of movement that promised a perfection of pain.

She denied them that satisfaction. She leapt at them. She fell hundreds of metres. She spat hatred and defiance all the way down.

The final seconds of her life felt like a victory, and that was good enough.

Regine Sorina crouched in the ventilation shaft. She saw three of the xenos rush down the corridor, passing just beneath her hiding spot. The entrance to the augur tower was ten metres to the left. She waited. She would be as much of a witness as she could for Sifry. She heard the old woman fall and the triumphant rage of her curses.

She winced when she heard the impact and reminded herself that Sifry had volunteered for the mission knowing that this was the best ending it could have. We have struck a blow, Sorina told herself. It was possible that no one would receive the signal. But someone might, she thought. Even if no one did, the xenos had reacted to a danger. They could be threatened. That was a thought to carry with her through the days.

She continued to wait and didn’t dare move until the xenos had moved on. Their senses were keen. They might hear her move. If they looked up, they might see her, though she had taken what precautions she could. She had used a broken fan blade to sheer her hair down to stubble. All her exposed skin was covered in the grime of the ventilation system. She could not become a shadow like the enemy, but she could sink beneath the ship’s centuries of detritus, which no amount of maintenance could prevent from accumulating. When she didn’t move, she was just another bundle of litter, a collection of rags and sharp angles. Malnourishment was turning her body into bone covered by a creased leather of flesh. Cycle by cycle, there was less and less of her to see.

After a few minutes, the trio walked by again. They were in no hurry. She held her breath. This was the closest she had ever come to the enemy. The xenos were morbidly beautiful. They were creatures of stories and hated myth. They were eldar. Their clothing had the precise elegance and lethality of straight razors. Their leader was the most beautiful and graceful of them all. Wherever she walked, terrible death followed. Sorina had only seen her once from a distance. She curled her lips as the memory intruded again. Weeks of the occupation had not blunted it, nor had the avalanche of new atrocities Sorina had witnessed.

She had been in a shaft, as now, having fled there in the first hour of the invasion. She had crawled without purpose then, scrambling away from the sounds of one-sided combat and massacre. She had stopped by a grille that opened onto one of the great hydroponic tanks. The tank was over a kilometre long and was where the crops were grown for consumption and trade. The harvest was already burning, the smoke stinging her eyes as it spread through the shaft.

Not far away, invaders on hovering jetbikes herded the workers together and presented them to the leader. She was a few centimetres taller than her escorts, and there was a dark power to her presence. A terrible gravity pulled all thought and light towards her. She stalked forward to the first rank of prisoners. Her movements were ballet and serpent strike. She pulled out a blade. It was narrow, curved, wrought with dark artistry. It was more than a weapon. It was an instrument. The eldar leader brought the blade toward the face of the nearest prisoner. She began to do things.

Sorina had tried to look away. She had failed, and now the memory was an unwanted companion of her days.

The echoes of the eldar’s steps faded. Sorina counted to a hundred, then started moving. As she crawled through the shafts toward the refuge, she sniffed the air. It was the habit of her entire adult life. For almost twenty years, she had spent eight hours of every cycle in Atmosphere Control, about a third of the way forward of the enginarium. It had been her duty to ensure the oxygen levels remained constant, and that the carbon dioxide and other toxic gasses were scrubbed from the air. Servitors and cogitators did the work well enough most of the time, but it wasn’t enough. Even a minor lapse could kill thousands. The task had been a privilege. During her shifts, she had held the lives of the Absolution’s citizens in her hands. That existence was in the past. The xenos had taken Atmosphere Control, along with all the other centres critical to the functioning of the ship. Despite their delight in prolonged murder, they also appeared to have every intention of keeping the population of the Absolution alive for further terrible delights.

The journey through the ducts to the sanctuary was a long one. She passed by many ventilation grilles. Through each, she was given a glimpse how of the culture of the Absolution had been transformed. Sorina resisted the idea that the xenos even had a culture, but its power was everywhere to be seen. All of the eldar genius was devoted to the furthering of atrocity. The aesthetics that confronted Sorina strove toward the fusion of desire and pain. The xenos had not had the time to remove the Imperial iconography of the ship’s interior. Nor did they appear to care about its existence one way or the other. In the spaces where they chose to linger, they forced the enslaved humans to desecrate the holy images and statues. Sorina had long since realized that it was not the sacredness of the original artwork that displeased the invaders. Rather, it was the torment suffered by the humans who had been forced to deface it that they valued.

And pain. Pain everywhere, spreading out in ripples from the bridge. The xenos took their victims singly or in groups, and made them the tribute to their appetites. The contortions of the flesh were art in its most obscene form. Sorina saw her comrades bent, twisted, broken, their ends as creative as they were prolonged. The sights were always new, the awful sounds always fresh. Even when she moved deeper into the ducts, away from corridors, the echoes of torment followed her.

Working for Atmosphere Control had given Sorina an intimate knowledge of the ventilation system. That had been her salvation. She could still move around with relative ease. As far as she could tell, it was a small group of xenos that had seized the Absolution. An unarmed population could do nothing against them, but the ship was too vast for the invaders to patrol. They could hold the vital points, and do what they would to anyone they discovered, but that left vast gaps through which she could slip.

For now.

The refuge was a larger space at the centre of a tangle of shafts. The group that Sorina had joined was small. There were eight other members. They did not dare call themselves a resistance. The few attempts to mount a rebellion of any scale had ended in bloodbaths. Improvised weaponry and untrained fighters were taken apart by cool sadism. The xenos were far from being threatened, or even angered, by the revolts. Instead, they were entertained. They were amused. Sorina and her companions had learned from the mistakes of their fellows. They did not launch assaults. They sought to keep each other alive. They scavenged. They found new hiding places. They watched. They endured.

But today, at last, they had acted.

Vaelassa Kthanys sat on the command throne on the bridge of the Absolution, her fingers playing absently inside the skull of one of the mon-keigh. He was still alive and was no longer capable of the limited sentience of his species, but his sense receptors were still very active. There was no dulling of his pain. That was all that mattered. His shackled limbs vibrated from the intensity of the sensations. Kthanys tasted his pain. She ran her tongue over the edge of her teeth, savouring the nourishing nectar of agony. The mon-keigh’s mouth was open in a wracked scream, but it was silent. She had torn his vocal chords out a few minutes ago so she could listen to the incubus before her. ‘Then there are no challenges to our control of the ship?’ she asked. She made her scepticism clear.

‘None, archon,’ Nathar Desserel replied. He had removed his helmet, and stood with it under his left arm. The edges of his black armour glistened with the blood of newer victims. ‘None worth noting, at any rate.’

Kthanys stored the qualification away for future use. Desserel no doubt thought he was protecting himself by avoiding a categorical assertion that could come back to haunt him as a lie, and thus a betrayal. Instead, he had opened himself up to the charge of weakness and incompetence should any of the thousands of mon-keigh still to be rounded up created even the slightest problem. Did he realize he had just put himself even more at Kthanys’s mercy? Likely not. Desserel was proving himself to be a poor game-player and Kthanys drove the point home for him. ‘Then how could a distress beacon have been activated?’

‘The signal was of very short duration. There will be no repetition.’

‘I see no reason to trust your judgement in this matter.’ She thought about killing him, then decided against doing so. He was a useful tool, not to be discarded unnecessarily. The raids had gone well. The ship was theirs. The beacon was the only event of any significance that had escaped their control.

‘How long until we re-enter the webway?’ she asked.

Desserel hesitated. ‘Within a week of this ship’s time.’

‘What?’ Her fist clenched, squeezing the prisoner’s brain to pulp, killing him. That was too long to spend in the materium, within range of systems controlled by the mon-keigh, especially after that signal. Its brevity was beside the point. Was Desseral truly that ignorant of the risks?

‘That will bring us to the nearest webway access wide enough to accommodate something of this size. Even that corridor will be strained to the point of near collapse.’

Though the prisoner was dead, the massive spasm of pain in his final moment was nourishing and it calmed her. There was nothing to be done about the geography of the webway. The Absolution had passed within a breath of the portal used as an ambush point by the raiders of the Kabal of the Desolate Sigh. But the tendrils of the webway could be very narrow, and the Absolution demanded a major artery.

The prize was worth the risk. With this ship in her possession, she had supply of slaves large enough to be self-renewing. The Absolution represented a massive increase in her material power, and therefore, more importantly, her influence in Commorragh. They had already survived a month without being detected. Another week, then, and the ship would be hers, beyond the reach of any mon-keigh retaliation. She could wait. There would be much to savour in the meantime. In the hundreds of thousands of lives at her disposal, there was so much potential pain to be consumed.

‘The engines will be ready for our use by then,’ she said.

‘Yes, archon, they will.’

‘That was not a question.’

A week after the beacon, Sorina was alone, in the lower reaches of the ship, in a starboard access tunnel that ran next to the hull. She was on a food run, and it was not going well. The last several had not. They were all growing weak. She paused in the shadows between the lumen strips, knelt and prayed. She prayed for the strength to continue to struggle. She dared not ask for anything more.

Her prayer was addressed to the Emperor but was answered by monsters. Their arrival was announced by a grinding vibration that seemed to Sorina to reach through the entire hull. There was a rising shriek of tortured metal on either side of her. She covered her ears. Thinking that the destruction of the Absolution was upon her. She stared at the wall, waiting for it to vanish, and for the venting atmosphere to propel her to frozen death in the void.

Instead, gigantic drill heads burst through the hull. Foaming sealant closed off the gaps between the ship’s hull and that of the boarding torpedo before the atmosphere had had more than a second to escape. Access hatches slammed down. The monsters emerged.

Sorina cowered. She knew of Space Marines. She had never seen any of the Adeptus Astartes in person, though she had seen many representations in everything from lithographs to commemorative statuary. None of those images resembled the beings who confronted her. Their armour was void-black, emblazoned with a coiled silver dragon. The group that stepped out of the sternward torpedo, flanking the captain, seemed to have a variety of horns added to their helmets. But then the captain removed his helmet and everything was worse. The horns were real. And those eyes: a profound, glistening black, as if the void itself had arrayed itself in flesh and ceramite to walk the Absolution.

The captain approached her. He was gigantic. From her perspective, his crescent horn seemed to graze the roof of the corridor. But then something even more immense emerged from the interior of the torpedo. This thing truly did fill the corridor, a behemoth on pillar legs. It was sarcophagus and tank. Three horns were affixed to the upper portion of the shell. Blades had been added to its arms, blades that looked a lot like bones. The organic artefacts were somehow more frightening than the formidable armaments at the end of the arms.

Sorina looked up at the captain, her gut filling with ice. Another myth had come to the Absolution, more creatures from humanity’s collective nightmares, and she wondered if she had helped summon them. ‘You’ve come to kill us all, haven’t you?’ she whispered.

The monster looked down at her.

‘We received a message from this ship,’ he said. His voice was huge. Though he spoke quietly, the tones rumbled in his chest. There was a hint of a snarl, too, in his sibilance. ‘Did you send it?’ he asked.

She would not hide. Even now, as she thought that the signal had summoned more of the Emperor’s enemies, something from an even more fearsome hell than the eldar, she would not dissemble. Not in her final moment.

‘I did,’ she croaked.

‘Good. You will be useful.’

She blinked. She wasn’t sure how to interpret that statement.

The captain continued. ‘We saw a xenos raiding ship affixed to this vessel’s superstructure. What do you know of their numbers?’

Her mind seemed to stutter as she tried to reconcile the monster’s words with his appearance. He wasn’t about to destroy her. ‘Who…’ she managed.

An expression passed over the captain’s features. Sorina found it hard to read the face of a being so far removed from the human, but it seemed to her that she had just witnessed pity. ‘I am Volos, Captain of the Second Company of the Black Dragons, and we have come to purge this ship of xenos filth.’

It took another few moments before the woman understood that the Black Dragons had come to save her and her kind, not destroy them.

‘I’m sure she would be much more reassured if we were Ultramarines,’ Liscar said over the vox channel.

Volos shot him a look but said nothing. Liscar was probably right. We are never wanted, he thought, but we are just as necessary. He felt no resentment over the mortal’s fear. The emotion was the natural reaction to all Adeptus Astartes, though the terror he and his brothers inspired was of another kind. It marked the difference between gods and monsters. It had its uses. He had always known this. But only recently had he come to accept the extremes of some of those uses.

He waited, and when the woman realized he wasn’t going to kill her, she stood. ‘What is your name?’ he asked.

‘Regine Sorina, lord,’ she answered.

Good. She was speaking. She had moved past the shock of the Black Dragons arrival.

‘Tell me about the enemy,’ he ordered.

Stumbling through her words, still frightened, she described the situation aboard the Absolution. When she had finished, Volos said, ‘Go to your companions. Tell them to stand ready.’

‘Yes, lord. We will follow you.’

Volos curled a lip as he donned his helmet once more. ‘You won’t find us hard to find.’

They could have set up an ambush for the eldar. The corridor was barely wide enough for Nithigg to move. It would have restricted the movement of the xenos, diminished their advantages of speed and agility. But the position was too far from the command and control centres of the ship. And an ambush was not what Volos had in mind. It would not be a punishment brutal enough for the invaders.

The Black Dragons moved sternward, and upwards, heading for the bridge. There were two squads: Ormarr and Pythios. Volos had made the Dragon Claws of Ormarr the core of the new command squad. Such a shift in rank for a tactical squad was a far cry from the orthodoxy of the Codex Astartes. But Second Company’s numbers were badly reduced after the schism triggered by the corrupted Toharan, and the Black Dragons had never been Codex-compliant. There were strategic considerations: the brothers of Squad Ormarr knew each other’s combat rhythms perfectly. It would be foolish to break apart a war machine that powerful. There were other reasons, more intangible, but even more compelling. Toharan’s heresy had begun as an attempt to bring the Black Dragons into compliance with the Codex. He had rejected the mutations of his brothers, condemning the very definition of the Chapters’ identity. So when Volos assumed command of a company battered by treachery, but strengthened in unity by the purge of war, moving the most heavily mutated warriors to its heart was a statement. Second Company blessed its curse with renewed fervour.

On this mission, Squad Ormarr was joined by Apothecary Urlock, Epistolary Rothnove, and Chaplain Massorus. They had at last emerged from their comas. They were hungry to taste once more the honour of war. They were also showing their support for Volos, and their acceptance of the changed face of the company. Volos was grateful on both accounts.

The Black Dragons travelled hundreds of metres, climbed dozens of levels, and their advance was uncontested. They crossed the paths of many humans, all clearly continuing a round of assigned duties. It was clear that they were slaves now, not crew. They regarded the Black Dragons with startled mixtures of fear and hope. They rushed to either side of the corridors, parting like wheat in a gale, before the march of the Space Marines. Volos noted the ornamentation on the ship’s walls and ceiling. Friezes stretched the length of the halls and extended up and down levels. They were intricate, looping meditations on pilgrimage. No matter what direction the viewer was heading, the designs were pointing towards the greater light of the Emperor. None of the friezes that Volos saw ended with arrival in His presence. Rather, it was the striving that was celebrated. Or it had been. Most of the friezes were damaged. The desecration was not spiritual in nature. There were no Chaos runes. Their damage was more secular, though no less cruel. It was too extensive to have been perpetrated by the invaders themselves. Volos realized that the inhabitants of the Absolution had been forced to do the blasphemous work themselves. He thought about what that would to the spirit of the slaves. He began to long for the honest brutality of the orks.

Five levels below the bridge, there was still no sign of the foe. Then Braxas called out, ‘Brother-captain, possible targets on the auspex.’

‘Finally.’ Volos stopped to see what Braxas was picking up. ‘I was starting to think they would all be waiting at the bridge.’ He knew the raiding force wasn’t a large one, but he had never known eldar of any description to barricade themselves in a confined space. They would be playing to the Black Dragons strengths, not their own. ‘Heading our way?’ he asked.

‘No,’ Braxas answered. ‘Parallel to us. One level down and to port.’ He cocked his head as looked at the auspex. ‘The signatures are massive, brother-captain. Too great for a raiding party. This looks like an army.’

‘And moving away from the bridge,’ said Urlock. ‘This is a diversion at best. Almost certainly a trap.’

Volos nodded. Braxas showed him the screen. ‘They are expending great effort of some kind to convince us to leave the bridge alone.’

‘An effort we shall ignore, brother-captain?’ Urlock asked.

Volos looked at the bulk of Nithigg looming behind the rest of the squads. ‘Your thoughts, brother?’

‘If the eldar cannot account for that much movement,’ Nithigg said, his voice shaking the walls, ‘what can?’

‘People,’ Volos muttered, dreading the conclusions he was about to reach.

‘Reaching the bridge will put a stop to whatever is going on,’ Urlock said, though he did not sound convinced of his own reasoning.

‘Will it?’ said Volos. ‘How much of the enemy’s force is being deployed in this effort?’ The grid on the auspex screen had almost vanished in the glare of light from thousands of contacts moving together.

‘We have come to exterminate the raiders,’ said Nithigg. ‘There they are.’

‘It must be a trap,’ Urlock insisted.

‘Of course it is,’ said Volos. ‘Though we may not have any choice but to take it.’

They altered their course. Following the readings took the squads down even larger corridors until they passed through loading bay doors. They had arrived in a gigantic cargo hold. Most of what had been contained here had either been sold or destroyed, leaving an empty space the size of a frigate. Wide platforms, corresponding to deck levels, ran the length of the walls. The Black Dragons were standing on the second level, at the stern end of the hold.

Towards the centre of the hold, the eldar had gathered their prisoners. There were thousands of them. The mortals stood like herded grox, shoulder to shoulder, milling and turning in aimless terror as their captors circled them on jetbikes.

‘What are they planning?’ Liscar muttered. ‘What use is this? This hold has no strategic value.’

‘Exactly,’ said Volos. ‘Yet we are here. Where they want us. Still a distance from the bridge.’

‘Then let us disappoint them, and slaughter the contingent at the bridge,’ Urlock urged.

Nithigg spoke over the vox-channel, muting his thunder. ‘The prisoners…’

There were Chapters of the Adeptus Astartes for whom that would not be a consideration. Volos wanted to believe that he was fighting for an Imperium with subjects, rather than a mere tally of victories. He wanted to believe. He was no longer sure that he did. The price of the Black Dragons victories on Aighe Mortis had been a river of civilian blood. The words of Canoness Setheno had become a refrain that dogged every decision: ‘Become what you must be. You are the Emperor’s monster. And you are necessary.’

He could not deny the truth of Setheno’s exhortation, and he knew he had not yet fathomed the full extent of that truth. Necessary was a two-edged blade. It was necessary that he become monstrous. That was another curse to be blessed. But the monstrous act was not always necessary.

And so? he asked himself. Is it now?

The eldar answered the question. Their lookouts must have spotted the arrival of the Space Marines. They ceased their herding and began their slaughter. The jetbikes descended on the prisoners. They became a razored cyclone. The xenos were too quick, and still too far, for Volos to make out the details of their actions. He could see the results, though. The outer perimeter of the circle of prisoners erupted with blood. Bodies disintegrated. Thousands of voices joined in a single scream.

Volos knew an invitation when he saw it. He would be damned if he declined.

Today, we come to slay monsters, he thought. ‘Brothers!’ he called as he leapt from the edge of the platform. He hit the floor of the cargo hold hard enough to dent its steel plating, and he charged towards the massacre. ‘The enemy offers us his presence in great numbers. Let us reward the gift with fire and bone!’

From behind him came the answer: ‘Fire and bone!’

The Black Dragons rushed the eldar in a double-wedge formation. The two squads began firing, aiming the bolter shells just above the heads of the mortals. The eldar broke away from their butchery immediately. They had been expecting the attack, and the squadron of five jetbikes jerked up and down unpredictably as they flew at the Space Marines. Even so, one was struck in the first seconds of the battle. The shells destroyed the xenos machine’s anti-grav technology. It pitched nose-first into the floor and at such high speed that it and its driver were spread across a dozen metres in seconds. Two of the other bikes opened fire with a stream of dark, crystalline splinters. When they struck Volos’s armour, they sank in as darts into leather, scarring the ceramite. None hit the joints, but he knew that if they did, the hellish shards would release their toxins into his flesh.

The bikes flew around the squads in a wide arc and ceased fire. The other two jetbikes came in without firing their guns. As they closed, Volos saw the pale faces of their pilots contorted by open-mouthed anticipation. The keels of the bikes came at the Black Dragons like scythes.

Pride, Volos thought as he threw himself down and rolled onto his back. The xenos didn’t just want to kill him. They wanted to kill him in a particular way. They were risking close quarters with their vehicles because of an obsession with their art. He used that. The bike passed over him. Brother Vasuk was slower, and the blade sideswiped his shoulder plate. It sliced like a blade, hit like a torpedo. It sent him spinning off his feet, blood jetting into the air. He collided with Nithigg, and regained his feet while the bike jinked to the fight, avoiding the Dreadnought.

The bikes reversed course, came in low and fired this time. The first two now attacked from each side, taking their turn at the bladed kill. One of them never made it. Ignoring the splinters, Nithigg tracked its flight with his assault cannon. The massive shells tore it apart and its pilot vanished in a shower of blood.

As before, the supporting fire ceased just before the charging jetbike crossed its stream. Instead of evading, Volos maglocked his bolter to his thigh and lunged at the bike. His leap took him above the pilot. He extended his arms, snapping out his bone blades. He slammed into the front of the vehicle, crumpling its nose. The impact was stunning, but he shrugged it off. His blades punctured the skull and chest of the eldar. He leapt off the bike as it careened to the surface of the hold, cartwheeling past the squads.

The eldar warriors’ foot infantry closed in. They kept their distance, circling the Black Dragons at a run, harrying them with splinter weapons.

‘Give me two fists,’ Volos called. Squads Pythios and Ormarr contracted into tight formations, guns facing outward, with Nithigg in the centre. Pythios marched to port, Ormarr to starboard, driving the eldar back towards the wall, while Nithigg launched a barrage, denying the enemy the chance to come up between the squads. The speed of the eldar made it almost impossible to draw a bead on them. Volos felt like he was shooting at the wind. The murderous splinters sinking deeper into his armour. Some struck home. Venom coursed through his blood. It was neutralized by his oolitic kidney, but not before it set his nerves on fire. He snarled away the pain, and found victory. The Black Dragons hit the eldar with such volume of fire that no degree of agility could avoid it. The mass-reactive shells tore open the xenos armour and exploded the flesh beneath.

The enemy warriors began to die. Their numbers dwindled. They could not win. And though Volos thought he saw pleasure on some of the faces of his victims, he didn’t care. He took his own pleasure from the judgement he was delivering.

‘We are losing, archon,’ said Desserel.

No, Kthanys thought as she listened to the reports coming in from the cargo hold, you are. It was Desserel’s command that was being taken apart by the power armoured mon-keigh. ‘You feel you cannot defeat them?’ she said.

‘We are showing undue restraint,’ he answered, sidestepping the question, attempting to blame her without doing so directly. ‘If we would commit the rest of our resources–’

She interrupted by seizing his face. She pierced his cheek with one of the dagger-pointed fingers of her gauntlet and scraped against his teeth. Blood filled his mouth, and he choked. Humiliation, pain, ecstasy and fear fought each other in his eyes.

‘I will not waste our remaining strength on your failure,’ she told him. She yanked her hand away, tearing his cheek open further.

‘Your pardon, archon,’ said a voice that begged no pardon at all. It was a cracked, whispering rasp, filled with the dust of millennia of inflicted pain and the worms of tortures to come.

Kthanys turned to the haemonculus. ‘We are ready?’

Serekraal’s nod was a shadow contracting on a shadow. His skin was the desiccated grey of dead insects. Held aloft by suspensor crystals, he floated just above the bridge’s deck, a being of angles and spikes and darkness. ‘At your command,’ he said.

His deference was a pretence, bordering on mockery, and Kthanys knew it. He had no more respect for her command than she had trust in him. But she needed him. She needed the skills he had that could keep her alive and beyond the reach of She Who Thirsts. In turn, she would provide him with an endless supply of subjects for his explorations of the outer limits of sensation. They had an understanding.

Kthanys suppressed a smile. Her compact with Serekraal had borne fruit. The incubus had been shown his place, had been weakened militarily, and the purpose of the operation had been met. The savages had been delayed long enough. ‘Then let us instruct our guests in their new reality,’ Kthanys ordered. ‘Welcome them to the full embrace of the Desolate Sigh.’

An eldar in armour that looked richer, more elaborate and more painful than the others raised a large-bored weapon. He stopped running and fired. The weapon unleashed a beam of blinding darkness. It caught Melus’s left hand, disintegrating it. Behind the sergeant, it hit Brother Anghen full on. He vanished.

Despite his wound, Melus tried to return fire, but the eldar warrior had already sprinted on. His bolter shells found only air. Volos caught the exchange in the corner of his eye. On the tactical readout of his helm lenses, Anghen’s rune went from green to absent in an instant. Melus’s flared orange, but remained stable. Volos tried to track the movement of the eldar. The xenos’s weapon ignored armour. It had to be dealt with immediately. But the warrior was jinking back and forth at high speed.

‘Brother-epistolary,’ Volos called.

‘He’s mine, brother-captain,’ Rothnove answered.

There was a flare of coruscating uncolour as the Librarian seized the powers of the warp. An aurora leapt out of Rothnove’s psychic hood and surrounded him. He stormed toward the eldar. Volos didn’t see him move. He saw a black streak, as if iron had become light. For a moment, the laws of mass and speed lost their hold on Rothnove. A ceramite rocket slammed into the eldar, shattering armour and bone, sending the dark energy weapon flying. With a single swipe of his power sword, Rothnove decapitated the xenos. The eyes of the tumbling head were wide with surprise.

The squads reached the walls of the hold and began a wide rotation of their own, with Nithigg as the immovable, deadly centre. They did their own herding. Now the eldar felt the lack of shelter. They had nowhere to fall back to as the squads spiralled in, trapping them between the hammers of Pythios and Ormarr and the anvil of Nithigg. The eldar died. There had been forty infantry warriors. Now there were fewer than half that many. And then they no longer had sufficient numbers to be a threat. Their force was immolated by the fury of the Black Dragons.

The victory was real, yet Volos did not trust it. These xenos were duplicitous, cunning, depraved. They were not stupid. This trap was only half a one. Were the eldar so overconfident that they had thought this contingent enough to overpower the Adeptus Astartes? He couldn’t believe that. There was a deeper game being hidden from him, perhaps even from the beings he was killing.

The ship jerked, once, as if the immense creation were an egg in the hand of a giant. The movement was an odd one. It did not throw Volos off his feet, though the violence of the shift was great. The translation was through something other than space.

Braxas grunted in surprise. ‘Brother-captain,’ he voxed, ‘I’ve lost contact with the Immolation Maw.’

‘Meaning?’ Volos blew the head off another eldar. The handful that remained responded to the inevitability of their defeat by throwing themselves directly at the Black Dragons, seeking absolute savagery in their final moments. Volos obliged. As the lithe creatures closed, he used his bone blades to give them deaths that were lingering enough to be agonizing.

‘It isn’t a problem with the vox,’ Braxas said. ‘The ship has vanished.’

‘Destroyed?’ Volos asked. Throne, no, he thought.

‘I don’t think so. The cut-off was too sudden. It’s as if the Maw was never there at all.’

‘Have we entered the warp?’ An eldar warrior swung a jagged, curved blade at him. He took the blow on his side. The sword cut deeply into his armour. It stuck. Volos retaliated with something far worse. His boneblades were edged with adamantium, but they had become something more since the struggle with the forces of Chaos on the moon Flebis. He skewered the xenos through the sternum. The being’s armour was irrelevant. The eldar writhed, an impaled insect. Volos gutted him.

‘There was no sign of the Absolution’s engines powering up,’ Braxas said. ‘There is no Mandeville Point in this vicinity.’

The steady hammer blows of Nithigg’s assault cannon ceased. The eldar were all dead. Their corpses were drained of their lethal grace. They were just meat now. The deck of the cargo hold was a mire of blood and body parts. At the other end of the hold, the thousands of prisoners pressed together in their terror. After the tumult of battle, their moans barely seemed to break the silence.

Volos wasn’t fooled. This was a false peace.

‘Be on your guard, brothers,’ he said. ‘The true nature of this trap has yet to be revealed.’ And still he knew that he had had no choice in his action. If he had allowed the slaughter to progress, leaving the eldar to their pleasure as he sought strategic victory on the bridge, he would have been no different from the xenos in his morality. No, that was wrong. He would have been worse. The eldar, here, had not depended on the deaths of thousands of their species for tactical gain.

As Pythios and Ormarr regrouped, a thought struck him. Perhaps the eldar had sacrificed their own after all. The Black Dragons had been held in a pointless battle, but to what end? One where the Maw was gone, and his squads cut off from all reinforcement.

To what end?

The answer came on razored wings.

Kthanys’s transmission had been received, and, more crucially, her order had been obeyed. The greater strength of the Kabal of the Desolate Sigh was waiting when the Absolution entered the webway. She laughed at the view that greeted her through the bridge’s primary oculus, and laughed again at Desserel’s expression as he realized how he had been used. ‘Open the ship,’ she commanded. ‘And let us make sport of the mon-keigh who would think of defying us.’

And so she provided her Kabal with the pleasure its members craved, while she delivered a wealth of slaves. Her power would be uncontested, and reaffirmed. She cast an amused glance at Desserel. She had weakened his prestige to the point that he needed her favour all the more. He should be grateful he still lived.

The gates to the landing bays of the Absolution rose. All of them. The great doors to the loading docks parted. The ship was open to all. Wyches and kabalite warriors in their hundreds on jetbikes, raiders and Venom skimmers rushed aboard. Through the tunnels they came, delighting in the slaughter of whatever humans crossed their paths, all of them answering the call of the archon to inflict humiliation, agony and death on the savage mon-keigh who imagined themselves a power in the galaxy.

It was a fighting retreat, and the Black Dragons took their toll on the swarm of eldar that descended upon them. It was still a retreat, and a hated bitterness in Volos’s soul. There was no choice, though. To stand against such numbers was to die, and there was no honour in a pointless death. As it was, Brother Ehrbon was lost, his armour damaged by splinter fire before he was shredded by the razorflails of acrobatic warriors in gladiatorial garb.

Volos took them into the nearest corridor. Nithigg smashed support columns as he passed, collapsing portions of the next deck up, blocking the path behind them, at least for the moment.

The mortals were left behind, once more at the pleasure of their captors. But Volos noticed that the eldar showed no interest now in their wholesale slaughter. As the Black Dragons were driven back, he had seen the humans being herded out the bay doors at the far end of the hold. The cattle had done their job. They would be preserved for some future fate. A slower and more cruel one.

‘How are you faring, Brother Melus?’ Volos asked.

Melus raised his left arm. ‘The wound has sealed. I am ready to shove my stump down the throat of the xenos scum.’

‘They must die,’ Chaplain Massorus said. ‘All of them.’ His voice shook with religious hate. ‘They are profaning this ship with their existence.’

‘I agree,’ Volos said. The question was how. The war would be one of tunnels and corridors now. That would work to the Black Dragons advantage. But they were fewer than twenty. The enemy’s resources would now be infinite.

‘We must face the reality of our situation,’ said Urlock. ‘We are in their domain. They will win by sheer attrition, if it comes to that.’

‘Then let it!’ Massorus snarled. ‘We will sell our lives at such a price that they will remember their victory only with shudders.’

An idea took shape before Volos’s mind’s eye. It was an ugly one. It ran counter to his every hope and desire. It was monstrous.

It was also necessary.

As the idea gathered definition, another voice spoke. ‘Lord,’ it said. It came from a ventilation hatch three metres up the port wall. It was the mortal woman, Sorina. Volos heard shuffling behind her. She wasn’t alone.

Volos moved to the wall, reached up and pulled the grille down. ‘Show yourselves,’ he said. He would look these people in the eye. He would give them honesty. There was little else he could offer.

‘We’ve lost, haven’t we?’ a man said.

‘Garrat!’ Sorina snapped, horrified by the lack of respect.

‘We haven’t lost,’ Volos said. ‘But the terms of the conflict have changed. This is no longer a rescue mission. This is a war. The xenos have made combatants of all of you, whether you like it or not.’

‘Not a rescue mission,’ Garrat repeated. ‘So we cannot be saved?’

‘If you fight, your souls already are,’ Massorus told him.

The man looked like he was about to collapse in on himself. So did the others with him. They had kept themselves alive on the thinnest of rations of hope. The miraculous help had come, but only to end hope.

Sorina was the one who rallied. ‘We can still win?’ she asked.

‘Yes,’ said Volos.

In the silence that followed, he saw puzzled despair on the faces of everyone in the group except Sorina. She drew a long, shaking breath. ‘I understand.’

Garrat looked at her. ‘What do you understand?’

‘Sacrifice is necessary.’

The others stirred uneasily. Sorina glanced up at Volos. He nodded for her to continue. Best that the mortals reach the inevitable conclusions on their own. But soon. There were no sounds of the wreckage being cut through behind them. That in itself was a bad sign. If the eldar felt the task was beneath them, that meant they felt their control of the ship was absolute.

‘There’s no returning for any of us,’ Sorina said. ‘But we can defeat the enemy.’

Volos watched comprehension dawn on the faces before him. One of the other women said, ‘We’ll be deciding for everyone else on the ship.’

‘They’re dead anyway. We all are.’

‘It’s a question of how we choose to die,’ Garrat said. He was beginning to sound stronger, less defeated. ‘Do we let ourselves become slaves and die by torture, or do we go out fighting?’

‘No,’ Sorina said. ‘That isn’t a choice. That’s our duty.’ She turned to Volos. ‘I think I know what you mean to do, lord. I can help.’

‘How?’

‘I worked at Atmospheric Control.’

Volos had been planning to destroy the engines. The possibility that Sorina suggested was much better, though it would make little difference for the mortals. ‘How quick and how extensive can your alterations be?’

‘Very, lord.’

‘You know what you will have to do?’

‘Yes.’

A simple word, really. Such a short, small sound, coming from the fragile human frame. The scale of Sorina’s courage in uttering that word deserved far greater acknowledgment. But there was time for nothing else. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘How far?’

‘The centre deck, forward of the enginarium.’

‘Venerable-brother,’ Volos said to Nithigg, ‘Regine Sorina has earned the honour of your escort. The rest of us will draw the attention of the xenos our way, and we will ensure the bridge is not sealed.’ He looked at the other humans. ‘Do you have weapons?’ They did not. ‘Then make your preparations.’

‘Meet what is coming with resolution and faith,’ Massorus instructed them.

Garrat looked at the skull design of the chaplain’s helmet as if Massorus were his death given form. ‘Yes, lord,’ he said.

Volos heard the earlier strength reaffirmed. These mortals would meet their end well. The Black Dragons could give them that and a victory. He blocked off the rest of his line of thought, though he knew that he would have to face it in the end. ‘To war, then. With fire and bone!’

Oh yes, he thought. There will be fire.

Sorina was more exposed than she had been since the raiders had attacked. She had not been in one of the main passageways for weeks. But the Dreadnought could not fit into the narrow byways that had kept her alive. So now she was performing her final dance down the main thoroughfares. And it was still a dance. Nithigg’s steps were ponderous, each one an echoing boom, but Sorina had to run to keep up. When the attacks began, she had to stick close, using the massive legs for shelter, dodging from one to the other as they rose and fell. So she danced. She danced for her life, for the privilege of the good death, and for the glory of the Emperor.

The eldar came for them almost as soon as they hit the main passageway. They ignored her. They saw her as property, not as a threat. They tried to stop Nithigg, monsters of cruelty attacking the monster of metal. The Dreadnought responded with a devastating barrage. His assault cannon turned the way ahead into a march of explosions. The agility of the xenos did them little good. Wide as the corridor was, Nithigg filled it with destruction. The few eldar who survived the blasts came with reach of the flamer attached to his power fist. Sorina moved forward into a landscape that was a burning distortion of the ship she had known all her life. Over the centuries, the utilitarian lines of the halls had been softened with mosaics and friezes, decorative archways and memorial pillars. Now there was just a passage through darkness that flickered with flame. The deck was twisted and cratered. The stonework fell from the walls. Architectural ornamentation crumbled. And more and more, there was the stench of spilled blood and burned flesh.

The eldar’s splinter weapons were helpless against Nithigg, but they were lethal enough for Sorina. They hit the Dreadnought’s armour like edged hail. Every time she ran through the space between the legs, she expected her flesh to be flayed by their storm. But they advanced.

There were other weapons too. There were the ones that fired the beams of blinding night. The wave of destruction that Nithigg kept up before them became his shield. There were a few shots that went wide, thrown off by the relentless explosions. But it would only take one opportunity, Sorina knew. The right pause, the right moment, and even this colossus of war could be stopped. And so would her dance.

The eldar used speed. So could Volos. Ormarr and Pythios punched their way to the bridge with the momentum of a torpedo. ‘We stop for nothing,’ Volos told his brothers. ‘If they shoot, close with them. If they try to use their blades, run them down. Show them a dragon’s rage.’

They did. With fire, with bolter, with blade, and most deadly of all, with fury, they ran the gauntlet of eldar attacks. The tactic was, Volos knew, one whose success could only be temporary. In the long run, all the enemy had to do was gather numbers until the sheer arithmetic of the battlefield overwhelmed the Black Dragons. And Volos was leading an assault that would draw those numbers. He knew there would be forces dispatched to stop Nithigg, but the Dreadnought was not heading for an obvious vital point. He would look like a diversion. In reality, the main force of the Black Dragons was the diversion.

The eldar used deception. So could Volos.

He could even prepare a trap they could no more ignore than the Black Dragons had been able to turn away from the one the eldar had set. He was heading for the bridge with two squads of Space Marines. He had to be stopped. At all costs.

The corridors were too narrow for eldar vehicles. The enemy was limited to foot soldiers against the rolling thunder of the Adeptus Astartes. Volos kept the fire constant. There was no conserving of ammunition. Victory was imminent or it would not come at all. The squads sent a suppressive rain of bolter shells down the halls before them and hurled frag grenades around corners. They advanced behind a moving wave of destruction.

The eldar were skilled. But they were up against a charge that nothing except sudden and total annihilation could stop. One of the gladiators lashed Urlock with some sort of power whip. Energy coursed along its length, immobilizing his armour with a massive shock. The whip’s coating was corrosive and it began to eat through his battleplate. Massorus stormed past the convulsing Apothecary and smashed the wych down with his crozius. He paused for Urlock to shake off his stun and catch up. Ahead of him, his brothers raced on.

So it went. Any skirmish between a single warrior and the enemy was ignored by all but one other battle-brother. The advance was relentless. The eldar never had the chance to cause a delay long enough for them to gather a concentration of their forces.

They tried outside the bridge doors. There, they had erected barricades. They had established a strong point. They had their heavy weapons guarding the approach.

It was not a style of war that suited them. The corridor that led to the bridge was a short one. The Black Dragons rounded the corner, their grenades preceding them. Blasts and shells took the barricades apart. The eldar still managed one round before they were shredded. Another blast of dark energy vaporized Brother Savrax. An even more intense beam shot down the centre of the corridor and melted the wall behind. It took off Braxas’s left arm at the shoulder. A hiss of pain crackled over the vox. He stayed on his feet.

The Black Dragons reached the bridge. It was a vast space. Their run was over. Their advantage was gone.

Atmospheric Control was almost as cavernous as the enginarium itself. The command console occupied a small, circular platform. It was surrounded by the gigantic processors that regulated the mix and feed of gasses, and the banks of turbines, hundreds of metres high, that powered the ventilation throughout the ship. Nithigg stood in the centre of the platform and directed fire at the chamber’s single access point. His position was strong as long as the eldar wanted to preserve the functionality of the ship. If they realized what was happening, if they didn’t care what happened to the facility, he would be caught in a cul-de-sac, where even he might be brought down. It was the survival of the mortal that was most critical and most difficult.

She had to live long enough to bring about her own death.

Sorina ran to the panels. She threw switches, then began moving sliders over to extreme positions. Tocsins sounded within moments.

‘How long?’ Nithigg asked. He kept up the bombardment. More bodies piled up at the entrance.

‘Not long, lord. The system is designed to get emergency air to all areas of the Absolution within minutes.’ She looked up, eyes shining with pride and fear. ‘Not long.’

She was so small. The gulf between her humanity and what he had become was immense. But still there was a thread of connection. It was faint, frail. It would not survive the centuries of entombment that awaited him. It was there now, though. The leviathan of war reached across the gulf.

‘Have courage,’ he said. ‘You have done well.’

Volos tasted the change in the air through his helmet’s rebreather. The oxygen levels were spiking. He ducked as the leader of the eldar lashed at him with her whip. It went over his head, but her skill was such that she struck again before he could counter. He raised his left arm to parry. The whip coiled around his forearm. It was some sort of power weapon, and its malevolence stabbed through his armour. It savaged his nervous system. His teeth snapped together as his nerves erupted in agony. He couldn’t move.

The eldar surrounded the Black Dragons, attacking them with a lethal erosion. They were laying siege to a fortress of ceramite. They were taking their time. The Space Marines had formed a circle, and were sending out bolter shells in all directions, but they could not cover every angle at every moment. In the cracks, in the pauses, the eldar sent back streams of splinter fire. Liscar, who had survived the worst of Antagonis, went down, his throat torn out by a murderous shot through the gorget.

Volos fought to move. The eldar yanked hard on her whip. His limbs were not his own. He stumbled forward, out of formation. The xenos fiend wore armour that appeared to be as much liquid as it was solid. The leader seemed insubstantial, a ghost, yet one who had already resisted a direct hit by a shell. Her face was invisible behind her helm, but there was a cancerous desire in her every blinding move. She hissed something at Volos, and the alien words sounded like a welcome.

The air tasted heady.

The whip was shutting down his thoughts with the unholy pain.

The eldar raised a blade.

Volos raged, one monster against another, his own hunger demanding satisfaction. His will travelled the length of the spasms shaking his frame, and his bone blades shot out. The left one severed the whip. The eldar staggered back, more from surprise than the recoil. Volos lunged at her. She leapt up, somersaulting backwards over a bank of consoles. Volos’s blades slashed the metal open.

The air, so keen, so sharp.

The eldar snarled something in her language. Her tone was defiant.

Volos laughed at her, his contempt a weapon. ‘You have lost,’ he said.

Sorina said, ‘It is done.’

‘You have triumphed, Regine Sorina,’ Nithigg said.

She smiled, and did not close her eyes as Nithigg ignited his flamer in a pure oxygen atmosphere.

The Absolution became a torch. The fire was a flash of total incineration, a rage of perfect flame that swept through every hold, corridor, chamber and shaft. In the positions furthest from the control centre, humans and eldar had several seconds to hear the great roar, and wonder what it portended. They died together, corpses fused beyond distinction by the breath of the dragon.

The burn was total. The ship screamed, and as its power died forever, the webway passage, already strained by its size, collapsed, dropping the Absolution back into the materium.

Volos’s auto-senses sealed him off from the ship’s agony. He stood still, surrounded by flame. For a few moments, he could hear and see and smell nothing. He was alone with the awareness of monstrosity.

Then the air was gone. The fire died, leaving the ship with darkness, silence, and ash. Volos could see again, the world tinted green through the hunter’s sight of his lenses. He looked for the body of the eldar leader. His lip curled when he did not see it. He was surrounded by the cinders of her army, though.

Braxas said, ‘I am receiving a hail from the Immolation Maw, brother-captain.’

‘Send news of our victory,’ said Volos. ‘The rest of you, return to our ship. I will go meet Venerable-Brother Nithigg.’ Together, he thought, they would walk through what they had wrought here. They would bear witness. They owed that much to Sorina, and to the half-million who had died.

They would pay their respects to the half-million mortals whose flesh was the necessary tribute to a dragon’s war.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Annandale is the author of the Warhammer 40,000 novels The Death of Antagonis and Yarrick: Imperial Creed, along with many short stories and novellas across the Horus Heresy and Warhammer 40,000 series. By day, he dons an academic guise and lectures at a Canadian university, on subjects ranging from English literature to horror films and video games. He lives with his wife and family and a daemon in the shape of a cat, and is currently working on a host of exciting new projects set in the grim darkness of the far future.

A BLACK LIBRARY PUBLICATION

Published in 2014 by Black Library, Games Workshop Ltd., Willow Road, Nottingham, NG7 2WS, UK

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Cover illustration by Clint Langley.

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