Fire Warrior

VII 18.37 HRS (SYS. LOCAL — DOLUMAR IV, Ultima Seg. #4356/E)

The cavern, its subterranean walls damp with sweat, echoed to a chorus of ugly words and unformed gurgles. Governor Lord Meyloch Severus paused in his chanting, drawing a breath and licking his lips. Too many of these alien phrases and litanies — transcribed long ago by servitors procured secretly from the Adeptus Mechanicus — required an intolerable abundance of uncomfortable syllables that dried out his mouth and made his throat ache. A small price to pay, he supposed. The servitors had lasted about a month each, he recalled, carefully attuned minds quickly succumbing to the burden of xenoheresy and shutting down in smoke-belching frenzies. One had bitten off its own fingers in a last-ditch attempt to arrest its writings, mutilated digits squirting blood and lubricant feebly across the imprint wafers it perched over, stylus clattering to the floor. Had it not been for his impatience to finish translating the eldar text, Severus would have found the entire episode highly comical.

As it was, the cartouche that had sealed the entrance to the temple-pit had been of negligible value, simply heroic accounts of the warlocks who’d wrought the warp prison and their leader, Farseer Jur Telissa. Severus often found himself dreaming at night of the fluted psych-helm of the alien sorcerer, enjoying the sensation of obliterating the figure’s pale, serene features in an imaginative variety of ways. On those nights he awoke in disappointment, knowing that Telissa was far, far beyond his vengeful reach and feeling somehow, strangely, as though the bitterness and anger weren’t his own.

Still, the sensation of a second voice in his mind had become an entirely routine phenomenon over the years, a manifestation — he had long ago assumed — of his innermost instincts and desires. He recalled wondering briefly — years ago — whether everyone enjoyed the same inner monologue of lusts and ambitions, like a whispered mantra in their skulls, then decided quickly that he didn’t give a grox’s-arse what anyone else felt or thought. He was above that.

If the cartouche was of little practical use, then at the very least it had awoken within him an interest, a grim appeal to study and unravel the legend of Tarkh’ax which, through the years, manifested with burgeoning strength until he’d plundered every resource; collected a secret library of material including even a skin-bound copy of the Liber Maelignicus; opened paths of communication with black astropaths across the galaxy that left his own message-dispatching psykers gibbering and deranged; and made contact with every dubious cult and coven within the system. At some point academic interest became professional obsession, and without even recalling the moment that spiritual inertia had been overcome, he was plunging headlong towards realigning his worship and becoming deeply embroiled in the plan to release Tarkh’ax from his torment. The eldar, it transpired, had overestimated the morality of Dolumar’s eventual settlers.

He returned his mind to the present.

The cowled things to either side of him, twisted forms only vaguely suggested by the awkward shadows of their robes, continued their chanting without hiatus. If they were aware of his pause, or even of his presence, they gave no indication of it, heads bent downwards and voices thick with the effects of physical mutation. Each one stood upon a major apex of a seven-pointed star— the fifth extremity of which he himself occupied — surrounded by an ocean of inscriptions and runes on the floor.

Severus stared at each chanting shape in turn, silently offering veneration to every priest’s patron god. To be considered worthy of inclusion within the dark rites that would free Tarkh’ax was an honour above and beyond his expectations.

The representative of Old Grandfather Nurgle to his left, supplicating to its mouldering god of pestilence and decay, was a withered shape leaning heavily on a gnarled cane, dressed in tattered robes of bilious green and brown. Its voice was thick with moisture and clotted saliva and it paused frequently to cough, splattering a viscous red-black paste across the floor. Flies orbited the lugubrious figure in an orgy of decaying stinks.

To its side, resplendent in a patchwork robe of rainbow hues and glimmering jewels, a priest of Slaanesh gestured grandly and hissed in a reed-thin voice. Worship of the hedonist god of pleasure and pain quickly aroused a sense of numbness in his followers, exposure to the vilest and most raucous of experiences deadening the senses to all but the most riotous of gratifications. Thus the Slaanesh priest dressed in a melange of clashing hues and bright-edge patterns, dragging knives across its exposed arms every few moments in an attempt to feel, groaning in ecstasy at every dimly experienced moment of discomfort.

At the next point of the star was a bulky priest of the Blood God, Khorne. Draped in butcher’s robes of black leather and studded chains, waving a polished cleaver with every sorcerous gesticulation, the gravel-voiced figure created an impression of raging impatience, as if the very idea of spell-chanting was a tedious impediment to the far more rewarding pursuit of carnage and blood spilling. Given the semi-cleaved heads and limbs it had carefully arranged around itself, Severus guessed it was more than adept at both.

And finally, to his immediate right, a sorcerer-devotee of Tzeentch, the Changer of Ways, spread-eagled its limbs and glowed with power. Besides the mirrorglass mask concealing its facial features, not one part of the figure’s form was permanent. Its fingers writhed and melted together, forming claws and blades and osmotic leech-mouths; its arms boiled with under-skin turbulence, a shifting landscape of scales and hair and suckers and spines; its legs churned with polymorphic fluidity from state to state and its voice was a transient chorus of tones: soft becoming hard, rasp becoming trill. Everything about it characterised constant unending change. As befitted Tarkh’ax’s status as a child of Tzeentch, the sorcerer-priest occupied the central apex of the star, channelling energy zealously.

Together, the four heretic-priests (surrounded to various degrees by acolytes and familiars and items of power) wove an energy web of fluctuating colours and sounds — a boiling lance of power to shatter apart the daemonlord’s imprisonment and unleash him at last upon reality.

Severus glanced at his wrist piece and smiled.

“...forty minutes...”

The last two points upon the star, minor vertices to be sure, but more than enough for his purposes, were occupied by his prisoners. Secured with wrist-constricting chains to immovable stanchions, Fleet-Admiral Constantine and Aun’el T’au Ko’vash were the unwitting conduits of horrific energies. A pale violet corona surrounded each one, unnatural flames coruscating across their bodies. Constantine’s voice had given out a little over ten minutes ago, warp-be-praised; his screams and curses were growing tiresome. By now, Severus was pleased to note, his very flesh was beginning to shift, mutations bubbling through his body like clots of blood hulking painfully along veins and arteries, eyes rolled back into his head.

Coming along nicely, he thought.

The tau, by comparison, was an entirely disappointing subject. Around his skull the energies seemed to boil and flex, hunting impotently for some foothold of emotion or excess with which to work. Impervious to psychic persuasion, a living embodiment of focus and calm, the ethereal was proving to be a very difficult creature to corrupt. Severus rather suspected that, when he arrived, Tarkh’ax would deem the tau race unworthy of Chaos’s more insidious attentions and choose to obliterate them instead.

He shrugged mentally. At least he’d tried. Glancing at the clock again with growing impatience, Severus took a breath and resumed the sonorous chant that would, as night fell across the pit’s entrance far, far above, release his new lord and master.

The land speeder hacked and coughed its way through the industrial quarter of Lettica, its dented prow trailing a long beard of black-purple smoke, dipping every few moments to grate noisily against the street before lurching upright again.

For Captain Ardias, accustomed to the clipped Codex-standard precision of Ultramarine behaviour, it was hardly a dignified mode of transport. Passing through hotly contested zones of violence — human and tau bodies mingling with those of Chaos warriors, gunfire and grenade blossoms marking every street corner — he grimly attributed the lack of pernicious fire aimed at him to the astonished amusement with which enemies and allies alike regarded him as he passed.

Like them, he considered the continued functioning of the land speeder something of a minor miracle, and hissed thankful prayers to Guilliman, the Emperor and whatever unknown techmarine had originally built the chassis. Despite the dents, sparks, smoke-belching fissures and various red-blinking warning icons, received at the ungentle end of the enormous bomb blast, the hovering contrivance delivered him safely to the shadow of the district’s central hangar with no more damage than a thumping headache and a wounded sense of pride. He was in no mood for tolerating xeno-contact when he arrived.

The blood-caked tau with the dented helmet, unexploded bolter shell still lurking within, watched him approach along the street with arms crossed, a healthy distance between his slouched position and the vast hangar.

The rogue element, Delpheus had said, before he died. The warrior with the bomb in his head.

This tau, this “Kais’, had singlehandedly wiped out the bridge of an Emperor-class battlecruiser. He’d crippled the Enduring Blade’s weapons systems, fought through the anarchy that consumed the ship to the drop pods and survived ever since. More than enough proof of his abilities. Still, it went against everything Ardias believed to consort, trust and rely upon the skills of an alien, even one endorsed by an Adeptus Astartes librarian, and drawing level with the cross-armed figure now confirmed every one of his fears.

“Fool!” he roared, leaping to the sand and drawing his pistol. “I told you to sabotage the war machine, not await my arrival! We can’t hope to stop it in time; you’ve doomed un—”

“Human,” the alien said calmly, holding up something small and silver. “Watch.”

It pressed a button.

Behind it the hangar went up like a box stuffed with firecrackers and for the briefest of moments Ardias could see the colossal shape of the titan shadowed against the flames, crisp hangar walls falling away like a layer of skin. It was a hunchback of smoke and shadow, an ogre of gargantuan proportions that basked— no, drowned — in its wreath of fire. All too soon it was lost to a series of detonations that plucked chunks from its torso and split apart its joints. Ugly gouts of plasma and promethium fuel vented outwards: fiery spouts from a dying whale, flexing and breaching its death throes in a blazing spectacle of incandescence.

An upper limb sheared away from the torso with slow gravity, tumbling downwards in an avalanche of debris. The noise of its impact jerked Ardias from his astonishment, leaving him uncomfortably aware of his proximity to the collapsing machine and, more annoyingly of the tau warrior, who stood regarding his expression of awe with tilt-headed fascination.

As he’d approached through the city he’d wondered vaguely what progress the alien might have made. He’d envisioned finding the creature’s body at the titan’s base, hurled dismissively from whichever inner tier at which its progress had faltered. He’d envisioned it cowering in a shadowy corner of the hangar, too horrified by the glory of Imperial engineering to even move. He’d imagined it failing and dying, or else succeeding with painstaking slowness. He had, to be blunt, not been confident.

He’d never considered arriving to find the job already done.

“You had better come with me,” he growled, motioning towards the land speeder, “before the whole thing comes down on top of us.”

“I’ll take that as a ‘well done’,” the alien grunted, clambering gingerly into the passenger seat.

“Do what you want. We have work to do.”

The vehicle moved off, sand mixing with soot and ash in a billowed cloudform wake. Behind it the titan wobbled uncertainly, knee joint buckling with enormous inevitability, the scene lent an eerie slowness by the scale of destruction. The building-machine toppled like a foundationless tower, tumbling apart in a riot of metal and stonedust, sparks and smoke swept along in its arc.

The noise of its impact shuddered throughout the city for long, ugly seconds, colossal slabs of armour and masonry flattening the surrounding buildings and choking everything in a tsunami of opaque dust that guzzled the light ravenously. Ardias and Kais were gone before the echoes stopped.

Kor’vesa 66.G#77 (Orbsat Surveillance) arranged itself carefully in relation to the other drones filling its airspace and, at the Or’es Tash’var’s command, trained every one of its sensors on the planetary surface.

Extending in a wide grid of sense clusters, radar-scanners and high-altitude surveyors, every available drone at the tau flotilla’s command had been hastily deployed. Weapons droids mingled with engineering apparatus, blocky chaff drones interspersed sparsely with maintenance constructs, top-of-the-range spy-sat cameras and barely sentient control-applicators seeming awkward and disparate in close proximity comparison. And every last one — from the most technologically advanced to the simplest of unipurpose models, from those with sensory equipment able to pinpoint a single individual in twenty different spectrums through a hundred tor’kans of atmosphere and cloud cover, to the lowliest of sightless fuel-gauge drones with barely enough scan sensitivity to penetrate the exosphere — trained the colossal might of their combined awareness upon the planetary surface and, in a closely choreographed orbital dance, spiralled their attention outwards from the city.

Every third mor’tek-raik’an 66.G flickered its attention across the precise bio readings and spectral signatures of Aun’el T’au Ko’vash, harvested from its memory banks and shared with the rest of the drone army. Thus did its sensor sweeps occur in three distinct segments: a reminder of its target; a momentary burst of information culled from its sensors and an alignment of the two, comparing and contrasting. The process was repeated over and over, thirty times in every raik’an, and only when the sensor reading and the memorised data matched could 66.G, or any of its comrades, be certain of having located the ethereal.

A blip moved across its target area: a series of energy emissions and gue’la-signature fuel traces moving quickly eastwards. The drone narrow focused on the reading and performed a detailed analysis. From the available data and scant vehicular information stored within its record matrices, 66.G postulated that it had discovered a “land speeder”, a low-tech human skimmer vehicle, and transmitted its discovery to the parent node on the Or’es Tash’var. A minor sensory fluctuation in the reading caused it some perplexity; an apparent Line Warrior energy signature that oscillated between invisibility and a warning-red state of crisis. Orbsat 66.G checked off the identifier-code against Shas’ar’tol records and found it earmarked for immediate broadcast. Accordingly, the drone forwarded its bizarre findings to O’Udas’s staff and awaited a response.

Below it the planet’s terminator rolled enormously onwards, a blur-edged sweep of sunless shadow grinding its way forwards as day segued into night.

O’Udas’s personnel responded quickly with a request for possible destinations of the gue’la vehicle. The surveillance drone tilted fractionally to train its central optic upon the contrivance and then, locking its direction of travel into a cluster of auto-reactive gyroscopes, panned ahead in a broad extension of the journey.

The foothills of a range of jagged mountains, like rotten teeth in the maw of a rogue kroothound, loomed ahead. Orbsat 66.G flicked through a sequence of filters routinely, not expecting to find anything.

Something flared phosphor-bright across its artificial consciousness.

“East, El’Lusha! We have a fix!”

“What? Who is this?”

“Sir, this is Ui’Gorty’l. We spoke earlier.”

“The ‘faulty sensors’, yes?”

“Uh...”

“Right. What do you want? I’m up to my optic-cluster in the enemy here.”

“My apologies, Shas’el. It’s just... you wanted to know about La’Kais.”

“You’ve found him?”

“We’ve picked up the phantom signal again. It could be him — we can’t be certain. But there’s something else—”

“Where is he?”

“Well, that’s just it... He’s heading east. We think he’s travelling in a gue’la transport.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“I know, Shas’el, but... We postulated a destination and found something.”

“Oh?”

“There’s an energy spike bigger than anything we’ve ever seen. O’Udas believes we’ve found the enemy headquarters.”

“And the ethereal?”

“A faint reading, but it’s definitely him.”

“East, you say?”

“Correct. Go with the tau’va, Shas’el.”

There was a reckoning coming. Kais gritted his teeth and stared ahead to the jagged spinal-chord of the mountains on the horizon.

Ardias said... Ardias said he knew where to find the enemy base. He said he was taking them there.

He said he’d wipe away this man, “Severus’, and end the madness and that Kais, if he had to, could tag along.

He said he’d kill him if he got in his way. Kais was inclined to believe him.

The tight-skinned concentration of the Marine’s features, hawkish face scarred and frozen in a permanent frown of martial intensity, filled Kais with a strange sort of assurance. So little in his world now seemed reliable, but to even question this man’s metal-clad resolve was unthinkable. The human’s focus, despite being bent upon conflict and triumph rather than unity and equilibrium, was equal to any that he’d encountered in members of the tau race.

Unity and Equilibrium and Progress and Growth...

Important words. Tenets of faith.

Ardias said... Ardias said faith would sustain him. Ardias said faith was the only shield Chaos couldn’t penetrate.

Kais plucked the display wafer from his pocket — too exhausted and bloodied to care about exposing the tiny rectangle of words that he was so careful to conceal. The jagged characters were like old friends — or enemies, perhaps — each line and curving inflection as familiar as his own face.

It began: My son. Somehow the familiarity of the phrase went against Kais’s ingrained impression of his father, as if to even accept such a base thing as having a flesh relative was below the idealistic grandeur Shi’ur had espoused in life.

Then four lines of text:

Military and focused and balanced and graceful, everything a Fire Warrior should be. Elegant but not excessive. Ambitious but moderated by knowledge of one’s limitations. It was efficient.

Below it, nestled beneath the freeform meditation like a thorn hidden within a perfect petal, the display wafer said: With pride.

Kais told himself: Don’t think about it. Not now.

Don’t think about the eyes. The big, dark eyes. Overshadowed by straight-edged brows, framed by sweeping cheek bones and underscored, like a grammatical emphasis, by the rule-straight gash of his mouth.

Don’t think about the disappointment. Don’t think about the silence of the battledome all those tau’cyrs ago as that diamond-tipped gaze, so full of disenchanted melancholia, regarded you and skewered you and made you bleed inside.

Don’t think about his words.

His dedication to the tau’va is commendable, I daresay? He excels?

Don’t think about the shas’vre, stammering for a dignified response when all he wanted to say was: “No. He struggles. He has no place here.”

Don’t think about O’Shi’ur at all. Think of something else.

Don’t think about never having had the chance to prove to him — to show him, for all time — that yes, I am your son! I am worthy of your blood!

Don’t think about him dying, battlesuit shredded by tyranid talons, body exposed and bleeding — like a curled limpet prised apart by a resourceful carrion crow. Don’t think about him dying in the sure and certain knowledge that his son — his one hope of lasting legacy, his one gift to the machine that would last beyond the passing of his own self — was flawed.

Don’t think about it!

“What’s that?” The Space Marine’s voice was like granite, exploding apart his reverie. He realised he was clutching the wafer so tight one corner was cracking, twisting the words with fluid amorphousness. Twisting the last piece of purity in his world, just as everything before it had crumbled or corrupted or faltered.

“Nothing,” he said, words strained. “Nothing you’d understand.”

“Hm.”

The silence, if one could call it that, resumed. Beyond sighing at the asthmatic spluttering of the vehicle’s engine and grunting at the occasional roar of friction as the nose dipped to grind against the desert shale, neither said a word. Ardias piloted the craft with unwavering absorption and Kais wondered vaguely, relieved to be distracted from the clamour of guilt and rage bubbling just below the surface of his mind, if the Marine, like him, was trawling through his memories for some way of explaining this rotaa’s insanity.

Nothing would come. Nothing had prepared him for this.

Combat itself had been a poisoned chalice: an intoxicating blend of fears and violences; at first terrifying and new, then dizzying and joyful and then, finally, regaining something of its terror at the realisation of that same joy.

It was like discovering he had a talent for murder.

It was like finding out he was a skilled butcher.

It was like coming to terms with a natural enjoyment of horror.

It was like—

Except... Except it wasn’t “like” any of those things.

He did have a talent for murder. He was a skilled butcher.

He did enjoy the horror and the carnage and the violence. The tau’va had never prepared him for that. The display wafer in his hand was laughing at him (the Mont’au devil said so, and hadn’t it served him well before?).

The insanity crawled along his spine and into his mouth and said:

Haven’t we been triumphant?

Haven’t I saved you and gloried in you and made you a hero?

Haven’t I guided you just when you needed me?

Haven’t I made you excel, just like you always wanted?

It said:

What would you do, Shas’la T’au Kais? What would you say if the old man, the old general, the old tired morsel of gristle and flesh with his imperious eyes and his holier-than-thou sneer, was here now?

What would you say to your father, little Fire Warrior?

Kais curled his knuckles around the display wafer and slowly, enjoying every rai’kan, cracked it into two jagged pieces.

If Ardias noticed he gave no indication, angling the speeder towards the humped shadows of the evening hills and extending a finger.

“There,” he said.

Over the next rise, depressed into the ground like a mighty bullet wound with jagged rock edges and black obelisks standing guard over its depths, a pit opened up into the guts of the world. A mighty disc of rock, covered in the spidery etchings of some ancient, alien hand, lay crumbled and discarded nearby. Walkways and ramps wove downwards from the surface, vanishing along tunnels that wormed their way into the exposed soil like arteries.

“I’m ready,” Kais said, more to himself than the Space Marine.

The land speeder slowed to a spasmodic halt and the two warriors stepped out onto the sand.

The Mont’au devil unsheathed its claws and prepared itself for the end.

The seven-pointed star throbbed hungrily, daemonic light racing along its vertices, creaking like a melting iceberg. Severus allowed the energy to build within his soul, a cinder point of heat that quickly grew to needle-sharp intensity. He resisted the urge to cry out.

The chanting reached its crescendo, rising to a chorus of resonant voices. Briefly the disjointed mantras of each chaos priest overlapped and reflected one another, lifting to a natural zenith. The floor of the temple pit radiated a sickly light, illuminating the four compass point shrines set at each corner.

One for each god of the major Chaos Arcana.

Nurgle.

Slaanesh.

Khorne.

Tzeentch.

Tarkh’ax, warp preserve his malevolent name, would make obeisance to them all. His sustenance was derived from the Changer of Ways — Tzeentch — but he was a being of rare cunning and understood the importance of union. By supplicating to each of the Dark Gods he would be gifted with strengths and powers beyond the remit of his sorcerous patron, sealing his ascension and anchoring him, immovably, into the realm of mortality and material.

It appeared to be working.

The plague priest to Severus’s left shrieked, fluids dribbling copiously from its hood, dropped its gnarled cane and scrabbled at its own chest, apparently arresting the spread of an intolerable fire that only it could see or feel. It gave a final pitiful squeal of agony and broke apart, scabrous residue splattering to the floor in a torrent of decayed flesh and bile.

The shrine to Nurgle’s pestilent pleasures, at the periphery of Severus’s view, illuminated with a vomit-green cast, bloated statue idol staring mutely.

Slaanesh’s hooded painbringer cried out next, pied cloak seeming to constrict and dissect its wearer, dissolving the figure with acidic slowness. The thing screamed and groaned in equal measure as its flesh peeled away.

Then the butcher priest of Khorne, erupting in a column of writhing flesh and blood, like chunks of abattoir meat.

Then Tzeentch’s sorcerer-devotee, amorphous form shifting and melding with growing speed until it oscillated and flexed alarmingly, breaking down in fluid disarray to dribble and puddle on the floor like melted ice.

As each priest willingly — if painfully — gave their life, the terrible features of their patron idol statue, constructed millennia ago before Tarkh’ax’s imprisonment, was cast in the ruddy light of its vile deity.

Four shrines of darkness and death.

The two prisoners had lost consciousness long ago, slumping against their restraints to hang limply, wrists bleeding at the tightness of their bonds. Severus dismissed them from his mind and concentrated on the surging warp-tides in his skull.

Only he remained to witness the final stage of Tarkh’ax’s release.

A surge of energy formed from the centre of the star; a glowing spine of blue white plasma that lifted high above the abyss, penetrating the clouds above and rising: a shifting spirit beacon to welcome the daemonlord back to reality.

Severus glanced at his timepiece again. 18.59 hrs. Twenty minutes left.

Tunnel gave way to tunnel. Catacomb to crypt. Withered chamber to spiral stairs. Always downwards, air growing thicker and greasier with every step, slurry underfoot growing more and more sludgelike. Like wading in glue.

“Descend here,” Ardias had said, pointing to one slipramp that coiled its way over the lip of the abyss and into the darkness. “I’ll find another route — we have more chance of recovering the prisoners this way. Do what you can. Keep them busy, make a diversion. Severus is mine.”

He’d racked his gun meaningfully, nodded once with something similar to professional respect, then jogged away across the blasted landscape, disappearing from view behind the coils of sulphurous smoke and jagged rock. A labyrinth of walkways and tunnels peppered the plunging surfaces within the pit: choosing to begin from opposite sides seemed to make the most sense.

Kais simply couldn’t bring himself to care.

Once every few raik’ors his mind would remind him — insidiously, he thought — of the ethereal Ko’vash languishing somewhere below. But all consideration of goal or purpose was quickly eclipsed behind the hissing of the rage in his mind, storming and shrieking, hunting down enemies to pulverise. Just as his descent was measured in a coagulation of the air and an impalpable sense of growing monstrousness, so too did the Mont’au-whisper flourish. With every tor’lek he walked, it grew louder, more urgent...

Killing was his reason, now. Violence was his rationality, carnage his sanctity. Equilibrium found in disharmony.

The walls moaned at him, half-formed somethings twisting and sucking at the moist earth; repugnant embryos locked in amniotic sacs of filth and disease. Kais had already exploded some, just for the sake of it. The exercise lacked gratification. He’d found gibbering daemon things and Chaos Marines instead: real prey that ran or fought back or at least reacted satisfyingly when he punched high-velocity munitions through their leering toothy faces.

He imagined how he must look now. A shadow thing of muck and flesh. Human blood going rust-brown as it dried across his armour, oily Chaos fluids staining him with an unclean patina, the asymmetry of his armour compounded by the ragged wounds and scars he’d received. His helmet was a misshapen cyclops visage, the single baleful eye of the bolter shell glowering down from above his brow.

The railgun had ceased to be a thing of grace and cleanliness long, long ago. Now it hung with chunks of gore, matted hair and filth staining every surface, viscous liquids dribbling slowly from beneath its stock.

Vhol, fastidious in his care of technology, would not approve.

If, that is, he was still alive.

If anyone Kais knew was still alive.

As if it mattered.

He rushed across a walkway that arched unexpectedly across the chasm of the pit, uncomfortable at the exposure. A bright blue lance of light, like an inverted sunray, punctured the abyssal airspace from below. He resisted the urge to look down into the murky depths and moved on, fingering the railgun’s trigger hungrily, waiting for a target.

As if to answer some unspoken prayer a shriek rang out from nearby: a protracted shrill of avian fury. Kais spun in his spot, gun raised and ready, a guilty smile smearing itself across his face.

There were two, and they came at him together. Sleek perversions of the hulking Chaos Marines, their aerodynamic bodies tapered into fluted talons that snapped apart mechanically and grasped for him as they dropped from above. Like swooping vultures, arcane jet packs disgorging a miasmic haze of fuel and smog, they ululated as they plummeted, slicing through the air with scalpel precision. Ducking hardly seemed worth it. He did it anyway.

A claw parted the flesh of his shoulder like jelly, making him cry out. The impact dragged him forwards and briefly he was certain of tumbling over the edge of the walkway, flailing downwards into the pit. But the raptor thing was gone in a flash, a sticky trail of cyan blood hanging threadlike in the air behind it, and Kais had just enough presence of mind, even through the haze of pain, to tumble aside as the second shrieking creature gusted past to finish the job.

Its talons — expecting the soft bite of flesh — instead clawed impotently at the slippery rock of the walkway and sent the creature toppling forwards, overbalancing with a shriek. Kais pumped a vengeful railgun shot into its tumbling back, ignoring the pain in his shoulder, and watched with no small satisfaction as its jetpack ignited messily.

It rained corrupted blood.

The surviving raptor howled indignantly above; a babyshriek eulogy for its dead comrade. It came at Kais in a flurry, knife claws an iridescent smear of reflected light, fluted wedge beak keening and howling. He watched it with something like fascination, drawing himself up to his full height like a cat arching its back, and didn’t raise his gun until the thing was almost upon him, yowling and screaming in fury.

Kais knew how it felt.

He fired and dropped onto his back in one smooth motion, senses too overburdened to pick out any confirmation of his shot having found its target. The dagger-like shape rocketed past overhead, more felt than seen, flashing claws dangerously close. His stomach turned over with the frustration of failure, his enemy still very much alive. A slick confetti of debris and fluids followed it past, and Kais rolled onto his front to prepare for the inevitable follow-up attack.

The shrieking stopped. He’d been on target after all.

Trailing streamers of flesh, the raptor’s sleek descent became a chaotic stall, limbs flailing and jetpack coughing. It mashed itself against the pit-wall and tumbled, in several pieces, into the gloom below.

Kais lay still, breathing heavily, until the last ruinous metal-on-stone clang resonated from below. The echoes died away, the sultry atmosphere of the pit flourished again. He pulled himself to his feet, clenching his teeth against the pain in his shoulder, and stumbled onwards. It seemed as good a direction as any, now.

Melphea Turneus Borik sank to his knees and groaned.

The warp was a grey mist in his skull, a textured stream of smoke and shadows, illuminated from an impossible distance by the frail light of the Astronomican. He was used to its flux and whimsy, to the malevolence of the things that lived there and the sensory abstraction that was the reality of the empyrean but now... now something had changed.

Something irresistible, like a great black leviathan disgorging its slime-slick flanks from some oceanic abyss, lurked on the edge of his perception and pushed. It was a hungry force, clawing and chittering to escape, certain of its imminent liberation. Borik clutched his fingers to his face and gurgled, fighting to breathe. He could feel his attendants and novitiae clamouring round, trying to restrain him, anxious for his wellbeing. Unable to see them in a conventional sense, to Borik they seemed galaxies away.

He’d been sightless since his thirteenth year. Since they dragged him, wailing and screaming, from the nuke-slums of Caer Malafori in a “mutebox” containment vessel. Since they bundled him into the cavernous spaces and tortured chambers of the Blackship Lamentation of the Adepta Astra Telepathica. Sightless since his soul was melted and bonded with the being of the Most Holy Emperor, since he screamed and screamed for three days during the ceremony, since the pain broke every bone in his hands and left his eyes pooling away like melted metal.

He’d been sightless since his graduation as an astropath: a psychic messenger-conduit able to span the interstellar vastness separating Imperial worlds, ships, stations and outposts. Stationed within the Oraclitus Meditarium aboard the Retribution-class battlecruiser Purgatus, no more than a comm-call from the bridge, Borik had served his Emperor-God for twenty-nine years. By astropath standards, he was ancient. But this force, this malignant presence threatening to birth itself into the local warp, this was something he’d never felt before.

His attendants lifted him reverently, as befitted his status, onto his meditation pallet. He barely felt their hands. His scrying mind struggled to identify the presence, reasoning that information would be the greatest weapon in the face of an unknown threat. The warp being seemed cut off, separated from conventional empyrean by a membranous prison that, even as Borik watched, grew thin and weblike, breaking down inexorably.

The thing, the daemon thing, noticed him.

Its howls stopped abruptly, silence sucking at Borik’s awareness. And slowly, like a cancer exploring the vastness of its host body, it turned its ethereal gaze upon him.

“Little mind...” it hissed, voice coiling with insidious fire and silk, “little mind — I see you...”

Borik stammered, tongue clumsy and heavy in his mouth. “G-get back...” Somewhere far away, in the mundanity of reality, his attendants frowned and backed away, respecting their master’s wishes.

“Little mind. I’m huuuuungry...”

Borik’s panicked defences, telepathically erected fortress walls and mindbomb ghost chaff, were woefully late. Stretching out its talons of molten warpstuff through the crumbling walls of its prison, the Daemon-lord Tarkh’ax snatched up the shivering spirit morsel and guzzled it whole.

“Soooon...” it shrieked into the churning ether, overjoyed at the taste of a mortal’s soul after so many long years. Its words echoed silently amongst the vacant expanses that now comprised the brain of Melphea Turneus Borik.

“Wh... What do you want with me?” the ethereal asked weakly, briefly regaining consciousness.

Severus giggled and lifted the struggling alien into the air with a wave of his hand, coruscating energies holding it there, immobile.

“What have you got?” he said.

His vision blurred.

A carpet of slurry and sewage gurgled and slurped beneath him, sending him careening along the slippery tunnel slide with no hope of slowing or stopping. The walls, insipid white rock given an organic undulation by millennia of draining filth, made his grasping attempts to arrest the descent futile.

Somewhere way above, at the sinkhole’s mouth, the last echoes of exploding ammunition filtered downwards, making the tunnel shake. A hulking Chaos monstrosity, limbs dribbling with viscous flesh that could writhe and reshape into a multitude of heavy weapons, had blocked his path like a sneering ogre, gun barrels slurping out of its elbows and shoulders. A well-aimed pair of grenades and some cautious long-distance targeting had blown open the fleshy shell, exposing an unnatural fusion of metal and liquid within, ragged clumps of ammo and high explosives forming with moist alacrity, like melting wax seen in reverse.

He’d thrown caution to the wind, dangerous impetuosity filling him with a Mont’au thrill, and darted forwards through the blossoming bolter craters and thrumming lascannon rounds to drop a phosphor flare into the wound, wet edges sucking like a toothless mouth at his arm, then forced his aching legs to dive aside.

The look on the twisted creature’s face as it realised what was coming had bubbled up in Kais’s throat as a stifled chuckle. He’d braced himself inwardly, expecting the joyful sentiment to arrive accompanied, as ever, by the secret guilt at having an untaulike thought.

But he was beyond that, now.

Before he could even contemplate finding some cover from the colossal detonation the ground had liquefied with a syrupy slurp, sending him tumbling with a cry into the slippery sinkhole bowels of the chamber. Here, at the heart of a daemon-temple, even the rock of the walls and floor was capable of treachery.

Missing out on the ogre’s undoubtedly messy destruction had galled him immensely.

Slime polyps and froth-specked effluvium further pronounced the filth of his armour, seeping into the fio’dr of his regs and leaving his wounded leg and slashed shoulder throbbing with the certainty of poisoned infection. He couldn’t allow himself the time to worry about it now, and bit on his lip to take his mind off the pain.

And then the rushing tunnel walls were gone, gravity took a hold of his body, and the sinkhole spat him out like a gobbet of spittle. He landed awkwardly in a lake of sludge which bubbled and gurgled violently at his touch, rolling to stand upright with fluids and froth dribbling from beneath his arms and legs.

The chamber seemed to go on forever. A foetid mist hung above the mire, cloying at his senses and filling him with soporific gloom, shifting and ghosting around him.

What’s the point? the smog seemed to say, tendrils of musky haze stroking against his exposed flesh. Best to give up now... Lie down... Ease yourself for a while...

His knees started to weaken.

That’s it...

Just for a short while...

The lake is so warm...

He felt his eyelids grow heavy and couldn’t for the life of him think of any reason why he should try to keep them open.

Yessss...

But then there was something else. A smell, perhaps, or a feeling. Conducted through his tastebuds and his nasal orifice, seeping into his ears and eyes. Not like any sense at all; just a certainty that built from the core of his bones outwards into his skin that somewhere, somewhere nearby, was someone important.

He remembered feeling peace, once. He could feel it again now: the first tentative echoes of that great focus he’d known, if only he could remember when and why. He could feel the glimmerings of serenity, unnaturally imposed but embraced nonetheless. He’d felt the peace and the awe and the security before, when for a few short raik’ors he’d been in the presence of...

Of...

“Ko’vash!”

The sound of his own voice startled him, chasing away the delirium and fatigue that the smoggy air draped across his senses and convincing him, somehow, that Aun’el T’au Ko’vash was nearby.

His mind cleared, as fresh water rushing across a muck-encrusted jewel, and he squared his shoulders and set off in the direction in which he guessed — no, that he knew — he’d find the ethereal.

Severus glared at the pale figure and snarled. “Alien!”

It didn’t respond, deeply ensconced in whatever trance or meditation it was mumbling. Severus wrinkled his nose, troubled by something he couldn’t quite put into words, and tried again.

“Alien! What are you doing?”

Again, nothing. Briefly, Severus considered the possibility of some hitherto unknown psychic ability possessed by the tau, but he reassured himself with a sneer. As the minutes counted away to the moment of Tarkh’ax’s release, the governor found his control over the dark powers growing ever stronger. An aura of crackling energy, a shifting halo of smoke and shadow, had formed around him, and now he could see into the coiling realm of the warp with as much ease as opening his eyes. This xenogen morsel hanging in the air was no psyker; no warp-sighted mutant that could cry out to its comrades for help. In fact, Severus was rapidly coming to the conclusion that the ethereal was of very little value whatsoever. The possibility of tainting a high-ranking tau had been worth exploring at least, he reassured himself: that it had failed merely assured their utter annihilation. Chaos had little time for incorruptibility.

Pursing his lips thoughtfully, and absent-mindedly waving away an exotic scent that briefly teased against his nostrils, he glared at the alien and slipped his jewelled dagger from its scabbard.

The Mont’au devil was scrambling Kais’s brains, an insidious whisper from within his own blood. Focus was the key. He remembered that from another time. He remembered the scent and presence of the ethereal.

Focus.

Unity.

Be one with the tau’va.

There was always something else to kill, as he descended further and further into the earth. Always something else to attack him, driving a wedge of despair and fury further into his brain.

There was no use in the sio’t, now. No use in parroting the empty promises and propaganda of the por’hui media. No use in meditations and chants and lessons. No hope of rediscovering the path — the One Path — into the light and serenity of the tau’va. He’d strayed too far. He’d lost his way.

He thought: I’ve failed.

The Trial by Fire was intended to separate the elite from the adequate. There was no shame in missing out on a progression of rank. It was all a question of niche. Pass the trial and advance to the next rank. Don’t pass it and be content with your place.

Kais had no niche.

He killed with too much skill, he realised with a jolt, almost laughing at the ridiculousness of the paradox. He gloried in devastation and violence where no excess of emotion was encouraged or allowed. He was too good at what he did.

The grizzled shas’vre from his youth in the battle-dome had seen it, all those long tau’cyrs ago. Even at that early age, Kais realised, his future had been set in stone:

“Given to tempers...” the instructor had said, stammering on his words in the face of O’Shi’ur’s unforgiving glare. “Changes in mood and focus.”

Flawed. Useless. Inefficient.

He remembered the shame, burning in his cheeks and brain. The shas’vre’s damning words were all the more dreadful for the inescapable truth they contained.

Kais’s didactic memories told him that the gue’la, innumerable populations smeared like a great plague across the galaxy, made full use of the insane and the volatile amongst them: presenting them with weapons, forming them into asylum legions and hurling them, like expendable human chaff, into the jaws of an enemy. They might die. It wouldn’t matter.

But maybe, the gue’la philosophy went, maybe one or two would prove so unhinged, so insane and unattainable, that they’d turn the tide of a war.

Using the deranged as sacrificial weapons: Kais could think of few uglier and more exploitative concepts. Except... Except hadn’t his commanders relied upon him? Hadn’t El’Lusha told him he was the only one who could do this?

Weren’t the tau just as bad?

A new bubble of bitterness and resentment welled up in his mind and burst obscenely, splattering his consciousness with its acid. They’d used him. They’d known he was damned, known he’d self-destruct, known he was lost to the guiding beacon of the tau’va...

And they’d used him nonetheless.

The Mont’au rage gobbled up the bitterness with relish and hunted hungrily for something to kill. Anything.

The desert rushed past, every grav-leap a colossal stride into the air. Sand became shale; a desolate wash of crumbled earth and stone pouring like a desiccated sea from the foothills.

Lusha landed and leaped in one motion, clouds of dust rising around his suit’s chassis then falling away within moments.

“Shas’el...” one of the team commed, voice exhausted. “We’re falling behind!”

Lusha ignored them, paying little attention to the three icons receding into the distance behind him on his HUD, unwilling to waste any time. A bright blue light, pulsing unnaturally, writhing like some luminous tentacle, hung immobile over the hills: a jagged pillar of energy. He stared at it in bewilderment, wondering what malefic event the beacon’s presence presaged.

Returning his mind to the journey, he fed every last scrap of energy he could muster into the suit’s motors and leaped again. Kais was in there, somewhere. Alone.

The sun began to set behind him.

Someone moaned nearby, a drawn-out groan of fear and pain that echoed airily throughout the moist catacomb. Kais racked the railgun with a metal-on-metal snarl and twisted to face the sound, feet splashing in the muck of the chamber’s floor.

It was the grey-haired admiral from the gue’la ship, and, as plain as the nose on his face, he was mad.

“Little... nn... little tau...” he giggled, spotting Kais through the drifting murk-haze. “Come here. Mm. Come close.”

That the human had been twisted by his ordeal was beyond doubt. His naval robes were stained and torn, damp with clotted blood and Chaos sludge. Half his hair was gone, a ragged patchwork of burns and cuts riddling the bald scalp beneath. He rolled on the floor and chuckled and muttered to himself, clawing at his eyes every few moments. Behind him a valve-like doorway clenched shut, circular muscles contracting wetly.

The human pulled himself into a half-upright crouch and coughed thickly.

Kais circled cautiously, fighting the desire to open fire regardless of what the scrawny creature had to say. The railgun seemed to warm in his hands, straining at his trigger finger slyly.

“Where is the Aun?” he said, quivering with the effort of restraint.

“Closer, yes. Come close now. I... I have things to tell you. You have to listen.”

Kais sidestepped closer, never letting the gun muzzle falter from its target. If the admiral was uncomfortable at staring down a muzzle he gave no indication of it, bloodshot eyes seeming exhausted and old.

“I’ve seen such things...” the man gurgled, scratching at one eyelid with an ungentle hand. “Things to... to... Things you can’t imagine.” he began to laugh, a damp and frail giggle that descended into a rasp of air. “Now look at us...” he hissed. “Emperor save us: our last hope riding on an alien... On a filthy little tau!” he threw back his head and laughed maniacally, great gouts of hilarity that quickly turned to sobs. He collapsed back onto the ground and heaved dry air, coughing and spluttering pathetically.

To Kais, he seemed as threatening as a one-tau’cyr youngling. Even with the rage gusting furiously through his blood the idea of shooting this defenceless thing was repugnant. He lowered his gun and slouched forwards, inquisitive.

The effect upon the human was electric. It jerked into a rigid crouch, face changing abruptly, stabbing out with the heel of its hand, fingers splayed.

“Stop!” it cried, voice suddenly losing its guttural unnaturalness. “Don’t come closer! It’s trying to... nn...” The man rolled onto his back, flexing furiously, spasming and dribbling and clawing at his own face. “Getoutgetoutgetout!”

Kais knew little of the ways of humans — his tutors had instructed him from an early age to think of them as a galaxy-wide pestilence, only dimly sentient and far from embracing the credo of the tau’va. But still, to his unpracticed eyes, it seemed like the admiral was struggling with some dark part of himself.

Kais could relate to that. He re-aimed the railgun and forced himself to stop shaking.

“Get out!” the man shrieked, punching himself in the eye. “Get back to the w... nn... J-just words, little tau. Feeling better now. Come closer. That’s it... No! Stay back!” Two voices, two faces, struggling and battering at one another viciously. Eventually the man slumped, exhausted, and lifted a tired face to stare at Kais.

“There...” he panted, “I-I think it’s under control...”

“What is?” Kais growled, needing little additional encouragement to squeeze his trigger.

Constantine bowed his head, breathing deep. They... they changed me. Opened me up to... oh, God-Emperor preserve me.

The man began to sob again. Kais took aim and began to tighten his finger, mouth a hard, tight line inside his helmet. Call it “mercy”, he thought.

“Wait!” the gue’la hissed, raising a shaky arm. “Not yet. I have to tell you! You need to know...”

“Tell me what, human? All I want is the ethereal. You’re in my way.”

“More important than that!”

“What, then?”

“How to stop the Darkness!”

The thing had no name, as such.

It was a minor being, by the standards of its kind, and it had never tasted the hard-edged paradise that was “reality”. It had lived out eternity as a coiling warp urge, a disembodied malevolence that hungered — yearned — for the seductive glory of materiality. The way had been opened.

A soul had been corrupted and twisted, burst into myriad shreds and left to gape open: an enticing entrance for any of the countless warp things that watched and waited. It was a light, a radiance of promise and power that the daemon minds had chattered and fought over, struggling to reach first.

Alone amongst billions, it had triumphed.

Inexperienced, still unfamiliar with the strange body it had entered, it found the host mind pushing back at it with annoying strength. It had plundered the thing’s memories for information: it called itself human, it had discovered, a shrivelled flesh morsel called “Constantine”. It had struggled against the warp mind’s incursion and now, of all the ignominy, had pushed it aside!

It was talking to some alien thing nearby, its words a meaningless prattle. Furious, the warp mind coiled itself into a ball and flexed, pushing all of its countless millennia of frustration and torment into that one daggerlike surge of consciousness.

The human’s mind broke like thin ice. The warp thing explored its new body quickly and decided, with a sneer, to make some changes.

“Y-you understand? The shrines! Remember!”

“I remember,” Kais grunted, impatient with the gue’la’s gibbering. Its voice grew weaker with every word, eyes rolling into its skull.

“It’s... it’s coming...” he gurgled, suddenly terrified.

“What is?” Kais glanced around the catacombs for any approaching enemy. None seemed forthcoming.

Constantine retched, then shifted.

His jaw distended obscenely, chin lurching forwards, mouth ratcheting open with a creak. His eyes sunk back into his head, pain-twisted orbs rolling and taking on an angry red lustre. Blood oozed copiously from his mouth, writhing upwards in mutiny against gravity, spreading out thin fingertips of fluid to consume the man’s entire head. His skull splintered with a dry crack.

His uniform ripped, moist fabric hanging briefly in the murky air. What bubbled and pulsed up from beneath the gaudy robes was far from human.

Kais backed away. The blood cocoon surrounding the man’s head cracked like an egg, reptile flesh revealed beneath, glowing with scaled luminescence. Black and blue tiger stripes undulated across red cheeks; themselves stretched into a beaklike maw, stippled with tiny teeth that bulged and hinged like insect legs.

The creature snapped its jaws together and dragged a long tongue into its eye to clean off the powdery residue of dried blood, gangly legs lifting it upright. It arched its back and leathery wings unfurled magnificently — a halo of tattered flesh and bone.

Kais didn’t need any further encouragement. He opened fire with a snarl.

The shell knocked the obscenity onto its back in a fountain of bone and gore, dust and smoke hanging around it as its flesh charred. It yowled in pain and lay still, taloned claws clutching rigidly at nothing. For a second Kais thought he’d destroyed it and the killing rage in his mind chuckled and whispered its congratulatory poison.

You can kill anything.

You are a god.

The corpse jerked upright, tilted its head, and screamed.

Kais staggered backwards, astonished, rocked by the force of the howl, clutching impotently at his ears and unable to block the audio-pickup from his helmet. The world wobbled on its axis, blurring in his mind, making his teeth rattle and his skull ache. Before he knew what was happening he was on his back, vaulted catacomb ceiling looming over. He shook his head to clear the haze and tried to move his arms, tried to rise up, tried to lift his gun but—

But the beast was on him, pinning him like a kroot hound, muscle chords straining beneath the dry sandpaper rasp of its skin. The railgun had blasted a hole straight through its midriff, a needle-eye that dangled shredded viscera upon Kais’s chest and emptied awful fluids across his armour. An aborted spinal chord dangled limply inside the wound, the beast’s legs uselessly dragging behind it.

His gun was gone, somewhere. Knocked aside in the rush.

A memory swelled abstractly from his mind. He remembered the first time he’d been given a lesson in hand-to-hand fighting, during the first tau’cyr of his training. The instructor had stared his young charges up and down and said, with no sense of irony at all:

“The first rule of unarmed combat is: don’t be unarmed.”

Too late for that. He wrestled to move but the creature’s grip was too strong, bony dagger claws scraping into his arms, slicing at his flesh and leaving his armour shredded.

It pushed its head, equine features surmounted by tall bone antlers of velvet and chitin, down upon Kais’s helmet, tongue slurping obscenely around the connector joints, searching for a way in.

Kais thought, with crystal clarity: I’m going to die.

“Kill me, if you must,” the ethereal said calmly. “My people will retaliate and crush you to dust.”

Severus giggled, idly dragging the tip of the blade across the tau’s flesh, enjoying the pale blue whorls and patterns it opened up in its wake.

The Aun, pinioned by invisible forces in the air, hadn’t cried out once, so far. These things, these tau, they were simply no fun.

Severus glanced at his timepiece.

Ten minutes.

“...tick-tock-tick-tock-tick-tock...” he muttered, grinning at the tau, then laughed like he’d said the funniest thing in the world. The voice in his head was so loud, now, that he couldn’t honestly say which of the two consciousnesses had been there first of all.

Snarling, the daemon-thing lifted a claw from Kais’s arm and scrabbled at his helmet, perplexed by its inability to get at his head.

“Wannnntt to eeeat your eeeyes...” it hissed, voice barely understandable beneath a drizzle of sputum and blood.

Finding himself with one arm free, Kais scrabbled for a weapon. His gun was out of reach, his knife holstered at his other hip, pressed down by the weight of his enemy. Seeing no other options, he pushed his fist directly into the cavernous wound in its guts, grabbed a handful of slippery vertebrae, and pulled.

It roared. It roared and squealed and shrieked, muscles spasming and arms twitching, tortured nerves sending contradictory messages through its unnatural form. It tried rising with its enormous wings, a thick blood sludge vomiting from its maw across Kais’s optics, but couldn’t control their leathery beating. It jerked and twitched and snarled, forever howling with enough force to shudder Kais’s very brain, but he held on to the brutalised spine with all his dwindling strength, and twisted.

He realised, without any surprise, that he was shrieking and howling just as much as his enemy.

Finally, mercifully, the beast flopped to one side in a tangle of rictus-stiff limbs and matted gore. Kais’s hand was wrapped around the pommel of his knife and tensing before his mind was even fully recovered from its exertions. The Mont’au insanity raised his arm, fed it with all of his remaining strength and brought it down in a glimmering arc.

The Chaos beast’s head sagged from its body with a wet rasp. The thing rustled as it died.

As if responding to some invisible signal, the circular doorway opened slowly, sphincter-muscles relaxing obscenely.

Kais stared out at the very base of the Temple abyss.

Ardias sunk his chainsword into the Traitor Marine’s guts with something like relish. In all the galaxy, of all the myriad enemies that clustered around the frail light of humanity, nothing was as satisfying to purge, he thought, as a traitor.

The thing gurgled a blasphemous oath, shuddered as its guts flopped out of its armour shell, and lay still. Ardias stooped to catch his breath and took a look around the chamber.

Just another crypt, one among dozens, lined with moistness and filth, vague suggestions of organic forms jutting from its walls and slurping doorways pulsing every few moments. If he came out of this alive, by the grace of the Primarch, he’d take great pleasure in overseeing an orbital bombardment of this place.

His descent was taking far too long. Perhaps he’d taken a wrong turn, or lost his bearings amongst the snaking corridors and stairways that he’d travelled, unable to tell which would wend its way back towards the shaft of the abyss, and which coiled endlessly away into the rock and soil of the earth. It was true that his sensors and compass readings were scrambled and confused by whatever foul energies riddled the pit, but he’d served the Emperor’s glory long enough to learn to rely upon his own senses just as much as those of his battle armour. Being lost meant someone was messing with his mind.

“T’au,” he voxed, uncomfortable at the thought. “T’au — are you there?”

“Ardias?” came the stammered reply, thick with interference. “Is that you?”

“Of course it is. Where are you? Are you near the bottom?”

The alien sounded changed, somehow; laughing grimly before answering. “Not near it, human. At it.”

Ardias blinked, surprised yet again by the tau’s resourcefulness. Delpheus’s dying prediction, it would seem, had been correct.

He was just wondering what orders to give the xenogen when the dead Chaos Marine decided it wasn’t dead at all and rose up with a roar.

Ardias, as if from a distance, heard shots, the tinny impart of bolter shells against his armour, the final abortive crackle of the vox-line being severed—

And a sharp pain exploded in his mind.

Everything went black.

Although every conceptual philosophy he had absorbed as a youth told him to scorn such fanciful observations, Shas’el T’au Lusha stood at the edge of the pit and recognised evil. Stretching in a wide bowl, nestled like some unhealed wound in the crux of three flint-covered foothills, the sweeping camber of its lip gave way to an uneven shaft some fifty tor’leks across. A curtain of black fumes and unnatural stinks rose from the abyss like the emissions of a pestilent volcano, detectable even within the confines of the battlesuit. A network of walkways, gouged roughly from the walls of the shaft, turned inwards like mutant ganglia to penetrate the rock itself and vanish into the gloom: bore holes that glowed with green and blue light.

Lusha found himself reciting litanies and sio’t meditations without even thinking. Lessons to bring serenity to his mind, lessons to restore him to equilibrium, lessons to stave off the horror of excess and selfishness, lessons to reaffirm the superiority of the tau’va.

“By the path...” he mumbled, astonished at the vastness of the desolation.

Chittering daemon things, like carrion crows, were gathering in a black pall above the abyss, orbiting the flexing blue-white pillar of energy that rose up from deep underground. Its lightning-bolt gesticulations punctured the very clouds and became fluted and spoutlike, segueing into the sky and sucking at the eye somehow, slurping everything into it little by little.

Lusha wondered vaguely where it led.

His team cast long shadows across the lip of the abyss, the sinking sun painting the sky a piebald red. Like splattered blood.

“El’Lusha...” Vre’Tong’ata commed. “I’ve found something.”

The shas’vre’s suit drifted forwards, mandible fingers extended and holding something small. “It was lying on the floor,” he explained.

El’Lusha mentally commanded his own digits to unfold from their protective sheaths and watched with interest as Tong’ata tipped two fragments of display wafer into his grip.

Placed side by side, it was just possible to make out the cracked message.

“Oh,” he whispered, beginning to understand. “Oh, Kais...”

“What is it, Shas’el?”

He looked back round at the pit, swollen darkness gathering around it like anti-light. “It is a reason, Shas’vre.”

A long range comm warning chimed peacefully, interrupting his thoughts.

“Shas’el? This is the Or’es Tash’var.”

“Ui’Gorty’l?”

“Yes. Shas’el, something’s happened. Whatever was blocking Kais’s signal has vanished. We think it was a gue’la communicator, holding open a channel with the shas’la.”

“And now it’s gone? Can you raise him?”

“Not yet, Shas’el. There’s a lot of interference.”

Lusha took a breath, fighting the adrenaline. “Kor’ui,” he said, keeping his tones measured and calm. “Listen very carefully. Find Fio’el Boran. Tell him to boost the signal. Tell him I need to be able to speak to Shas’la Kais.”