Killing Ground

ONE

Do people shape the planets they live on or do the planets shape them? The people of Mordian are melancholy and dour, the folk of Catachan pragmatic and hardy. Is this the result of the harsh climes and brutal necessities required for survival, or were the people who settled the planets in ages past already predisposed to those qualities? Can the character of a world affect an entire population or is the human soul stronger than mere geography?

Might an observer more naturally attribute a less malign disposition, a less frightful character, to those who walk unconcerned for their safety beneath the gilded archways of a shrine world than to those who huddle in the darkness of a world torn apart by war and rebellion?

Whatever the case, the solitary heaths, lonely mountains and strife-torn cities of Salinas would have provided an excellent study for any such observer.

Rain fell in soaking sheets from the grey, dusky skies: a fine smirr that hung like mist and made the quartz-rich mountainside glisten and sparkle. Flocks of shaggy herbivores fed on the long grasses of the low pastures, and dark thunderheads in the east gathered over the looming peaks.

Tumbling waterfalls gushed uproariously down black cliffs and the few withered trees that remained on the lower slopes surrounding a dead city bent and swayed like dancers before the driving wind that sheared down from the cloud-wreathed highlands. A brooding silence, like an awkward pause in a conversation, hung over the dead city, as though the landscape feared to intrude on its private sorrow. Rubble-choked streets wound their way between blackened buildings of twisted steel and tumbled stone, and ferns with rust and blood-coloured leaves grew thick in its empty boulevards.

Wind-weathered rock and spars of corroded metal lay where they had fallen, and the wind moaned as it gusted through empty windows and shattered doors, as though the city were giving vent to a long, drawn out death rattle.

People had once lived here. They had loved and fought and indulged in the thousands of dramas, both grand and intimate, common to all cities. Great celebrations, scandalous intrigues and bloody crimes had all played out here, but all such theatre had passed into history, though not from memory.

Hundreds of streets, avenues, thoroughfares and roads criss-crossed the empty city, wending their way through its desolation as though in search of someone to tread them once more. Open doors banged on frames, forlorn entreaties to a nameless visitor to enter and render the building purposeful once more. Rain ran in gurgling streams beside the cracked pavements, flowing from grates and gathering in pools where the land had subsided.

A tall church, its facade of stone scorched black and greasy, stood proud amid the ruins, as though whatever calamity had befallen the city had seen fit to spare the mighty edifice the worst of its attention. Tall spires cast long shadows over the city and the great eagle-winged pediment that had once sat proudly above the arched entrance now sagged in defeat, its wings dipped and streaked with green corrosion.

High windows that glorified the Emperor and His many saints were shattered and empty, fragments of coloured glass jutting like teeth in rotted frames. The heavy iron doors that had once protected the main vestibule of the church lay twisted and broken on the cracked flagstones of the esplanade. Shattered statues lay beside the doors, fallen from the roof and left to crumble where they lay.

The wind collected here, as though drawn by some unseen imperative to gambol in the open square before the church. Wisps of mist were dragged along with the wind and fluttering scraps of cloth, paper and leaves spun in miniature whirlwinds as the strength of the wind gathered force.

The gaping blackness of the church's entrance seemed to swallow what little light was left of the day, and though the wind pulled the leaves and debris of the city back and forth with ever-greater vigour, none dared violate the darkness within the abandoned building.

A hollow moaning issued from the church, though nothing lived within it - or indeed in the entire city - and a gust of air, colder than the depths of space, blew into the square.

Beginning as spots of brightness against the black, rippling streamers of light oozed from the arched entrance and flowed like ghostly lines of mercury along the ground in two parallel tracks. Before, the church had seemed relentlessly solid and immovable, now its fabric seemed to ripple and warp as though in the grip of a monstrous heat haze.

The moaning built, rising from a far distant sound to something much closer, a shrieking howl of a thing in agony that fought to hold itself together as though its very sinews were being unravelled with every passing second.

The darkness of the church's interior swelled, billowing outwards like an explosive ink stain. Then it retreated, spilling back over something that had violated time and space to enter this world, a churning, seething remnant of a thing first given form in another age.

It resembled a great juggernaut machine of pistons and iron, its brazen flanks heaving with unnatural energies as it thundered from the church. Steam leaked from every demented, skull-faced rivet as wheels of rusted, dissolving iron ground the mercurial tracks beneath it.

Deep within its fragmenting structure, it might have once resembled an ancient steam-driven locomotive, but unknown forces and warped energies had transformed it into something else entirely.

Whatever power had once fashioned the monstrous, terrifying amalgamation of machine and dark energy now appeared to be working to unmake it. Flaring whoops of light streamed from it, peeling back like the layers of an onion. The very air seemed toxic to its existence, hissing clouds of stinking vaporous light billowing from its every surface.

The terrible machine screamed like a wounded beast, but deep within the aching agonies of its dissolution, there was a keening note of welcome release, as though an eternity of torment had come to an end. Its passage slowed until it came to a halt, like a hunted beast that had reached the end of its endurance and could run no more.

Within the tortured end of the machine, there was the suggestion of voices, a hint of things within it that were not part of its decay. The sounds of the voices grew stronger with each passing second, as though their owners called out from some freshly unlocked, yet still impossibly distant chamber.

As a portion of the juggernaut dissolved, it revealed a dreadful glimpse of the machine's red-lit interior, a stinking meat locker that reeked of unnumbered slaughters and debaucheries, roaring fires and an eon's worth of bloodshed.

Shapes moved within the light, a handful of figures that stumbled like newborns or drunks as they spilled like entrails from the dying machine. Tall, broad and humanoid, they scrambled and crawled from the light as though in pain.

The figures emerged from the armoured leviathan that had brought them to this world, wreathed in coiling wisps of smoke. Their steps were feverish and unsteady, but even unsteady steps were welcome, so long as they carried them away from the dissolving machine.

As the figures put more distance between themselves and the heaving engine, their shapes resolved into clarity, though, had an observer been watching this incredible arrival, he might have wished that they had not.

They were monsters: the Unfleshed.

They were twisted freaks of nature, the bastard by-blows of hideous surgery, failed experiments and dreadful power of unnatural origin. No two were alike, their skinless bodies massive and grotesque, their heads swollen, encephalic nightmares of distended eyes, ripped faces and gnashing fangs.

To see such things would have driven many a man mad with fear, but had anyone had the courage to look beyond the physical deformities and hideous malformations of bone and flesh, they would have seen something else, something that would no doubt have horrified them even more: the glimmer of human understanding and awareness.

Two other figures followed the monstrous creatures, as stumbling and as dazed as the monsters, but without the horrifying aberrations of the flesh that afflicted them. Both had the bulky, gene-built physique of Astartes. One was broader and more powerfully built than the other, although his right arm ended abruptly at the elbow.

One was clad in blue armour; the other in fragments of armour the same colour. The first wore his dirty blond hair tight to his skull, his features wide and open, while the other, dark haired, grey-eyed and wolf-lean, had a face that was stern and patrician.

Both warriors, for it was clear from the wounds and weapons they bore that these were men to whom the crucible of combat was no strange and unknown place, staggered away from the disintegrating machine, collapsing to the ground and heaving great draughts of cold air into their lungs.

With the disembarkation of its passengers, the mighty engine that had carried them squealed with the sound of metal grinding on metal as the burning wheels of iron dragged the strange and terrible machine away from the place.

Confined so long to realms beyond the material universe, its substance was unused to the assault of the elements that made up this existence, and the abrasive banality of reality was undoing its unknowable, warp-spawned structure as surely as a flame devours ice.

Its former passengers watched it gather momentum, moving slowly at first and then with greater speed as its form became ever brighter, as if some infernal power source within was drawing close to critical mass. Its brightness soon became too much to bear, even for those whose eyes were genhanced to withstand such things. With a tortured scream, though whether one of death or release none could tell, the living engine vanished in an explosion of light.

No violence or blast spread from this explosion, but a glittering rain of light fell and saturated the air with the sense of an infinite power having been released into the world.

With the final dissolution or escape of the great, immaterial engine, the gloom and dread of the dead city smothered the world once more, the rain bathing the bedraggled travellers in cold, clammy wetness.

The two Astartes warriors found each other in the rain, embracing like brothers at the simple joy of having returned to a world where the air was not a toxic soup of pollutants, ashen bone matter and the hot, sad smell of burned iron and war.

The bigger warrior ran a hand through his hair, frowning as he took in the dismal nature of their surroundings.

'Thank the Emperor,' he said. 'We're not on Medrengard!'

His companion smiled and tilted his head back, letting the cold rain run down his face, as though such a sensation was a rare and precious gift. 'No, Pasanius,' he said, 'we're not.'

'Then where are we?'

'I think we are almost home, my friend,' said Uriel Ventris.

Though it was dusk, Uriel's eyes could easily pierce the gloom enveloping the city once the afterimages of the Omphalos Daemonium's departure or destruction had faded. No trace remained of its passing, and Uriel was grateful to be rid of the vile daemonic creation.

Once it had been the infernal conveyance of a mighty creature of the warp, an engine by which it could traverse the dreadful regions of warp, time and space to wreak havoc on mortals throughout the galaxy. That daemon was gone, destroyed by another of its diabolical kind, allowing Uriel and Pasanius to escape the daemon world of Medrengard in its blood-soaked interior.

'Where do you think it's gone?' asked Pasanius, his hand resting on the butt of a purloined boltgun. Though his right arm was gone below the elbow, Uriel knew that Pasanius was equally adept at killing with his left. Uriel too was armed, a golden-hilted sword that had once belonged to Captain Idaeus, his mentor and former captain of the Fourth Company of the Ultramarines, gripped in one fist.

'I don't know and I don't care,' said Uriel, breathing the crisp air and relishing the fresh, wild scents carried from the forests that circled the mountains towering over them. He saw flocks of grazing beasts on the rugged flanks of the peaks, and the sight of something so unthreatening was absurdly welcome. 'I am just glad we're free of it.'

'Aye, there's that,' agreed Pasanius. 'Now we just have to figure out where it's dumped us. I certainly wasn't steering, were you?'

'No, but I don't think the Omphalos Daemonium was ever meant to be steered by the likes of us.'

'So we could be anywhere,' said Pasanius.

'Indeed,' said Uriel, as curious as his friend to know where they had been deposited. Though he had no idea why the daemon engine had chosen to end their journey upon this world, whichever world it was, he had spent the unknown period of time within its depths visualising Macragge and his home world of Calth, hoping against hope that thoughts of familiar places would somehow guide the mighty engine's course towards them.

It hadn't worked. This world neither looked nor felt like either of those worlds. The sky above was leaden grey, with brooding and dissatisfied clouds scudding around the peaks of the high, craggy mountains that looked down on the strange, abandoned city they found themselves within.

Uriel turned from the mountains to survey their more immediate surroundings, a wide, marble-flagged square choked with rubble and weeds. The buildings around the edge of the square had been cast to ruin by time and, unmistakably, the brutal effects of war. Bullet holes, laser scarring and promethium burns marked almost every inch of stonework and the cold sense of the lingering dead hung heavy in the air.

'So I wonder where this is?' said Pasanius, turning in a circle. 'It's Imperial at least.'

'How do you know that?'

'Look,' said Pasanius, nodding towards the building behind Uriel.

Uriel followed Pasanius's nod to see a double-headed, bronze eagle hanging at a forlorn angle from a tall building of blackened stone. The arched niches and statuary, though broken and in a state of gross disrepair, were unmistakably those of an Imperial temple. The Unfleshed gathered beneath the eagle, their heads craned back to stare in rapt adoration at the symbol of the Emperor.

'Or at least it was an Imperial world,' pointed out Pasanius. 'This place is dead.'

'Aye,' agreed Uriel. 'This place is dead, but there will be others.'

'You sure?' asked Pasanius. 'I hope you're right.'

'I am,' said Uriel. 'I don't know how, but I just am.'

'Another one of your feelings?' said Pasanius. 'Emperor preserve us. That always means trouble.'

'Well, wherever we are, it has to be better than Medrengard.'

'That wouldn't be hard,' pointed out Pasanius. 'I don't know many places that wouldn't be a step up from a world in the Eye of Terror.'

Uriel conceded the point, trying to blot out memories of Medrengard's continent-sized manufactories, its impossible fortresses, the billowing clouds of hot ash that seared the throat with every breath and the vile, dead things that soared upon the thermals of hellish industry.

They had endured all manner of horrors on Medrengard in the service of their Death Oath, but despite everything the home world of the Iron Warriors could throw at them, they had triumphed and escaped.

But where were they?

Uriel's thoughts were interrupted as those of the Unfleshed that could, dropped to their knees before the church of the Emperor. Those with anatomies too twisted to kneel simply bowed their heads, and a low, keening moan issued from their distorted throats. Uriel could only imagine what these poor, pitiful creatures might be feeling.

As if sensing his scrutiny, the largest of the creatures turned to face Uriel and shuffled over towards him, its steps heavy and its sheened body rippling with monstrously powerful muscles. A pungent, animal odour came with the creature, the Lord of the Unfleshed, his body raw and crimson, the soft rain dripping from him in red droplets.

As always, the sight of this creature brought a mix of feelings to the surface: horror, pity, anger and a protective urge to see that they were not treated as their appearance would suggest, for the Lord of the Unfleshed was, by any definition of the word, a monster.

Taller than Uriel, the Lord of the Unfleshed's body was grossly swollen and built beyond the power of a Space Marine. Once, not so long ago, he had been a child, a captive taken by the dreaded Iron Warriors to Medrengard, where daemonic magic and the cruel attentions of the Savage Morticians had wrought him into a freakish beast.

In an attempt to hothouse fresh warriors, the diabolical surgeon-creatures of the Warsmith Honsou had implanted stolen children in grotesque daemonic wombs and fed their developing anatomies a gruel of genetic material concocted from fallen Iron Warriors and captured Astartes gene-seed.

A capricious and unpredictable alchemy at best, this process resulted in far more failures than successes and those pathetic, mutant offspring deemed too withered or degenerate to be further transformed were flushed from the hellish laboratories like so much excrement.

Most such abortions died in Medrengard's nightmarishly polluted wastelands, but some did not, living as skinless monsters driven into the darkest abyss of madness and despair by the horror of their own existence.

Uriel and Pasanius had first seen the Unfleshed, as other inhabitants of Medrengard had dubbed them, as they slaughtered the degenerate prisoners of an Iron Warriors' flesh camp. He had been horrified by their savagery, but later came to realise that they were as much victims of the Iron Warriors as any of those lost souls whose bodies had been tortured beyond all endurance in the camps.

When Uriel had come to realise the truth of the Unfleshed's existence, he had been horrified and filled with pity for these towering monsters, for they were creations of flesh and blood that carried the essence of Space Marine heroes in their veins.

They all boasted physiques reminiscent of carnival grotesques in their unnatural anatomies, with flaps of dead skin pulled over their deformities as if such paltry disguises could hide their warped flesh. One creature's jaw was kept forever open by distended fangs like splintered bone, another was cursed with the withered, still living body of its conjoined twin fused to its chest, another's skeletal structure was so warped that it no longer resembled anything human and moved with a locomotion never before seen in man nor beast.

'This Emperor's world?' asked the Lord of the Unfleshed, his leathery tongue having difficulty in forming the words over thick, razor-edged fangs.

Uriel nodded, seeing the pain behind the creature's eyes, yes, it is. 'One of them anyway.'

'More worlds like this?'

'Millions,' agreed Uriel.

Seeing the confusion in the Lord of the Unfleshed's face, Uriel understood he probably had no concept of so vast a number. 'There are many worlds like this,' he said, pointing up to where hundreds of stars shimmered in the darkening sky. 'Each of those lights is a world like this.'

Uriel knew that wasn't exactly true, but as the Lord of the Unfleshed looked up, a slow smile spread across his face.

'Sky black.'

'Yes,' smiled Uriel, only now realising how much he had missed the natural diurnal cycle of a habitable world. 'The sky is black, and in the morning it will become light again.'

'Like world of Iron Men?'

Uriel shivered as he pictured the dead, unchanging skies of Medrengard and the unblinking, black sun that held sway over it all. 'No, not like Iron Men's world at all. The sun is golden and warm. You'll like it.'

'Good. Iron Men's world bad,' said the Lord of the Unfleshed. 'This world smell bad too. Not bad like Iron Men's world, but still bad.'

Uriel's interest was piqued. 'This world smells bad? What do you mean?'

'Bad things happen here,' said the Lord of the Unfleshed, looking around the square with an apprehensive gaze. 'Blood spilled here, much blood. Not all gone yet. Making Unfleshed hungry.'

Uriel shared a look with Pasanius, both warriors all too aware of how dangerous the hunger of the Unfleshed could be.

The Unfleshed had fought alongside them on Medrengard through brutal necessity and desperate circumstance, but how long such an alliance would hold against their terrible appetites was something Uriel was not keen to find out.

He looked up into the mountains, where the faint outlines of herds of animals could still be seen. Uriel pointed upwards and said, 'You see those beasts on the mountain?'

The Lord of the Unfleshed nodded and Uriel was reminded that their physiques were, at least partially, made up from Space Marine gene-seed, which included superior eyesight to that of mortals.

'You can hunt them,' said Uriel. 'That is good meat, but only that meat. You understand?'

'Yes.'

'Human meat is bad meat,' said Uriel. 'You cannot eat it. The Emperor does not want you to eat human meat anymore.'

'We understand,' said the Lord of the Unfleshed. 'No eat humans.'

'If you see any humans you don't recognise, hide from them. Don't let them see you,' added Pasanius.

The Lord of the Unfleshed bobbed his massive head, thick ropes of drool leaking from around his fangs, and Uriel knew he was already thinking of the taste of fresh meat and hot blood. Without another word, the mighty creature turned and barked a string of guttural commands to his fellow creatures, who rose from their obeisance below the temple's eagle and followed their leader as he set off in the direction of the mountains.

'Will they be all right left to their own devices?' asked Pasanius.

'I don't know,' admitted Uriel. 'Emperor help me, but I hope so.'

Uriel and Pasanius watched them as they vanished from sight, swallowed up in the darkness of the dead city.

'Now what?' asked Pasanius.

Uriel turned to his sergeant and said, 'Now we talk.'

TWO

Night closed in on the dead city as Uriel and Pasanius sought shelter from the drizzling rain and biting wind. Pasanius was still clad in his stained blue power armour, albeit severed at the elbow, while Uriel's skin was largely bare to the elements. Portions of Uriel's armour had been stripped from his upper body by the brutal ministrations of the Savage Morticians, and though fragments remained of his breastplate, the armour was essentially useless.

Without power feeding the fibre bundle muscles that augmented the wearer's strength, it was heavy and cumbersome, impeding where it was designed to enhance. Without conscious thought, both Space Marines gravitated towards the Imperial temple. Of all the buildings around the square it was the most intact and therefore the most defendable.

The city felt dead and abandoned, but it did not pay to take such things at face value. A fuller exploration of the city could come when the sun rose, but for now, shelter and somewhere to lie low was Uriel's priority.

The doors lay twisted and melted on the ground, and Uriel recognised the telltale impact striations that spoke of a melta blast.

'Someone barricaded themselves in here,' said Pasanius, following Uriel's gaze.

'Looks like it,' agreed Uriel.

'Now why would someone do that?'

'If you were a citizen of this city and you were under attack, where would you seek refuge?'

'I wouldn't be seeking refuge,' said Pasanius. 'I'd be fighting, not hiding while others fought for me.'

Uriel said nothing in response to the simple, yet wholly understandable sentiment, recognising the same lack of empathy for the fears of mortals in Pasanius's tone as he had heard in so many others of his kind. To be so elevated above ordinary men brought the risk of arrogance and though he had heard that egotism given voice by many other Astartes warriors, he had never thought to hear it from Pasanius.

The temple's vestibule was cold, a chill that reached out to Uriel beyond the sensations pricking his skin. He had stood in many temples from the most magnificent to the most humble, but even the least of them had a sense of the divine in their architecture and sense of scale, but this building had none of that.

It felt empty.

Uriel pushed open the splintered remains of the doors that led to the nave, the echoes of his footsteps thrown back at him like those of a shadowing twin. Dust motes spun in the air, but his vision easily pierced the gloom of the temple's interior as he made his way inside. A vaulted ceiling arched overhead and thick pillars of fluted stonework marched the length of the nave towards a toppled altar.

Fallen banners that reeked of mould lay curled on the flagstones and broken wooden pews filled the floor between the vestibule and the raised altar. The walls were faced with dressed ashlar and the last of the day's light illuminated thousands of scraps of paper fastened to every square inch.

Intrigued, Uriel made his way towards this unusual sight, breaths of wind through the empty window frames making it seem as though the wall rippled in anticipation. The papers were old and faded and many had rotted away to fall on the floor, piled up like snowdrifts. Of those that remained, Uriel saw they were a mix of scrawled prayers for the dead, scraps of poems or simple lithographs of smiling men, women and children.

'What are these?' whispered Pasanius, his voice loud in the stillness of the temple as he made his way along the wall and peered at the sad pictures and words.

'Memorials,' said Uriel. 'They're prayers for dead loved ones.'

'But there're so many… Thousands. Did they all die at once?'

'I don't know,' replied Uriel. 'It looks like it.'

'Emperor's blood,' hissed Pasanius. 'What happened here?'

A cold breath whispered across Uriel's neck.

You were there.

Uriel spun on his heel, his hand reaching for his sword.

'What?' said Pasanius as Uriel's blade hissed into the air.

'Nothing,' said Uriel, relaxing when he saw there was no threat.

He and Pasanius were the only trespassers in the temple, but for the briefest second, Uriel could have sworn that there had been someone behind him. The temple's crepuscular depths were empty of intruders, and yet…

Uriel's warrior instincts had been honed on a thousand battlefields and he had not stayed alive this long without developing a fine sense for danger. Though he could see nothing and hear nothing within the temple, he had the definite impression that they were not alone.

'Did you see something?' asked Pasanius, bracing the bolter between his knees and racking the slide. The noise was ugly and harsh, and both warriors felt a ripple of distaste at the sound. The weapon was from the battiefields of Medrengard and had once belonged to an Iron Warrior. Though he held it before him, Uriel saw that Pasanius was reluctant to employ a weapon of the enemy.

'No,' said Uriel. 'I felt something.'

'Like what?'

'I'm not sure, It was as if someone was standing right behind me.'

Pasanius scanned the temple's interior, but finding no targets for his weapon he lowered the bolter. Uriel could see the relief on his face and the sense that they were not alone in the temple receded.

'There's no one here but us,' said Pasanius, moving along the length of the wall towards the altar, though he kept a firm grip on the bolter. 'Maybe you're still a little jumpy after Medrengard.'

'Maybe,' said Uriel as he followed Pasanius, walking past a procession of smiling faces, votive offerings and fluttering prayer papers.

So many had died and been remembered on these walls. Pasanius was right, there were thousands of them and Uriel thought the scene unbearably sad. The opposite wall was similarly covered in sad memorials, and stacks of fallen papers clustered around the base of every column.

They reached the altar and Uriel sheathed his sword.

'We should study these papers,' said Uriel, pushing the fallen altar upright and beginning to unclip the few broken pieces of the armour encasing his upper body, not that there was much left of it. 'They might give us a clue as to where we are.'

'I suppose,' said Pasanius, placing the bolter on the ground and pushing it away with his foot.

'Are you all right, my friend?' asked Uriel, placing a shorn sliver that was all that remained of his breastplate on the altar. 'We are on our way home.'

'I know, but…'

'But?'

'What's going to happen when we get there?'

'What do you mean?'

'Think about it, Uriel,' said Pasanius. 'We've been to the Eye of Terror. No one comes back from there unchanged. How do we know we'll even be welcome back on Macragge? They'll probably kill us as soon as they see us.'

'No,' said Uriel, 'they won't. We fulfilled our Death Oath. Tigurius and Calgar sent us there and they will be proud of what we did.'

'You think?' said Pasanius, shaking his head. 'We fought alongside renegade Space Marines. We made a pact with cannibal mutants and freed a daemon creature. Don't you think Tigurius might take a dim view of things like that?'

Uriel sighed. He had considered these things, but in his heart he knew they had made every decision with the best intentions and for the right reasons.

The Masters of the Chapter had to see that. Didn't they?

It had been Uriel's wilful deviation from Roboute Guilliman's Codex Astartes that had seen them banished from Ultramar in the first place. Penned by the Ultramarines primarch ten thousand years ago, the Codex Astartes laid out the precise organisational tenets by which the Space Marine Chapters would arise from the mighty Legions of the Great Crusade.

Everything from uniform markings, parade drill and the exact means by which warriors should deploy for battle was described within its hallowed pages, and no Chapter exemplified its teachings better than the Ultramarines.

To conform to the principles of their primarch was seen as the highest ideal of the Ultramarines and so to have one of its captains go against that was unacceptable. Uriel had willingly accepted his punishment, but having Pasanius condemned with him had been a shard of guilt in his heart for as long as they had marched across the surface of Medrengard.

In his time on that hell world, Uriel had often doubted his worth as a hero, but with the casting down of Honsou's fortress and the destruction of the daemon creatures that had birthed the Unfleshed, he had come to see that they had been instruments of the Emperor's will after all. Now, with their Death Oath fulfilled, they were going home.

How could such a thing be wrong?

'We have done all that was required of us,' said Uriel, 'and more besides. Tigurius will sense that there is no taint of the Ruinous Powers within us.'

'What about this?' asked Pasanius, holding up the severed end of his arm. 'What if there's some lingering remainder of the Bringer of Darkness left in me?'

'There won't be,' said Uriel. 'Honsou took that from you.'

'How can you be sure it's all gone?'

'I can't,' said Uriel, 'but once we get back to the Fortress of Hera, the Apothecaries will know for sure.'

'Then I will be punished.'

'Perhaps,' allowed Uriel. 'You kept a xenos infection from your superior officers, but whatever the senior masters of the Chapter decide, you will be back with the Fourth Company before long.'

'I wonder how the company is doing,' said Pasanius.

'Learchus promised to look after the men of the Company in our absence,' said Uriel. 'He will have done us proud, I'm sure.'

'Aye,' agreed Pasanius. 'As straight up and down a sergeant as you could wish for, that one. Bit of a cold fish, but he'll have kept the men together.'

'What few were left after Tarsis Ultra,' said Uriel, thinking of the terrible carnage that had seen much of the Fourth Company dead as they defended the Imperial world against a Tyranid invasion.

'That was a tough one, right enough,' said Pasanius as Uriel placed the last of the broken pieces of his armour on the altar. His upper body was left clothed in a simple body sleeve of faded and dirty khaki, the toughened fabric pierced with holes where his armour's interface plugs had meshed with the internal workings of his body.

'I'm sure Learchus will have been thorough in raising promising candidates up from the Scout Auxillia,' said Pasanius. 'The Fourth will be back to full strength by now, surely.'

'I hope so,' agreed Uriel. 'The idea of the Ultramarines without the Fourth does not sit well with me.'

'Nor I, but if you're right and we get back soon, do you think it will be yours again?'

Uriel shrugged. 'That won't be up to me. Chapter Master Calgar will decide that.'

'If he knows what's good for the Chapter, he'll appoint you captain the day we get back.'

'He knows what's good for the Chapter,' promised Uriel.

'I know he does, but I can't help but feel apprehensive. I mean, who knows how long we've been gone? For all we know, hundreds or thousands of years could have passed since we left. And this place…'

'What about it?'

'The Lord of the Unfleshed… He's right, something bad happened to this city. I can feel it.'

Uriel said nothing, for he too could feel the subtle undercurrent in the air, a feeling that the imprint of terrible calamity had befallen this city, that it hadn't simply been abandoned.

'And another thing,' said Pasanius, 'just what in the name of the Primarch are you hoping to achieve with those monsters?'

'They're not monsters,' said Uriel. 'They have the blood of Astartes within them.'

'Maybe so, but they look like monsters and I can't see anyone with a gun not shooting as soon as they lay eyes on them. We should have left them on Medrengard. You know that don't you?'

'I couldn't,' said Uriel, sitting next to Pasanius. 'You saw how they lived. They may look like monsters, but they love the Emperor and all they want is his love in return. I couldn't leave them there. I have to try to… I don't know, show them that there is more to existence than pain.'

'Good luck with that,' said Pasanius sourly.

The moon had risen and pools of brilliant white light reflected a ghostly radiance around the temple's interior by the time the Unfleshed returned. Uriel was loath to use the memorials as fuel and thus they had built a fire from the kindling of the shattered pews in an iron brazier they discovered at the rear of the temple.

The Unfleshed dragged the carcasses of three of the mountain grazers into the church, each beast's body torn and bloodied with fang and claw marks. The dead beasts were covered in a coarse fur, with bovine heads and long, burrowing snouts of leathery hide. Their legs were slender and powerful looking and Uriel imagined they would be swift on the hoof.

'They've already fed then,' said Pasanius, seeing the bloody jaws of the Unfleshed.

'So it appears,' replied Uriel as the Lord of the Unfleshed dragged one of the larger kills over to the altar. The carcass was dropped before him.

'We eat meat on mountain,' said the Lord of the Unfleshed. 'This meat for you.'

Without waiting for an answer, the hulking creature turned away, his eyes dull and lifeless. Curious as to what was the matter, Uriel reached up and placed a hand on the Lord of the Unfleshed's arm.

No sooner had Uriel touched the arm than it was snatched away and the Lord of the Unfleshed turned to face him with a hiss of pain. Uriel flinched at the suddenness of the reaction and the violence he saw in the Lord of the Unfleshed's eyes.

'Not touch me,' hissed the Lord of the Unfleshed. 'Pain. This world hurts us.'

'Hurts you? What do you mean?'

The Lord of the Unfleshed paused, as though struggling to find the words to articulate his meaning. 'Air here different. We feel different, weak. Body not work like before.'

Uriel nodded, though he had no real idea as to why the Unfleshed should feel different on this particular world.

'Try to get some rest,' advised Uriel. 'When the sun comes up we'll get a better look at the lie of the land and decide what to do next. You understand?'

'I understand,' nodded the Lord of the Unfleshed. 'Emperor happy with us?'

'Yes, he is,' said Uriel. 'You are in a place dedicated to Him.'

'Dedicated?'

'It belongs to him,' explained Uriel. 'Like where you lived before.'

'This house of Emperor?'

'It is, yes.'

'Then we stay here. Emperor take care of us,' said the Lord of the Unfleshed, and Uriel found the simple sentiment curiously touching. These creatures may be genetic aberrations, but they believed in the Emperor's divinity with a simple, childlike faith.

The Lord of the Unfleshed lumbered away to rejoin his fellows and Uriel turned back to the altar, where Pasanius was butchering the carcass they had been provided with in preparation for roasting it over the fire. Space Marines could, of course, eat the meat raw to gain more nutritional benefits, but after the deprivations of Medrengard, both warriors were in the mood for some hot food inside them.

Uriel watched the Unfleshed as they hunkered down before the walls, staring in fascination at the parchment scraps on the wall. Pasanius handed him a skewered hunk of meat and placed his own over the fire.

'It's easy to forget,' said Uriel.

'What is?'

'They are just children really.'

'The Unfleshed?'

'Yes. Think about it. They were taken as youngsters and twisted into these horrific forms by the Savage Morticians, but they are still children inside. I was placed inside one of those daemon wombs. I know what it tried to do to me, but to do that to a child… Imagine waking up and finding that you had been turned into a monster.'

'Do you think any of them remember their former lives?'

'I don't know,' said Uriel. 'In some ways, I hope they don't; it would be too awful to remember what they'd lost, but then I think that it's only the fragments of what they once were that's keeping them from truly becoming monsters.'

'Then let's hope more of their memories return now that they're away from Medrengard.'

'I suppose,' said Uriel, turning his skewer on the fire. 'I know they look like monsters, but what happened to them isn't their fault. They deserve more than just to be hunted down and killed because they aren't like us. We may not be able to save their bodies, but we can save their souls.'

'How?'

'By treating them like human beings.'

'Then I just hope you get to talk to people before they see them.'

'I plan to, eventually, but let's take things one step at a time.'

'Speaking of which,' said Pasanius, lifting his skewer of meat from the fire and taking an experimental bite.

'Oh, that's good. What's our next move in the morning?'

Uriel removed his skewer from the fire and bit into the meat, the smell intoxicating and the taste sublime after so long on ration packs and recycled nutrient pastes. The meat was tough, but gloriously rich. Warm juices spilled down his chin and he resisted the impulse to wolf down his meal without pause.

Between mouthfuls, Uriel said, 'Tomorrow we explore the city, get a feel for its geography and then work out where we might find a settlement.'

'Then what?'

'Then we present ourselves to whatever Imperial authorities we find and make contact with the Chapter.'

'You think it'll be that easy?'

'It will or it won't be,' said Uriel. 'I suppose we'll find out tomorrow, but we need some rest first. Every bone in my body aches and I just want one night of proper sleep before we get into things.'

'Sounds good to me,' agreed Pasanius. 'Every time I closed my eyes on that damn, daemon engine, all I saw were rivers of blood and skinned bodies.'

Uriel nodded, only too well aware of the nightmarish things that lurked behind his own eyes when he had tried to rest on the Omphalos Daemonium. Not since he had stood before the Nightbringer had he seen such horrors or believed that such terrible things could be dreamed into existence.

For the unknown span of time they had spent within its insane depths, both they and the Unfleshed had been plagued by these blood dreams and Uriel knew that his mind had been close to breaking, for who could be visited nightly by such phantasms and remain sane?

Of all the nightmarish visions of death and bloodshed that plagued Mesira Bardhyl, it was the Mourner she feared the most. She never saw his face, she just heard his sobs, but the depths of agony and suffering encapsulated in those sounds was beyond measure.

It seemed impossible that anyone could know such pain and sorrow and live. Yet the mourner's dark outline, stark against the white, ceramic tiles of the empty room, was clearly that of a living person.

Tears coursed down her cheeks at the sight of the Mourner, a measure of his pain passing to her as her treacherous feet carried her towards the iron-framed bed he sat on, the only piece of furniture in this otherwise featureless room.

She knew she was dreaming, but that knowledge did nothing to lessen her terror.

Despite the khat leaves Mesira had mixed with the half bottle of raquir she'd downed before reluctantly climbing into bed, the nightmare of the Mourner had still found her.

Step by step, she moved closer to the Mourner, wracking sobs of anguish causing his shoulders to shake violently. As Mesira drew closer, she felt his grief change to anger, and though she tried to will her hand not to reach out, it lifted of its own accord.

As she touched the Mourner's shoulder, the stink of burned meat filled her senses and images danced behind her eyes: burning buildings, screaming people and a firestorm so intense it billowed and seethed like a living thing.

'No,' she whispered. 'Not again.'

The Mourner ceased his weeping, as though only now aware of her.

Without warning, flames suddenly bloomed into life across his body, engulfing his head and limbs with incandescent brightness.

'You were there,' said the Mourner, apparently oblivious to the fire that consumed him.

'No, I…' cried Mesira, falling back from the killing heat.

'You were there,' repeated the Mourner, his voice accusing as the flames slithered over him. In moments, his body was scorched black and the smell of his seared flesh made her gag.

'The dead are watching and you will all be punished.'

'Please,' begged Mesira. 'Why me?'

'You were there,' said the Mourner, as if that explained everything. 'You were there.'

'I didn't do anything. It wasn't me,' wept Mesira.

'You were there.'

'I—'

'You were there,' said the Mourner, turning towards her, 'and you will pay. You will all pay.'

Mesira Bardhyl hurled herself from her bed, screaming in terror and clawing at the sheets as she fought to free herself from them. She thrashed on the floor of the room, kicking and shrieking like a madwoman. Weeping, she curled into the foetal position, her palms pressed against the side of her head and her bitten-down fingernails clawing at her scalp.

She bit the flesh of her palm to stifle her screams, rocking back and forth on the floor.

Her eyes were closed tightly and it took an effort of will to open them.

The room was dimly lit, a weak glow from the haphazardly arranged lumen globes on the street outside filtering through the thin curtains twitching at the window. A stainless steel sink and toilet unit gurgled behind a privacy screen and stacks of papers fluttered on the table in the centre of the room.

Mesira remained on the floor until her breathing returned to normal and her heart rate slowed, before picking herself up using the edge of the bed to steady her shaking legs. Her whole body was trembling and she bent to lift the fallen sheet and wrap it around her skinny, wasted frame.

The vision was still fresh in her mind and she wiped away tears as she made her way to the table and poured a tall glass of raquir. Loose papers lay strewn across the table, a half finished report for Verena Kain detailing - empathic readings she'd made at a meeting between Governor Barbaden and community leaders. It was a breach of security to have them lying out like this, but she had left the Imperial palace early that day, unwilling to spend any more time in Barbaden's presence than she had to.

The sounds of the city drifted in through her window: the clatter of ramshackle ground cars, the raucous sound of drunks pouring from the bars and the occasional violent oath. She could sense the feelings and emotions drifting in the air behind the sounds, but shut them out, blunting her powers with another shot of raquir.

She poured another, knowing she would get no more sleep tonight and unwilling to close her eyes again after the horrors the Mourner had shown her.

In her dream he had turned his face towards her, his flesh dripping from his blackened skull as the heat of the flames roared hotter and brighter. She had wanted to look away. She had known with utter certainty that to see his face would drive her to madness, but her head was fixed in place and when she saw his eyes, cold and white like the heart of a dead star, she had seen horrors that went beyond even those of the Killing Ground.

Sloshing, corpse-filled tenders shuddered and bumped behind a heaving daemon engine that spurted blood and travelled on tracks of bone. Forests of dead children were impaled on jangling meat hooks. Entire planets were laid waste before a tide of screaming daemons, and galaxies were extinguished by the power that poured into this world from the insane geometry of the monstrous engine.

Dead souls writhed in the depths of its awful, daemonic structure and she could feel the immense warp energy surrounding it, a flood of power saturating the air and earth and water of Salinas with its presence. Whatever this horrifying machine was, it had seen unnumbered slaughters and brought with it the dread memories of every drop of blood spilled in its vile existence.

She had seen them all, every soul torn from flesh, every violation visited upon an innocent and every vile, unimaginable horror wreaked upon the living.

As clearly as if she had stood watching it, she saw the mighty daemon engine appear before the temple in the main square of Khaturian, its bronze, eagle-winged pediment sagging where the bombs had loosened it from the stonework: the building the Screaming Eagles had attacked with melta guns and then stormed with guns blazing and blades chopping.

Mesira closed her eyes, trying to block the memories of screams, the echoing bark of gunfire and the horrifying, unending whoosh of flamers. She moved from the table to stand at the window, looking over the cobbled streets of Barbadus and watching the few people that dared pass beneath her window. They walked by without looking up, for it was well known that Barbaden's pet psyker lived here, and no one wanted to attract her evil eye.

Anger touched her and she allowed her ability to reach out, feeling the ghost touch of the minds that filled the squalid tenements and ad hoc dwellings formed in the remains of a regiment's worth of vehicles that the Achaman Falcatas had abandoned to the elements.

Barbadus was a city built upon the bones of an Imperial Guard regiment's cast-offs.

With the conclusion of the campaign to quell the rebellious system, the planet Salinas had been awarded to the Falcatas, and the regiment had been permitted to keep the bulk of its armoured vehicles, for there had not been the means to transport most of them off world. However, without sufficient enginseers or tech-priests, most had swiftly fallen into disrepair and only a handful of companies were able to maintain their tanks and transports in working order.

Those that could not simply abandoned them, and it did not take long for the enterprising citizens of Barbadus to claim them. Families lived in and around these vehicles, making homes in what had once been instruments of war.

A Leman Russ battle tank could house a family of five once any unnecessary kit had been hollowed out, a Chimera even more. Many other vehicles had been cannibalised for parts and sheets of metal, and entire districts of Barbadus were constructed from the remains of those vehicles that had rusted solid, broken down or otherwise failed.

Her senses were filled with the simmering resentment that bubbled just below the surface of virtually every inhabitant of the city, and it was a resentment Mesira could well understand, for the invasion of the Achaman Falcatas had been brutal and bloody.

The new governor had even renamed their capital city after himself.

No wonder they hate us, she thought. I hate us too.

Though her empathic ability was normally confined to reading humans, Mesira could feel something very different tonight, as though she could sense the planet's deep anger. The air had a charged quality, a ripened sense of importance and impending confluence that she had not felt before and which frightened her a great deal.

Something profound had changed on Salinas, but the sense of it eluded her.

Were the images she had seen in the eyes of the Mourner real or allegories?

She was not skilled in interpreting visions and wondered if Governor Barbaden's astropathic diviners might know what to make of what she had seen.

No sooner had the thought of the Falcata's former colonel entered her mind than she felt a cold breath sigh across the back of her neck.

She shivered and spun around, her hand reaching up to her scalp.

A small figure of light stood in the far corner of the room, a young girl with her hands outstretched.

You were there.

Though he craved rest, Uriel was unable to sleep, the persistent sense that they were not alone still lingering at the back of his mind. After eating their fill of meat, both he and Pasanius had explored the empty chambers of the church, a crumbling vestry, some abandoned supply rooms and a number of private chapels in the transepts.

They had found nothing untoward and had then made a patrol circuit of the exterior of the church, climbing tumbled masonry and crossing angled slabs of broken roadway as they scouted the area around the temple. With only the two of them, it was impossible to completely secure such a large area, but they had found nothing to make either of them think there was anything living in the city besides themselves.

Pasanius slept sitting upright with his back against the wall, his soft snores making Uriel smile as the cares his friend had carried since Pavonis seemed to melt from his face. Though he appeared to be deeply asleep, Uriel knew that Pasanius could switch from rest to full wakefulness in a second.

The Unfleshed huddled in a circle of bodies, curled together like pack animals with the Lord of the Unfleshed at their centre. Their breathing was a cacophony of rasping, hacking gurgles and whistles through the gristly slits that were their mouths and noses.

Knowing that sleep would not come, Uriel got to his feet and wandered down the aisle of the church, pausing every now and then to examine one of the fluttering prayer papers or pictures stuck to the wall. Smiling faces stared back at him, men and women, the old and the young.

What had happened to these people and who had placed the memorials?

A number of the papers were scrawled with a date, and though the format of it was unknown to Uriel, it was clear that each one was the same. Whatever calamity had befallen these people had come upon them in one fell swoop.

Uriel moved down the aisle, unable to shake the feeling that he was, if not in the presence of another, at least being observed by someone or something. He kept a tight grip on the hilt of his sword, taking reassurance from the feel of the golden hilt and the legacy of heroism it represented. Captain Idaeus had forged the sword before the Corinthian campaign and had borne it to glory for many years before passing it to Uriel on Thracia as he went to his death. Uriel had vowed to do the sword and memory of his former captain honour, and the weight of that promise had kept Uriel true to his course through the long months of suffering and hardship.

Uriel emerged from the temple, his eyes quickly adjusting to the ambient light and enhancing it to the point where he could see as clearly as he would in daylight.

Where before the city had possessed a melancholy, abandoned feel, it now seemed altogether threatening, as though some buried resentment was allowed to roam freely in the darkness. Uriel's every sense told him that he was alone, but some indefinable instinct told him that there was more to this city than met the eye.

Dust scampered around the square as though disturbed by invisible footsteps and the wind moaned through shattered window frames and open doorways. Moonlight glinted on shards of glass and metal. Somewhere, a skittering of pebbles sounded like laughter.

Tapping his fingers on the golden pommel of his sword, Uriel set off at random into the city.

Crumbling buildings hemmed in broken streets littered with the detritus of a vanished populace: cases, bags, pots, keepsakes and the like. The more Uriel saw of such things, the more the analytical part of his enhanced brain that was trained to seek patterns in disorder realised that there was an underlying scheme to the placement of them.

These were not simply random scatterings of possessions forsaken by their owners. They were yet more silent memorials, arranged to look haphazard, but set with deliberate care: coins placed in identical patterns, ribbons tied on fire-blackened re-bars and pots stacked together as though waiting for their owners to return.

It looked as though the people who had placed these things had not wanted someone else to know that the dead were mourned and remembered.

It was yet another piece of the puzzle, but without more information, Uriel could make little sense of it. The buildings to either side of him were scarred by small-arms fire and, here and there, Uriel saw the unmistakable impact of artillery and heavy calibre shells. An army had come through this city, firing at will and killing anything that lived.

Rust brown splashes on the walls could only be blood and Uriel stopped as he saw moonlight illuminate the white gleam of bone. He knelt beside a tumbled cairn of rounded stones that covered a small skull, no larger than a child's.

A faded picture had been set amongst the stones, encased in a clear plastic bag to protect it from the elements. Uriel wiped moisture and dirt from its surface, seeing a young girl with long blonde hair in a simple white, knee-length dress. She stood beside a tall man, presumably her father, who beamed with paternal pride. They posed before a building of plain stone with a pair of shuttered windows behind them.

Uriel turned the picture over. Scrawled in simple letters was the name Amelia Towsey.

'How did you die?' asked Uriel, his whisper echoing from the walls as though he had shouted the question. Startled by the volume, Uriel looked up and caught a glimpse of something at the end of the street: a small girl in a white dress.

THREE

Uriel blinked in surprise, and the girl was gone, vanished as though she had never existed.

He surged to his feet and ran towards where she had been standing.

Uriel reached the end of the street and looked left and right. There was no sign of the girl and he began to wonder if he had seen her at all. The image had been so fleeting that he couldn't be sure he hadn't just imagined her there after seeing her in the picture, but she had been so real.

Even as he began to discount his sighting of the girl he heard a soft sigh, no more than a breath, from ahead and a flash of white. Cautious, his every sense alert for danger, Uriel drew his sword and advanced along the street in the direction of the sound. The buildings around him were dark and seemed to lean inwards.

He passed more of the cairns, but didn't stop to examine them as the sighing sound changed in pitch. Instead of a breath, it was a sob: a child's uncomprehending grief.

Uriel stopped as the sound faded away and he found himself before a building of plain stone with two shuttered windows. The shutters hung from rusted hinges and a portion of the building had been punched through with bullets and shell impacts, but it was unmistakably the dwelling from the picture.

Had he been led here?

The thought should have disturbed him, but he felt no fear of this place.

All sounds had ceased and even the wind had fallen silent as Uriel picked his way over the ruined wall and entered the building with his sword held at the ready. Part of him thought to go back for Pasanius, but he felt no threat from within, just an aching loneliness.

Once again, Uriel's eyes adjusted to the changing light conditions and he saw a shattered room with smashed furniture scattered across the floor. Broken chairs and a table lay in splinters, charred and blackened by fire. The room reeked of old smoke and Uriel ran his finger down the nearest wall, feeling the filmy residue of spent promethium jelly.

Uriel looked around the blackened room, seeing the sad remnants of lives obliterated in an instant. Two silhouettes were burned onto the far wall, their arms raised in terror or perhaps in a final, useless, gesture of protection from the flames that had killed them.

He could picture the room on fire and the terror and pain of those within as they burned, and he hoped their deaths had been swift. Glass and ceramic crunched underfoot and Uriel bent down to retrieve something metallic from the ashes and rubble: bullet casings, autogun rounds from the calibre, stamped with an Imperial eagle and a Departmento Munitorum serial code.

'Fired in attack or defence?' wondered Uriel, seeing the melted and blackened shape of the autogun lying in the corner of the room. The barrel of the weapon was straight and silver, though pitted with rust. How had it escaped the molten heat of the fire that had destroyed the rest of the dwelling?

Thinking back to the patterns of votive offerings he had seen scattered through the streets, Uriel saw meaning in the gun's placement, following the direction of the barrel and heading into a back room.

Like the main room, this chamber was blackened by fire damage, the walls peeling and bubbled where the heat had not quite reached to scorch. The room was empty and dark, a bedroom by the look of the rusted iron bed frame collapsed in one corner.

Uriel made a circuit of the room, looking for something that the autogun in the outer room might have been pointing at. Feeling slightly foolish, he was about to leave when he saw the words written on the wall.

Partially obscured by dust, the words were nevertheless clearly visible to his genhanced eyesight, hidden, but visible to someone who was looking for something.

The Sons of Salinas will rise again!

Uriel frowned as he read the words, wondering what they meant.

Who were the Sons of Salinas?

A cult? A resistance movement? A pro-Imperial faction?

Whoever they were, they had been careful to hide their imprecation to rebellion and that alone made Uriel suspicious of their allegiance.

Was Salinas a person or the name of this world?

Uriel turned as a shadow was thrown out on the wall before him. Crunching, heavy footsteps and a wet animal smell told him who had followed him and he lowered his sword.

He edged into the main room of the house, and as he cleared the doorway, he saw the Lord of the Unfleshed crouching beside the wall where the two silhouettes were emblazoned. The creature's enormous head lowered to sniff at the wall and his eyes widened as he took in the scent.

'These people…?' said the Lord of the Unfleshed.

'What about them?'

'This place… Many families?'

'Yes,' agreed Uriel. 'This was a city.'

'And these people?' asked the Lord of the Unfleshed.

'They lived here,' said Uriel.

'They died here.'

Uriel nodded, sheathing his sword. 'They did, but I don't know why.'

'This world feels wrong, sick. I not think that we be happy here,' whispered the enormous beast. 'Men that killed these people… They are bad men, like Iron Men.'

'How do you know that?' asked Uriel.

The enormous creature shrugged, as though the answer should have been obvious, and turned away from the wall, to where a collection of children's toys lay scattered in the corner of the room. The Lord of the Unfleshed crouched beside the toys, a melted doll with a scorched dress and a pile of blocks with the letters burned from them.

The beginnings of what might have been a smile creased the creature's face and Uriel felt his heart go out to the Lord of the Unfleshed, wondering what the future might have held for the child he had once been had the Iron Warriors not cruelly abducted him.

'Bad men will want to kill us,' said the Lord of the Unfleshed without looking up.

'Why do you say that?' asked Uriel, though he suspected the sentiment was accurate.

'I know we are monsters,' said the creature. 'A bad man that kills families will fear us.'

'No,' said Uriel, 'I won't let that happen.'

'Why?'

'Because you deserve a chance to live.'

'You think the Unfleshed can live here?'

'I don't know,' admitted Uriel, 'but what chance did you have on Medrengard? I don't know anything about this world, where it is or even what it's called, but I promise you I will do everything I can to make sure you have a better life here. What happened to you… It was monstrous, but you don't deserve to be condemned for it. You just have to be patient for a little longer and stay hidden until I can find the right time to tell people of you. Can you do that?'

'Unfleshed good at staying hidden. Not be found unless we want to be. Learned that on world of Iron Men.'

'Then stay here, stay hidden and when the time is right, Pasanius and I will come and get you. Then you will feel the sun on your face and not have to worry about Iron Men.'

'A better life,' said the Lord of the Unfleshed. 'You promise?'

'A better life,' agreed Uriel.

'And the Emperor will love us?'

'He will,' said Uriel. 'He loves all his subjects.'

The Lord of the Unfleshed nodded and turned his massive head towards Uriel. Such a terrible, twisted face was incapable of guile and Uriel felt the responsibility of the creature's simple faith in him. He had promised them a better future and he had to make good on that promise.

The Lord of the Unfleshed's head snapped up and the folds of flesh above his jaws pulsed.

'Men are coming,' said the creature, 'men on machines.'

Colonel Verena Kain stifled a yawn and rubbed a gloved hand across her eyes, her body naturally rolling with the motion of the Chimera armoured fighting vehicle she travelled in. Sitting high in the commander's hatch, she had a clear field of view across the rugged predawn landscape that followed the course of the river towards the ruined city of Khaturian.

She could see the jagged outline of the city ahead, stark against the bleak ruggedness of the mountains and a grim sight for this Emperor-forsaken hour of the morning. Moving with a unique, striding gait, six scout Sentinels darted ahead through the gloom, the bipedal machines ensuring that this fool's errand Mesira Bardhyl's warning had sent them on wasn't a Sons of Salinas ambush.

The scrawny psyker woman had arrived at the palace in the dead of night and demanded to see Governor Barbaden, which only served to prove her idiocy. Bardhyl had claimed she had something of great import to tell him, and once ushered into the governor's presence, she had sobbed out some nonsense about monsters and oceans of blood spilling out from the Killing Ground.

A slap to the face from Kain had halted her ramblings and she smiled as she remembered the look of shock on the woman's pinched face. Mesira Bardhyl had once been the sanctioned psyker attached to the Screaming Eagles, but was one of the cowards who had chosen to muster out of the regiment following the partial demobilisation of the Falcatas after Restoration Day. Kain had little time for such cravens and the chance to put Bardhyl in her place could not be passed up.

As a psyker, Bardhyl should have been handed over to the Commissariat following demobilisation, but, for reasons known only to himself, Barbaden had allowed her to quit the regiment without a fuss. Why he allowed Bardhyl to do so was beyond Kain, but she took great pains not to press him too hard on the subject, for Leto Barbaden's cold, diamond-sharp mind was an icy thing that could end her career as surely as his patronage had advanced it to the position he had once held.

When Bardhyl had calmed enough to speak without gratuitous hyperbole, she spoke of a great surge in warp energy that had appeared in the ruined city of Khaturian. Consultation with the Janiceps had confirmed that, and Barbaden had ordered her to take a detachment of troops out to the Killing Ground and investigate.

Behind Kain's vehicle, a further eleven Chimeras spread out in a staggered arrowhead formation, filled with over a hundred of her Screaming Eagles. Veterans of a score of campaigns and the most feared and disciplined soldiers of the Achaman Falcatas, the Eagles were her favoured warriors when order had to be restored with maximum efficiency and speed.

As the outline of the dead city drew closer, Kain felt a shiver of apprehension, but shook it off. The last time she had seen this place it had been completely ablaze and the sights and sounds of that night returned with the force of a recently unlocked memory.

She realised she had not thought of that night in many years, but the recollection did not trouble her as it did some members of her regiment. They had done what needed to be done and the planet had been brought to heel. She had no regrets and unconsciously reached up to touch the eagle medal that hung from the left breast of her uniform jacket.

Her Chimera bounced over the uneven ground and she raised battered magnoculars to her face, scanning the outline of the city as the Sentinels drew near the razor wire fence that surrounded the ruins.

Tumbled buildings filled her view, rendered green and milky by the mechanics of the viewfinder, but there was precious little else to see. Their route was becoming rockier and cut through some wooded hills, so Kain pulled her arms in tight and slid back down inside the Chimera.

It paid to be cautious. The Sons of Salinas had stepped up their campaign of guerrilla attacks and, while it was unlikely they would attack such a well-armed force, it was possible that a number of snipers could be lying in wait within such terrain. This whole endeavour could simply be a ruse to lure out and kill an Imperial officer.

Inside the Chimera, it was noisy and dim. Engine noise roared from the back and the stink of oil and sacred unguents was thick in the air. Cramped and filled with solid iron and dangerous moving parts, it paid to be slightly built as she manoeuvred her body into the commander's seat.

'Anything, ma'am?' asked Bascome, her aide-de-camp, from his position by the vox-gear.

'There's nothing there,' she said, shouting to be heard over the rattling noise of the engine.

'Any idea what we should expect?' asked Bascome.

Kain didn't know what to expect after the frustrating vagueness of Bardhyl's warning, but it did not become a colonel to admit ignorance in front of her junior officers.

'Possibly some Sons of Salinas activity,' she said. 'Or else more fools coming to place their trinkets on a pile of stones.'

Bascome shook his head. 'You'd think they'd learn not to come here, especially after the last lot we shot.'

Kain did not reply, remembering the sight of the three men put before the firing squad against the palace wall for breaking the cordon around Khaturian. Entry to the city was strictly forbidden and punishable by death, something that appeared not to deter the many numbskulls that regularly risked their lives to place memorials.

If Barbaden had listened to her, the ruins would have been obliterated by massed Basilisk fire the hour after Restoration Day, but the newly installed Governor had decided that such a move would only re-ignite flames of rebellion so recently extinguished.

Well, the last ten years had shown how well that had worked out: a decade of bombings, riots and discontent from a populace too stupid to realise that it was beaten. Imperial rule held sway over this world and the Sons of Salinas were a spent force, no matter how charismatic and cunning Pascal Blaise was said to be.

All sorts of wild rumours had grown up around the leader of the Sons of Salinas: that he had once served in the Guard, that he had once been Barbadus's chief enforcer before Daron Nisato had taken over or even that he was a rogue inquisitor. Whatever the truth of his former life, Kain had killed enough of his soldiers to know that he clearly wasn't that good a leader.

'I hope it is the Sons of Salinas,' said Bascome. 'It's been too long since we had a proper stand up fight.'

Kain echoed her aide's sentiment. Since Restoration Day, there had been precious little proper soldiering for the Falcatas. No intense firefights against xenos or the warriors of the Ruinous Powers, but plenty of civilian rioters and thankless patrols through districts of their own derelict war machines where improvised explosives waited to blow off limbs and snipers lurked to take pot shots at the patrolling Imperial soldiers.

The entire situation made no sense to Kain. Hadn't they liberated this system from the Ruinous Powers? True, there had been no overt outbreak of rebellion on Salinas, but with three other worlds in the system already fallen prey to heresy, it had surely been only a matter of time before Salinas came under the sway of the Great Enemy. Didn't these people realise how lucky they had in fact been?

The Falcatas had arrived in a flurry of pomp and ceremony, an occasion demanded by the Master of the Crusade, General Shermi Vigo (a man who loathed Leto Barbaden and who was, in return, despised), but it had only served to inflame the people, leading to three years of grubby, inglorious warfare.

The result of the pacification had never really been in doubt, for the Achaman Falcatas had fought through the treacherous hells of two of the system's worlds already and were in no mood to offer mercy. As brutal and necessary as the fighting had been, there had been little glory in shooting civilians who thought that holding guns made them soldiers.

'Don't get your hopes up, Bascome,' warned Kain. 'This isn't likely to be anything out of the ordinary.'

'What do you think?' asked Pasanius.

'It sounds like Chimera engines, and Sentinels.'

'That's what I thought,' agreed Pasanius. 'Guard?'

'I think so.'

'Let's hope they're friendly.'

Uriel nodded and ran a hand across his scalp as the noise of the engines drew nearer. Uriel's superior hearing filtered out the distortions caused by the ruggedness of the landscape, allowing him to pick out the different engine noises and pinpoint their location.

The vehicles were perhaps two kilometres away and would be here in moments.

Uriel had raced back through the streets of the city, feeling its character change once more, the wind whipping through the streets as though bearing word of the approaching men with every gust. The Lord of the Unfleshed had long outpaced him, his lumbering gait and long, elastic limbs propelling him through the rubble-strewn streets with uncanny speed and grace.

Pasanius was waiting for him and the two gathered their meagre possessions before heading towards the southern edge of the city. Whoever these men on machines were, Uriel and Pasanius would meet them with their heads held high.

As they prepared to leave, Uriel turned to the Lord of the Unfleshed. He reached up to place his hand on the creature's arm, but remembered how such a gesture had hurt it before and pulled his hand back.

'You understand what you have to do?' asked Uriel.

The mighty creature nodded, his brood of twisted followers echoing the gesture. 'Hide.'

'Yes,' said Uriel, 'you need to hide, but it won't be for long, I swear to you. Let us deal with these men and find out more about this world.'

'Then you come and get us? Tell men not fear us?'

Uriel hesitated before answering, unsure of what to say and loath to promise something he could not deliver. 'I'll come and get you as soon as it is safe, but until then you have to stay hidden. Move higher into the mountains. It looks like there's food and water there and you should be safe as long as you stay away from any settlements.'

The Lord of the Unfleshed took a moment to process all that Uriel had said, his massive form suddenly seeming to be much smaller than before. Uriel realised that the creature was feeling fear and as ridiculous as that thought was, it was completely understandable. Since their last days on Medrengard, the Lord of the Unfleshed had looked to Uriel as a child looks towards its father for guidance.

Now, that guidance was going away and Uriel saw the fear of abandonment in the creature's milky, bloodshot eyes.

'You will be safe,' said Uriel. 'I give you my word. I will not let anything happen to you. Now you have to go, quickly.'

The Lord of the Unfleshed turned and led his followers into the depths of the ruined city and as Uriel watched them go, he hoped they might have a chance of life on this world.

Now, as he stood before a long line of razor wire that appeared to encircle the city, he wasn't so sure. Their explorations of the previous night had not carried them this far south and to find that this dead city was cordoned off was a cause for some concern.

'They sound like friendlies,' said Uriel. 'Looted Guard vehicles don't sound as smooth. The engines are well cared for, I can hear that much.'

'Well, you always did have better hearing than me,' said Pasanius, affecting an air of casualness, but Uriel could sense his friend's unease. 'So, what do you make of this razor wire?'

Uriel looked left and right, following the line of tall wooden posts rammed into the ground and strung with looping coils of vicious, toothed wire.

'They didn't skimp on it, that's for sure,' said Uriel. 'Anyone caught in that fence would be torn to bloody shreds trying to cross it.'

'Aye,' agreed Pasanius, holding the bolter loosely at his side. 'From the scraps of cloth and bloodstains on it, it looks like there's no shortage of people attempting to get through.'

They had reached the edges of the city and followed the road until reaching a wide gate, strung with coloured ribbons and garlands of faded flowers. More of the prayer strips hung from the wire and it had the effect of making the gate look almost festive.

'How are we going to play this?' asked Pasanius.

'Carefully,' said Uriel. 'It's the only way we can. I want to be honest with these people, but I don't want to be gunned down by some overeager Guardsman with an itchy trigger-finger.'

'Good point. Best we don't mention where we've been.'

'Probably not,' agreed Uriel. 'Not yet, at least.'

Pasanius nodded to the horizon. 'Here they come.'

Uriel watched as a trio of boxy, bipedal machines stalked through the landscape towards the city, moving with a wheezing, mechanical gait. Painted a deep rust red, each was, much to Uriel's relief, emblazoned with a golden eagle on their frontal glacis. Two bore side-mounted autocannons, while the third sported a lascannon that hummed with a powerful electric charge.

'There's more than these three,' said Pasanius, his head cocked to one side.

'I know,' said Uriel. 'There's one on our right and another two in the woods to the left.'

'Autocannons and a lascannon… They'll make a mess of us if they open fire.'

'Then let's not give them reason to, eh?'

'Sounds good to me.'

Uriel watched as the three visible Sentinels slowed and approached the gate with greater caution now that they had spotted the two of them. Guns were trained, hissing hydraulics powered up and arming chambers unmasked the war spirits within the weapons.

'Easy now,' whispered Uriel.

All three Sentinels had their weapons firmly aimed at them.

'If they open fire…' said Pasanius, his grip twitching on the grip of the bolter.

Uriel spotted the gesture and said, 'Slowly. Very slowly, put down that gun.'

Pasanius looked down at the weapon, as though he had forgotten he was carrying it, and nodded. With his truncated arm raised, he knelt and placed the bolter on the ground. The Sentinel armed with the lascannon followed his movements.

None of the other vehicles moved, content simply to cover them with their weapons.

'Why aren't they doing anything?'

'Communicating with their commanding officer I expect.'

'Damn, but I don't like this,' said Pasanius.

'Nor I,' said Uriel, 'but what choice do we have? We have to make contact with Imperial authorities sometime.'

'True. I just wish we weren't doing it with a company's worth of heavy weaponry pointed at us.'

The Sentinels before them didn't move, but Uriel could hear the sounds of the ones out of sight moving around to confirm that they were alone. He hoped the Lord of the Unfleshed had managed to get his followers clear of the city, for if the commanding officer of these soldiers was even halfway competent, he would order a search of the city to confirm that they were alone.

At last, Uriel heard the rumbling of tracked vehicles and a staggered column of a dozen Chimeras came into view. No sooner had the armoured vehicles appeared than the Sentinels opened up with dazzling searchlights. Uriel blinked away spots of brightness from his eyes as they adjusted to the blinding light.

Even though dawn was lighting the eastern skyline, the beams from the spotlights were intense and Uriel had to squint to make out any detail behind them. Mortal eyes would have been blinded, but those of a Space Marine could filter out all but the most searing light.

As Uriel's eyes focused, he saw the Chimeras spread out, a squadron's worth of heavy weaponry aimed squarely at him and his sergeant. Doors cranked open and scores of soldiers disembarked from the backs of the vehicles.

'They're good, I'll give them that,' hissed Pasanius, and Uriel was forced to agree.

The soldiers were clad in armour composed of gleaming red plate fringed with fur-edged mail and short, crimson cloaks tied over their left shoulders. Their rifles were aimed unwaveringly at the pair of them, each soldier advancing with a fluid motion that kept his weapon steady.

Their helmets were conical affairs of bronze metal with angled cheek plates and flexible aventails. Each warrior also carried a heavy sword with a curved blade, and nothing in their appearance gave Uriel the impression that they were simply for ornamentation.

'They've gone to a lot of trouble for just the two of us,' whispered Pasanius.

'I know, and how did they know we were here?'

'I suppose we'll find out soon enough,' said Pasanius. 'Looks like they're coming in.'

A sergeant with ocular implants integral to his helmet waved two squads forward. A heavy, square device was planted in the centre of the gate and a cable run back to the lead Chimera by a robed enginseer with a heavy backpack of hissing cogs and bronze instruments.

A flickering glow built around the box attached to the gate and a crackle of electrical discharge flared along the length of the fence. Barely had the glow faded than the soldiers were coming through, the magnetically sealed gates swinging open with a booted kick.

The red-clad soldiers spread out, moving in pairs to expertly envelop them in overlapping fields of fire.

'Clear!' shouted one soldier, and the cry was repeated by his opposite number.

Up close, Uriel saw that they were professional soldiers indeed. They kept a precise distance from their targets, while still remaining close enough for it to be impossible to miss if this encounter turned violent. None even seemed fazed by the fact that their guns were aimed at warriors who clearly had the bulk of Astartes.

The sergeant with the ocular implants came forward with his curved sword drawn, and Uriel could see that the weapon was a form of falcata, a single-edged blade that pitched forward towards the point. Such weapons were heavy and capable of delivering a blow with the power of an axe, yet with the precision and cutting edge of a sword. The hilt was hook-shaped with quillons in the shape of flaring eagle wings.

Using the tip of his blade, the sergeant hooked Pasanius's bolter away from him and gestured a soldier behind him to carry it away. The soldier struggled under the weight of the gun and Uriel watched as it was handed off to the eager looking enginseer.

The sergeant looked Uriel up and down, his face invisible behind a combination vox/rebreather attachment and his bionics. With their only gun taken away, the soldiers relaxed a fraction and Uriel felt his respect for them drop a notch, for Uriel still carried his sword. In any case, the soldiers should know that a Space Marine was as proficient a killer with his bare hands as he was with a weapon.

No one moved until the top hatch on one of the Chimeras opened and a slender figure in the uniform of an officer emerged. Uriel saw that it was a woman, a tall, long-limbed woman who dropped to the ground with the assured movements of someone used to being in the field.

She pulled off her helmet and ran a hand across her scalp. Her hair was dark and cut short, her features angular and chiselled. She marched from her Chimera, trailed by a shorter man bearing a portable vox-caster on his back.

Like every one of her soldiers, she too bore a sheathed falcata. A golden eagle medal shone brightly on her uniform jacket.

The woman halted beside her sergeant, clearly surprised to see two such warriors standing before her. To her credit, her surprise lasted for only the briefest of seconds.

'Who are you?' she asked.

'I am Uriel Ventris and this is Pasanius Lysane,' answered Uriel.

'You are Adeptus Astartes?'

It was asked as a rhetorical question, but Uriel nodded and said, 'We are Ultramarines.'

Again, Uriel saw surprise, but just as quickly it was masked. 'Ultramarines? You are a long way from home. How did you come to be here?'

'With respect,' said Uriel, 'we do not even know where here is. What planet is this?'

Ignoring Uriel's question, the female officer said, 'You are trespassing on prohibited ground, Uriel Ventris. To enter Khaturian carries a penalty of death.'

Uriel shared a shocked look with Pasanius. The sheer physical presence and legendary prowess of a Space Marine was enough to render most mortals speechless with awe and reverence, but this woman seemed unconcerned that she faced two of the Emperor's finest.

Anger touched Uriel and he took a step forward.

Immediately, a host of lasguns snapped up, and the soldiers' posture of vigilance was instantly restored.

'We are Space Marines of the Emperor,' snarled Uriel, the frustrations of the time they had spent exiled from the Chapter boiling to the surface. He gripped the hilt of his sword and said, 'We are warriors of the Fourth Company of the Ultramarines Chapter and you will show us some damned respect!'

The woman did not flinch from Uriel's outburst, but her hand flashed to her falcata.

'If you were to try to draw that weapon, I could cut you down before it was halfway drawn,' promised Uriel.

'And you would be dead a moment later,' she promised.

'Maybe so, but at least I would have silenced your insolent tongue,' snapped Uriel.

He felt a restraining hand on his arm and turned to see Pasanius, a look of resigned amusement in his eyes.

'Remember when I asked you how we were going to play this?' asked Pasanius 'You said, ''Carefully''. Does this fit any definition of careful?'

Uriel's anger vanished and he smiled at the absurdity of his behaviour in the face of so much firepower. He released his sword hilt and returned his gaze to the female officer, who glared furiously at him with her hand still held firmly on the grip of her weapon.

Pasanius stepped between her and Uriel. 'Look, before this gets out of hand and someone gets killed, let's everyone take a breath and we'll start again. We are strangers on this world and didn't know that to come here was forbidden. We're just trying to get back to our Chapter and could really use your help. Can you at least tell us what planet we're on and who's in charge?'

The woman relaxed a fraction and released her weapon. She took a deep breath, smoothed the front of her uniform jacket and laced her hands behind her back.

'Very well,' she said. 'I am Colonel Verena Kain, commanding officer of the Achaman Falcatas, and this world is called Salinas.'

'Who's in charge?'

'Governor Leto Barbaden is the Imperial Commander of this world,' said Colonel Kain.

'Can you take us to him?' asked Uriel.

'You'll have to travel under armed escort until your identities can be verified.'

'Verified?' asked Uriel. 'You don't believe we are Adeptus Astartes? Are you blind?'

'Trust me,' snapped Kain. 'I have spent decades fighting the Emperor's enemies, and some of them looked just like you, so you'll forgive me if I don't entirely trust that you are all you seem.'

Uriel was about to retort when Pasanius said, 'Colonel Kain has a point, Uriel. Come on, what does it matter anyway? We're going where we need to go.'

'I suppose so,' said Uriel.

'You'll travel in the back of a Chimera,' said Kain, gauging their bulk. 'It will be cramped, but you can squeeze in I'm sure.'

'Indeed,' said Pasanius, leading Uriel forward under the watchful gaze and lasguns of the Guardsmen.

As they marched towards the waiting Chimeras, Pasanius turned to address Colonel Kain one last time. 'One other thing,' he said. 'What year is it?'

FOUR

The light coming through his threadbare curtains and the sound of the city coming to life woke Pascal Blaise long before he heard the metal door to his home banging open. He rolled over and reached under his pillow for the pistol that was never more than an arm's length away from him. He checked the load and flicked off the safety catch as he heard excited voices from downstairs.

From the tone of the voices and the lack of further commotion, he knew it wasn't Daron Nisato's enforcers kicking down the door, but didn't put away his pistol just yet. These were uncertain times and the deadly games he and the Sons of Salinas were playing demanded caution.

He ran a hand over his shaved scalp and tugged at the twin forks of his braided beard, as he always did when thinking. He recognised the voices below; one belonged to Cawlen Hurq, his shadow and bodyguard, the other to Rykard Ustel, one of his intelligence gatherers.

Pascal rolled his head, loosening muscles that had cramped during the night. He was alone and the room smelled faintly of engine oil, but that was inevitable given that it was sheeted with plates cannibalised from the rusted hulk of a Leman Russ battle tank.

Satisfied that there was no immediate danger, Pascal slipped from the bed and pulled on his clothes, a faded grey work tunic and a wide leather belt. He pulled on his boots and was lacing them up when he heard a soft double knock at his door.

'Come in, Cawlen,' he said, his voice strong and authoritative. It was a voice used to giving commands, but had once been more used to calling out tithe numbers, accounts and scribe roll calls.

Cawlen Hurq pushed open the door and nodded respectfully towards him, his every motion controlled and unencumbered by unnecessary effort. He was a big man, broad of shoulder and threateningly built. Nature had made him unsuited for any role in life other than the infliction of violence. Like Pascal, Cawlen wore a simple tunic, but he also carried a short-barrelled lascarbine and bore a scabbarded blade at his hip.

'Rykard Ustel's here,' he said.

'I heard,' said Pascal. 'What does he want?'

'He's got word of troop movements.'

'And he has to bring it to me this early?' asked Pascal irritably.

'It's the Screaming Eagles,' said Cawlen, 'in company strength.'

Pascal's irritation vanished along with any lingering tiredness. The Screaming Eagles were the most hated of all the Imperial forces on Salinas. Their reputation for brutality and indiscriminate violence was well deserved and everyone on Salinas had cause to hate them for what they had done to Khaturian.

'It gets better,' said Cawlen.

'How?'

'Kain's leading them.'

Pascal finished tying his boots and rose from his bed. Verena Kain.

'Oh, but it would be sweet to take that black-hearted bitch down.'

'That's what I thought,' agreed Cawlen with a wicked grin. 'Where are they?'

'Rykard said they set off towards the north,' said Cawlen. 'Said it looked like they were heading towards the Killing Ground.'

'Do we have anyone there?'

'No; at least we shouldn't.'

'Then why is she leading a company there?'

'Who knows, but Rykard said they didn't have any supply vehicles with them, so they'll be back soon. We should get shooters in place.'

Pascal nodded. 'Send runners to the ambush cells. Six teams of missiles. We'll assemble at the Iron Angel and deploy from there. Go.'

Cawlen nodded and left the room, leaving Pascal alone once more.

Pascal felt his heart race at the thought of striking back at the Screaming Eagles. He fought to control his excitement, knowing that a cool head was needed here. Emotional men made mistakes and he was not a man given to displays of emotion, considering them a waste of energy.

He paced the room, thinking through the situation, unlocking talents for analysis that had once served him well in the ranks of the Imperial Administratum, a duty that seemed a lifetime ago.

Pascal Blaise had been a scribe overseer in the office of Governor Shaara, a cog in the ever-turning machine that was the Imperial bureaucracy of Salinas in the days before the Achaman Falcatas had come. Though other planets in the system had seethed with turmoil and unrest, Governor Shaara had kept Salinas free of malcontents and rabble-rousers in the belief that they could ride out this time of troubles.

How wrong he had turned out to be.

Tarred with the same brush as the system's other worlds, the hammer of the Imperial Guard had fallen, on Salinas with no less ferocity and force as it had on the others. Governor Shaara had been executed the day the Falcatas had landed and his officers rounded up in detention camps while the Departmento Munitorum officials decided what was to be done with them.

Pascal Blaise had been part of the delegation chosen from among the surviving administrative personnel to approach Colonel Leto Barbaden, the commander of the Imperial forces moving across the surface of Salinas, to protest at the unnecessary nature of these measures.

The memories of that day were burned forever on Pascal Blaise's mind. No sooner had they spoken against the harshness of the Falcatas and the loyalty of their former governor than a detachment of soldiers, men and women that Pascal later learned were Barbaden's 8th Company known as the Screaming Eagles, had surrounded them.

Colonel Barbaden had spoken of the treachery that infected the system and of how he had heard the same protests of innocence from the lips of every leader on the rebellious worlds.

Then the shooting had begun.

Pascal reached towards the puckered scar tissue at his chest where the first las-bolt had struck him. A second had grazed the side of his head and he had fallen into a black pit of pain and unconsciousness. When he had awoken, he was in a long trench, freshly dug outside the palace walls, which was filled with corpses. He had recognised the faces of his fellow delegates and the horror and injustice of their murder allowed him to plumb reserves of strength and endurance that he had not known he possessed.

Bleeding and on the verge of collapse, he had climbed from the mass grave and lurched through the shot-and-scream-filled darkness until he found his way to the nearest house of healing, where his strength had finally given out.

He remembered nothing of the next few days except pain and the sedative highs of medication. A week after his shooting, he had risen from his bed to hear the sounds of Imperial Guard tanks rumbling through the streets of his city and the tramp of marching feet as red-clad soldiers of the Achaman Falcatas rounded up suspected traitors.

Hatred filled him and, in that moment, the administrative overseer he had once been died and the warrior he became was born. Within a month of the Falcatas arrival, the newly formed Sons of Salinas made its first gesture of defiance, planting a bomb that had killed several senior officers of the Falcatas.

Under the charismatic and fiery Sylvanus Thayer, the Sons of Salinas had enjoyed initial successes and had seriously hampered the work of the Falcatas in securing Salinas.

It couldn't last.

Against the relentless force of the Imperial Guard and the ruthlessness of Leto Barbaden, the Sons of Salinas could not hope to prevail. After the horror of the Killing Ground, Sylvanus Thayer had led the vengeful Sons of Salinas into a pitched battle, a battle they could not hope to win, and the flower of their world's manhood had been wiped out.

Pascal had pleaded with Sylvanus not to meet the Falcatas in open battle, telling him over and over that the destruction of Khaturian had been designed to draw him into such a reckless act, but his leader's fury at the massacre could not be restrained.

And, they had died, pounded by artillery, ground over by tanks and finished off by infantry.

Men called Sylvanus Thayer a hero, but Pascal knew the man was a fool. Blinded by rage and the need for vengeance, he had not seen the trap that Barbaden had laid for him. Or if he had seen it, he had not cared.

Pascal Blaise had rallied the survivors and taught them the value of caution and secrecy. He had taught them that they were not the almighty avenging force that Thayer had told them they were, but the trickle of water that, over time, would split the rock.

Thus the war of the Sons of Salinas had continued.

There were no grand gestures of defiance, but small attacks that gradually wore down the soldiers who occupied their cities and whose former colonel sat in the Governor's palace.

A knock at the door drew Pascal from his bitter reveries and he looked up to see Cawlen Hurq standing at the door once again.

'You coming?' he asked.

'Yes,' said Pascal, lifting his ash-grey storm cloak.

He smiled and dropped the cloak, opening the gun-metal footlocker beside his bed and reaching for the cunningly disguised switch that opened the secret compartment at its base. Pascal lifted the false bottom and drew out a carefully folded bundle of green and gold cloth.

He swept up the double wrapped cloak of the Sons of Salinas and fastened it to the buckles at his shoulder and chest.

Cawlen nodded appreciatively.

Pascal bolstered his pistol and grinned to his bodyguard. 'If we're going to kill Verena Kain, it's only fitting she should know who her executioners are.'

High in the mountains above the dead city, the Lord of the Unfleshed sat with the rest of his brethren in the midst of a forest of tall trees. Mist clung to the ground and the wet sensation of it around the exposed musculature was strange and unusual. The softness of the ground beneath him was a joy and the cold air in his lungs the sweetest elixir.

He had never known such things, his every breath before now coated with toxic filth from the belching refineries that covered the desolate plains of the Iron Men's world.

They had brought down another two of the beasts that lived in the pastures below a towering escarpment of rock and dragged them into the concealment of the forest. The carcasses lay torn apart and bleeding in a ring of the Unfleshed. The Lord of the Unfleshed tore meat from the bone with his teeth, the hind leg of one of the animals clutched in one meaty fist.

The meat was like nothing he had tasted before, fresh, bloody and full of goodness. All he could remember eating was the spoiled meat of the dead or the chemically disfigured, the fatty bodies of the ones they had found in the flesh camps of the Iron Men.

The thought that there could be another way to live had never entered the Lord of the Unfleshed's mind, for what other life was there? Fragmentary visions of his life before, like images on the shards of a broken mirror pricked his mind from time to time, but he had always turned from them.

Sometimes, when the pain and exhaustion of his existence grew too great to bear, he would travel deep into the ashen mountains and bask in the smoggy peaks wreathed in caustic pollutants that would send him into the deepest slumbers, where he could cling to the last of his remembrances.

There his body would rest, and he could reach the dreams of another life, another way of living.

Were they memories? He didn't know, but he liked to think so.

He would see a woman's face, kind and full of unconditional love. He hoped she was his mother, but had no memory of her beyond this sight. She would speak to him, but he never heard the words. All he saw was how beautiful she was and how much she cared for him.

As the fumes carried him deeper into the tormented depths of his altered mind, he saw towering buildings of white stone, glorious windows of many colours and a host of statues depicting a golden warrior, his head haloed in stars and surrounded by angels of light.

Of all the fevered visions the Lord of the Unfleshed saw, this one had the most power and, more than that, it had an identity.

This was the Emperor and the Emperor loved him.

This love would never last and these golden memories would shatter, replaced by loathsome visions of horror and blood so terrifying that he would crush rocks with his fists in his dreaming frenzy.

He saw fire. He saw explosions and stuttering flickers of bullets.

In the bursts of light, he saw warriors in iron-grey armour fringed with chevrons of yellow and black.

Heavy, textured gauntlets reached for him, tearing him from the bloody corpse of the beautiful woman, his screams, falling on deaf ears as his world resolved into snapshots of horror: darkness and terror, the taste of blood never far from his mouth; slavering saw-carrying monsters and the giant, drooling faces of monstrous mothers.

Then only pain and emptiness as he felt himself enfolded by moist folds of flesh and dragged down into darkness.

Then, gloriously, light.

But the light was a lie and served only to reveal his hideousness.

A monster he was and a monster he became, flushed away with the rest of the rotten meat into the unforgiving wilderness beyond the Iron Men's citadel.

His revulsion at his own horrible existence would always break the grip of the toxic fumes and he would rise from the mountainside to make his way back down to his wretched band, the unwanted, the rejected and the unloved.

Many of the wailing masses of twisted meat and bone shat from above were howling things without form or mind.

These the tribe would eat, but those with enough semblance of form and strength would become part of the Lord of the Unfleshed's growing tribe.

This was the Lord of the Unfleshed's life and he had known of no other way to live, until the warrior had come.

The Lord of the Unfleshed had watched the latest outpourings from the Iron Men's citadel fall into the pool, imagining the taste of their meat as they struggled to the edge of the black water. Anticipation turned to puzzlement, for they were none of them monsters. His only thought had been to feast on them, but he had smelled the mother meat on the warrior who led the new arrivals.

The Lord of the Unfleshed had taken the new arrivals to the great cavern beneath the earth that was home and presented them to the mighty statue of the Emperor that they had built from the detritus flushed from above. The Emperor had judged the warrior, who called himself Uriel, worthy and so they had become part of the tribe and struck back at the Iron Men who lived in the fortress on top of the impossible mountain.

Much blood had been shed, many Iron Men killed and their fortress brought crashing down. Many of the Unfleshed had died also, but it was a good memory, one the Lord of the Unfleshed held fast to as they escaped the world of their monstrous birth in the bowels of the iron daemon's machine.

The Lord of the Unfleshed did not like to think of the time spent within the daemonic machine's reeking, blood-soaked depths, for it had taken all his power and strength to prevent the tribe from turning on one another in a frenzy of gnashing jaws and taloned fists.

The journey had ended though and they had set foot on this world. The air was clean and the ground soft, but there was something wrong with it. He did not know what it was or how to articulate that wrongness, but a presence of great anger saturated the air of this place.

He could feel it as surely as he felt the blood running down his fleshless face.

The meat from the carcasses was almost gone. One of the tribe, a creature with glistening organs oozing at the edges of its bones and a hideously elongated mouth filled with serrated fangs, snapped bones and sucked the marrow from them. Another scraped the inside of the gutted beast's stomach for the last morsels.

'No,' growled the Lord of the Unfleshed, 'we not need to live like this.'

The tribe looked up at him, confusion twisting their mangled features.

'This a better world for us,' he said. 'Uriel promise us this. We not be feared and Emperor loves us.'

He could see the hope in their eyes, the first rays of sunshine diffusing through the treetops with a soft golden glow. The Lord of the Unfleshed felt it on his skin as a pleasant tingle and looked down as the warmth spread across the raw redness of his arm.

He rose to his feet and made his way from the shadows of the forest, ducking under branches as the sun rose higher over the mountains and spilled its golden light over the landscape. The tribe followed him, captivated by the glow building in the sky.

Walking like recently awakened sleepwalkers, the Unfleshed made their way from beneath the trees to stand in the open. Their faces were alive with wonderment, the sight of this bright orb in the sky incredible and new, yet strangely familiar.

Memories of happier times fought to reach the surface of the Lord of the Unfleshed's mind and he felt the beginnings of hope stir in his breast. Perhaps this could be a better place, a new beginning on a world where they were not hated and hunted.

The sensation of the sunlight on his body grew stronger, the tingling turning to something else, something painful. The tribe began to moan, rubbing their arms and bodies as though scratching at a persistent itch.

The Lord of the Unfleshed felt the musculature of his body begin to burn, the sensation like the angry heat that covered his body whenever he had ventured into the filthy waters of the Iron Men's world.

He growled as the burning sensation grew stronger, the meat of his body unused to the strange sun's rays. Black patches began to form on his skin, spreading like droplets of oil on water. Pain grew as the black, blistering marks grew and the Lord of the Unfleshed roared as he scratched one and a viscous pus oozed from the wound.

On the Iron Men's world, the sun radiated despair and hopelessness, but this one… this one radiated pain.

The Unfleshed began to howl, clawing at the meat of their limbs and bodies as they struggled to understand what was happening to them. Their cries were piteous as the sunlight burned their bodies and the Lord of the Unfleshed roared in anger and hurt betrayal.

This world was no good. He had known it, but had allowed himself to forget that everything hated them.

Even the sun wanted to destroy them.

'Tribe!' he roared. 'Back! Back into shadow!'

He turned from the burning sun and ran back to the shelter of the trees, but even there the sunlight found them, slicing through the trees in deadly beams that seared the unprotected flesh of their bodies. The Unfleshed looked to him for guidance, but he had none to give.

There was no better life, not for the likes of them.

The Unfleshed bellowed and beat their chests in agony and the Lord of the Unfleshed cried his frustration to the heavens. Through the foliage he saw the rocky escarpment rearing above them, a vertical slab of glistening black rock with numerous waterfalls cascading from high above.

Against the blackness of the rock, the Lord of the Unfleshed saw a patch of deeper darkness, a cleft in the sheer surface: a cave.

'Tribe must run!' he cried. 'Find shelter in rocks! Follow!'

Without looking to see if any came with him, the Lord of the Unfleshed broke from the scant cover of the forest and ran uphill towards the cliffs. His powerful muscles easily carried him across the landscape, leaping over huge boulders and shutting out the burning pain that threatened to overwhelm him.

Behind him, he heard howls of pain, but also the sounds of the tribe following him, wet, meaty footfalls and the crack of malformed bones grinding together.

The black lesions spread across his body as he ran, but the Lord of the Unfleshed shut out the pain, his entire being focused on reaching the cooling darkness of the cave. He vaulted a fallen slab of rock and slowed his pace as he slid into the shadow. The immediate burning sensation subsided, but the crawling pain in his limbs and body remained.

He turned as the faster members of the tribe completed their mad dash to the cave, howling and gnashing their teeth against the pain. The Lord of the Unfleshed turned to see others making their painful way over the open ground, the golden light searing and blackening the meat on their bones with every passing second.

One of the Unfleshed, a creature with stunted legs and an oversized upper body tripped on a loose boulder. It fell to the ground with a shriek of pain, viscous ooze seeping from burns that tore open as it landed. Its glistening, red body split apart where it was burned and it fought to right itself. Its body was out of balance and it could not get up. Powerful arms sought to haul it to its feet, but the pain and horror of what was happening to it were too much.

The creature collapsed with one final howl, and the Lord of the Unfleshed watched the blackness creeping across its body as the unforgiving sun burned away the last of its life.

'Dead now,' said the Lord of the Unfleshed and the others shuffled over to look at the blackening corpse. They could smell the meat on it and he could sense their confusion and hunger, but none dared venture out into the light.

The Lord of the Unfleshed turned away from the light of the cave mouth. Black, water-streaked, walls stretched off into the distance and the darkness was comforting after the pain of the light. The Lord of the Unfleshed lurched deeper into the cliff, his thoughts in turmoil at this new pain.

Once more they were monsters, lurking in the darkness of the cave, where all monsters should be.

Anger swelled within the Lord of the Unfleshed.

The troop compartment of a Chimera armoured fighting vehicle claimed to be able to convey twelve soldiers and their kit into battle. As was typical for spaces designed by the military, it assumed that the soldiers would not need to move so much as a muscle once they were packed in. With two Space Marines inside, that space became seriously confined and five soldiers had been displaced and forced to ride back on the roof of the vehicle.

'And I thought Rhinos were cramped,' said Pasanius. 'Remind me never to complain to Harkus again.'

Uriel did not reply, keeping his eyes fixed on the landscape coming into view through the scuffed vision blocks that punctuated the sides of the vehicle and allowed a little natural light to enter the compartment. Recessed glow strips ran the length of the roof, but their light was a sickly red.

Four soldiers of the Achaman Falcatas sat with them in the back of the Chimera, three helmeted warriors with their lasguns held across their laps and the sergeant who had removed Pasanius's weapon. He alone had removed his helmet and Uriel saw that the ocular implants were integral to it and not part of him.

The sergeant was middle-aged, but had a weathered, deeply lined face topped by a shock of sandy hair. The man's eyes were hard, but not unkind, and he looked at Uriel and Pasanius with an expression that was part awe and part nervous excitement.

'So you're Ultramarines?' he said.

'We are,' nodded Uriel.

'I'm Sergeant Jonah Tremain,' said the man, extending his hand to Uriel. The hand beneath the gauntlet felt hard and inflexible to Uriel and he suspected that the sergeant's hand was augmetic.

His suspicions were confirmed when Tremain held up his hand and said, 'Lost it in a skirmish against eldar pirates. Caught a ricochet and a splinter of something got under the skin. Got infected and the medics had to take it right there and then.'

'I have fought the eldar before,' said Uriel. 'They are swift and deadly killers.'

'That they are,' agreed Tremain. 'That they are. But then the colonel was no slouch either. Outmanoeuvred them and none of their fancy tricks could save them when his Screaming Eagles had them locked in place.'

'His? I don't understand.'

'Ah, of course. Colonel Kain's only been in charge of what's left of the regiment since Restoration Day,' explained Tremain. 'Before that, Colonel Barbaden led the Falcatas.'

'The same Barbaden who is now governor?'

'The very same,' agreed Tremain. 'We won this world fair and square. Did our ten years of service, and after we'd fought through the hell of Losgat and Steinhold we were given the right to settle here once we'd won it back for the Emperor.'

Uriel glanced over at the silent soldiers who sat by the heavy iron assault door at the rear of the vehicle. They were hard, tough men and the notion that the sergeant would be so garrulous seemed out of character.

'So how did you pair come to be all the way out here?' asked Tremain.

'In that city or on this world?'

'Both,' said Tremain, smiling, but Uriel could see that the expression was forced. 'I'm sure it's an exciting story. We don't get many visitors here, let alone Space Marines. So come on, tell me how you came to be out here.'

Uriel could sense Pasanius's unspoken warning of saying too much and wondered if Colonel Kain was listening in. Had she placed Tremain in here to get them to talk unguardedly in front of a friendly sergeant?

'That is a long and… involved tale, Sergeant Tremain,' said Uriel.

'You must have a ship. I mean, how else would you have got to the surface?'

'No, we don't have a ship,' said Uriel.

'So did you just teleport down?' pressed Tremain. 'From a vessel in orbit? Or maybe a drop-pod? You Space Marines use drop-pods, don't you?'

'We do,' agreed Uriel, 'but we did not arrive in one.'

'Then how did you get here?'

'As I said, that's a long story, and one I think I'd prefer to tell Governor Barbaden. I will tell you this, though, we are loyal servants of the Emperor, just as you are. We have been on a mission for our Chapter and all we want is to go home to rejoin our battle brothers.'

'It's just that of all the places you had to turn up, it was there,' said Tremain.

'In Khaturian? That's what that place was called wasn't it?'

'Yes, that's what it was called,' said Tremain, and Uriel sensed the man's reticence to talk further of the dead city.

'What happened to it?' asked Uriel. 'Why does it carry a death penalty to go there?'

'It just does,' snapped Tremain. 'Now we'll have no more talk about the Killing Ground.'

'The Killing Ground?'

'I said we'd have no more talk about it,' warned Tremain, clearly not intimidated by the fact that he sat opposite a warrior who could kill him in the time it took to think it. Whatever the truth of Khaturian, or the Killing Ground as Tremain had called it, it was not a subject he was comfortable talking about.

Seeing he was going to get nothing useful from Uriel, Tremain's volubility evaporated and the next few hours of the journey were undertaken in silence, the sergeant offering no more insights to the world of Salinas or its inhabitants. Uriel made no attempt to engage him in conversation, and, instead, turned his attention to the slivers of landscape that he could see through the vision blocks fitted above the vehicle's integral lasguns.

What little he could see suggested a lush landscape of tall mountains, wide forests and clear skies. To see such things after the nightmarish landscapes of a daemon world in the Eye of Terror was a very real pleasure and Uriel looked forward to seeing more of this world before departing for Macragge.

The thought of seeing the home of his Chapter once more was like a balm on his soul and he could already feel the shadow that had fallen over his normal demeanour lifting.

They had completed their Death Oath and had returned to a world of the Imperium. True, they were little better than willing captives, but that would not be the case for long and Uriel was willing to suffer a little indignity before reaching home. He could not fault the Falcatas for their suspicions, for had they not appeared unannounced and unexpectedly in the middle of nowhere? Had someone done the same on Macragge, they would have been hurled into the deepest dungeons of the Fortress of Hera before being mercilessly interrogated.

Ah… the Fortress of Hera: the great libraries of knowledge, the Temple of Correction where the body of Roboute Guilliman lay in stasis, the Hall of Heroes, the Valley of Laponis… So many wondrous places.

If given the chance upon their return to Macragge, Uriel decided he would visit them all.

A crackling voice from a battered loudspeaker cut through his reverie.

'All units, mount up,' said Verena Kain's voice. 'Everyone get on a gun, we're approaching the outskirts of Barbadus.'

Uriel returned his attention to Tremain. 'Barbadus?' he said. 'Is that a city?'

Tremain nodded, chivvying the four remaining soldiers onto the integral lasguns.

'Yeah, it's the capital,' said Tremain, pulling a periscope-like device with a scratched pict slate down from the metal roof of the compartment. The slate flickered to life, displaying a static-washed image of the approaching conurbation.

Its outline was blurred and the buildings at the edge of the city looked somehow strange to Uriel, but the resolution of the image was too indistinct for him to see exactly why.

Raised high above the outskirts of the city's edge was a tall structure or sculpture that, through the distortion of the pict slate, looked like a winged angel.

As the column of vehicles drew closer, Uriel asked. 'What is that?'

Tremain said, 'That? It's the Iron Angel.'

Pascal Blaise crouched behind the low roof parapet of an adobe ruin as he watched the approaching Chimeras. He had given up trying to identify in which vehicle Colonel Kain would be travelling, for none had the distinctive whip aerials of a long range vox or bore any distinctive iconography that might indicate that a senior officer was aboard.

No, the Falcatas has learned not to make such elementary mistakes.

Three Sentinels roamed ahead of the column and another three brought up the rear and he had a moment's unease as he pictured the amount of firepower this force could pump out.

Beside him, Cawlen Hurq cradled a battered missile tube, the projectile already loaded and primed. Across the street, on buildings to either side of him and within burned out chassis of tanks, were another five missile teams and thirty gunmen armed with a variety of ancient lasguns and simple bolt action rifles.

The men had been hastily assembled and though acting with such haste and lack of planning went against everything he taught his soldiers, the chance to take out Kain was too tempting to pass up.

The Chimeras were rumbling at speed through the ragged outskirts of the city, where the buildings became more decrepit and bled out into the landscape. Even now, Sons of Salinas sympathisers would be clearing the dwellings below him of innocents. Pascal Blaise was careful not to place the people of his world in any unnecessary danger, but the Falcatas would not be so careful when they retaliated.

Hopefully, by the time such retaliation was unleashed, he and his men would have vanished into the maze of ruins and abandoned vehicles that filled the city.

'Ready?' he whispered, the rumbling of the tracked vehicles growing louder with every passing second.

'Damn right,' said Cawlen.

'Let the walkers go past and then take out the lead vehicle,' said Pascal. 'The others are waiting for you to fire.'

'I know,' hissed Cawlen. 'Believe it or not, I have done this before.'

'Yes, of course. Sorry,' replied Pascal, fighting his instinct to micromanage.

Confident that Cawlen Hurq would unleash the ambush at the right moment, Pascal looked up at the Iron Angel, the guardian and lucky charm of the Sons of Salinas.

The great sculpture of scavenged parts towered above him. Her wings were those of a crashed Thunderbolt, her body shaped from the crumpled remains of its fuselage and her features formed from engine parts.

She was crude and unfinished, and she was beautiful.

'Watch over us today, fair lady,' he whispered.

Pascal slid his body up to look over the parapet.

The Chimeras had entered the killing box.

Cawlen Hurq rose to his knees and swung the missile tube over the parapet to point at the Chimeras on the street below.

'For the Sons of Salinas!' he yelled and mashed the firing trigger.

FIVE

Uriel heard the explosion through the armoured skin of the Chimera as a dull whump, the concussion of the detonation rocking the vehicle back on its tracks. Bright light flashed through the vision blocks and a series of rattling pings sounded as blazing shrapnel smacked the hull.

Another explosion sounded, this time from behind and the internal speakers suddenly exploded with chatter and screams.

'Ambush!' he shouted, before the echoes of the first blast had begun to fade.

A tremendous impact hammered the side of the Chimera, tipping it up onto one track. The soldiers cried out and Uriel snatched for the grab rail as the vehicle slammed back down to earth. A portion of the Chimera's side bulged inwards. Smoke and sparks spewed into the compartment and Uriel smelled blood.

One of the soldiers was down, his neck clearly broken. Another was screaming, his face a mask of red where it had smashed against the interior of the hull. The others lay bruised, but unhurt and Uriel surged from his seat against the hull to hammer the release mechanism of the assault door. Immobilised, the Chimera was a death trap.

Hot fumes blew inside and Uriel caught the reek of burning propellant and scorched flesh. Outside, morning sunlight illuminated a blazing vehicle, flames spewing from its ruptured sides and thick, tarry black smoke billowing into the sky.

'Come on!' he shouted. 'Out!'

Pasanius grabbed the wounded soldier as Tremain helped the others escape the stricken Chimera. Bodies and shredded pieces of meat littered the ground, the exploded remnants of the soldiers forced to travel on the roof.

Another whooshing roar made Uriel look up in time to see a missile streak from its launcher and slam into the roof of another of Colonel Kain's Chimeras. This time the missile punched through the thinner armour of the vehicle's topside and it shuddered as the warhead exploded inside. Smoke ripped upwards and a rattle of gunfire barked from the rooftops as previously hidden gunmen revealed themselves.

Uriel dragged another wounded soldier away from the fire that was taking hold of their stricken vehicle. The engine was ablaze and it was only a matter of time before the ammo and power pack on board cooked off explosively.

Solid rounds and las-bolts smacked the earth and Uriel ducked as he and the wounded soldier made their way into cover. A hail of shots tore into the wall next to him. Fragments of rock billowed and he blinked dust from his eyes.

Pasanius joined him, propping the wounded soldier against the rough stone of a sagging ruin, and Uriel laid the man he carried next to him. Shots rattled from both sides of the street, a street that Uriel could see was composed of rough, adobe brick buildings and what looked like the shells of abandoned tanks.

Canvas awnings and corrugated iron porches had been built into the rusting hulks and these ad hoc dwellings outnumbered those constructed of more traditional materials.

'We should get into this fight,' said Uriel.

'With what?' pointed out Pasanius. 'Kain's lot seem like they know what they're doing.'

That at least was true. Colonel Kain's Chimeras were roaring forward to protect the damaged vehicles while spraying bright bolts of las-fire into the buildings on either side of the street.

The soldiers were fighting from their vehicles, letting the armour take the weight of small-arms fire while the turrets opened up with the snapping fizz of heavy las-bolts. A Chimera pulled ahead of Uriel in a skid of dirt and fumes as it sought to protect a damaged one.

Hard bangs of gunfire echoed from the turret-mounted heavy bolter, the rounds chewing up the stone parapets of the opposite buildings. Uriel saw puffs of red and heard screams over the incessant gunfire. The shooters had sprung their ambush well, but they were hunkered down behind a parapet that might as well have been fashioned from paper for all the protection it provided against bolter rounds.

Uriel watched as a loping Sentinel unleashed a torrent of autocannon rounds towards a group of men moving between the ruins. The heavy calibre shells exploded among them and they all fell, chewed up and unrecognisable, their blood spraying on the pale stone walls in looping arcs.

A shot rang out, distinctive and high pitched, and the Sentinel pilot's head snapped back, a ragged hole punched in the back of his head. Sniper.

Uriel glanced in the direction of the shot and saw the blurred outline of the shooter through the smoke of the battle. More of the Chimeras were pulling up to the damaged ones and soldiers were helping their comrades from the blazing wrecks to pull them inside those that had, thus far, escaped attack.

Uriel risked a glance around the bullet-chipped corner that he sheltered behind. To stand by and watch a battle being fought around him was anathema to him, and he knew he could not sit idly by while others were dying around him.

He turned to Pasanius, but before he could open his mouth, his sergeant said, 'You're going in, I know. Go. I'll cover you.'

Uriel nodded and slid from the alleyway, running towards a damaged Chimera that listed horribly to one side. Smears of blood and oil streaked its surfaces and smoke spat from its stinking interior. Its main gun was buckled, but Uriel had seen that its pintle-mounted weapon was still intact.

Bullets filled the air, the distinctive whine and buzz of them telling Uriel how close they were. Ricochets spanged from armour and he felt a burning line across his calf of something hot and sharp.

He dived into the cover of the listing Chimera and rolled to his feet in its shadow. He gripped the upper edge of the Chimera's hull and swung himself up onto its roof, scrambling across the upper armour towards the pintle-mounted gun. He snapped off the safety and swung the weapon around, his posture unsuited to firing it, but his strength more than able to bear the brunt of its recoil.

The sniper reared up to take aim at another Sentinel and Uriel pressed down on the palm triggers. The noise of the weapon was deafening, uncompromising, and designed to intimidate as much as wound. Heavy slugs spat from the barrel in a flaring burst. Uriel's target flew apart into flesh chunks and a fountain of blood.

He swivelled the weapon on its mount, raking the pounding thump of heavy bullets across the parapet line of the buildings opposite. Clay bricks dissolved under the impacts, blasted to powder by the high velocity slugs. The recoil was prodigious, but easily controllable by the strength of a Space Marine.

A las-bolt creased Uriel's shoulder and he flinched at the sudden pain, but kept his weapon trained on the roof-lines opposite. Arcs of bronze shells spewed from the smoking breech.

'Uriel!' shouted Pasanius from below. 'Your left!'

He turned towards where Pasanius was gesturing with the stump of his arm, seeing a flicker of movement between two blackened hulks of tanks that were now homes. A group of three men were preparing to launch a missile, and Uriel pulled the trigger as he brought his weapon to bear.

The bullets described a curving line as the weapon discharged, the impacts ringing like the sound of a hundred bells as they ricocheted from metal hulls. One man was hurled from his feet, a hole the size of his torso blasted in his body.

To their credit, neither of the other two men balked at the horrific death of their comrade, but kept the missile tube aimed squarely at the Chimera that Uriel sat upon. He kept the weapon trained on them, but the gun coughed dry, the hammer snapping on an empty chamber.

Uriel could see triumph on the gunner's face as he closed one eye. Then his head exploded.

Uriel heard the distinctive report of a bolt weapon and saw Pasanius running towards him from the alleyway, the welcome sight of a bolt pistol bucking in his left hand. His sergeant fired again and the second man was pitched from his feet. A tremendous explosion mushroomed skyward as Pasanius's next bolt connected with the spare warheads in the canvas sack he wore.

The gunner's missile corkscrewed up from his fallen corpse, spinning wildly before exploding and smearing the sky with black tendrils of smoke.

More grinding sounds of tracks and the heavier, percussive thump of concentrated volleys of fire filled the air and Uriel released the grips of the heavy stubber. Colonel Kain's soldiers had the situation under control and Uriel could add little to the battle.

He saw a flash of green and gold and looked up to see a cloaked man with a shaved head and forked beard through a pulverised section of parapet. The man was shouting, but his words were inaudible over the roar of gunfire and the mad revving of engines.

Even Uriel's enhanced hearing could make out little of what the man was saying, but the sense of his words was clear as gun barrels vanished from rooftops. The weight of fire fell away as the ambushers disengaged and melted into the tumbled ruins.

The man risked one last glance from the rooftops and his eyes locked with Uriel's.

Uriel knew hate when he saw it. He had seen enough on Medrengard to last a lifetime.

This man hated him and wanted him dead, and not just him, but everyone in this bloody, smoke-filled street: the Falcatas, Uriel, Pasanius and every soldier who fought and shouted to their wounded comrades.

The man vanished from view and Uriel rolled from the roof of the Chimera.

He landed in the dirt beside Pasanius.

'Thanks for the warning,' said Uriel. 'That missile could have really spoiled my day.'

'No problem,' replied Pasanius. 'He'd have probably missed anyway. These idiots didn't know they were beaten until it was too late for them.'

Uriel had to agree with his friend's assessment of their opponents. The Falcatas had taken a serious hit when the ambush had been sprung, but had reacted with commendable speed and calm. The soldiers had followed their training and got into the fight without the confusion and panic that might have handed their attackers a victory.

Instead of retreating after their initial success, the ambushers had fought for longer than was sensible and had suffered the worst of the encounter, unable to match the discipline and firepower of a well-led force of Imperial Guard.

'Did you see the man with the green and gold cloak?' asked Uriel.

'I did,' said Pasanius, awkwardly trying to reload the bolt pistol. 'He looked like the leader. Stupid of him to wear something so noticeable though.'

'That's what I thought,' agreed Uriel, taking the bolt pistol from Pasanius and sliding a fresh magazine home. 'Where did you get this?'

'From him,' said Pasanius, indicating a dead sergeant of the Falcatas at the edge of the battlefield with a chunk of shrapnel the size of a shoulder guard buried in his face. 'Didn't think he'd be needing it again and thought it would be appropriate to use his own weapon to avenge him.'

'Very appropriate,' nodded Uriel.

'It means I don't have to use that other damned weapon…'

'Where is it now?'

'In there,' said Pasanius, pointing at the wreck they had clambered from what must only have been minutes ago. 'I'll let it burn.'

Uriel understood Pasanius's sentiment, for there was no honour and only risk in using a weapon that had been touched by the Ruinous Powers. Better to let it perish in the fire than risk it turning upon you.

Another Chimera pulled up beside them, the hatch in the turret open and Verena Kain leaning on the handles of a pintle storm bolter. The barrels smoked and Kain's face was black with dirt, pink lines streaking her features where sweat had run from her scalp.

'Get in,' she barked. 'They could be back.'

'Unlikely,' said Uriel, but he picked himself up and helped Pasanius to his feet. The armoured door at the back of the Chimera opened and Sergeant Tremain and two other troopers stepped out, their lasguns trained on the roof-lines.

Tremain beckoned them over and Uriel and Pasanius jogged over to the rumbling vehicle.

The street was filled with smoke and five blazing wrecks were abandoned where they had been destroyed. There were no bodies to be seen, the dead and wounded gathered up by the crews of the surviving vehicles. The Sentinel whose pilot Uriel had seen shot had collapsed, its leg broken by a careening Chimera. The pilot was nowhere to be seen.

Uriel shielded his eyes and asked Kain, 'Where to now?'

'To the barracks,' said Kain. 'It's closer and we have wounded.'

He had more questions, but the needs of the wounded took precedence and seconds could make the difference between life and death for some of these soldiers. Tremain clambered inside the Chimera, but as Uriel gripped the sides of the door, he saw that the compartment was full to bursting with wounded men who groaned as they lay on the sloshing floor. Uriel knew that the other vehicles would also be like this, thick with the stench of fear and pain and blood.

Soldiers sat shoulder to shoulder, packed in more tightly than even the most ambitious vehicle designer could have hoped, and Uriel saw a respect and admiration in their eyes that hadn't been there before.

Soldiers shuffled as they made room for them, word of Uriel and Pasanius's involvement in the fight having spread to those who hadn't seen it. Corpsmen cared for the wounded as best they were able in the red-lit compartment and a sullen anger simmered below the surface of every man on board.

'We'll ride on top,' said Uriel. 'You need all the room you can get in here.'

The Chimeras sped onwards through the city of Barbadus, and Uriel was afforded his first proper look at this Imperial capital. It appeared to have grown up around the ruins of an ancient battlefield, such was the litter and detritus of warfare that lay strewn around. Entire graveyards of armoured vehicles had been abandoned and left for the elements to devour and the people of the planet to colonise.

Buildings of agglomerated stone, brick and metal leaned precariously, supported by iron buttresses that had once been the main guns of armoured vehicles. The further into the city the racing column of vehicles went, the more solid and conventional the structures became, high-walled towers of pink stone and bleached timber.

Buildings of dark iron and tempered glass that were of Imperial origin nestled uncomfortably amongst the pale stone and clay bricks of the city and Uriel saw evidence of the war that had been fought to win this world on every one of the older buildings: las-burns and bullet marks, the latter worn smooth by the elements.

Uriel caught glimpses of green and gold streamers wafting from high spires and sagging clotheslines, the same green and gold that the man with the forked beard had been wearing. Many of the memorials in the dead city had streamers of the same colours attached to them and Uriel wondered what they symbolised.

'Emperor's blood!' hissed Pasanius, looking towards a gently sloping hill that rose to the west of the city.

'What?' said Uriel, fearing another ambush.

'Would you look at that?' said Pasanius. 'I've never seen the like.'

Uriel followed Pasanius's gaze and saw a strangely shaped building on the plateau of the hill. There was a familiarity to its silhouette, but it took him some moments to realise why.

The inhabitants of the city had been thorough in their cannibalisation of the discarded armoured vehicles, rendering many of them into dwellings, but this act of refurbishment was surely the apex of the scavenger's art.

Three towering Capitol Imperialis, mighty leviathans of vehicles used for command and control of entire battlefronts, sat side by side and had been transformed into something else entirely. Hundreds of crewmen and officers could operate from within each of these incredible war machines, directing entire regiments of artillery, hundreds of thousands of men and entire companies of armoured vehicles. To see one such colossus on a battlefield was rare, but to see three, abandoned no less, was unheard of.

They were surely abandoned, for the rust and corrosion on their sides was clear proof that these machines were no longer in use. The Imperial eagles on the sides of the outer two were gone, though it was impossible to tell whether they had been erased by the elements or by design. Swaying walkways joined them and iron-sheathed tunnels connected them at lower levels.

'What do you suppose it is?' asked Pasanius.

Uriel had been wondering the same thing. As he looked closer, he saw what might have been a winged staff encircled by a pair of entwined serpents above the control bridge of the middle vehicle.

A caduceus?

'A medicae facility perhaps?' suggested Uriel. 'Seems a bit excessive to use Capitol Imperialis for that.'

'True, but perhaps that was all they were fit for.'

'What do you mean?'

'Look at everything else we've seen,' said Uriel. There is a whole army's worth of abandoned armour here. Half the city's built among the mined chassis of Imperial Guard tanks. When the Falcatas took this place, I think whatever Crusade force left them here didn't leave them with much to maintain their equipment.'

'Meaning it all went to wrack and ruin.'

'Eventually, yes.'

'Damn shame that,' said Pasanius. 'Not a good idea to show that lack of respect to something that would have saved your life in battle.'

'No, not a good idea at all,' agreed Uriel, remembering the harsh treatment meted out to his armour on Medrengard.

Uriel longed to be enclosed in the battle plate of the Astartes, to feel that he was whole once again and a righteous servant of the Emperor, clad in the strongest armour and armed with the deadliest weapons. Uriel's battle gear was more than simply artefacts of war, they were instruments of the Emperor's will.

At the foot of the hill upon which stood the medicae facility was a multi tiered, colonnaded dome that could only belong to the roof of an Ecclesiarchy temple. The soaring grandeur of the building was no doubt designed to dominate the more lowly structures around it with its Imperial majesty. Its glories had not spared it the harsh ministrations of war, however, for two of the four spires that rose from the cardinal points of the dome were broken stumps of stone and steel.

Eclipsing even this temple in its display of Imperial power was a tall, grim-spired palace that towered over the ramshackle city spread around it like debris tumbled from a mountain. Stark against the sky, it was an austere structure, cold and bereft of the glorious ornamentation that Uriel had seen on many other such buildings.

'The Imperial palace?' he said.

Pasanius nodded. 'Certainly grim enough for this place.'

Uriel nodded at Pasanius's assessment. The forbidding aspect of the palace, with its brutal architecture of drum towers topped with hooded turrets, lightning-wreathed antennae and shuttered hangars was certainly in keeping with the sombre atmosphere of this world, but more than that, the building's architecture gave the impression of power without compassion.

Clearly, Governor Barbaden was not a man given to ostentation. That was a nugget of information to store for later and Uriel wondered what manner of man the Imperial Commander was.

He was certainly not liked, if the people on the streets of his city were anything to go by.

They were a handsome, tall people dressed, almost uniformly, in ash-grey coveralls and long cloaks.

The people hugged the buildings as the Chimeras rushed past, and Uriel saw the same sullen hostility in their eyes that he had seen on the faces of the Guardsmen in the Chimera.

The Falcatas victory in claiming this world as their own had obviously left scars: scars that had not yet healed.

Everywhere Uriel looked, he saw evidence of the peoples' cannibalisation of what the Imperial Guard had discarded: market stalls formed from the beaten sheet metal of tank hulls, carts and wagons dragged on wheels scavenged from supply trucks and barrows with handles fashioned from exhaust pipes.

Colonel Kain's column was travelling rapidly through the streets, taking sharp, veering turns at random.

'She's not taking any chances on a second ambush,' noted Pasanius, giving voice to Uriel's thought and gripping the edge of the Chimera as it skidded around another corner.

Uriel looked at the naked hostility that burned from every face.

'I don't blame her,' he said.

The Screaming Eagles' journey through the strange streets of Barbadus continued for another ten minutes, ten long minutes during which Uriel expected a shot or streaking missile with every breath. No such violence was unleashed, and each turn took them deeper into the warren of streets and further from the Imperial palace.

Eventually, the Chimeras increased speed as they surged towards a walled compound set apart from the buildings around it. Uriel had noticed the buildings becoming more widely spaced and less complete for a few moments, but only as they passed out into the open did he see why.

Rolled coils of barbed wire surrounded the compound and squat, unlovely bunkers of sandbags and timber flanked the heavy iron gate. A bronze eagle was stamped across both sides of the gate and the column of vehicles began to slow as they negotiated a path between great slabs of concrete laid to prevent any direct approach.

'They're cautious, I'll give them that,' said Pasanius, noting the way the guns at the corners of the compound walls followed the column in.

'They're scared,' said Uriel, thinking back to the hostility he had seen on every face they had passed on their journey towards this place. 'They've pulled back within their walls. I didn't see any patrols on the streets, did you?'

'No, but I wouldn't necessarily expect to see a military presence on the streets,' said Pasanius, 'Local enforcers maybe, but not Guard.'

'I didn't even see any of them,' said Uriel.

'No. Odd isn't it?'

'Very,' said Uriel.

Further conversation was halted as the gate rumbled open, sliding within the fabric of the wall, and the vehicles passed into the dusty courtyard of the compound. There were several barrack buildings inside, of basic Imperial design, portal framed sheds with corrugated iron walls and felt roofs. Similarly drab buildings were spaced at regular intervals around the compound: a mess hall, engineering sheds, fuel dumps, quartermaster stores and an infirmary.

A flag bearing a golden eagle with outthrust talons flew high over the compound and anxious looking soldiers ran from every building as the battered Chimeras parked up. Shouts were exchanged between men spilling from the vehicles and medics bellowed at their comrades to give the wounded room.

Uriel vaulted from the roof of the Chimera, aware of the strange looks he and Pasanius were drawing. He saw Colonel Kain, her clipped tones easily cutting through the confusion and collective outrage at the attack. With calm efficiency, she directed the work of the medics, ignoring their expressions of irritation at her meddling.

Uriel nodded to Pasanius and they walked over to the colonel of the Falcatas.

'Anything we can do to help?' asked Uriel.

Kain looked up from issuing her orders, her face clean and pristine again.

'No,' she said, 'and I'll thank you to remain with Sergeant Tremain. You are still in our custody.'

'Even after what just happened?' said Uriel, as Sergeant Tremain and a trio of Guardsmen, resplendent in fresh uniform jackets and raised lasguns moved up behind them.

'Especially after what just happened,' said Kain. 'Your arrival and the Sons of Salinas attack coming so soon after… I would be remiss not to wonder what the connection is, would I not?'

'The Sons of Salinas?' said Uriel. 'Who are they? I saw that name scrawled on a building in Khaturian.'

'Another thing I am less than comfortable with,' said Kain.

'But who are they?' pressed Uriel.

'They are nothing,' snapped Kain, her eyes blazing with fury. 'They are traitors who cling to the notion that the forces of the Imperium are invaders and should be resisted at every turn. They are terrorists, murderers and heretics, deserving of nothing less than extermination.'

Uriel was not surprised at her vehemence, for she had just seen scores of her men killed or wounded. Even so, there was a hatred in her steely tones that ran deeper than simple anger at the violence done to her company.

Verena Kain hated the Sons of Salinas with the passion of a zealot.

'Have you any idea how they were able to attack you like that?' asked Pasanius.

Kain flashed him a bilious glance that spoke volumes of her frustration. 'This whole damn city feeds them information,' she said. 'Every move we make, there's someone with a portable vox passing word of it.'

It took another thirty minutes to treat the wounded, secure the battered vehicles and re-equip the soldiers, all of whom had expended a good deal of their ammo load in the battle. A nervous looking commissar took statements from soldiers, selected at random, as far as Uriel could tell, and Kain continued to bark orders with the vigour of someone who dared not stop for even a second in case she had time to dwell on what had just occurred.

Her every command was obeyed with an alacrity that suggested that to do otherwise would result in the severest consequences, and Uriel recognised an officer who knew her trade, and who would never allow others to forget it.

In that time, Uriel and Pasanius sat against the hull of one of the Chimeras, the metal ticking and groaning as it cooled. The sun was halfway through its ascent towards its zenith and Uriel closed his eyes and let its warmth bathe his exposed flesh.

With nothing to do but wait until Colonel Kain decided it was time to leave, Uriel revelled in this unaccustomed time to himself. A Space Marine on active duty had precious little time that wasn't spent in preparation for battle. Weapons practice, strength building, biochemical monitoring and all manner of training drills were the virtual be all and end all of his life.

It was a life of service, a life of sacrifice and a life of battle.

What servant of the Emperor could ask for more?

The question presented its own answer in the shape of Ardaric Vaanes.

Uriel's time on Medrengard had caused him to question his role as a Space Marine, but he had passed his own time of testing and come through it stronger.

Others on that damned world had not shown such strength of character, and Uriel bitterly remembered the sight of Ardaric Vaanes as he had turned his back on his duty to the Emperor.

Vaanes had once been a warrior of the Raven Guard, but had, for reasons Uriel never discovered, forsaken his Chapter and taken the path of the renegade. Uriel had offered Vaanes the chance to rediscover his honour and seek redemption, but the warrior had chosen dishonour and disgrace.

Uriel wondered what had become of Ardaric Vaanes. In all likelihood, he was dead by now, a bleached corpse lying in the ashen wasteland of that dreadful world.

Feeling himself becoming maudlin, he put Vaanes from his mind and turned his head towards Pasanius.

Neither man felt the need to speak to one another, the companionable silence of two old friends who had seen life and death and everything in-between allowing them the luxury of silence.

That silence was broken by the approach of Colonel Kain.

Uriel looked up as she approached. 'Governor Barbaden is ready to see you,' she said.

'Good,' replied Uriel. 'I think I'm about ready to see him too.'