The First Heretic

Forty-eight seconds later, the first of his minders touched down in the courtyard. He found Ishaq Kadeen a bloody mess, cradling his picter in bruised hands as he sat on the grass, rocking back and forth.

‘Did you see that?’ he grinned at the soldier.

Three remembrancers, six Euchar soldiers – a strike force of nine souls, moving through the corridors of the palace. It was a scantly-decorated affair with little in the way of art or ornamentation. The architecture was all pillars and arched roofs, while uncarpeted stone floors led them deeper into the structure, which had all the charm and warmth of a mountaintop monastery.

When they’d first entered the palace, leaving the fire-blackened Astartes drop-pod behind, Ishaq had wondered how they’d know which way to go. It turned out to be a needless worry. They just followed the bodies.

Evidence of the Astartes’ passing was everywhere. This wing of the palace was swept clean of life, with ruptured corpses left in place of traditional decoration. One of the other remembrancers, a whippet-lean imagist by the name of Kaliha, would pause every few minutes and compose a pict around the dead bodies. It was clear from the angle of her picter that she sought to avoid any real focus on the slain, perhaps leaving them as blurred images in the foreground.

Ishaq had no interest in chronicling this butchery – artfully, tastefully or otherwise. The ambitious, mercenary part of his brain knew there’d be no point: such work would never enter the most treasured archives. Truly morbid pieces rarely did. People on Terra wanted to see what was humanity was capable of creating, not the aftermath of what it destroyed. They wanted to witness their champions in moments of glory or struggling in righteous strife, not slaughtering helpless humans that resembled Terrans far more than the Astartes themselves did.

It was all about presentation, about presenting what people wanted to see, whether they knew it or not. So he left the bodies unrecorded.

He tried not to look at the corpses they passed. Their ruination was so brutally complete it was difficult to imagine that these gobbets of meat had ever been people. They hadn’t just been killed, they’d been destroyed.

One of the soldiers, Zamikov, caught Ishaq’s eye. ‘Chainblades,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘The look on your face. You’re wondering what does this to a body. Well, it’s chainswords.’

‘I wasn’t wondering that,’ Ishaq lied.

‘No shame in honest horror,’ Zamikov shrugged. ‘I’ve been with the Serrated Sun twelve years now, and I puked my way through the first two. The Crimson Lord’s lot do messy work.’

They took a left, stepping through another broken barricade that had failed to do its job. Gunfire in the distance hastened their strides.

‘I’d heard the Word Bearers always incinerated their enemies.’

‘They do.’ Zamikov hiked a thumb over his shoulder, at the corpses arrayed in various pieces around the furniture barricade. ‘That’ll come afterwards. First they kill, then they purify.’

‘They come back to burn the dead after a battle? They actually do it themselves?’

Zamikov nodded, no longer looking over at the imagist. Ishaq noticed the shift in the soldier’s stride – as soon as they’d heard the gunshots, each of the Euchars moved lower, faster, their lasrifles clutched tighter. It was like watching hive-street cats on the hunt for rats.

‘They do it themselves. No funerary serfs or corpse-servitors for the Word Bearers. They’re a thorough lot, you’ll see.’

‘I can already see.’

‘That a fact?’ Zamikov spared him a quick glance. ‘What do you see here?’

‘Bodies.’ Ishaq raised an eyebrow. What kind of question was that?

‘It’s more than that.’ The soldier looked ahead again. ‘This entire wing of the palace is cleaned out, but we’ve doubled back on ourselves more than once following the trail of dead. The Word Bearers aren’t racing to the throne room. That’s not how they do things. They’re killing everyone in the palace first, room by room, chamber by chamber. That’s punishment. That’s being thorough. You understand now?’

Ishaq nodded, not sure what else to say.

The sound of gunfire was joined by the guttural whine of motorised blades. He felt his heart quicken. This was it: battle, seeing the Astartes fight. And hopefully, not getting shot at himself.

‘Look alive,’ the sergeant grunted. ‘Rifles up.’

Ishaq didn’t have a rifle, but with his face set just as stern as Zamikov’s, he raised his picter.

When they caught up to the Word Bearers, the scene was nothing like he’d expected. Firstly, it wasn’t a squad of Word Bearers, it was just one. And secondly, he wasn’t alone.

The picter clicked and clicked and clicked.

They were twins in movement, a single weapon with a single intent. Neither led the other, neither moved any more or less than his twin. It was not competition. It was the perfection of unity.

They stopped as one, ending their advance to take stock of their surroundings. The city was in the throes of evacuation, for whatever good it would do the populace, and the air was a wailing morass of conflicting sirens audible even here within the palace. Platoons of defenders stood at every corridor corner and junction, armed with solid shot rifles that cracked and pinged harmlessly off Astartes armour.

The vox-network was calm. No cries for reinforcement. No demands for orders. The monotonous chanting so typical of Word Bearer squads was absent from the Gal Vorbak. Forty warriors, drop-podded into four sections of the royal castle, immediately splitting up to slaughter with muted grunts and growls.

Another barricade stood before the two advancing warriors, manned by dozens of the rifle-armed defenders in their ostentatious white and gold garb. Puffs of smoke preceded the click-clack-click of their bullets sparking harmlessly aside.

Both warriors broke into a run, boots crunching into the stone floor. Both vaulted the barricade of smashed furniture in the same moment, both grunting in effort as they leapt. Both landed at the same time, and both let loose with abandon, their weapons lashing out to shed blood. The defenders fell in pieces around them, chopped and carved faster than the eye could follow.

Ruthless familiarity with each other was all that made this possible. When one would weave low to thrust, the other would aim high to slice. Their movements were a blurring dance around each other’s forms, forever watching and anticipating the other’s movements even as they focused on slaying their enemies.

Around the two warriors, nineteen defenders were twitching human wreckage. The last to die had been disembowelled and decapitated by both warriors in the same heartbeat.

Now blood ran from the sword’s blade, just as it ran from the eight talons. Back to back, the warriors glanced at the ruination around them, took half a second’s note of the Euchar escorting the remembrancers down the hallway, and moved on in the same second.

Aquillon ran.

Argel Tal staggered.

Surprise froze the Custodian’s movements dead. As he turned, he saw the Word Bearer take another flawed step and crash to his knees among the corpses they’d created.

Aquillon span his blade – a deflective propeller to ward off any assassin’s shot. He wasn’t connected to the Legion’s networked data-stream, and couldn’t read Argel Tal’s life signs on a convenient retinal display. But there was no blood. No sign of injury, beyond the collapse and spasm.

‘Are you hit?’

Argel Tal answered with wordless rasps. Something wet and black dripped from his helm’s mouth grille, thinner than oil, thicker than blood, hissing like acid as it fell to the stone.

Aquillon stood above the prone Word Bearer, sword spinning in his gold hands. No matter where he looked, he couldn’t gain a target lock. There was no assassin – at least none that he could see. He risked another glance down.

‘Brother? Brother, what ails you?’

Argel Tal used his claws to rise, digging them into the wall and dragging himself to his feet. Black bubbles, silvered by saliva, swelled and popped at his mouth grille.

‘Rakarssshhhk,’ he said, in a greasy blurt of vox. The twitching was subsiding, but the Word Bearer seemed in no hurry to move.

‘What struck you down?’

‘Hnh. Nothing. Nothing.’ Argel Tal’s voice was a breathy wheeze. ‘I... Tell me you hear that.’

‘Hear what?’

Argel Tal gave no answer. The scream in his mind went on and on, a sound of sorrow and anger somehow ripened by amusement – a meaningless melange of incompatible emotion, curdled into a single scream. Each second it lasted, his blood boiled hotter.

‘Let’s move on,’ he growled at Aquillon through chattering teeth.

‘Brother?’

‘Move on.’

Torgal screamed in unison with the distant cry, sending human defenders panicking before him. The Gal Vorbak warriors by his side dropped their weapons, hands clutching at helms, wordless shouts of anguish vox-roaring throughout the throne chamber.

Psychopomp Shal Vess Nalia IX watched this sudden madness through tears in her eyes. The ruler of the planet Calis had, before this moment, been curled in her oversized throne – a mess of rich robes containing rolls of fat – weeping and wailing for all to hear. The last survivors of her royal guard, those who’d not fled to leave her to die at the hands of the invaders, were similarly taken aback now as the red-armoured slaughterers howled and ceased their butchery.

The guards’ ceremonial blades were worthless against Astartes armour, as were their solid-shot rifles. Instead of pressing the attack, they used the momentary respite to fall back to the psychopomp’s throne.

‘Highness, it’s time to leave,’ a house-captain told her. This was a refrain he’d been trying for days, but if it wouldn’t work now, at least he’d never need to try again.

She blubbed in response. Her chins jiggled.

‘Forget her,’ one of the others said. All of their faces were taut under the pressure of the invaders screaming so loud. ‘This is our chance, Revus.’

‘Defend me!’ the matriarch wailed. ‘Do your duty! Kill them all!’

Revus was fifty-two years old, and had served most loyally as house-captain to the current psychopomp’s father, who’d been a charismatic and effective ruler beloved by his people – everything his fat bitch of a daughter was not.

But he couldn’t leave. Or rather, he wouldn’t.

Revus turned to the prone invaders, watching them kneel and cry out in the sea of carved corpses around them, and made the last decision he would ever make. He would not run. It was not in him to do so. Instead, he would defend his sire’s indolent daughter with his life, breaking his blade upon the armour of his enemies, making sure his final words would be to spit defiance in their faces.

‘Turn and run, dogs,’ he snarled at his own men. ‘I will die doing my duty.’

Half of them seemed to take that as an order, for they fled immediately. Revus watched their dark-armoured forms slipping into servants’ passages, and despite himself, couldn’t wish harm upon them for their cowardice.

The house-captain remained in the screaming maelstrom with eight men: all too proud or too dutiful to run, and all on the veteran side of forty.

‘We’re with you,’ one of them said, his voice raised to make it above the shouts.

‘Defend me!’ the hideous girl wailed again. ‘You have to protect me.’

Revus spoke a small prayer of reverence, wishing the shade of her father well, and promising to see him soon in the afterlife.

The invaders rose again. The screams faded to moans and grunts. They reached for weapons that had fallen into the gore.

Revus yelled ‘Charge!’ and did exactly that.

He cared nothing for slaying one of the invaders, for he knew he couldn’t. All he wished to do was break his blade upon their red armour – to land a single blow, when so many of the royal guard had died without even striking once.

One moment he ran and roared, the next, he was crashing to the floor. There wasn’t even any pain as his legs went out from under him, just a moment of dizziness, before looking up to see the crimson warrior towering above. His blade remained unbroken. His last wish, denied.

The invader stepped on the dying man’s chest, crushing every bone in his torso and pulping the organs. House-Captain Revus died without even knowing his legs and waist were three metres away, severed from his body by the red warrior’s first blow.

Torgal dispatched the last of the ardent defenders, reaching the throne before the other Gal Vorbak. Acidic bile still stung his throat, but control and strength alike had returned to his limbs. The vox was a frenetic exchange of squads all reporting the same crippling pain and the sound of laughter.

‘Leave my world!’ the psychopomp squealed from her chair.

Torgal plucked her up by her fat neck. The weight was considerable, even for Astartes battle armour. He felt gyros in his shoulder and elbow joints lock to deal with the strain.

Next to him, Seltharis was replacing his helm after spitting black bile at one of the dead bodies. ‘Just kill the piggish creature. We need to return to orbit. Something is wrong.’

Torgal shook his head. ‘Nothing is wrong.’ He did his best to ignore the girl’s weeping protests. ‘But we must commune with the Chaplain at once. If this is the ordained hour, we must–’

‘What?’ Seltharis was almost laughing. ‘What must we do? I am hearing a spirit laughing inside my skull, while my blood boils hot enough to burn my bones. We have no plan for this. None of us truly believed it would ever come.’

‘Leave my world!’ the matriarch insisted. ‘Leave us in peace!’

Torgal sneered at her behind his faceplate, loathing her down to the wretched, alien fish-stink of her sweating skin. What abominable event in this world’s past had led to such deviancy? What could make such desecration – the corruption of the human genome with alien genetics – a necessary reality? These people seemed no stronger, no more enlightened, no more industrious than any other human culture. In truth, they were less advanced than most.

‘Why did you do this to yourselves?’ the Astartes asked.

‘Leave my world! Leave!’

He threw her aside. The fleshy pile crashed to the ground, her dynasty ended by a broken neck.

‘Burn everything,’ ordered Torgal. ‘Burn it all, and summon a Thunderhawk. We stand at the ordained hour. I will report to the Crimson Lord.’

The Crimson Lord surveyed the courtyard. Empty, but for the grounded gunship.

He lowered his claws.

Torgal reported the monarch’s downfall almost an hour before, but Argel Tal’s fervour had faded even before the announcement. With the echo of that silent scream still drifting through his skull, he stood in the shadows of his Thunderhawk, Rising Sun, abstaining from the final slaughter within the palace. With flamers and incendiary grenades, the Gal Vorbak were erasing all evidence of royal life, gutting the pillared palace from within.

Most were voxing questions to one another, coating the communication network in a buzz of aggressive, amused voices. The words Ordained Time surfaced with sickening frequency. Their blood was up, for it seemed the gods had called.

Aquillon had followed him, which was the first thing he expected, and the very last thing he needed. The four Custodes were scattered among the Word Bearers assaulting the palace. They had surely seen everything, and that was going to become a problem sooner rather than later.

Argel Tal watched the man he would soon be ordered to kill, and wondered if he were capable of the act, both physically and morally.

‘I have no answer for you,’ Argel Tal told him. ‘I do not know what happened. A momentary weakness played over me. I forced it back. That is all I can tell you.’

The Custodes sighed through his helm speaker. ‘And you are well now?’

‘Yes. My strength returned quickly. There has been no moment of similar weakness.’

‘My men report similar incidents,’ the Custodian said. ‘Many of the Gal Vorbak fell as if struck by unseen hands, at the same moment you lapsed yourself.’ Aquillon removed his helm in a gesture of familiarity. It was a gesture that went unreturned. ‘We have detected no enemy weaponry capable of creating such an effect.’

He could only meet Aquillon’s gaze with his own eyes guarded by the lenses of his helm.

‘If I knew what had afflicted me,’ Argel Tal said, ‘I would tell you, brother.’

‘We have to consider that this is some previously unknown flaw in your Legion’s gene-seed.’

Argel Tal grunted a vague noise that may or may not have been affirmation.

‘You understand,’ the Custodian continued, ‘I must report this to the Emperor, beloved by all, at once.’

Behind his faceplate, Argel Tal was drooling blood again.

‘Yes,’ he said, licking his lips clean. ‘Of course you must.’

At first, he believed the scream was returning. Only after listening to its ululating wail for several moments did he turn back towards the palace walls.

‘Do you hear that?’ he asked.

This time, Aquillon nodded. ‘Yes. I do.’

When the siren started, almost all of the Word Bearers requested confirmation of its origins. The Colchisian rune flickering across hundreds of retinal displays told a blunt, stark tale, but it was a story that made no sense.

Even among the Gal Vorbak, the red-clad warriors hesitated in their fire-bearing purges, voxing to the orbiting fleet for immediate confirmation and explanation.

In the courtyard, Argel Tal and Aquillon boarded the Rising Sun, ordering their warriors to return to their dropships without hesitation. The psychopomp’s palace no longer mattered. This entire compliance was now meaningless.

‘All Word Bearers, all Custodes, all Imperial Army forces of the 1,301st Expeditionary Fleet – hear these words. This is Argel Tal, Master of the Serrated Sun. Word has reached De Profundis from Terra itself, bearing the seal of the Emperor. The Isstvan System is in open rebellion, led by four of our own Legions. Rumours are rife, and facts are few. It is said the Warmaster has renounced his blood-oaths to the Throneworld. True or false, we will not go to war blinded by ignorance. But we will answer the primarch’s call, for Lorgar himself demands we respond.

‘Disengage from the surface attack, and regroup at your transports. Return to orbit at once. We are ordered to Isstvan, and we will obey as we were born to obey. The Word Bearers will cut to the heart of this betrayal, tearing the truth out from within. Officers, to your stations. Warriors, to your duties.

That is all, for now.’

Aquillon stood with the Crimson Lord in the gunship’s crew bay. ‘I cannot give this even a moment’s belief. Horus? A traitor?’ The Custodian ran his fingertips over the flat of his sword’s blade. ‘This cannot be true.’

‘You heard the message, just as I.’ Argel Tal blink-clicked a runic marker on his visor display, opening a vox-channel to the Gal Vorbak.

‘Confirm network security.’

Another rune twinned with the first, blinking in reassurance.

‘This is Argel Tal,’ he spoke only to his closest brothers now. ‘Aurelian calls us.’

A voice answered without the aid of vox, drifting through his senses with maddening familiarity.

They already know. They sense it.

I know this voice, he thought.

Of course we know it. It is our own voice. We are Argel Tal.

TWENTY-THREE

Traitors

Possession

The Choice

The astropath nodded.

Aquillon was too stunned to even feel rage. ‘Treason,’ he said. ‘How can this be?’

The astropath’s name was Cartik, and at his full height he cut an unimpressively short figure, only made worse by both advancing age and a tendency to hunch his shoulders like an animal about to be attacked. The psyker was pushing seventy years of age with a face cracked by time’s lines, and he’d hardly been spry even in youth. He was old now. It showed in everything he did, and how slowly he did it.

Surprisingly lovely eyes flickered about as they watched from beneath half-hooded lids, sunk into the sallow sockets of an ugly face formed by cruel genes and chubby cheeks. Upon seeing him once, a remembrancer had remarked that Cartik’s mother or father – perhaps even both – were almost definitely rodents.

He’d never been skilled at cutting comebacks. His talents simply didn’t lie in witticism. That was the last time he attempted to make friends among the newly-arrived civilians. He knew loneliness would drive him to try again, but was content to let it wait a while.

His position as personal astropath to the Occuli Imperator had brought his family on Terra a modest measure of wealth, though it had brought nothing but a lonely and boring indentured exile for himself. Such were the sacrifices made in this day and age. He was content enough to do the Emperor’s duty, safe in the knowledge that his family were well provided for.

Once or twice, remembrancers had come to him, seeking to use his position for their own ends, in their quest for stories to record and tales to tell. Cartik read the naked ambition in their eyes, as well as their utter disinterest in him, and made himself unavailable to such visitors. In truth, he’d grown used to the loneliness. He had no desire to be used just to escape it.

‘I confirm it,’ Cartik said. His speech, like his eyes, was deceptively pleasant. Not that anyone would ever know it beyond Cartik himself, but he had a wonderful singing voice, too. ‘Exalted sire, the aether has cleared a great deal in recent days, and the message from Terra was clear. It has come to treason.’

Aquillon looked at the others gathered in Cartik’s isolated chamber. Kalhin, the youngest, with barely nine names in the Emperor’s service. Nirallus, with his breastplate bearing twenty name-etchings, and the best of them all with a guardian spear. Sythran, still keeping his vow of silence sworn atop one of the few remaining mountains of Himalaya, looking up at the walls of the Imperial Palace. He viewed their assignment as penance, and would never speak a word until they returned to Terra in seven more years, at the completion of their five-decade service.

‘Four Legions,’ said Kalhin. ‘Four entire Legions have betrayed the Emperor.’

‘Led by the Warmaster,’ Cartik added to their discussion with awkward softness. ‘The Emperor’s most beloved son.’

Nirallus breathed out something between a snort and a laugh. ‘We are the Emperor’s most beloved sons, little warp-speaker.’

Aquillon ignored the old argument. ‘Argel Tal informs me we will reach Isstvan in thirty-nine days. Upon arrival, the Serrated Sun will rejoin the Legion and deploy alongside the other Word Bearers. No Army, Mechanicum or external forces are to join the assault, including us. This is an Astartes concern, apparently. They wish us to take command of four smaller vessels, to aid in repelling boarders. I have acquiesced to this.’

The others turned to him. Most nodded in acceptance at the honour offered to them, though they were still troubled.

‘Thirty-nine days?’ asked Nirallus.

‘Yes.’

‘That is incredulously quick,’ Kalhin said. ‘We’ve spent years pushing through turgid tides and bringing backwater worlds to compliance, and suddenly the Navigators are reporting clean warp-lanes all the way to where we need to be? A quarter of the way across the galaxy? That journey should take a decade.’

‘The warp has cleared,’ reiterated Cartik.

‘In good tides, it is still a journey of many months. Even years.’

Aquillon looked down at Cartik. One by one, so did the others.

‘Yes, Occuli Imperator?’ the man said.

‘Inform the Sigillite that we await his orders. The Astartes are resistant to exterior forces taking part in the coming battle, but we will be spread across the Word Bearers’ fleet, commanding four of their vessels.’

‘By your word,’ Cartik said reflexively. It would be a long night of pulsing so urgent a message all the way to Terra, and maintaining a link with an astropath on the distant home world long enough to carry a reply. ‘It will be as you wish.’

The Custodians left the room without saying another word.

Argel Tal shivered in his armour, cold despite the heat, icy sweat drenching his skin before it was absorbed into the layers of his armour and recycled back into his body.

The scraping of heavy ceramite on steel decking was a rhythmic rasp, screeching each time his body gave another shudder in time to his heartbeat. He’d tried to stand countless times. Each attempt met with failure, crashing back down to the floor of his meditation chamber, denting the deck and chipping paint from his armour.

An open vox-channel to the other Gal Vorbak brought him their curses and murmured prayers, but he could neither recall opening the link, nor remember exactly how to close it. They suffered as he suffered. Most didn’t sound capable of speech, either – their voices lost in feral, ragged snarls.

The door signal chimed once.

Argel Tal released a low growl, needing several moments to form a single word.

‘Who?’

The wall-speaker hissed. ‘It is Aquillon.’

The Word Bearer turned watering eyes to his retinal chron, seeing the digital runes counting up. He had forgotten something. Some... event. He couldn’t think clearly. Saliva stringed between his aching teeth.

‘Yes?’

‘You were not present at our sparring.’

Yes, that was it. Their daily spar.

‘Apologies. Meditating.’

‘Argel Tal?’

‘Meditating.’

There was a pause. ‘Very well. I shall return later.’

Argel Tal lay on the decking, shivering and whispering mantras in the language at Colchisian’s core, freed of its Terran and Gothic roots.

At one point, lost in a haze of pain, he’d drawn his combat blade. In a trembling grip, he used the sword to slice the palm of his gauntlet, seeking to release the burning from his blood. What dripped from the wound was like boiling oil, bubbling and popping, and it ate into the deck floor in hissing rivulets.

The slice closed the way a smile slowly fades. Even the cut in his armour resealed with disgustingly organic scarring.

He managed to haul himself to his feet after another hour had passed, composing himself enough to stand without trembling. Over the vox, his warriors were laughing, weeping, betraying emotion after emotion rarely heard from the throats of Astartes.

‘Xaphen.’

The Chaplain evidently needed several long seconds to reply. ‘Brother.’

‘We must... hide this from the Custodes. Spread the word. The Gal Vorbak are to be sequestered in meditation. Penance. Contemplation as we travel to Isstvan.’

‘We can just kill them.’ Xaphen barked the words over the vox-network. ‘Kill them now. The time has come.’

‘They die,’ Argel Tal swallowed a gobbet of acid, ‘when the primarch says they die. Spread the word across the ship. The Gal Vorbak is suffering penance, and refuses all outside contact.’

‘By your word.’

In the background, his brothers were screaming and howling. The sound of fists and foreheads crashing against walls transmitted over the vox in dull clangs. He couldn’t breathe. He had to get his stifling helmet off; even the ship’s warm, recycled air was better than choking in this ashes-and-ember reek.

Fingers clasped at his collar seals, but each tug jerked his whole head. The helm wouldn’t come free. Cold sweat, somehow, had cemented it to his face.

Argel Tal moved to the doorway, pressing the activation plate. Once the door was open, the Crimson Lord broke into a staggering, lurching run, moving down the corridors, seeking the one place of refuge his disoriented mind could focus upon.

‘Enter,’ she called.

The first thing she heard was the servo-snarl of armour joints with the booted thunder of Astartes tread. She opened her mouth to speak, but the smell silenced her. Aggressively strong, the potent chemical iron-reek of melting metal, with the ashen scent of burning coal.

The footsteps were uneven, leading into her chamber, and ended with a crash of ceramite on metal that shook her bed. In the wake of the crash, the door sealed again. She sat on the edge of her sleeping mattress, staring blindly where she’d heard the Astartes fall.

‘Cyrene,’ the warrior spoke. She knew him instantly, despite the strain in his voice.

Without a word, she slipped from the bed, feeling for where he’d fallen. Her hands brushed the smooth armour of his shin guard, and the tattered oath paper that hung there. With that as her frame of reference, she moved up, until she sat by the warrior’s shoulders, cradling his heavy helm in her lap.

‘Your helmet will not come off,’ she said.

This was his face now: this image of slanted eyes and snarling ceramite. He didn’t answer.

‘I... I will summon an Apothecary.’

‘Need to hide. Lock the door.’

She did so with a spoken command.

‘What is wrong?’ There was no concealing her concern, or her rising panic. ‘Is this what Xaphen spoke of? The... the ordained change?’

So the Chaplain had already told her everything. He knew he was foolish to be surprised by that fact – Xaphen had always shared all with the Blessed Lady, using her as yet another instrument in his spread of the new faith among the Legion and the serfs alike. Argel Tal blinked sweat from stinging eyes before he replied. A targeting lock outlined Cyrene’s face above him, and he voided it with gritted teeth.

‘Yes. The change. The ordained hour.’

‘What will happen?’ The unease in her voice was an aural nectar. Through a perception he didn’t quite understand, Argel Tal felt stronger when he heard the break in her breathing... the way her heart beat faster... the warmth of fear in her voice. Tears fell onto his faceplate, and even this made his muscles bunch with fresh strength.

We feed on her sorrow, the thought rose unbidden.

‘Are you dying?’ she asked through her tears.

‘Yes.’ His own answer shocked him, because he’d not expected it, and yet knew it was true the moment he spoke it. ‘I think I am.’

‘What should I do? Please, tell me.’ He could feel her fingertips stroking along the faceplate of his helm, cool to the touch, soothing some of the pain. It was as if her cold fingers rested directly against his feverish skin.

‘Cyrene,’ he growled, his voice barely his own. ‘This is the primarch’s plan.’

‘I know. You won’t die. Lorgar wouldn’t allow it.’

‘Lorgar. Does whatever. Must be done.’

He felt his voice growing fainter as he fell, drifting and slipping back from awareness as if into a sleep forced by narcotics. With ringing echoes, his thoughts split into an uncontrollable duality.

He could see her, her closed eyes that still trailed tears, her tumbling locks of chestnut hair curtaining down around her face. But he could see more: the pulse at her temple, where the vein quivered beneath her thin, too-human skin; The wet, crumpling boom of her heartbeat, pumping liquid life through her fragile body. The scent of her soul, escaping moment by moment throughout her entire life, breathed from her body until her body would breathe no more. She smelled alive, and she smelled vulnerable.

Somehow, that fired his hunger, like battle-lust, like starvation, but more potent than both – fierce enough to pain him. Her blood would tingle on his tongue, and sing through his digestive tract. Her eyes would be sweet balls of chewy, mouth-watering paste. He would break her teeth and swirl the shards around his mouth, before pulling her tongue from her bleeding lips and swallowing the severed length of flesh whole. Then she would scream, gurgling and tongueless, until she bled to death before him.

She was prey. Human. Mortal. Dying, minute by minute, and her spirit was destined to swim in the Sea of Souls until devoured by one of the Neverborn.

She was also Cyrene. The Blessed Lady. The one soul he’d come to at the nadir of his life, as his body broke and his faith broke alongside it.

She would be a joy to destroy. Her sorrow would sustain him, even enrichen him.

But he would not harm her. He could, but he would not. The wrath, born from nowhere, faded in the face of this realisation. He was not enslaved to his feral needs, despite their urgent strength.

He would never abandon his brothers, or shirk from Lorgar’s vision. Everything was a choice, and he would choose to suffer through this as the primarch had intended for him, carrying the changes so that others would never have to. Humanity would live on through the strength of the chosen few.

‘Argel Tal?’ she spoke his name as she always spoke it, with a curious gentleness.

‘Yes. We are Argel Tal.’

‘What’s happening?’

He managed a reassuring smile. It split the ceramite of his helm, and the faceplate smiled with him. She couldn’t see the daemonic visage leering up at her.

‘Nothing. Only the change. Watch over me, Cyrene. Hide me from Aquillon. I can control this. I will not harm you.’

He raised a hand, watching through swimming vision as the edges of everything grew blurry and indistinct. A bladed claw met his stare, a human hand coated in cracked crimson ceramite, the black talons stroking her hair with inhuman care. For a time, he simply watched his new claws catch what little light existed in the room’s ever-present darkness – the metal of his armour now an epidermis of ceramite, and the claws of his gauntlets now the talons of his own hand.

‘Your voice is different,’ she said.

His vision focused, the blurs fading, gelling into acuity. The claw was no more than his own gauntleted hand, as human as it had always been.

‘Do not worry,’ Argel Tal told her. ‘One way or another, it will be over soon.’

The Gal Vorbak did not remain in seclusion for long. Most emerged from their sealed chambers within a handful of nights. Xaphen was the first, leaving his chamber seemingly unchanged, though he was never without his helm as he travelled the ship’s decks. A brazier burned at all times from its cage mounting on his power pack, trailing the scent of ashes and coals wherever he went. He spent his time visiting the other Gal Vorbak in their meditation chambers, allowing no other visitors.

Argel Tal left Cyrene’s chamber after three nights. Aquillon was in the sparring halls, just as the Word Bearer had expected.

‘I had a feeling you’d be here,’ he said.

The Custodes stepped back from one another: Aquillon had been duelling with Sythran, both of them wielding live weapons and wearing full armour, including their crested helms.

Sythran deactivated his guardian spear, the spear blade turning off with a snap of discharged energy. Aquillon lowered his blade, but left it active.

‘A long meditation,’ he said, watching through ruby eye lenses.

‘Is that suspicion in your voice, brother?’ Argel Tal grinned behind his faceplate. ‘I had a great deal to dwell upon. Sythran, may I borrow your spear? I wish to duel.’

Sythran turned his head to Aquillon, saying nothing. The Occuli Imperator spoke for him. ‘Our weapons are keyed to our genetic spoor. They would not activate in your hands. As an addendum, it is considered the height of insult for one of us to let another touch the blades issued into our care by the Emperor himself.’

‘Very well. I meant no offence.’ Argel Tal moved to the weapon rack, donning a battered, ancient pair of power claws over his gauntlets. ‘Shall we?’

Aquillon’s golden helm tilted slightly. ‘Live weapons?’

‘Duellem Extremis,’ Argel Tal confirmed, tensing his fists to activate the electrical power fields around the long claws.

Sythran left the practice cage, sealing his commander and the Crimson Lord within. He’d seen Argel Tal and Aquillon cross blades on hundreds of occasions, and an educated, experienced estimate would see the Word Bearer defeated within sixty to eighty seconds.

The commencement chime sounded. Eleven clashes and five seconds later, the bout was over.

‘Again?’ enquired the Astartes. He heard Sythran’s quiet exhalation in place of speech. Aquillon said nothing, either.

‘Is something amiss?’ Argel Tal asked. With the claws on his gauntlets, he couldn’t offer a hand to help Aquillon rise.

‘No. Nothing is amiss. I had not expected you to attack, that is all.’

The Custodian regained his feet, his own armour joints humming as false muscles of machine-nerve and cable-sinew flexed and tensed.

‘Again?’

Aquillon hefted his long blade. ‘Again.’

The two warriors flew at one another, each strike flashing aside with bursts from their opposing power fields. Every second saw three strikes made, and each strike snapped back with the weapons’ electrical fields repelling one another after the metal kissed for the briefest moment. The air was rich with the ozone scent of abused power fields in only a matter of heartbeats.

This time, the two warriors were more evenly matched. Argel Tal’s strength lay in his awareness, not only of his own blade work but his enemy’s potential, betrayed by their own movements. It had always allowed him to stand his ground against superior weapon-masters, such as Aquillon, for a respectable amount of time before being unable to deflect the winning blow. Now he coupled that perceptive gift with speed to match the Custodian’s, and Aquillon was forced to bring desperate defensive strokes to bear for the first time in any of his duels with Argel Tal.

He gleaned the flaw in the Word Bearer’s sudden thrusts – that edge of indelicacy, the suggestion of imperfect balance – and struck out when the next opportunity presented itself. The flat of his blade crashed against Argel Tal’s breastplate, sending the Astartes stumbling back. Aquillon’s lips were already creasing into a smile as the crimson-clad warrior thudded to the deck.

‘There. The balance is restored. You are back where you belong: on the floor.’

Argel Tal’s voice told of the grin behind his faceplate. ‘I almost had you.’

‘Not a chance,’ the Custodian replied, wondering why it was suddenly true. ‘But you are different, brother. Energised. Vital.’

‘I feel different. Forgive me for now – I have duties to attend to.’

‘By your word,’ said the Custodian.

Both Aquillon and Sythran watched the Astartes leave. In the silence afterward, Aquillon said ‘Something has changed.’

Sythran, true to his vow of silence, merely nodded.

TWENTY-FOUR

Isstvan V

Traitors

In Midnight Clad

Isstvan – an unremarkable sun, far from Terra, precious Throneworld of the Imperium.

The system’s third world, comfortably close enough to the sun to support human life, was a virus-soaked mass grave marking the anger of Horus Lupercal. The world’s population was nothing more than contaminated ash scattered over lifeless continents, while the bones of their cities remained as blackened smears of burnt stone – a civilisation reduced to memory in a single day. The orbital bombardment from the Warmaster’s fleet, payloads of incendiary shells and virus-laden biological warfare pods, had seemingly spared nothing and no one anywhere in the world.

Isstvan III lingered now in silent orbit around its sun, almost grand in the extent of its absolute devastation, serving as the scarred tombstone for the death of an empire.

The system’s fifth planet was a colder globe, able to support only the most resistant and genetically valiant life. Its skies were thick with storms, its skin was scabbed by tundra, and nothing on the face of the world promised an easy life for any that would settle upon it.

Ringing Isstvan V was one of the largest fleets ever gathered in the history of the human species. Without a doubt, it was the most impressive coalition of Astartes vessels, with the scouts, cruisers, destroyers and command ships of seven entire Legions. The matt-black hulls of the Raven Guard’s vessels blended into the void around their flagship, the sleek, vast and vicious Shadow of the Emperor. In a tighter formation, the green armour-plated warships of the Salamanders clustered in orbit around their primarch’s vessel, the immense Flamewrought, its edges and battlements bedecked in leering, draconic gargoyles of burnished bronze.

A much smaller fleet hovered in the high atmosphere, comprised almost entirely of smaller escorts around the hulking capital ship Ferrum, marked the presence of the Iron Hands. The vessels were denser, their armour thicker, and their black hulls were trimmed with gunmetal grey and polished silver. The Iron Hands had sent their elite companies, while the bulk of the Legion’s fleet remained en route.

Of the enemy fleet, there was no sign at all. The vessels of the Death Guard, the Emperor’s Children, the World Eaters and the arch traitorous Sons of Horus were gone – hidden from Imperial eyes and the Emperor’s vengeance.

In preternatural concordance, hundreds of vessels drifted closer to the world from the system’s farthest reaches. Clad in armour of midnight-blue, the warships at the vanguard bore the skullish insignia and bronze statuary of the Night Lords Legion. The Iron Warriors drifted alongside their brothers, bastion-ships of composite metals and dull iron ceramite barely reflecting the stars. The vessels of the Alpha Legion formed the peripheries of the massed fleet, their sea-coloured hulls painted with stylised scales in honour of the reptilian beast they’d taken as their symbol. Embossed hydras snarled into space from their places along the ships’ hulls.

At the core of the approaching armada, with more warships than any of their brother Legions, came the stone-grey battlefleet of the Word Bearers. The XVII Legion flagship, Fidelitas Lex, carved its way closer to the world ahead, massive engines vibrating with the gentle power of an approach vector’s thrust.

So many vessels breaking from the warp at once should have been a maelstrom of colliding hulls and spinning junk, yet the armada coasted closer to Isstvan V with maddening calm, safe distances maintained between every craft, and the void shields of each ship never once coming into crackling contact.

With a precision that required mass calculation, the fleets of seven Astartes Legions hung in the skies above Isstvan V. Shuttles and gunships ferried between the heaviest cruisers, while the decks of every warship made ready to deploy their warriors in an unprecedented, unified planetfall.

Horus, traitorous son of the Emperor, was making his stand on the surface. The Imperium of Man had sent seven Legions to kill its wayward scion, little knowing four of them had already spat on their oaths of allegiance to the Throneworld.

The cellar was crowded with the remembrancers and off-duty Army grunts barred from the operations decks. Ishaq shouldered his way through to the bar, earning a score of annoyed grunts and tutted threats that he knew wouldn’t ever go anywhere near an actual confrontation.

He ordered a plastic beaker (no expenses spared here in the Cellar) of whatever engine grease had been recently brewed without being immediately fatal. In payment, he scattered a few coppers on the bar’s stained wooden surface. In their absence, his pockets were distinctly empty.

Around him, the conversations were all keyed to the same subject. The planetfall. The betrayal. Horus, Horus, Horus. What he found most interesting was the tone such discussion was taking. ‘The Emperor abandoned the Great Crusade.’ ‘Horus was betrayed by his father.’ ‘The rebellion is justified.’ It went on and on, just as it had been doing for over a month now, during the entire time the fleet had been in the warp.

Ishaq tapped one of the nearest drinkers on the shoulder. The man turned, showing a face with an interesting geography of scars. He wore Euchar fatigues, and a holstered sidearm.

‘Yes?’

‘So tell me why you think this is all justified,’ Ishaq said. ‘Because it just sounds like treason to me.’

The Euchar trooper sneered and turned back to his friends. Ishaq tapped him on the shoulder again.

‘No, really, I’m interested in your perspective.’

‘Piss off, boy.’

‘Just answer the question,’ Ishaq smiled.

The Euchar gave a grin that would have been more threatening if he didn’t have flakes of his last meal caught between his teeth. ‘The Warmaster conquered half the galaxy, didn’t he? The Emperor’s been hiding back on Terra for half a century.’

Typical soldier logic, Ishaq thought. While one man dealt with the incomparable scale of managing an entire interstellar empire, he was infinitely less respected than the man who waged war in the most simple, aggressive terms, and always from positions of tactical, numerical and materiel supremacy.

‘Let me get this straight,’ Ishaq feigned a thoughtful expression. ‘You admire the man who has armies large enough never to lose a single war, but loathe the man responsible for the vision and effort of actually maintaining the Imperium?’

The Euchar scoffed at Ishaq’s description, and turned his back on the remembrancer. For just a moment, the imagist wondered if he was missing some key point in all this. The Word Bearers were here under Imperial orders, summoned to help put down Horus’s rebellion. Yet here, the human staff and crews of the expeditionary fleet were practically united in favour of Horus’s actions.

He sipped the drink and immediately regretted it.

‘Delicious,’ he said to the girl behind the bar.

The talk rattled on around him. Ishaq let it filter in, as he did most nights, listening without speaking, eavesdropping without being brazen about it. He was a passive seeker of public opinion. Easier to avoid fights that way – the Cellar had become a little more ‘fisticuffy’ since the soldiers had started drinking here too.

‘The Word Bearers won’t attack Horus,’ one voice said with solemn surety.

‘It’s not a war. They’re here to negotiate.’

‘It’ll be a war if the negotiations fail.’

‘The Emperor is a relic of the Unification Wars. The Imperium needs more from its leaders now.’

‘Horus hasn’t even committed any crime. The Emperor is overreacting out of fear.’

‘It won’t come to battle. Lorgar will see to that.’

‘The Emperor won’t even leave Terra to deal with this?’

‘Does he even care about the Imperium?’

‘I heard Horus will lead the other primarchs to Terra.’

Ishaq left his drink unfinished as he headed back to his personal chamber on the communal civilian deck. He wanted to believe he had only so much stomach for bad beverages and seditionist ideology, but the truth was far more prosaic. He didn’t have much money left.

Halfway to his room, he decided to change his course. Sitting bored in his chamber yet again wouldn’t achieve anything, and even without the coin to get pleasantly drunk, he could do what he’d done back in those first nights after joining the Legion’s fleet. It was a duty that had, for better or worse, lapsed in recent weeks. His endless attempts to arrange a meeting with one of the Gal Vorbak were rebuffed each and every time. The crimson warriors’ seclusion was ironclad, and it was rumoured even the Custodes were barred from accessing their meditation chambers. The continuous refusals and lack of battle had dulled the remembrancer’s ambitious interest somewhat, but with nothing else to do, it was time to get back in the game.

Ishaq checked his picter’s battery cell, and went off in search of something that would make him famous.

The primarch was waiting for them.

As they disembarked from the Rising Sun and onto the main hangar platform of Fidelitas Lex, Lorgar stood in full warplate, the massive crozius maul Illuminarum in his grey fists. At his side, Erebus and Kor Phaeron wore their own granite-dark armour, the surfaces of each armour plate etched with invocations from the Word. Behind them, the entire First Company formed an imposing welcome in their overbearing suits of Terminator wargear, bearing double-barrelled bolters and long blades in brutish fists.

Lorgar’s benevolent countenance broke into a warm smile as the thirty-seven crimson warriors walked onto the hangar deck. As one, they went to their knees before their liege lord.

Lorgar gestured for them to rise. ‘Are your memories so short? My Gal Vorbak need never kneel before me.’

Argel Tal was the first back to his feet, noting the distaste upon Kor Phaeron’s aged features. He growled, baring his teeth at the first captain as his gauntlet claws extended.

Lorgar chuckled at the display. ‘My prayers are answered,’ the primarch continued, ‘for you have arrived.’

‘As ordered,’ said Argel Tal and Xaphen in the same moment.

The Gal Vorbak had little cohesion in their ranks. There was no pretence of standing at attention or gathering in orderly rows. They stood together but alone, each one remaining among their brothers yet guarding their personal space with narrowed eyes behind crystal blue helm lenses.

‘We make planetfall within the hour,’ Lorgar said. ‘Argel Tal, Xaphen, for now, I would have you come with us. You will rejoin your brothers before we commence the assault.’

‘Very well,’ said Argel Tal.

‘The Custodes?’ Lorgar asked. ‘Tell me they still live.’

‘They still live. We have them scattered on four separate vessels, assigned with “overseeing the defence” if the vessels are boarded in the coming battle.’

‘They know there will be a battle?’ Lorgar rounded on Argel Tal.

‘They are not fools, nor are they inured to news as it spreads from ship to ship. They are placed on four vessels that are... delayed... in the warp. Their Navigators and captains have been appraised of the situation’s delicacy, sire. The Custodes will not arrive until the Battle of Isstvan is won.’

Xaphen broke in. ‘They were spared, as you ordered.’ He ignored Argel Tal’s glare, feeling it despite the fact his brother still wore his helm.

‘It was not my order – at least not in recent years.’ The primarch gestured to Erebus, who inclined his head in turn. ‘The First Chaplain has demanded they remain alive all this time. He weaves the plans that require them alive.’

Argel Tal said nothing, though he openly radiated annoyance. Xaphen was less restrained. ‘Erebus?’ he asked, smiling behind his faceplate. ‘I have paid heed to every addendum and subscript in the Book of Lorgar, brother. I’ve used many of your new rituals myself. I would be keen to learn more of this one.’

‘In time, perhaps.’

Xaphen thanked the other Chaplain as the group moved on. Erebus remained closest to the primarch as they walked away – his stoic, tattooed features as stern and dignified as ever. Kor Phaeron stalked in their wake, the heavy gear-joints of his Terminator armour grinding with each step. Xaphen kept his actions the very mirror of Erebus’s, but Argel Tal glanced at the First Captain with a smile.

‘What amuses you, brother?’ the ageing half-Astartes asked.

‘You do, old one. You reek of fear. I pity you, that they never bred the human terror out of your bones.’

‘You think I feel fear?’ The scarred face twisted into something even sourer. ‘I have seen more than you know, Argel Tal. We have not been idle in the true Legion, while you danced at the galaxy’s edge, playing nursemaid to the Custodes.’

Argel Tal merely chuckled, the laugh leaving his helm in a low growl of crackling vox.

The Fidelitas Lex played host to a gathering of rare significance.

Upon entering the war room, Argel Tal couldn’t hold back an exhalation of awe. He’d been expecting a gathering of Word Bearer captains, Chaplains and Chapter Masters. He’d not anticipated the presence of commanders from the Night Lords, Alpha Legion and Iron Warriors, let alone the three figures that stood around the central hololithic table.

The crowds parted, allowing Lorgar to proceed to the centre, where he stood alongside his brothers. None of the three welcomed him, just as none of them seemed overly respectful to each other, either.

Argel Tal grunted acknowledgement of the two captains closest to him as he took his place at the front of the gathered Astartes. Their heraldry offered their identities in flowing Nostraman script: the first – a tall, austere warrior with bronze-plated skulls hanging from his pauldrons on iron chains, bore the numerals of 10th Company, and the name-etching Malcharion.

The second needed no declarations of identity, for everyone knew him as soon as their eyes rested upon him. His armour was wreathed in stretched, leathery patches of flayed flesh, and his helm’s faceplate was a skullish glare of bleached bone. His was a name spread across the Imperium, almost as notable as that of Abaddon of the Sons of Horus, Eidolon of the Emperor’s Children, Raldoron of the Blood Angels... or even the primarchs themselves. Argel Tal inclined his head in respect to Sevatar, First Captain of the Night Lords Legion. The warrior nodded in return.

‘You are late,’ his voice issued forth as a grinding snarl.

Argel Tal didn’t rise to the Night Lord’s bait. ‘How perceptive of you,’ he replied. ‘You can read a chronometer.’

A guttural grunt of amusement issued from Sevatar’s skull-painted helm.

In the centre of the gathered leaders and lords, Lorgar raised his hands for silence. The baiting, grumbling and occasional laughter between the Astartes died down.

‘Time is short,’ said the golden primarch, ‘and events are already in motion. Those of us in this room are under no illusions as to what we face. Eight Legions, of which we are four, and countless worlds are rising in rebellion against the Imperium. If we are to march on Terra and take the throne, we must annihilate those Legions remaining loyal to the Emperor. And we must do so alone. No matter how loyal our Army regiments are, they will be devastated if they are committed to the surface of Isstvan. So we wage war without them: Astartes against Astartes, brother against brother. There is a poetry to that I am sure you will all appreciate.’

No one said a word. Lorgar continued.

‘You have all walked different paths, but together, we come to the same destination. The Emperor has failed us. The Imperium has failed us all.’

Here, Lorgar nodded to the largest gathering of Night Lords in their lightning-streaked warplate. ‘It has failed us by the laxity of its laws, the decadence of its culture, and in the injustices heaped upon those of us who served most loyally.’

He gestured to the bare metal ceramite of the Iron Warrior captains. ‘It has failed us by never recognising our virtues, never rewarding us for the blood we have shed in bringing about its ascendancy, and never providing unity when we needed it most.’

The Alpha Legion stood impassive and silent in their scaled armour. ‘It has failed us,’ Lorgar inclined his head to them, ‘by being flawed to its core, imperfect in its pursuit of a perfect culture, and in its weakness against the encroachment of xenos breeds that seek to twist humanity to alien ends.’

Finally, the primarch turned to his own captains, their grey armour decorated with prayer scrolls. ‘And it has failed us, most of all, by being founded upon lies. The Imperium is forged by a dangerous deceit, and erodes us all by demanding we sacrifice truth on the altar of necessity. This is an empire, propagated by sin, that deserves to die. And here, on Isstvan V, we begin the purge. From these ashes shall rise the new kingdom of mankind: an Imperium of justice, faith and enlightenment. An Imperium heralded, commanded and protected by the avatars of the gods themselves. An empire strong enough to stand through a future of blood and fire.’

The change in the room was subtle, but impossible for Astartes senses to miss. Every warrior stood taller, straighter, their hands resting upon the hilts and handles of sheathed weapons.

‘The Emperor believes us loyal. Our four Legions were ordered here on that misguided conviction alone. But our coalition here and now is the fruit of decades’ worth of planning. It was ordained, and brought about according to ancient prophecy. No more hiding in the shadows. No more manipulating fleet movements and falsifying expeditionary data. From this day forward, the Alpha Legion, the Word Bearers, the Iron Warriors and the Night Lords stand together – bloodied but unbowed beneath the flag of Warmaster Horus, the second Emperor. The true Emperor.’

The Astartes stared, none of them moving a muscle. The primarch could have been addressing an army of statues.

‘I see your eyes,’ Lorgar’s smile took in the room, ‘even behind your helms. I see the hesitation, the unease, the mistrust of the very brothers by your side. We are not friends, are we? We have never been allies. Our Legions are kin by bloodline, yet not brought together in proven, chosen brotherhood. But remember this, as you look upon the shades of armour so different to your own. You are united by righteousness. You are unified in revenge. Every weapon in this room is wielded for the same cause. And that, my sons, brothers and cousins... That is all the strength we need. After today, we will be brothers. The forge of war will see to that.’

Silence reigned in the wake of Lorgar’s words. The primarch turned back to the hololithic table, already entering the codes necessary to activate the image generator, when several muted clanks sounded behind him.

Lorgar looked over his shoulder, seeking the sounds’ sources. Several Word Bearer captains were shaking hands with their counterparts in the other Legions, with more joining in every moment. They gripped wrist-to-wrist, a traditional warrior gesture to seal a pact.

Argel Tal offered his hand to Sevatar. The Night Lord gripped the Word Bearer’s wrist as their emotionless faceplates met each other’s eyes.

‘Death to the False Emperor,’ said Sevatar, becoming the first living soul to utter the words that would echo through the millennia.

The curse was taken up by other voices, and soon it was being cried in full-throated roars.

Death to the False Emperor. Death to the False Emperor. Death. Death. Death.

At the heart of the cheering, the four primarchs smiled. Each curl to their lips was variously cold, ugly, mocking or indulgent, but it was as close as they’d come to showing any emotion so far.

Lorgar keyed in the last command code. The hololithic table rumbled into life, its internal generators cycling up to project a flickering image of the surface tundra. A grainy view, flawed by patches of static distortion, hovered in the air above the table. Helms of dark iron, midnight, sea-green, crimson and grey lifted to regard the holo image. It showed a ravine, gouged with tectonic ambivalence, running for several kilometres through the landscape.

‘The Urgall Depression,’ said one of Lorgar’s brothers in a rumbling baritone. ‘Our hunting ground.’

Konrad Curze had once, perhaps, been a majestic creature. Everything in his bearing spoke of a regal nature now shattered, all grace and grandeur cast aside to leave a warrior-prince skinned down to a core of lethal, cadaverous nobility. In black armour edged by unpolished bronze, the primarch of the Night Lords gestured to the ravine with a power claw of four curving blades. ‘Enhance the image.’

Unseen servitors did exactly that. The three-dimensional hololith blurred momentarily, before refocusing on a more detailed landscape. At one end of the ravine was a fortress of plasteel, ceramite and rockcrete, rendered indistinct by the haze of void shields protecting it from orbital bombardment. A massive panorama of bulwarks, barricades, trenches and earthworks stood implacable guard around it. Every warrior present could see it for what it was: a defensive masterpiece, constructed to repel tens of thousands of enemy troops.

At the other end of the canyon, a literal fleet of gunships and drop-pods lay in wait, but it was what turned the canyon’s centre dark that drew all eyes in the chamber.

Two armies were locked in pitched conflict, two greyish masses of grinding battle lines, reduced to an amalgamated horde.

‘Enhance central sector,’ ordered Primarch Curze.

The image blurred and refocused again, showing a flawed image, disturbed by interference, of...

‘Civil war,’ Konrad Curze smiled, all teeth and bright eyes. ‘The two sides are matched, with our brothers in the Death Guard, World Eaters, Sons of Horus and Emperor’s Children holding superior ground, and the Iron Hands, Salamanders and Raven Guard maintaining numerical superiority.’

Argel Tal growled as he breathed, feeling his lips moistened by bile. Nearby heads turned to him, but he ignored their watchful eyes.

‘Brother?’ Erebus voxed from his place at the primarch’s side.

‘I thirst,’ Argel Tal smiled as he spoke into the private channel.

‘You... thirst?’

‘I have tasted Astartes blood, Erebus. It is rich enough to never fade from memory, and its genetic holiness stings the tongue. I will taste it again, on Isstvan V.’

The Chaplain didn’t reply, but Argel Tal saw Erebus turn to Kor Phaeron, and knew all too well that they were conversing over a secure channel. The thought made him smirk. Silly little creatures. So precious in their meagre ambitions. So feverishly hungry for temporal power. He felt a moment’s pity for the primarch, to have spent the last four decades guided by their insipid scheming.

That thought cooled his condescending wrath, though. What had they done in all this time? Kor Phaeron’s remark about Argel Tal nursemaiding the Custodes away from the ‘true Legion’ had bitten deeper than he wished to confess.

The growl grew faint in his throat, taking on a bestial whine.

‘Be silent,’ grunted Sevatar.

Argel Tal tensed, holding his breath, suppressing the rush of anger he felt at being spoken to in such a way. Whatever was bonded to him truly loathed being pushed into situations of submission.

Raum.

What?

I am Raum.

Argel Tal felt his heart beat in time to the whispered syllables. The bile at his lips bubbled as it boiled, and his hands ached to the bone with merciless ferocity.

You are the second soul my father saw so long ago.

Yes.

You twist my thoughts. I am forever on the edge of rage, or speaking bladed words to my brothers.

I bring out only what is already present within you.

I will not let you claim me.

I will not try. We are one. I have slept long enough to drip into every cell within your body. It is your flesh, and it is my flesh. It will change soon. We are Argel Tal, and we are Raum.

Your voice is the same as mine.

It is how my soul speaks to yours, and how our shared flesh translates it into mortal meaning. I have no voice, except for the roars we will shout when we shed blood.

Argel Tal felt burning wetness around his gauntleted fingers. I am in pain. I cannot move my hands.

Symbiosis. Union. Balance. There will be times when you rise to the fore. There will be times when I am in ascendance.

Then what is this pain?

It is all a prelude for the changes to come.

The gods have already sent their call. The ordained time has come... I am faster, stronger, more vital than before. And I cannot remove my armour, nor take off my helm.

Yes. This is our new skin.

What more changes can there be?

Raum laughed, whisper-faint and teasingly distant. You will hear the gods many times in your life. The ordained time has not truly come. You heard the call to begin the Long War, but the gods have not screamed yet. This is the prelude.

But I heard them. We heard them.

You will know the scream when you truly hear it. This, I promise.

‘...the Gal Vorbak will stand with the Iron Warriors, forming the anvil,’ concluded Lorgar.

Argel Tal refocused on his surroundings. The pain in his hands faded once more. Not knowing what he should say, he nodded his head in the primarch’s direction, agreeing with Lorgar’s words without knowing what they were. The primarch offered a kindly smile, seeming to sense his son’s distraction.

Lord Curze turned his sleepless eyes upon his own Astartes. ‘Then we stand ready. My First Company will also join the Iron Warriors for the initial strike.’

‘Dath sethicara tash dasovallian,’ the Nostraman language hissed off his tongue. ‘Solruthis veh za jass.’

The Night Lord captains banged dark gauntlets against their chestplates. ‘In midnight clad,’ they chorused.

‘Iron within,’ Perturabo spoke gruffly, and hefted his massive warhammer over his shoulder. ‘Iron without.’ In response, his men thudded the hafts of their axes and hammers on the decking.

The warriors of the Alpha Legion, and their primarch himself, remained silent.

It fell to Lorgar, as Argel Tal had known it would, to finish the gathering.

‘The forces on the surface have been embattled for almost three hours with no clear victor emerging. Even now, the loyalists wait for us to make planetfall, believing we will reinforce their final advance. We all know our parts to play in this performance. We are all aware of the blood we must shed to spare our species from destruction, and install Horus as the Master of Mankind.

‘Brothers,’ the primarch bowed his head in reverence. ‘Today we take the first step towards forging a greater kingdom. May the gods go with you.’

As Argel Tal made to move from the chamber, he saw his former mentor beckon him closer. Erebus was handsome only in the way a weapon could be called such: a cold blade, dangerous no matter who holds it, reflecting the light while producing none of its own. The Gal Vorbak leader stalked closer, ululating a quiet growl in his throat, nursing it there and enjoying the feel of his rage.

Erebus wished to speak with him, and Kor Phaeron would almost certainly remain. That in itself was cause for disquiet. What ambitions had they fed to the primarch in four long decades? What had they seen, and what had they learned?

His growl grew louder.

Hate him, but do not strike him. He is chosen. Just like you.

Will I always hear your voice?

No. Our end is fated. We will be destroyed in the shadow of great wings. Then you will hear my voice no more.

Argel Tal felt his blood run cold, and knew that this feeling, at least, was not part of the promised changes to his body.

‘Erebus,’ he greeted the First Chaplain. ‘I am in no mind to argue.’

‘Nor I,’ the older warrior said. ‘Much has happened since we last spoke. We have both seen many things, and made difficult choices to bring us to this moment in time.’ Erebus met Argel Tal’s eye lenses with his own stony, solemn gaze. It was hard not to admire the Chaplain’s composure at all times, and his great patience.

It was also hard to forget his great disappointment, once it was earned.

‘I have heard of all you witnessed, and went through,’ Erebus continued. ‘Xaphen has kept me appraised.’

‘Do you have a point?’ Argel Tal murmured, and even to his own ears his words sounded puerile.

‘I am proud of you.’ Erebus briefly rested his hand on Argel Tal’s shoulder. ‘I simply wished to say that.’

Without another word, Erebus moved away, following the primarch. Kor Phaeron gave a wet, burbling chuckle, and stalked off in slower pursuit, Terminator joints grinding.

TWENTY-FIVE

Second Wave

Changes

Betrayal

It was the battle to begin the war.

The Urgall Depression was churned to ruination beneath the boots and tank treads of countless thousands of Astartes warriors and their Legion’s armour divisions. The loyal primarchs could be found where the fighting was thickest: Corax of the Raven Guard, borne aloft on black wings bound to a fire-breathing flight pack; Lord Ferrus of the Iron Hands at the heart of the battlefield, his silver hands crushing any traitors that came within reach, while he pursued and dragged back those who sought to withdraw; and lastly, Vulkan of the Salamanders, armoured in overlapping artificer plating, thunder clapping from his warhammer as it pounded into yielding armour, shattering it like porcelain.

The traitorous primarchs slew in mirror image to their brothers: Angron of the World Eaters hewing with wild abandon as he raked his chainblades left and right, barely cognizant of who fell before him; Fulgrim of the lamentably-named Emperor’s Children, laughing as he deflected the clumsy sweeps of Iron Hands warriors, never stopping in his graceful movements for even a moment; Mortarion of the Death Guard, in disgusting echo of ancient Terran myth, harvesting life with each reaving sweep of his scythe.

And Horus, Warmaster of the Imperium, the brightest star and greatest of the Emperor’s sons. He stood watching the destruction while his Legions took to the field, their liege lord content in his fortress rising from the far edge of the ravine. Shielded and unseen by his brothers still waging war in the Emperor’s name, Horus’s lips were never still – he spoke continuous orders to his aides, who transmitted them across to the embattled warriors. His eyes remained narrowed as he watched the carnage playing out on the stage below, orchestrated and guided by his own will.

At last, above this maelstrom of grinding ceramite, booming tank cannons and chattering bolters – the gunships, drop-pods and assault landers of the second wave burned through the atmosphere on screaming thrusters. The sky fell dark with the weak sun eclipsed by ten thousand avian shadows, and the cheering roar sent up by the loyalists was loud enough to shake the air itself.

The traitors, the bloodied and battered Legions loyal to Horus, fell into a fighting withdrawal without hesitation.

Argel Tal watched all of this from the cockpit of Rising Sun as the Thunderhawk swooped low, engines howling as they carried it over the warring armies. A host of Word Bearer’s landing craft, the colour of their hulls matching the bleak weather of this cold world, headed for the ravine’s edges.

‘This is far enough. Set down,’ he ordered Malnor, who was piloting.

‘By your word.’

The two crimson gunships among the leaders of the grey pack began their downward drift. The Word Bearers, chosen landing site was close to the spread of terrain used by the Raven Guard in the initial assault, and the flock of regal, granite-grey aircraft touched down alongside their charcoal-black twins.

Affirmation pulses chimed across the beleaguered vox-network as the four Legions’ landers hit their marks. The tide was turned at the eleventh hour. Horus and his rebels broke into full retreat, fleeing back to their fortress.

Argel Tal walked down the gang ramp and into his first filtered breath of Isstvan V’s air. It was cold, cold and coppery, with the rich, earthy smell of churned mud and the ever-present smog of thruster exhaust. A quick scan through his eye lenses showed the panoramic view of the unfolding battle, where the Night Lords corvidish gunships were coming down on one flank, and the Alpha Legion’s war machines on the other. The main Word Bearer force bolstered both of their brother Legions on the Depression’s sides, and for a brief, uplifting moment, Argel Tal saw the flash of grey, ivory and gold that marked out Lorgar among the exalted First Company.

Then the primarch was gone, stolen by distance, smoke and the press of too many gunships between here and there.

The Iron Warriors had claimed the highest ground, taking the loyalist landing site with all the appearance of reinforcing it through the erection of prefabricated plasteel bunkers. Bulk landers dropped the battlefield architecture: dense metal frames fell from the cargo claws of carrier ships at low altitude, and as the platforms crashed and embedded themselves in the ground, the craftsmen-warriors of the IV Legion worked, affixed, bolted and constructed them into hastily-rising firebases. Turrets rose from their protective housing in the hundreds, while hordes of lobotomised servitors trundled from the holds of Iron Warriors troopships, single-minded in their intent to link with the weapons systems’ interfaces.

All the while, Perturabo, Primarch of the IV Legion, watched with passionless pride. He wore layered ceramite that would have looked at home as a tank’s armour plating, and clicking, crunching servos in his joints announced even the smallest shift in his stature.

Occasionally, he would spare a moment’s glance for the representatives from the other Legions among his number: nodding acknowledgement to the Word Bearers and Night Lords captains sharing his defensive bastions. The nod spoke volumes when coupled with the primarch’s bitter eyes: without even the pretence of respect, he acknowledged their presence and warned them to be about their business. Let them remain here as their primarchs had ordered, so long as they did not interfere. The Iron Warriors did not need them getting in the way. All the while, the sounds of warfare’s industry rattled and ground on, and the firebase structures lifted higher, their battlements forming and defensive cannons whirring as they took aim down at the central plain.

Argel Tal and Xaphen led the Gal Vorbak away from their Thunderhawks, through the statuary of landed gunships, and through to the barricades being raised by the metallic forms of the Iron Warriors. The ground trembled gently with the tread of Astartes boots as the Word Bearers seconded to Argel Tal’s command closed ranks and followed. Thousands of warriors awaited his signal, their companies and Chapters marked by banners raised high.

Down the line, past the mounting masses of Iron Warriors battle tanks and assembling Astartes, Argel Tal could make out the cloaked form of First Captain Sevatar and his First Company elite, the Atramentar. Bronze chains wrapped their armour, leashing weapons to fists, as the Night Lords made ready for the coming signal.

‘We are to be the anvil,’ Xaphen voxed to the gathered Word Bearers as they waited by the barricades. ‘We are the anvil, while our brothers form the hammer yet to fall. The enemy will stagger back to us, exhausted, clutching empty bolters and broken blades, believing our presence to be a reprieve. The Iron Hands have damned themselves by remaining in the field, but you see the survivors of two Legions coming to us even now. The Salamanders. The Raven Guard. We must hold them long enough for our brothers to annihilate them from the flanks and the rear.’

Argel Tal had tuned out already. He watched the battle breaking apart, seeing the defiant Iron Hands contingent ringing their primarch at the heart of the battlefield. The righteous indignation that kept them there would see them slain before any others.

The forest-green of Salamander ceramite formed a withdrawing mass scrambling its way back uphill to the Iron Warrior barricades over to the east, while the battered black armour of the Raven Guard warriors came towards the unified Night Lords and Word Bearers force. The loyalists’ shattered unit cohesion was already beginning to reform, reshaping around bannered sergeants as they marched up the incline.

Argel Tal swallowed a mouthful of something that tasted like poisoned blood. He couldn’t keep himself from salivating.

Raum, he said silently, but there was no answer. In a bizarre moment of clarity, he realised he could feel the wind against his skin. Not the focused feeling of pressure from a puncture in his warplate, but all over – a faint breath of wind against his flesh, as if his wargear had grown dull nerves capable of recognising external sensation. His hands began to ache again, and this time the pain brought something new: the sense of swelling, stretching, the torture of his own body-meat rendered as malleable as clay, with the brittle creaking of bone still inside.

Targeting circles that he hadn’t activated started to spin before his eyes, flickering across the blue lenses in search of prey.

Beneath them the Raven Guard in their thousands marched up the rise of land. Not a single one had escaped with his armour unscarred from the battle below. Despite their distance, Argel Tal’s vision was keen enough to make out how individual warriors marched with their bolters slung, out of ammunition, and oaths of moment reduced to burned, flapping parchment rags in the wind.

‘Sixty seconds,’ he growled into the vox.

‘By your word,’ chorused three thousand warriors in the ranks alongside him.

Dagotal sat in his saddle, looking over the barricades. The repulsor drive built into his jetbike’s chassis hummed in sympathy with his movements, whining louder as the rider leaned forward to watch the withdrawing Raven Guard draw nearer.

His task was to skirt the battle’s edges, cutting down any stragglers that sought to escape from the main melee. Although only five of his outriders had survived the transition into the Gal Vorbak so many years before, they sat at his side now, gunning their engines in readiness for what they were committed to do.

He blinked burning sweat from his eyes, breathing in laboured rasps, trying to ignore the voice howling in his mind. The pain in his throat had been building in intensity for hours to the point where swallowing caused excruciating pain. Now, even breathing was a trial. Venom dripped down his chin, bubbling hot, from his overworking saliva glands. The acidic poison dripped over his lower teeth every few seconds, and he could no longer bear to swallow and neutralise it.

‘Thirty seconds,’ came Argel Tal’s order.

Dagotal murmured meaningless syllables with a wet voice, as acid hissed from his helm’s mouth grille.

Torgal thumbed a gear-rune on his chainaxe’s control, shifting settings from soft tissue to armour plating. A thicker second layer of jagged teeth slid forward alongside the first. In truth, a chainbladed weapon would always struggle to do more than strip the paint from layered ceramite, but it would chew through fibre-bundle armour joints or exposed power cables with ease.

He had been weeping blood, without feeling sorrow or any emotion at all, for an hour. Had he been able to remove his helm, Torgal was certain the scarlet tracks would be stained across his cheeks by now, darkening the skin with a tattoo’s permanence. Each time he blinked, his tear ducts flushed more of the watery blood-fluid down his face. When his tongue moved in his mouth, it slid along a maw of jagged teeth that cut his tongue open, and he tasted coppery pain for the few seconds it took the little slice wounds to seal.

Blood, thick and dark, was leaking from the knuckle-joints of his gauntlets, cementing his fingers to the haft of his axe. He couldn’t open his hand. He couldn’t release the weapon, no matter how he tried.

‘Twenty seconds,’ said Argel Tal.

Torgal closed his eyes to blink them clear, but they wouldn’t open again.

Malnor’s breath sawed in an out of his vocaliser grille. A chorus of voices assailed him, and for the briefest moment, he believed he was listening to the sounds of everyone he had ever met in his life. There was a tremor in his bones that he couldn’t suppress.

‘Ten seconds,’ came Argel Tal’s voice. ‘Stand ready.’

Malnor’s twitched head turned to the advancing ranks of the Raven Guard. Distance markers flashed across his retinal display, flickering as it recognised individual squad sigils on their shoulder guards.

Malnor grinned, and clutched his bolter tighter.

‘Brothers,’ the voice crackled. ‘This is Captain Torisian, 29th Company, Raven Guard.’

At the vanguard of the marching Astartes, a cloaked captain raised his hand in greeting. A spent bolter was mag-locked to his thigh, and a gladius glinted in his left hand. The captain’s cloak, once a regal blue, was a ragged ruin. Argel Tal raised his own hand in response, and replied over the vox.

‘This is Argel Tal, Lord of the Gal Vorbak, Word Bearers Legion. How goes the battle, brother?’

The Raven Guard leader laughed as he came closer. ‘The traitorous dogs already flee the field, but they fight like bastards, each and every one. In Terra’s name, it is a blessing to see you. Our primarch has ordered us back for resupply – but Lord Corax is an unselfish man. He would not wish us to steal all the glory on this day of days.’

Argel Tal could hear the smile in the other warrior’s voice as he continued. ‘Good hunting down there, all of you. Glory to the Word Bearers. Glory to the Emperor!’

The commander of the Gal Vorbak didn’t reply. The advancing Raven Guard were almost at the barricades. He felt his muscles bunching and twitching with sick need.

‘Brother?’ asked Torisian. The captain’s armour was an older Mark III Iron-class suit, blocky and heavy, almost primitive compared to the Maximus-class armour worn by the XVII Legion. ‘What are your plans for assault?’

Argel Tal took a breath, and prepared to speak damnation.

Without knowing why, he couldn’t keep from thinking of Lorgar’s words to him, spoken so long ago. ‘You are Argel Tal. You were born on Colchis, in the village of Singh-Rukh, to a carpenter and a seamstress. Your name means ‘the last angel’ in the dialect of the southern steppes tribes.’

He thought, briefly, of his parents – two hundred years dead now. He had never visited their graves. He wasn’t even sure where they might be.

His father had been a quiet man with kind eyes, who had round shoulders from a lifetime of devotion to his craft. His mother was a mouse of a woman, with dark eyes and black hair in the ringlets preferred by the southern tribes. She had smiled a great deal. It was his abiding memory of her.

How far he’d come, in distance and time, from their riverside hut of packed mud and straw. He could almost feel the river water on his hands now, cooling to the touch even as it sparkled in the oppressive Colchisian sun.

He had four older sisters, each as distant and dead as his parents. They had wept when the Legion came for him, though at the time he couldn’t understand why. All he could see was the adventure, the joy, in being chosen by the holy warriors. The youngest – Lakisha, only a year older than he was – had given him a necklace of desert-dog teeth that she’d made herself. He felt it now, tied around his wrist, bound there each dawn upon rising and completing his meditations. The original string had long since rotted away, but he threaded the jackal teeth onto a new cord with the passing of every few years.

His oldest sister, Dumara, had spent every day telling him that he was good for nothing but getting underfoot. But she had no unkind words that day, and instead brought him a blanket of goat’s wool to take with him.

‘He will not require that,’ the massive grey warrior had declared in a machine-voice.

Dumara flinched back, clutching the blanket to her chest. Instead of offering it to the boy, she kissed his cheek instead. She was crying, too. He remembered how her tears made his face wet, and he hoped the warrior didn’t think it was he who’d been crying. He had to look brave, else the warrior might not choose him after all.

‘What is the boy’s name?’ the warrior demanded.

His mother had surprised him with a question of her own. ‘What is your name, warrior?’

‘Erebus. My name is Erebus.’

‘Thank you, Lord Erebus, this is my son, Argel Tal.’

Argel Tal. The Last Angel. He’d been born as a sickly little thing, during a year of blight and drought, and was given a name to mark him as the last child his mother would ever bring into their dry, thirsty world.

‘Forgive me,’ he whispered now. He hadn’t meant to speak the words aloud, but didn’t regret doing so.

‘Brother?’ Torisian’s voice crackled. ‘Repeat, please.’

Argel Tal’s grey eyes hardened to flint. ‘All Word Bearers,’ he said. ‘Open fire.’

TWENTY-SIX

Dropsite Massacre

Hull Breach

In the Shadow of Great Wings

Torisian shoved the body of his sergeant aside and scrambled forward. His ammunition counter flashed up the moment he touched a hand to his bolter, and it told a stark tale indeed. Among the clattering, crashing carnage, he drew his combat blade and charged.

‘Victory or death!’ he cried the call of his Legion. ‘We are betrayed! Attack!’

Bolt shells hammered into his chest and pauldrons as he ran, throwing him off-balance and breaking his armour apart. He sustained damage faster than his retinal display could track it. Torisian staggered, feeling fluid in his throat. A dense wetness was drowning him behind his ribcage.

The flash of blue hit him from nowhere, brighter than staring into the sun, tipping him back down to the ground. There he died alongside so many of his brothers, bisected by lascannon fire and dead from his wounds before he could drown in the blood filling his lungs.

The Raven Guard front ranks went down as if scythed, harvested in a spilling line of detonating bolter shells, shattered armour and puffs of bloody mist.

Black-armoured Astartes tumbled to their hands and knees, only to be cut down by the sustained volley, finishing those who fell beneath the initial storm of head- and chest-shots. Seconds after the first chatter of bolters, beams of achingly bright laser slashed from behind the Word Bearers as the cannon mounts of Land Raiders, Predators and defensive bastion turrets gouged through the Raven Guard and the ground they stood upon.

Argel Tal saw precious little of the bigger picture. Beams of ice-blue, as thick as his arm, slashed and burst overhead as they carved furrows in the soil and sliced cleanly through bodies. At his side, the Gal Vorbak stood in silence, clutching their axes and blades. The Iron Warriors and Word Bearers around them were variously reloading, opening fire again, hurling grenades, and preparing to fall back.

In the eye of this storm, Argel Tal looked on with hooded eyes. The vox-link to Torisian remained open long enough for him to hear the warrior die, wordless gurgles transmitting over the channel as the captain crashed to the ground.

Kor Phaeron licked his yellow teeth.

The wind howled around them, funnelled through the Urgall Depression in a noisy roar that challenged the battlefield’s thunder for supremacy. It was an unclean wind, carrying the bowel-smoke of tank engines in its breeze.

‘I cannot see,’ he confessed. ‘It is too far.’

The Word Bearers Legion had taken up landing positions on the west of the field, ready to sweep down and engage the Raven Guard from the flank. Three figures stood atop the roof of an ornate command tank, the Land Raider’s bronze and grey armour decked out with flapping banners and etched with fingernail-fine scripture over every visible surface.

Kor Phaeron, Master of the Faith, watched the distant dropsite through a desperate squint. He was unhelmed, and his massive Terminator warplate gave him the appearance of a hunched, armour-plated giant.

Erebus stood at his side, watching without effort, his Astartes vision keen enough to offer clarity.

‘We are winning,’ he said. ‘Nothing else matters.’ Only a flicker of emotion in his eyes betrayed his humour. Erebus was a dry soul, right to his core. ‘But already, the Raven Guard attacks the barricades. Far to the other side, the Salamanders fall to the guns of the other Legions. In the centre of it all, the few remaining Iron Hands encircle their doomed lord.’

Lorgar towered above both of them, but had no attention to spare for the treacherous opening salvoes against the warriors of the Raven Guard and Salamanders Legions. He stared into the battlefield’s heart, his eyes wide even in the wind, his lips gently parted as he watched his brothers killing each other.

Fulgrim and Ferrus, the fading sunlight flaring from the edges of their swinging weapons. The wind stole the clash and clang of their parries, but even in silence the duel was beyond captivating. No senses but a primarch’s could have followed such instant, liquid movements. The perfection of it all almost brought a smile to Lorgar’s lips.

Lorgar knew them both, though never as well as he’d wanted to. His approaches to Fulgrim had always been rebuffed with diplomatic grace, but his brother’s ire was clear: Lorgar, among all of the Emperor’s sons, was the failure that just wouldn’t remain silent. Even in the fifty years since his humiliation in Monarchia, as the Word Bearers had conquered more than any other Legion, desperate to match the tallies of the Sons of Horus and the Ultramarines. Fulgrim still wished nothing to do with him. The Lord of the Emperor’s Children – and oh, how proud he was that his sons alone among the Astartes could wear the Emperor’s aquila on their armour – had never voiced his distaste in express terms, but Fulgrim’s feelings were transparent enough. He was a being that valued nothing but perfection, and Lorgar was irrevocably stained by his flaws.

Ferrus, Lord of the Iron Hands, was an open book where Fulgrim was a closed one. Lorgar’s passion was ever on the surface, as was the passion of his Legion on the battlefield. Ferrus contained his wrath beneath a dignified facade but never buried it, and asked the same of his warriors. While Ferrus treasured those times on Terra he had spent working at the forge, shaping metal into weapons worthy of gifting to his demigod brothers, Lorgar had sequestered himself in the palace itself, debating philosophy, ancient history and human nature with Magnus and the Emperor’s more cerebral courtiers, advisers and viziers.

The closest they’d come to an accord was still a memory barely worthy of any family. Lorgar had come to find Ferrus in his forge, working at the construction of something molten, dangerous and undoubtedly destined to be a weapon of war. It seemed all the Iron Hands primarch was capable of.

Knowing the spiteful thought was petty, Lorgar had sought to temper it. ‘One wonders if you are capable of making anything that creates, rather than destroys.’ He tried to smile, hoping it would rob the accusation of any venom as he stood uncomfortably in the heat blaring from the open furnace.

Ferrus had cast a glance over his dark-skinned shoulder and watched his fey brother for a moment, not returning the smile. ‘One wonders if you are capable of creating anything worthwhile at all.’

Lorgar’s golden features had tightened, the smile now etched on rather than worn with any sincerity. ‘You summoned me?’

‘That I did.’ Ferrus stepped away from the anvil. His bare chest was flecked with miniscule marks of burn tissue, hundreds of them pockmarking his dark skin from stray sparks and spatters of molten metal. A lifetime of forge-work, worn like a coat of medals that scarred the flesh. ‘I made something for you,’ he said, his voice as low and rumbling as ever.

‘What? Why?’

‘I won’t call it a rescue,’ said Ferrus, ‘for my warriors wouldn’t stand for that. But I owe you thanks for the “reinforcement” at Galadon Secondus.’

‘You owe me nothing, brother. I live to serve.’

Ferrus grunted, as if doubting even that. ‘Be that as it may, here is a token of my appreciation.’

Ferrus’s Legion was named for the primarch himself. His arms were metallic, but not robotic, as if formed from some alien compound of organic silver. Lorgar had never asked about his brother’s unique biology, knowing that Ferrus would never explain it to him.

As he reached a nearby table, he lifted a long weapon with a sure grip. Without a word, he tossed it to Lorgar. The Word Bearer caught it neatly with one hand, though it was heavier than he’d expected and he winced under its sudden weight.

‘It’s called Illuminarum,’ Ferrus was already working back at his anvil. ‘Try not to break it.’

‘I... I do not know what to say.’

‘Say nothing.’ Already, the falling ring of hammer-hand upon yielding steel. Clang, clang, clang. ‘Say nothing, and leave me be. That will spare us any halting attempts at conversation when we agree on

nothing, and have nothing but awkwardness to share.’

‘As you wish.’ Lorgar had forced a smile to his brother’s back, and left in silence. Such was the extent of his closeness to Fulgrim and Ferrus.

Lorgar stared at the two of them now, awe paling his features as their weapons cracked off each other, shedding sprays of power-field lightning.

‘What have we done?’ he whispered. ‘These are my brothers.’

Kor Phaeron grunted in wordless disapproval. ‘Boy, order the attack. We must support Argel Tal and the Iron Warriors.’

‘But what are we doing? Why have we done it this way?’

Erebus didn’t scowl, he was far too composed for that, but Kor Phaeron wore his human emotion with greater ease. He fairly snarled the words, leeching them of kindness.

‘We are bringing enlightenment to the galaxy, Lorgar. This is what you were born for.’

Erebus turned to regard his primarch. ‘Is it not a grand sensation, sire? To be the architect of all this? To see your designs reach fruition?’

Lorgar would not, could not, look away from his duelling kin. ‘This was not my design, and you know it as well as I. Let us not pretend I have any skill at orchestrating bloodshed and betrayal on this scale.’

Kor Phaeron’s lips twisted as close as they ever came to a smile. ‘You give me far too much credit.’

‘It is well-earned.’ The primarch’s gauntleted fist was tight around Illuminarum’s haft, and minute tremors narrowed his eyes with each blow that rained upon Ferrus’s black armour. ‘Ferrus is tiring. Fulgrim is going kill him.’

With a grinding purr of servos, Kor Phaeron came forward to rest a clawed hand on his foster son’s arm. ‘Do not let it grieve you. What must be, must be.’

Lorgar didn’t shake the hand off, which both Erebus and Kor Phaeron counted as enough of a triumph. Lorgar’s feyness had worn on them both, and it took great patience and subtlety to incite him to violence. This battle had been years in the planning, and they would not allow him to foul it now with misplaced compassion. Emboldened, Kor Phaeron continued. ‘The truth is ugly, boy, but it is all we have.’

‘Boy.’ Mirth had no place in Lorgar’s smile. ‘I am over two centuries old, and I am dragging my father’s empire to its knees. Yet you still call me boy. Sometimes I find that a comfort. Other times, a weight around my shoulders.’

‘You are my son, Lorgar. Not the Emperor’s. And you are bringing hope to mankind.’

‘Enough,’ said the primarch, and now he did shake his foster father’s hand loose. ‘Come. Let us get this day done with.’ Lorgar raised his crozius maul to the sky.

It was all the signal they needed. Thousands of Word Bearers roared their approval behind him, as their liege lord led them to war.

The war on the surface was of no concern to him anymore.

Staying alive was, but then, that was always a concern. He was forever aware of that fact, which was why he was so good at it. Still, he had to admit it had become a more pressing matter, and a more difficult aim to reach.

Ishaq had never been in a void battle before, and it wasn’t something he hoped to get into again. The ship shook as if in a storm’s grip, shuddering with a belligerent aggression that defied all expectation. Every two dozen steps he took found him thrown to the floor with knee-aching violence, and resulted in hisses of pain along with the creation of new swear words – the latter usually by melding three existing curses together in a stream of invective. When Ishaq Kadeen swore, he swore with feeling, even if not with sense.

Half of the problem was that he was lost, and the other half of the problem was that he was lost on what was jokingly-referred to as the monastic deck, where the Word Bearers and their Legion serfs went about the business of being heroes (and the slaves of heroes). Sneaking onto the deck had seemed a good idea at the time; he’d hoped for some panoramic views of Astartes training chambers, or discarded suits of armour awaiting repair, or immense weapon racks to show the scale of war waged by the Emperor’s Legions. All of these would have made for fine, private and personal images very rarely seen from the Great Crusade, and would have bolstered his portfolio immeasurably. Stealing the grey, hooded Legion robe had been no trouble at all. Even slaves with vows of silence had to do their laundry.

It had started well. Then the battle had started, and he’d got lost.

Luckily, no Word Bearers were on board, all of them committed to the world below. The Legion serfs he did see were hurrying along about their business, but even they were hardly a sizable population. Evidently they had other duties to perform when their masters went to war. What they might be, Ishaq had no idea.

‘Shields down,’ shouted a voice over the shipwide vox, accompanied by some truly horrendous shaking. ‘Shields down, shields down.’

Well, that wasn’t good.

He stumbled around a corner as the lights flickered above. Another long corridor awaited him, with various junctions leading off deeper into this never-ending maze. At the far end, he could see another bulkhead of dense, multi-layered metal. He’d come across several of these so far, and was almost certain that they led to the most interesting parts of the deck. Ishaq wasn’t about to attempt to gain entrance though – a single failed retinal scan would mark his location to the Army units on board, and he could look forward to a quick execution. Oh, yes. He remembered the penalties for coming here all too well.

The Euchar were proving to be a problem too. Squads of them patrolled the halls with their lasguns held diligently to their chests, and though he was immune to their gaze with his robe’s hood covering most of his face, they made it difficult to take any picts, even if he had actually come across anything worthwhile.

Ishaq was finally considering a tactical retreat when the ship shook with enough violence to send him sprawling off-balance, head banging off the steel wall. It hurt enough to stun him, and it stunned him enough that he didn’t even think of swearing.

That lapse was rectified several seconds later, when an automated voice declared a list of breached decks over the vox. The list came to a climax with the words: ‘Deck Sixteen, void breach. Bulkheads sealing. Deck Sixteen, void breach. Bulkheads sealing.’

In a moment of almost poetic disgust, Ishaq looked up to see the great, red ‘XVI’ emblazoned on the wall where he’d hit his head. It was even decorated with spots of his blood.

‘You’re kidding me,’ he said out loud.

‘Deck Sixteen, void breach,’ the crackling voice monotoned again. ‘Bulkheads sealing.’

‘I heard you the first time.’

The ship rattled again, with the definite booming of explosions only a few corners away. Smoke billowed from the far end of the corridor.

Ishaq’s world dimmed into the deep, unwanted red spectrum of emergency lighting. At best, it would ruin any picts he took. At worst, and much more likely, he was about to die.

Argel Tal drew back his claws. The blood lining them sank into the curling metal, drank as thirstily as desert soil drinks rainwater. He released a great howl to the sky as he waded forward, kicking aside wounded Astartes and carving out at the massed Raven Guard in range. Their blades broke against his armour, each strike hitting with a curiously muted sensation – he could feel the slices as if they were chopping into the skin of his armour, but they never bled, never caused any pain.

blade left danger kill

The warnings manifested with tickling pressure behind his forehead, somewhere between a voice, a premonition, and a tide of instinct. He wasn’t sure if Raum was warning him, or he was warning Raum – both voices were the same, and his movements were only half his own. He would swipe with a claw, but the blow would accelerate and hit harder than he could ever manage himself. He would block a sword blow, but would find his talons around the enemy’s throat before he had time to think.

He wrenched his head to the left – he smelled the metal tang of the descending blade, he caught the flash of sunlight along its edge without even looking – and Argel Tal span to kill its wielder. The Word Bearer’s claws raked across the warrior’s torso and the Raven Guard dropped instantly, his armour savaged and pulled from his body. Argel Tal’s fingers burned as they absorbed his brother’s blood. Under his helm, his grinning mouth was stained red by a bleeding tongue.

In every battle of his life, he’d felt a desperation beneath the ferocity of the moment. A feverish awareness of how to survive always nestled beneath his righteous anger, even in those moments of near-suicidal attack when he’d led dozens of his brothers against hundreds of the enemy. As his claws ravaged the armour and exposed faces of the Raven Guard around him, he cast that awareness aside.

‘Traitor!’ one of the Raven Guard cried at him. Argel Tal roared in reply, the ceramite of his helm cracking open to reveal a jagged maw, and leapt at the warrior. The Astartes died on the blood-mulched ground, pulled and torn to pieces by Argel Tal’s jointed claws.

He was dimly aware of snarling laughter coming over the vox. At one point, in the senseless, timeless melee, Xaphen had shouted to them all.

‘The Gal Vorbak are released at last!’

‘No,’ Argel Tal replied with growling certainty, without knowing how he knew. ‘Not yet.’

He tore the helm from a Raven Guard’s head and leered into the struggling warrior’s face.

‘Beast...’ the Astartes choked. ‘Corruption...’

Argel Tal caught his reflection in the warrior’s eyes. His black helm roared back at him, the left eye still ringed by a golden sun, the mouth grille split to reveal monstrous jaws of ceramite and bone, the crystal blue eye lenses leaking trails of blood down his painted faceplate.

Argel Tal sank his claws into the warrior’s body, feeling the tingle of leeching blood as his talons scratched at the man’s organs and bones. ‘I am the truth.’

He pulled, and the Raven Guard came apart in his hands, rendered into bloody chunks.

‘No peace among the stars,’ he said, unsure if both of his voices were speaking or if he merely imagined one of them.

‘Only the laughter of thirsting gods.’

The Gal Vorbak howled as one as they cast around for more prey, chasing down the Raven Guard that sought to regroup and oppose the unbelievable treachery facing them. Argel Tal howled loudest of all, but the sound soon died in his throat.

A shadow, the shadow of great wings, eclipsed the sun.

The ground murmured with his landing. Claws slashed from their power-fist housings with silver flashes, and shimmering wings of dark metal reached up from his shoulders into the air above. Slowly, so painfully slowly, he raised his head to the traitors. Black eyes stared from a face whiter than Imperial marble, and written across the pale features was the most consummate, complete anger Argel Tal had ever seen. It was an emotion truer and deeper even than the rage that ruined the faces of the daemons within the warp.

And Argel Tal realised it was not anger, nor rage. It went beyond both. This was wrath, in physical form.

The primarch of the Raven Guard turned with an inhuman cry, letting the thrumming wing-blades affixed to his smoking jetpack slice out with their killing edges. Word Bearers tumbled away in droves, shredded into lumps of armoured flesh. The claws followed, rending through any of the grey warriors unlucky enough to be within range of the warlord’s landing.

Once he was in motion, Corax never slowed. He was a blur of charcoal armour and black blades, carving, chopping, dismembering without effort, mutilating with the barest movement, butchering with an ease that belied his ferocity.

Lascannon fire rained towards the primarch as the Iron Warriors turned their turrets on the gravest threat in range. The Word Bearers caught in the net of streaming fire were sliced apart as surely as the ones killed by Corax’s claws, but the beams themselves flashed aside from the primarch’s armour, never striking it straight-on, leaving savage burn scars without once penetrating.

The voices of dying Word Bearers became a conflicting chorus over the vox.

‘Help us!’ one of the captains screamed to Argel Tal.

The Crimson Lord cast aside the last Raven Guard he’d killed – the warrior’s neck had crackled most satisfyingly as he was strangled – and ordered the Gal Vorbak to charge. It left his helm as a split-jawed roar, for even his face was no longer his own.

Even with the cry reduced to wordless malice, the Gal Vorbak understood and obeyed. The first to reach Corax was Ajanis, and the Raven Guard lord butchered the warrior without even turning to face him. A burst of flame from the flight pack seared Ajanis’s armour, slowing him long enough for the swinging wings to shear through his torso as Corax turned to face other enemies. The crimson Word Bearers leapt and struck at the primarch, but their assault did little more than their grey brothers’ had done.

We die in the shadow of great wings, came the voice from within.

I know.

Argel Tal leapt forward to meet his end at the hands of a demigod.

Lorgar hesitated, and in that moment his crozius maul lowered. Blood marred its ornate head – the blood of the Raven Guard: the same blood that ran in his brother’s veins ran through his genetic progeny.

Bolter shells cracked against Lorgar’s armour, their heat and explosive debris going utterly ignored. Just as the Word Bearers struggled to stand before Corax, so too did the Raven Guard fall back and die in droves to Lorgar’s dispassionate, surgical destruction through their ranks.

Lorgar’s head snapped back as a bolter shell thudded into his helm, disrupting the retinal electronics and warping the ceramite. He wrenched the mangled metal from his face and killed his attacker with a single swipe of Illuminarum. The blow sent the Raven Guard tumbling away over the heads of his retreating brothers, crashing down among them.

‘What is it?’ Kor Phaeron stalked to Lorgar’s side, his claws as wet as the primarch’s crozius. ‘Push on! They are breaking before us!’

Lorgar aimed his maul across the battlefield. Corax was wading through the Gal Vorbak, ripping the crimson warriors apart.

‘Who cares about the albino’s cowardice?’ Kor Phaeron was frothing, spit spraying from his lips as he cursed. ‘Focus on the fight that matters.’

Lorgar ignored the bile in his father’s words, as well as the infrequent shells crashing against his armour. Given a blessed respite from the primarch’s murderous advance, the Raven Guard were falling back from him in a black tide. They left their dead in a carpet at the primarch’s feet.

‘You do not understand,’ Lorgar shouted over the din. ‘My brother is not fleeing. He has flown to where the fighting is thickest. He is cleaving a path to his gunships, drawing the worst of our firepower, so his sons might escape.’

Erebus was a grey blur of lethal motion, hammering an unhelmed Raven Guard sergeant to the ground and killing him with a return swing that caved in the warrior’s skull.

‘Sire...’ The First Chaplain’s armour was blackened from flamer wash, the joints still smoking. ‘Please focus.’

Lorgar clutched his sundered helm in one hand. The vox-link was still open. He could hear the tinny screams of the dying. ‘He is killing so many of us.’

The helm fell, gripped no more. He held his bloodied maul in ironclad fists, and clenched his teeth just as tightly. ‘No,’ the word was breathed with absolute conviction.

Kor Phaeron’s face was a mess of wounds, and even with his augmentations, he was breathing in a hoarse rasp. The battle was costing him dearly. He met Erebus’s eyes for a moment – and something akin to disgust passed between them.

‘Your deeds are ordained on these killing fields,’ Erebus spoke almost as if delivering a sermon. ‘You must not face your brothers yet. It is fate. We play our destined parts, as the pantheon wills it.’

‘Kill. The. Raven. Guard.’ Kor Phaeron growled through bleeding lips. ‘That is what you are here to do, boy.’

Lorgar stepped forward and cast a sneer that settled over both his mentor and ancient foster father. ‘No.’

Kor Phaeron screamed in frustrated anger. Erebus remained composed. ‘You have laboured for decades to raise an army of the faithful, sire: a Legion that would die for your cause. Do not deviate from the path now you at last possess what you have dreamed of.’ Lorgar turned from them both, first watching the retreating Raven Guard, then seeing Corax slaughtering his way through Word Bearers – some armoured in grey, some in crimson.

‘We have found gods to worship,’ he said, staring without blinking. ‘But we are not enslaved to them. My life is my own.’

‘He’ll kill you!’ Kor Phaeron’s sluggish Terminator warplate wouldn’t let him run, but there was real fear, real sorrow, beneath the anger and panic. ‘Lorgar! Lorgar! No!’

Lorgar broke into a sprint, boots pounding over the churned earth and dead bodies of his brother’s Legion, and for the first time in his life, he went to engage in a battle he had no hope of winning.

‘My death is my own, as well,’ he breathed the words as he ran.

He saw his brother – a man he’d barely spoken to in two centuries of life, a man he barely knew – butchering his sons in a vicious rage. There was no thought of conversion. No hope of bringing Corax into the fold, or enlightening him enough to cease this murderous rampage. Lorgar’s own anger rose to the fore, burning away the passionless killing of only moments ago. As the Word Bearers primarch hammered his way through the Raven Guard to reach his brother, he felt power seethe within him, aching to rise out.

Always, he’d bitten back his psychic potential, hiding it and hating it in equal measure. It was unreliable, erratic, unstable and painful. It was never the gift it seemed to be for Magnus, and thus, he had swallowed it back, walling it up behind unyielding resolve.

No more. A scream of release tore itself free, not from his mouth, but his mind. It echoed across the battlefield. It echoed into the void. Energy sparked from his armour, and a sixth sense unrestrained at last, with its purity perhaps coloured by Chaos, exhaled from his core. A sound like the crashing of tides in the Sea of Souls swept through the ravine, and Lorgar felt the heat of his own fury made manifest. He felt his unchained power reaching out, not only to enhance his physical form, but reaching to his sons across the battlefield.

And there he stood at the heart of the killing fields, winged and haloed by amorphous contrails of psychic fire, shouting his brother’s name into the storm.

Corax answered with a shriek of his own – the call of the betrayer, the cry of the betrayed – and the raven met the heretic in a clash of crozius and claw.

This, came the voice, is the cry of the gods we have both been waiting for.

Argel Tal had no hope of replying. The pain knifing through every cell in his body was enough that he sought to slay himself, clawing at his helm and throat, feeling his fingers burning with his own blood as he ripped hunks armour from his flesh, and fistfuls of flesh from his bones.

Do not fight the communion.

Again, he ignored the voice. He wasn’t dying, no matter how he tried. A hooked claw tore the skin from his throat, and with it, half of his collarbone. He inflicted similar injuries upon himself with each second, but he wasn’t dying. He scrabbled at the armour and bone shielding his two hearts, feverish in his need to wrench both of them from his chest.

Communion... Ascension...

The winged shadow vanished from Argel Tal’s vision, and above him the sky was brightened by the last rays of the setting sun.

I am alive, he thought, even as he tore himself apart, even as he ripped a handful of steaming organ meat from his shattered ribcage and burst his first heart in his hand. I did not die beneath the shadow, and I cannot destroy myself now.

This pain will bleed you of sanity. Let me ascend!

Despite agony no living being had ever survived, there was still a moment of fierce resistance in the war behind Argel Tal’s eyes. He wanted to die, to taste nothingness, not to endure further corruption. The sentience that was Raum found itself shackled deeper within by a soul ruthlessly unwilling to surrender.

I will save us, not harm us. RELEASE ME.

The Word Bearer’s concentration went slack, not because he believed the daemon’s words, but from reaching the absolute end of his strength.

Argel Tal closed his eyes.

Raum opened them.

A cloven hoof of bleached bone, wreathed in ceramite that seemed moulded to fit, crushed a gasping Raven Guard warrior into the mud. Great claws with too many joints, resembling the lashing branches of winter trees, closed and opened, closed and opened, while each of its long fingers ended in black talons. Most of the crimson armour was bulked up and layered by dense bone ridges and knuckly spines. It stood taller than even an Astartes – though not equal to the primarchs battling a short distance away.

Its helm was crowned in pagan majesty with great horns of ivory, and silhouetted against the bright cannon fire it seemed to resemble the Taur of Minos from pre-Imperial Terran mythology. Its legs were jointed backwards and brutally muscled beneath the armour, with powerful black hooves leaving burning imprints in the soil. Its Astartes helm was split along the cheeks and mouth grille to reveal a shark’s maw with rows of bladed teeth, glinting with clear acidic saliva.

The daemon drew in a great breath and roared it back out into the retreating ranks of the Raven Guard. That terrible wall of sound hit the Astartes as if an earthquake was laughing at them. Dozens fell to their hands and knees.

Around the warped helm’s left eye lens, the golden sun was all that marked the creature as the man it had been.

TWENTY-SEVEN

An Image to Make his Name

Sacrifice

The Burden of Truth

Ishaq made a jump for it, and rolled under the bulkhead before it slammed down. It was less daring than it sounded as the security doors were taking their sweet time to close, but with the sirens wailing and the emergency lighting darkening everything to deep red, he was hardly thinking clearly. He didn’t want to get sucked out of a void breach, but nor did he want to be caught up here when the battle was over. He needed to go, go, go.

Checking his picter was still in one piece, he broke into another sprint, desperate to get the hell off this deck. The labyrinthine corridors defied this, hindering him further by the fact most of the wall markings were in Colchisian rather than Imperial Gothic.

Have I been here before? One corridor was much the same as another. In the distance, he could hear bulkheads sealing shut and corridors collapsing as the ship sustained more damage. He’d already made it through several thoroughfares where the walls were reduced to wreckage scattered all over the floor in a twisted mess of grey steel and black iron.

He started running again. Four dead men waited around the next corner – four Euchar soldiers, half-crushed by an exploded, fallen wall.

No. Three dead. ‘Help me,’ said the fourth.

Ishaq froze while the ship shook around him. If this soldier survived and identified him later, he was a dead man for being on the monastic deck.

‘Please,’ the trembling man begged.

Ishaq knelt by the soldier and heaved some of the wreckage off his legs. The Euchar screamed, and the imagist squinted through the emergency darkness to see why. Some of the detritus had pierced the soldier’s legs and belly, pinning him to the floor. There’d be no helping him, after all. Pulling this out was the work of a skilled surgeon, and even then, it likely wouldn’t be enough to save the poor wretch.

‘I can’t. I’m sorry. I can’t.’ He rose to his feet. ‘I can’t do anything.’

‘Shoot me, you stupid bast–’

‘I don’t have a–’ He saw the soldier’s rifle half-buried in the junk, and hauled it free. As he tried to take aim, the shuddering ship almost sent him sprawling.

Click, went the trigger. Click, click, click.

‘Safety,’ the soldier groaned. Blood was pooling beneath him. ‘The... switch.’

Ishaq flicked the switch along the gun’s side, and pulled the trigger. He’d never fired a lasweapon before. The crack-flash left dancing lights before his eyes, and he struggled at first to see the soldier. The man was dead now, his head emptied against the wall behind him. The corridor itself was blocked by debris, and Ishaq dropped the rifle with a clatter, turning to head back the way he’d come.

The bulkhead at the end of the concourse thunked shut with a finality Ishaq almost swore was smug, trapping him in a corridor with four dead bodies and a lot of wreckage. One door led out of here, marked by what looked like Colchisian verse on the damaged walls either side.

He pounded his fists against it, getting no answer. The door was warm, charged somehow, as if the room on the other side were a living thing. Ishaq hammered meaningless numbers into the keypad, receiving the same amount of success.

At last, he took up the lasrifle again, closed his eyes, and shot the security panel. The keypad shorted out, flickering with small flames, and the door at the heart of the monastic deck opened with a sweltering whisper of released air. The sigh of pressure was obscene in its biological origins, stinking of unwashed flesh and the faecal reek of prolonged deprivation. Voices drifted out from the room as if carried on the air. They mumbled and muttered, and made no sense.

Ishaq stood, staring inside, unable to form words at what he was seeing.

His picter flashed. This, at last, was the image to make his name.

His brother was a warrior, a warlord, and from the very first moment their weapons met, Corax was fighting to kill, while Lorgar fought to stay alive. The battle moved too fast for mortal eyes to perceive, with both primarchs pushing themselves beyond anything else they’d endured.

Corax evaded the crozius without even once parrying. He weaved aside, threw himself out of reach, or fired his flight pack with enough force to boost him up and over Lorgar’s heavy swings. By contrast, sweat stung Lorgar’s eyes as he desperately blocked each of his brother’s attacks. Illuminarum’s great hammerhead rang like a church bell as it battered aside the Raven Lord’s claws.

‘What are you doing?’ Corax cried into his brother’s face as their weapons locked. ‘What madness has taken you all?’

Lorgar disengaged, hurling Corax backward with enough strength to leave his brother unbalanced. The Raven Lord compensated instantly, his flight pack breathing fire and propelling him back at his brother. Bladed wings flashed out to the side, but Lorgar was ready for them. He ignored their scraping, cutting wounds as they knifed through his armour, and focused on hammering Corax’s claws aside. In the seconds’ safety he bought for himself, Lorgar at last landed a true blow. Corax was sent sprawling again as the crozius pounded into his breastplate. The power field around the maul’s head struck with enough force to send a shockwave blasting out from the warring brothers, throwing all nearby Astartes to the ground.

In less time than it took to breathe in, Corax was back on his feet, thrusters firing, spearing at Lorgar once more.

‘Answer me, traitor,’ the Raven Lord grunted. His dark eyes were narrowed at the sickening light that haloed Lorgar. ‘You... are a poor reflection of our father... with that psychic gold.’

Lorgar felt himself slipping back in the mud, his boots grinding across the earth as his brother’s strength leaned heavier against him. He couldn’t break the weapon lock this time. Both Corax’s claws clutched at Illuminarum’s haft, burning the handle and the Word Bearer’s hands.

‘I am bringing the truth to humanity,’ Lorgar breathed.

‘You are destroying the Imperium! You are betraying your own blood!’ The wildness in the Raven Lord’s black eyes was something Lorgar had never even imagined before. Corax had always seemed so taciturn, so devoid of passion. That this warrior lay beneath the albino facade was a horrendous revelation.

The claw tips, spitting with crackling power fields, were a finger’s length from Lorgar’s face now. ‘I will kill you, Lorgar.’

‘I know.’ He spoke through gritted teeth, feeling strength bleed from his bones. ‘But I have seen what will be. Our father, a bloodless corpse enthroned upon gold, and screaming into the void forever.’

‘Lies.’ The black eyes narrowed, and the Raven Lord’s pale muscles bunched, locking harder. ‘You are reducing a kingdom to chaos. Overthrowing the perfect order.’

Lorgar’s grey eyes danced with light despite the strain on his body. ‘The opposite of chaos is not order, brother. It is stasis. Lifeless, unchanging... stasis.’

With a last grunt, Lorgar’s strength gave. Quivering hands could no longer keep his brother’s weapons back.

‘Here it is,’ Corax promised in a hiss, his saliva flecking Lorgar’s eyes and cheeks. ‘Here is the death you so richly deserve.’

The claws reached his brother’s face. Slowly, the metal burning-hot, they sliced over Lorgar’s golden skin. Inch by inch, blackening the golden flesh, cutting into the meat of his cheeks. Even should he escape, he would bear these scars until the day he died. He knew this, and did not care.

The psychic fire wreathing them both flared in response to Lorgar’s pain. Corax closed his eyes to spare his sight, and instinct cost him his quick victory. Lorgar threw the Raven Lord back again. Illuminarum rose, ready to strike, before a burst of smoky fire launched the Raven Lord up from the soil to come down on Lorgar from above. The Word Bearer smashed the first claw aside, striking the fist with enough force to shatter the gauntlet completely, but even as scythe-long claw blades span off into the surrounding melee, the second claw struck home.

Metre-long talons sank through Lorgar’s stomach, the tips glinting to the side of his spine as they thrust from his back. Such a blow meant little to a primarch – only when Corax heaved upwards did Lorgar stagger. The claws bit and cut, sawing through the Word Bearer’s body.

Illuminarum slipped from the impaled primarch’s fists. Those same hands wrapped around Corax’s throat even as the Raven Lord was carving his brother in half.

‘For the Emperor,’ Corax breathed, untroubled by his weaker brother’s grip. Lorgar crashed his forehead against Corax’s face, shattering his brother’s nose, but still he couldn’t free himself. The Raven Lord gave no ground, even as a second, third and fourth head butt decimated his delicate features.

‘But he lied to us,’ Lorgar spoke through lips that produced more blood than language. ‘Father lied.’

The claws jerked, snagged against Lorgar’s enhanced bones. Corax tore them free, inflicting more damage than the first impaling had done. Blood hissed and popped as it evaporated on the force-fielded blades.

‘Father lied,’ Lorgar said again. He was on his knees, hands clutched over the ruination of his stomach.

Corax’s black eyes gave nothing away. He stepped closer, his one functioning claw raised to execute his brother.

‘Do it,’ Lorgar snarled. The psychic wind, the misty fire – all were gone now. He was as he’d always been: Lorgar, the Seventeenth Son, the image of his father, the one soul in twenty who’d never wished to be a soldier. And here he would die, at the heart of a battlefield.

The foul irony of the moment settled on his shoulders, feeling grotesquely apt. He couldn’t move his legs. His body was a temple to nothing but pain. He could barely even see his executioner, for his psychic efforts had left him quivering with both weakness and a vision-blurring ache in his mind. A faint outline met his gaze, the blurred image of scythe-blades raised high.

‘Do it!’ Lorgar screamed at his brother.

The claw fell, and struck opposing metal.

Corax looked to meet eyes as black as his, in a face as pale as his own. His claw strained against a mirroring weapon, both sets of blades scraping as they ground against each other. One claw seeking to fall and kill, the other unyielding in its rising defence.

Where the Raven Guard primarch’s features were fierce with effort, the other face wore a grin. It was a smile both taut and mirthless – a dead man’s smile, once his lips surrendered to rigor mortis.

‘Corax,’ said the other primarch.

‘Curze,’ Corax said the name as the curse it was.

‘Look into my eyes,’ said the progenitor of the Night Lords Legion, ‘and see your death.’

Corax sought to wrench his claw free, but Curze’s second gauntlet closed on his brother’s wrist. ‘No,’ Curze’s laughter as was joyless as his smile. ‘Do not fly away, little raven. Stay. We are not finished, you and I.’

‘Konrad,’ Corax tried. ‘Why have you done this?’

Curze ignored the plea. He turned his void-like eyes on the prone Lorgar, with disgust written plain across his carcass face. ‘Rise from your knees, you accursed coward.’

Lorgar sought to do just that, using his brother’s midnight-blue armour as a crutch to haul himself to his feet. Curze bared his sharpened teeth. ‘You are the foulest weakling I have ever seen, Lorgar.’

Corax was not idle as this exchange took place. He fired his flight pack, burning his fuel reserves to escape Curze’s grip. The Raven Lord’s claw ripped free, and Corax soared skyward, carried on jet thrust away from Curze’s rising laughter.

On the ground, Curze shook himself free of Lorgar. ‘Sevatar,’ he spoke into the vox. ‘The Raven comes to you, to free his men.’

Battle sounds. Bolter fire. The roar of tank engines. ‘We will deal with him, lord.’

‘See that you do.’ Curze shoved Lorgar back towards his Word Bearers. Around them both, the grey Legion warred with the warriors in black. ‘I am done with you, golden one. Go back to killing Astartes with your pretty hammer.’

Lorgar’s preternatural biology was regenerating his damaged tissue with alacrity, but the primarch was shivery and weak as he reached for the fallen crozius.

‘Thank you, Konrad.’

Curze spat at Lorgar’s feet. ‘I will let you die next time. And if you...’

The Night Lord trailed off, his black eyes narrowing as he watched the figures appearing at Lorgar’s side. Their armour was crimson ceramite and ridged bone. Great claws, both metallic weapons and fleshy, jointed talons, extended from bestial arms. Every helm was horned. Every faceplate was split by a daemon’s skullish leer.

‘You are so much more than merely foul,’ Curze turned his back. ‘You are rancid in your corruption.’

Lorgar watched his brother stalking back through the ranks of Night Lords and Word Bearers, wading through them to reach the Raven Guard once more. Soon enough, the silver claws began to rise and fall as they always had, shearing through the armoured bodies of Curze’s enemies.

Lorgar turned to the Gal Vorbak. ‘Argel Tal,’ he smiled at one of them, knowing him instantly.

The creature grunted, twitchy with the need to shed blood. ‘It is I, sire.’

‘The warriors I would need,’ Lorgar murmured the old words with awe tainting his breath. ‘Truly, you are blessed by the gods. Go. Hunt. Kill.’

The Gal Vorbak withdrew from their lord, launching themselves back into the battle with leaps and snarls. Argel Tal lingered. A claw of ceramite and bone closed on Lorgar’s arm.

‘Father. I could not reach you in time.’

‘It does not matter. I live still. Hunt well, my son.’

The daemon nodded and obeyed.

Thunderhawk gunships in the colours of the Raven Guard and the Salamanders exploded at the launch site as the Iron Warriors turned their weapons from the slaughter and targeted the loyalists’ only avenues of escape.

Despite the grind of battle, dozens of the landing craft managed to make it back into the air. Most of these were soon sent spiralling back down to earth, streaming black smoke from lascannon wounds in propulsion systems. The Iron Warriors fired with impunity, caring nothing that many of the downed gunships fell groundward into the battle still being waged. The burning hulls of destroyed Astartes craft rained onto the killing fields, pulverising Word Bearers and Night Lords more often than they crashed into the few remaining pockets of Raven Guard and Salamanders survivors.

When contacted by Legion commanders protesting the careless destruction, the Iron Warriors captains replied with laughter that bordered on betrayal.

‘We are all bleeding today,’ an Iron Warriors captain voxed back to Kor Phaeron. ‘Have faith, Word Bearer.’ The link went dead to the sound of chuckling.

Time ceased to have any meaning for Argel Tal. When he was not killing, he was moving, hunting, seeking something else to kill. His claws savaged any Raven Guard warrior that came within his grip. Corax had thinned the ranks of the Gal Vorbak before Lorgar’s intercession, but enough of the chosen sons remained to form a feral pack that led their Legion, cutting into the diminishing foe.

In battle, he changed. His was not the ascendant consciousness. He ceded a measure of control to Raum, the surrender coming as naturally as breathing: it seemed simply a function of his new form. The daemon in possession added strength to even his lighter blows, and tore chunks from his enemies even as Argel Tal sought only to clutch onto them. His every motion was made feverish, hungrier somehow, drenched in blood and inhuman needs. As he wrapped his claws around a Raven Guard’s throat with the intent to strangle, his talons sank into the warrior’s neck and hooked around his spine. Every motion was instinctively more violent, breeding more pain in those foolish enough to stand before him.

Many of the Raven Guard sought to run. Argel Tal let these live, knowing his grey-armoured kin would cut these down with their bolters. It was a chore to resist the animalistic need to chase down prey – just seeing them flee from him was enough to tense his muscles into the desire for pursuit – but he knew his role in this war. He was a warrior, not a hunter.

A connection he’d not known existed went hollow and cold, and he felt, rather than saw, Dagotal die.

You are all bound. Blessed and bound.

A second of pain, like the memory of an old wound, and a curious loss stole over him. It was a lessening, as if the warmth of the sun had fallen behind a greying sky. The momentary chill passed, but the knowledge of his brother’s demise was etched into him, as cold as a stone in his skull.

He died in fire. Raum’s voice was as ecstatic as it was breathless. A cascade of chopping images flickered in Argel Tal’s mind, showing Dagotal engulfed in flame, surrounded by Raven Guard bearing flamer units. They bathed him in the corrosive fire, layering chemical propellant over his mutated armour, stoic against the unbelievable stench their murder was making.

The images flashed away, and Argel Tal dropped the corpse he’d strangled. Immediately, the need took him again. Like a hunger, a need for satiation, he physically ached unless he was moving toward prey. And he knew this ferocious need was the only emotion the neverborn could ever feel. This was how their minds worked – in stunted, brutal instinct.

The daemon moved to sate his new hunger.

The tremors eased, but didn’t cease. Still, Ishaq was thankful for small mercies. Nonessential bulkheads were grinding open now. The red light staining everything flickered back to standard illumination. He assumed De Profundis was pulling free of the main battle for... some reason. To rearm? To regroup? Whatever, he didn’t know and it didn’t matter. He was bolting through the corridors the moment he heard the first bulkhead unsealing.

Many were still shut tight, blocking off voided sections of the deck. This, too, didn’t matter. He didn’t want to explore any more, he just wanted to get out of here alive.

It was strangely worse to slow down and walk solemnly past Euchar infantry patrols than it was to pick and weave between the dead bodies that adorned some of the more damaged corridors. The Euchar squads were here to clean up, and he didn’t envy them that job. On several occasions, he moved past them in a dignified walk, seeing them gathering the fallen and bagging them up. He made sure his face was covered by the serf hood, and did his best to seem as if he paid little heed.

Once he was free of the monastic deck, he made his way to the Cellar, shaking loose the Legion robe on his way. His picter scanner was kept in a white-knuckled grip that would’ve broken a cheaper, less sturdy model.

The doors opened before him, revealing the Cellar in all its bustling slum hole glory. Even in the midst of the battle, the remembrancers and civilian crew had gathered here, gambling and drinking and doing their damndest to ignore the war raging outside. In truth, he didn’t blame them. He’d done it himself in smaller battles before.

His hands were shaking when he reached an empty table. A passing girl brought him something he didn’t order, and wouldn’t like even if he was in the mood to drink it. He scattered the few coins he had left, not caring that he overpaid. He just needed to be around people. Normal people.

‘Ishaq Kadeen. The imagist. I have your pict of De Profundis. A masterpiece, young sir.’

Ishaq looked up to meet the speaker’s dark-ringed eyes. He recognised the old man immediately.

‘You’re the astropath. The astropath for the Occuli Imperator.’

‘Guilty,’ the old man performed a strangely courtly bow, ‘as charged.’ He gestured to the chair. ‘Absolom Cartik at your service. May I sit?’

Ishaq’s grunt passed as a yes. The elder seemed nervous in the Cellar, just as he had last time Ishaq saw him in here. ‘I’ve not seen you in a couple of weeks. There was talk you’d be forsaking this place for good.’

‘I do not fit in well, but at times, the quiet gets to me. I feel the need to be around other people.’ Cartik gestured to the walls. ‘The battle,’ he swallowed. ‘They always get to me.’

‘I know that feeling. Sorry, but I’m not exactly wonderful company right now,’ Ishaq said.

The astropath was watching him with unwavering focus. ‘Your thoughts are very loud.’

All the blood drained from Kadeen’s face. ‘You’re reading my mind?’ He stood up fast enough to make himself dizzy. ‘Is that legal?’

The astropath waved his concerns aside. ‘I could never read a mind as you would understand it. Suffice to say, you are broadcasting your emotion with great intensity. Just as someone might see you laugh or cry, knowing your thoughts from your face, I can see the distress in your mind. No details, but it is very... loud,’ he finished lamely.

‘I don’t need this right now. I really don’t.’

‘I meant no offence.’

Ishaq took his seat again. The ship shook under enemy fire – enough to spill people’s drinks. Most pretended to ignore it. A few faked laughter, as if it were all part of the adventure.

‘Might I ask if you have any more masterpieces in the making?’ the old man asked. Ishaq glanced at his picter rod.

‘I’m not sure. Maybe. Look, I have to go.’ He squeezed his eyes shut, but everything looked the same when he opened them again. ‘I don’t want to be around anyone after all. And I’m not going to drink this, so consider it a gift.’

He slid the glass across the table. As Cartik took it, the astropath’s finger brushed the imagist’s knuckles. The elder jumped if kicked, staring with wide eyes. He looked as suddenly unwell as Ishaq felt.

‘By the Throneworld...’ he stammered. ‘Wh-what have you seen?’

‘Nothing. Nothing at all. Goodbye.’

Absolom Cartik’s elderly claw gripped onto the younger man’s wrist with all the tenacity of a raptor talon. ‘Where. Was. This.’

‘I didn’t see anything, you crazy old bastard.’

Their eyes met. ‘You wish to answer the question,’ Cartik said softly.

‘I saw it on board the ship.’

‘Where?’

‘The monastic deck.’

‘And you made recorded images? Evidence of what you saw?’

‘Yes.’

Cartik released the man’s wrist. ‘Come with me, please.’

‘What? No chance.’

‘Come with me. What you have seen must be shown to the Occuli Imperator. If you refuse, I can guarantee you only one thing: Custodian Aquillon will kill you for attempting to keep this a secret. He will kill everyone who has kept this a secret.’

The emergency lighting dimmed back into life. Complaints rang out across the Cellar, and the vessel around them shivered as its engines flared open again. They were returning to the battle.

‘I’ll... come with you.’

Absolom Cartik smiled. He was an ugly man – and age hadn’t helped change that fact – but he wore the kind of paternal, assured smile that stayed in a family’s memory for many years.

‘Yes,’ the old man said. ‘I thought you might.’

TWENTY-EIGHT

Aftermath

Blood is Life

An Unusual Welcome

He found Dagotal after the battle.

First, he came across his brother’s jetbike, powerless and half-buried in the Urgall dirt. Not crashed. Abandoned. Abandoned when the change took place, abandoned in favour of running and killing with one’s own claws.

He moved on, stepping over the bodies of slain Raven Guard, their white Legion symbol tarnished by mud or split by savage weapons. A warrior nearby still lived, his breath straining from a broken mouth grille. With a reaching claw, Argel Tal enclosed the Raven Guard’s neck, squeezing the soft armour there and ending the warrior’s life with the popping crackle of destroyed vertebrae.

There was no flood of endorphins from a hunger momentarily sated. With each minute that passed, Raum’s consciousness ebbed from Argel Tal’s mind with the helpless loss of sand slipping through his fingers. With the daemon’s recession, Argel Tal’s own instincts and emotions rebuilt themselves in his mind. In place of bloodlust and unnatural appetites, he felt hollow, and used, and so very, very tired.

His shadow stretched before him, made uneven by the dead bodies it fell across. Great horns curled from his helm. His body was a nightmare of protruding bone ridges and crimson ceramite. His legs were... He didn’t even have the words. They were jointed like a beast’s hind legs – a lion or a wolf – and ended in huge hooves of black bone. His warplate still covered them, leaving his silhouette like the shade of a creature from unholy myth.

Argel Tal turned from his shadow. A wet, burbling growl rumbled in his throat. That scent. He snuffed the air twice. Familiar. Yes.

He stalked away, letting his shadow fall across other bodies. There. Dagotal. A blackened thing, ripe with the scent of baked blood and life reduced to ash. Grey and red armour was strewn all about him, making his husk the cremated statue at the heart of a fallen Word Bearers pack. In the deepest distance, bolters still chattered. Why? The battle was over. Prisoner execution, perhaps. It did not matter.

Still infused with the aftermath of Raum’s inhuman perception, he sensed the others approaching. All of them resembled Argel Tal to some degree. Malnor was a twitching, brutish thing, his bunched musculature claimed by frequent spasms. Torgal hunched as he moved, his faceplate moulded into a snarling face entirely lacking eyes. Argel Tal knew without asking that Torgal was blind. Perhaps he was aided by scent and sound, but he hunted by the daemonic awareness of mortality nearby. Instead of the claws most of the Gal Vorbak now sported, Torgal’s arms ended in lengthy bone blades, hooked like primitive scimitars. Jagged, knuckly teeth roughened the surface of them, showing where they’d once been his chainblades.

Eleven of the Gal Vorbak remained alive. Corax had slain over two dozen – their dismembered parts now scattered over the nearby area – red amidst the grey. In the heat of the battle, it had been an easy matter to ride Raum’s perceptions, discarding the fragmentary pulsing pain of his brothers’ lives ending. But now, in the bitter dusk, their absence was harder to ignore. Their loss left him cold.

With the passing minutes, Argel Tal could feel the daemon’s quiet, small presence wrapped in a crippling exhaustion. Raum was not gone, nor truly distant. The daemon slumbered, its cold weight seeking to warm itself within the Word Bearer’s mind.

The horrendous changes inflicted upon his body and armour began to undo themselves at last. Ceramite cracked and resealed. Bony protrusions sank back beneath his skin, dragged back into the bones from whence they came. As Ingethel had promised so long ago, it was not a painless process, but by now the Gal Vorbak had passed through the fire of that particular torment. Pain was just pain, and they’d endured so much worse. A few grunted as the changes unwrought and their Astartes physiques reformed, but none voiced a lament as bones creaked and muscles condensed.

Still, they’d been seen. Warriors from the other Legions had seen them during and after the battle, and made their distasteful fascination shown in varying measures. The Night Lords seemed particularly unwilling to approach the Gal Vorbak. When Argel Tal had neared Sevatar, the captain had removed his helm to spit acid on the ground by the Word Bearer’s feet. The Sons of Horus – the Warmaster’s own – were more willing to approach and speak of the change. Argel Tal was unwilling to indulge them, but Xaphen, the slowest by far in resuming his Astartes form, seemed all too keen to enlighten the Sons of what the future held for the gods’ chosen warriors.

Argel Tal waited an hour for his bones to cease their creak-aching, but the sense of relief was nothing short of divine when he disengaged his collar seals and pulled his helm free.

The battlefield stank of engine breath and chemical-rich blood, but he had no sense to spare for anything beyond the feel of the wind rushing over his face for the first time in so many weeks.

Boot steps, heavy and assured, came from behind. He knew who it would be without needing to turn.

‘How does it feel?’ came the expected voice.

‘Strong. Pure. Righteous. But then cold, and hollow. Violated.’ Argel Tal turned to meet the other’s eyes. ‘I feel the daemon within me now, weakened and slumbering. Even after knowing the change would grip and fade in tides like this, it was like nothing I can describe. I am uneasy in the knowledge it will happen again, but I also feel anticipation for it. I... I lack the words to do it justice.’

‘We saw you fight,’ said the other. ‘The “blessed sons” indeed.’

Argel Tal sighed, still enjoying the world’s air instead of the filtered oxygen of his warplate. ‘I was spiteful to you before the battle, master. I ask forgiveness.’

Erebus’s smile didn’t reach his lips, but the momentary warmth of sincerity showed in his gaze. ‘Master no more.’

Argel Tal broke the look to stare out over the battlefield. Thousands and thousands of armoured bodies. Hundreds of wrecked tanks. Gunship hulls, still burning in their craters. Roaring cheers from the ranks of the World Eaters as they gathered skulls. The buzzing grind of chainblades as the warriors of seven Traitor Legions looted the dead for trophies and relics.

‘I do not regret taking the sword instead of the crozius all those years ago. As I’ve proven so many times since, I lack the words to be a preacher.’

Erebus came alongside his former pupil, looking out over the desolation. His armour showed clear signs of the battle, cracked and scorched all over. Erebus was never one to send his warriors into battle without leading them in himself. The bas-relief etchings of his deeds in neat Colchisian were discoloured by burn markings and stripped paint showing flashes of metallic ceramite beneath.

‘I believe that night may have been the very first incident of an Astartes seeking to kill another Astartes.’

Argel Tal remembered it well. ‘The primarch told me, long ago when I last stood in the City of Grey Flowers, that you had forgiven me for that night.’

‘The primarch was right.’

Argel Tal narrowed his eyes. ‘I never asked for your forgiveness. Not for that.’

‘It is yours, nevertheless. You still believe I went too far in my methods. I do not. We will never agree upon it. Do you believe you were right in your reaction? To draw a weapon against a brother? To seek to slay a Chaplain of your own Legion?’

‘Yes.’ Argel Tal’s gaze was unwavering. ‘I still believe that. I would have killed you, had I the chance.’

Erebus remained impassive. ‘Beside that first and last betrayal, you were a better student than you give yourself credit for. Loyal, intelligent, and strong of both heart and will.’

Loyal.

Raum’s thought was somnolent, barely formed in a veil of fogged weariness. It brought Argel Tal on guard, as he expected the daemon’s intent had been.

‘Sometimes I wonder,’ he said, ‘just how much of our loyalty is written into our blood.’

Erebus wasn’t blind to the inference. ‘The gene-seed changes every Legion, but the Word Bearers would not follow Aurelian into damnation and triumph with equal passion. We follow him because he is right, not because we must.’

Argel Tal nodded, neither agreeing nor arguing.

‘I need answers,’ the Gal Vorbak commander said. His tone was cold and clear, and Erebus turned upon hearing it.

‘Is this really the time?’ he asked.

Argel Tal fixed his former mentor with a cynical scowl. ‘We stand in the midst of two Legions brought to extinction by traitorous hands, and walk the first battlefield of an Imperial civil war. There will never be a better time to talk of betrayal, Erebus.’

The slightest edge of a smile coloured the Chaplain’s lips. ‘Ask.’

‘You already know what I would ask, so spare me speaking the question.’

‘The primarch.’ Erebus was utterly neutral once more, ever the statesman. ‘You would have me relay what we have done in the main Legion fleet for forty years? There is no time for such discussion. Much of what we learned is contained within the Book of Lorgar.’

A curl to his lips showed how little Argel Tal liked that answer. ‘Which, it seems, you have written half of,’ the Gal Vorbak lord said.

Erebus acquiesced to this with a shallow nod. ‘I have added to the rituals and prayers within, yes. As has Kor Phaeron. We have learned much, and have guided the primarch as often as he has guided us.’

Argel Tal growled his displeasure. ‘Be clearer.’

‘As you wish. A moment, please.’ Erebus knelt to slide his gladius into the throat of a twitching Raven Guard warrior. As they walked on, he wiped blood from the blade with an oiled cloth from his belt pouch.

‘You do not know what it was like, Argel Tal. After venturing into the Great Eye, Lorgar was... distraught. His faith in the Emperor was already destroyed, and the truth he found at the galaxy’s edge tormented him as much as it inspired him. Indecision gripped him for months. Kor Phaeron took command of the fleet for a second time, and we did little but vent our wrath across the worlds we came across. Despite Lorgar’s return, the Legion felt no joy from the primarch’s presence. In truth, Aurelian wasn’t certain humanity was ready to learn of such... horror.’

Argel Tal’s skin crawled. ‘Horror?’

‘The primarch’s own word, not mine.’ Erebus nudged another body with his boot. When a rasping breath wheezed from its mouth grille, the Chaplain repeated his execution, cleaning the blade again afterwards. ‘The Legion never struggled to adopt the new faith. We are philosophers as much as warriors, and take pride in such. All could see how the gods had seeded their worship into our culture from generations in the past. The constellations. The cults that always looked skyward for answers. The Old Ways themselves. Few Word Bearers resisted the truth, for most had always felt it on some level.’

‘Few resisted...’ An uncomfortable thought climbed Argel Tal’s spine with prickling fingers. ‘Was there a purge? A purge of our own ranks?’

Erebus weighed his answer before giving it voice. ‘Not all wished to turn on the Imperium. They believed that stagnancy was strength, that stasis was preservation. No such reluctance remains in the Legion now.’

So Word Bearer had slain Word Bearer, unseen by the eyes of other Legions. Argel Tal breathed slowly, not wishing to ask yet unable to resist. ‘How many died?’

‘Enough.’ Erebus took no joy in confessing it. ‘Not many – nothing like the numbers of those who were culled from the faithless Legions – but enough.’

They moved around the charred hull of a Sons of Horus Rhino. The armoured personnel carrier’s tracks were shattered and scattered like teeth punched from a jaw, while the sloped green hull was pockmarked with bolter fire. Erebus glanced inside. The driver was dead, slain by the shell that destroyed the tank’s front plating, his sea-green ceramite ruptured with shrapnel as he lay slack in his seat.

‘Why do I sense that was not your only question,’ he muttered.

Argel Tal scratched his cheek, and the motion turned into a subtle check, feeling his face for any further changes. He was himself again, at least for now. The mutations were locked inside his genetic code as the daemon slumbered. He knew they’d return soon enough. Just dwelling on the thought was enough to set Raum stirring, the daemon slowly writhing in its repose, like a creature shifting in its sleep.

‘The Custodes,’ he said. ‘We have suffered a long exile to keep them alive. Xaphen’s ritual kept them silenced. Tell me why, Erebus. We have ached to be by the primarch’s side.’

‘So has every Word Bearer in every one of the Legion’s fleets.’

‘We are the Gal Vorbak.’ Argel Tal crashed a fist into the Rhino’s flank, denting the armour plating.

‘Temper, Argel Tal.’

‘We,’ the commander repeated, ‘are the Gal Vorbak. We brought the truth to the primarch at the cost of our own souls. I am not demanding glorification. I am asking for a reason why we were kept in exile.’

Erebus walked on, leaving the tank, and the two Salamanders warriors it had crushed, behind. ‘You came to reflect a side of the primarch’s doubts, until Kor Phaeron and I were able to reignite his conviction. We travelled to those first worlds we conquered – the ones that we’d allowed the Old Ways to in secret remain out of respect. On those worlds, Lorgar’s passion to enlighten the Imperium was reforged anew.’

‘So why were we not recalled? Xaphen’s ritual to silence the Custodes–’

‘I know the ritual,’ Erebus snapped. ‘I wrote the ritual myself, after weeks of communion. Only then did I provide it to Xaphen, and it has been refined each time the invocation was cast.’

The invocation. A spell. Sorcery. Argel Tal shuddered. The word alone was enough to make his skin crawl. On the hillside, the first construction work was beginning on a towering funeral pyre, and a platform for the Sons of Horus to aggrandise themselves above the ‘lesser’ Legions. Argel Tal and Erebus paid the work little heed.

‘I can read the reluctance in your voice, Argel Tal. You do not burn with fervour to kill them, and I will see through any lies you tell me otherwise.’

‘I have no desire to slay them. We have grown closer over time, bonding through battle. But I must know why they were ordered to be spared.’

‘I need them alive,’ the Chaplain admitted at last.

‘Obviously,’ Argel Tal snorted. ‘But why?’

‘Because of what they are. Imagine a life form that cannot reproduce. Imagine it self-replicates instead, but the process is not perfect. It only achieves immortality for its species by creating weaker versions of itself down the generations. We are an example of this. From the Emperor came the primarchs, from the primarchs came the true Astartes. We are a species that names the Emperor not only as our inceptor, but our grandfather.’

Argel Tal nodded, waiting for Erebus to continue. He felt the threat of a smile as he recalled their lessons just like this, back in the days of tutor and student, master and acolyte.

‘We are the third generation of this genetic line. But what if our fleshworkers, our Apothecaries, and our psychically-gifted warriors could use our link to the Emperor as a weapon against him? Should we not capitalise on that possibility?’

Argel Tal shrugged a shoulder. ‘I do not see how we could.’

Erebus chuckled. ‘Think back to the Old Ways, and the lore you know of that faith from archives. Think back to the superstition and dogma that the Emperor has sought to banish from the sphere of human knowledge in his precious “Great Crusade”. How much of humanity’s clearest, core beliefs centred around sacrifice and spells fuelled by blood? Blood is life. Blood is the focus of a million magics, linking invoker and victim, or serving as an offering to reach the higher powers within the warp. If you have a being’s blood, you can tailor a poison to slay them and no other – a venom bred to end a single life, but to spare all others.’

‘And our blood is the blood of the Emperor,’ Argel Tal finished for him.

‘Yes. But it is thinned and filtered by mass production, with too many artificial chemical components, making it too weak to use in either alchemy or sorcery. The link to our grandsire is far too tenuous.’

Alchemy. Sorcery. Argel Tal found it starkly ironic that even with a daemon in his heart, he hated to hear of these words spoken so lightly. Truly, the winds of change had blown hard in the four decades of his unofficial exile.

Erebus looked across the battlefield, where the Iron Warriors were gathering bodies with the blunt efficiency so typical of the Legion’s attitude to warfare. Tanks fitted with great plough blades heaved through piles of the slain, sending the bodies tumbling along towards the funeral pyre.

‘Do you understand?’ he asked, without taking his eyes from the funerary work.

‘You believe the Custodes offer a closer link to the Emperor.’

‘I do. They are born from the same genetic code, though ours was filtered for mass production. They are purer for their rarity, if not their quality.’

It was an old assumption, and one with no proof, to claim that the Emperor was a primarch to the Custodian Guard. Argel Tal shook his head.

‘You need living Custodes for their blood,’ he said, ‘in the hopes of chasing what may well be a myth.’

‘All weapons must be considered.’ Erebus was composed. ‘No one but the Emperor has ever had the chance to study the Custodes, and knowledge is power. It must be guarded well. We have tried rituals with the blood of eleven Legions now, and all results met with disaster. What if we master the secrets of the Custodian genus? We could harness that lore to strengthen ourselves, not simply harm our foes. The Custodians in the main fleet, led by Iacus, were killed in battle long ago. Aquillon and his minions present one of the few remaining opportunities. Their blood must be borne from a beating heart for the rituals to have any hope of success.’

Another thought occurred, and Argel Tal spoke before considering it. ‘Are not the primarchs closest to the Emperor? You could use their blood for these... rituals.’

Erebus laughed. For the first time in Argel Tal’s life, he heard the First Chaplain really, honestly laughing. ‘Truth,’ Erebus smiled, ‘from the mouths of babes. Do you see any willing primarchs? We failed to capture any of the Emperor’s sons here, and you will not find Horus or even Aurelian eager to let their blood be manipulated in such a way.’

Argel Tal hesitated. In his hand, his helm emitted a vox-crackle.

‘My lord?’ came the voice of Fleetmaster Torvus. The Word Bearer replaced his helm with a deep sigh of reluctance. His clear vision was immediately stained dark and flickered with targeting markers.

‘This is Argel Tal.’

‘Sir, our final four ships have broken from the warp. The Occuli Imperator is demanding to board De Profundis immediately.’

‘Allow it. It no longer matters. They will have their suspicions, but only evidence would rouse them to fury. We are returning to orbit within the hour, and will deal with them then. Has the ship sustained damage?’

‘A great deal, but we’ve held it together through spit, grit and prayer. The only damage you will consider vital was taken on the Legion’s sanctum deck. Several breaches, but all hull wounds are isolated and secured.’

Argel Tal swallowed. ‘The Blessed Lady?’

‘Secure and well. A Euchar force investigated not thirty minutes ago. The enemy fleet is dust and wreckage in orbit. How fares the surface battle?’

Argel Tal scanned the devastation for several moments before answering. ‘We won, Baloc. That’s enough for now.’

Aquillon walked from the eagle-winged shuttle and onto the empty hangar deck. He’d never seen it so quiet: a hollow space of silent, waiting cranes and idle servitors standing by their wall-stations. The Legion was deployed, and everything the Word Bearers commanded had been committed to the world below.

At the base of the ramp, several figures were waiting for him. Sythran inclined his head in silence. Kalhin and Nirallus likewise didn’t salute – it wasn’t their custom to show obeisance to anyone but the Emperor, beloved by all. The three warriors held their guardian spears in loose grips, but their body language and postures suggested restraint, rather than simply remaining casual. He could read the telltale tension in their muscles, even beneath their golden armour.

The other two figures drew Aquillon’s attention. The first was Cartik, who offered a deep bow. The old man was sweating in the cold hangar, and his ageing heart beat in an accelerated, irregular rhythm. The second was unknown to him. Dusky-skinned and keen of eye, daunted by nothing he bore witness to. A brave soul, this one. Or reckless.

‘A curious welcome,’ the Occuli Imperator said softly. He was not angry – not yet, at least – but his patience had bled dry many hours before. The loss of contact with the Word Bearers fleet left him rattled, and this was indeed an unusual welcome. He knew something was wrong the moment he saw his brothers waiting for him below.

‘Your ships were “delayed” as well,’ Aquillon surmised. ‘You were prevented from reaching the battle at all.’ All three warriors nodded.

‘I was first to arrive,’ Nirallus said. ‘Less than ten minutes ago. The approach to the fleet was a nightmare, and the auspex chimed out with hundreds of dead ships in the upper atmosphere. It will rain steel on Isstvan V for decades to come.’

‘I saw the same,’ admitted Aquillon. ‘No sign of any vessels bearing the traitors’ colours, but the loyal Legions have suffered horrendous losses themselves. And the wreckage patterns did not suggest accurate numbers. It seems two Legions have been annihilated. Others who were supposed to be present were simply never here.’

‘I have not been able to reach Argel Tal,’ said Kalhin. ‘Or anyone else on the surface.’

Aquillon looked down at the two humans. ‘Explain their presence.’

Sythran stepped forward, and offered Aquillon a bulky plastek picter rod. The imagifier was of expensive make, that much was clear. Aquillon took it, but didn’t look at the viewscreen.

‘You are an imagist?’ he asked the human.

‘Ishaq Kadeen,’ the man replied. ‘Yes, I’m an imagist. You activate the–’

‘I know how it works, Ishaq Kadeen.’ Aquillon thumbed the activation setting along the haft, and the small screen blinked into life.

Aquillon processed what he was seeing. His education and training at the Emperor’s side allowed him a broad view of human capability, and the possibilities of technology in union with living beings. He had never seen anything quite like this before, but he knew immediately what it had to be.

The Occuli Imperator handed the picter to Ishaq, who took with a mutter of gratitude. ‘You found this on the sanctum deck, I assume?’ Aquillon enquired.

‘The monastic deck? Yes.’

‘Of course.’ And then, with infinite dignity, Aquillon reached to unsheathe his blade. ‘My brothers,’ he said. ‘We are betrayed.’

‘I do not much like our chances against an entire vessel’s crew, even with the Legion off-ship. What do you suggest?’ asked Kalhin.

‘First, we find the depths of this betrayal. I must see this madness for myself, and tear the truth from the lips of those that keep it. Before we can even consider cutting out the cancer at this rebellion’s heart, we must secure passage to Terra and relay every detail to the Emperor.’

‘Beloved by all,’ said Kalhin and Nirallus at once. Sythran tapped his knuckles to his chestplate, over his heart. Ishaq’s own ‘beloved by all’ came a couple of awkward seconds later, though none of the others were paying him any attention anymore.

‘This will be a great deal of work,’ Kalhin grunted.

‘Who do we interrogate?’ asked Nirallus. There was no doubt in his voice – he didn’t ask because he had no idea of an answer, he asked because there were too many possible names and the decision ultimately rested with Aquillon. ‘The fleetmaster? The general?’

‘There’s one soul on this ship that has listened to the Word Bearers whisper their secrets for half a century. We will find this precious soul not far from where you found the evidence of their treachery. Come with me.’

‘H-how will you get onto the monastic deck?’ Cartik was already falling behind, practically ignored by the Custodes.

‘We will kill everyone that stands in our way,’ Nirallus replied as if the answer were obvious. ‘Return to your room, old one. It will not be safe at our side.’

The Custodes moved forward, blades drawn. Aquillon let emotion curl his lip into an ugly snarl. ‘Cyrene,’ he hissed. ‘Their “Blessed lady”.’

TWENTY-NINE

Cyrene

Never Human

A Completed Vow

She lifted her head at the sound of blades against her door, though of course, she saw nothing. Heat came at her in a breathy wave, emanating in her direction from the thudding steel portal. Power weapons, then. They were cutting through with power weapons.

Cyrene typed as fast as she could, her fingertips dancing over the familiar keypad, but her efforts ended mid-sentence. The door slammed to the floor, and the thrum of live power armour filled the room. Joints whirred. False fibre-bundle muscles purred.

‘Aquillon. I knew you would c–’

‘Be silent, traitorous whore. The Word Bearers are gone, and you will answer to the authority of the Emperor. Order your maids to flee, or they will suffer alongside you.’

Cyrene inclined her head in a slight nod. The two older women fled the room barely short of a run.

‘Brother...’ began Kalhin, turning to the secondary chamber and the open door leading into it. Another figure had appeared there, doubtless hiding in wait.

‘The Word Bearers,’ it said, ‘are not all gone.’

‘You have no place here, tech-adept,’ Aquillon gestured with the point of his sword.

‘Correct.’ Xi-Nu 73 applied an exact amount of pressure on the trigger of the signum control in his left hand, and a massive figure made of gears and armour plating moved into view behind him. It took up the entire door arch as it gave a mechanical growl of warning. Xi-Nu 73 steeled himself to finish speaking. ‘I have no place here. But he does.’

The robot’s arms, both mounted with heavy bolter cannons, were preloaded and cycled live – they’d been powered up for hours, ready for this worst of possible moments. Cyrene hurled herself off the bed, seeking all the distance she could put between herself and Aquillon.

‘For the Legion.’ The voice was like steel bars tumbling over rock.

The Custodes were already moving, their halberds spinning, when Incarnadine opened up at them with a horrendous storm of fire.

Argel Tal sprinted up the gunship’s ramp, his boots clanging all the way into the troop bay. He was the last aboard. The vox was a hive of conflicting voices as the Gal Vorbak snapped at him to hurry. Other Thunderhawks, proud in the Legion’s grey, were already lifting off.

‘Take off,’ he ordered the pilot over the vox, unashamed by the threat of panic in his voice. ‘Get us back to the ship.’

Rising Sun shivered as its claws left the parched soil.

Argel Tal switched vox-channels. ‘Jesmetine. General, are you there?’

Distortion.

‘Answer me, Arric.’

‘Lord.’ The general was breathless. ‘Lord, they are loose.’

‘We just received the warning. Tell me exactly what has happened.’

‘They landed. The Custodes landed. They stormed the monastic deck soon after. Something has enraged them. They must have discovered the truth, though I’ve no idea how. All Euchar forces there are out of contact or already confirmed dead. One of them, one of them, is holding the corridor leading to Cyrene’s chamber. Blood of the gods, Argel Tal... he has a barricade made from the bodies of my men. Every charge sees more cut down. We cannot overwhelm one of them, let alone four.’

The Word Bearer felt the gunship lurch beneath his feet. ‘We have started primus burn, and are en route. What of Xi-Nu 73?’ Across the vox, he could hear the snap-crack of lasguns barking their payloads. More Euchar engaging in futility.

‘No word,’ the elder general replied. ‘Not a damn word. Where the hell are you?’

‘We are on our way.’ Raum? he quested.

Weak. The link was sluggish and feeble. Slumber.

The gunship climbed, its engines exhaling smoke and flame as it left the killing fields far below.

Sythran fought as he always fought: in the perfection of silence and solitude. Everything was in motion to an exacting standard – each twist of the spear haft brought the blade up to block las-fire or down to cut flesh, while each weave and duck was performed with the necessary vigour to keep him unwounded, but never left him overbalanced or needing to reposition himself. His footwork was stoic and rigid only long enough to kill the nearest soldier, before blending back into the dance of movement.

They fell back again. No, they fled.

Behind his faceplate, Sythran smiled. The bolter on his spear juddered with its release, punching explosive shells into the spines of all who were cowardly enough to turn their backs on him. The rhythmic pound of detonation after detonation made an abattoir of the hallway. Sythran went prone behind a mound of the dead, spinning his spear to hold the blade end. A clunk, a click, and the weapon was reloaded. Sythran rose again, already cutting the air with grand sweeps, batting aside the streaking laser fire.

‘Syth,’ crackled Aquillon’s voice. ‘We move.’

Sythran returned an acknowledgement blip by blinking at the affirmation rune on his retinal display. More Euchar, so very proud in their dull orange fatigues, came charging down the corridor. Sythran leapt his cadaver barricade and met them head on. They fell in pieces, and beyond a las-burn along his shoulder guard, the blood on his blade was the only evidence he’d even been fighting. The corridor was clear for now, populated by dead fools who’d believed they could bayonet him where their fellows had failed. Sythran looked over his shoulder in time to see his brothers emerge from the witch’s cell. But only two. Nirallus and Aquillon, their armour pitted and cracked by incendiary fire.

Perhaps they detected his questioning glance without seeing his face, for Aquillon said ‘Kalhin is dead. We must hurry.’

Well did he mark the blood shining on Aquillon’s sword point.

Xi-Nu 73 sighed. It vocalised from his rebreather mask as an insect’s buzzing. The sensory inhibitors lining his nerves like insulating cable around wire were doing all they could, but they failed to entirely mute the pain of shutting down. Shutting down? Dying. In his final mortal moments, he couldn’t resist the biological descriptor. Such resonance. Dying... Death... So dramatic.

He laughed, and made more static-laden buzzing. It became a cough that tasted of spoiled oil.

With his one remaining hand, the adept started the laborious task of dragging himself across the floor. A potential subroutine to this task presented itself as he moved. Could he not stop halfway and examine the corpse of the human female?

A cost/benefit analysis flickered in his thought-core. Yes. He could. But he would not. The subroutine was discarded. His hand clawed at the smooth deck, and he dragged himself another half-metre with the squeal of his metal body along the floor. All the while, functionality statistics formed charts behind his eyes. He realised there was a chance, though small, that he would terminate before he reached his objective. It spurred him on, while the bionic nodules attached to his few remaining mortal organs stimulated the fading flesh with jolts of electrical energy and injections of emergency chemicals.

The tech-adept was blind by the time he reached his destination. His visual receptors had failed, as blank as a monitor with no power. He felt his hand clank against his intended target, and used the motionless bulk to pull himself closer. The fallen robot was a toppled statue, a fallen avatar of the Machine-God, and Xi-Nu 73 embraced it as one would a beloved son.

‘There,’ he murmured, barely hearing his voice as his aural receptors failed next. ‘Duty done. Honoured. Name inscribed. In. Archive of. Visionary. Merit.’ His throat vocaliser failed at the last word, leaving him mute for the remainder of his existence.

Xi-Nu 73 expired twenty-three seconds later as his augmetic organs powered down without hope of restarting. He would have taken no pleasure at all in the irony that his withered organs of meat strove on for half a minute more, still trying to feed life through a body that couldn’t process it.

The chamber remained still and quiet for only a short while. Booted footfalls soon drummed down the hallway, heralding the arrival of more inhumans.

The figure in crimson armour stood in the doorway, framed against the bloodstained wall behind. He waited there without moving, unable to accept what lay before his eyes.

‘Let me through,’ said Xaphen.

Argel Tal stopped him with a glare, and went inside himself.

Xi-Nu 73 lay in embryonic repose, curled foetally beside Incarnadine’s cracked and broken shell. The robot was in complete ruin, its armour riven into a hundred chopped canyons inflicted by hacking blades. The war machine’s banner-cloak and oath scrolls were likewise ravaged, reduced to shredded rags. The walls and floor had fared no better. Holes showed through the sides of the armoured chamber into adjacent rooms, and where the walls still stood whole, they were cratered by punishing bolter fire.

Argel Tal noted all of these details in the time it took to blink, and paid no heed thereafter. He knelt by Cyrene’s slack form. Blood deepened the red of her gown – the same crimson as his own armour – and painted the floor beneath her. Liquid red flecked her neck and hair. The wound was a blatant one: a great split in her chest where the sword-tip had rammed into her. One blow, a heart strike, had been enough to pierce her precious mortality.

Blood. The presence was still thick and slow, but Argel Tal’s despondent anger was rousing the daemon to wakefulness. Blood soon. Hunt.

The change was taking hold again. The daemon sensed battle, and the flesh they shared began to warp in reaction. Argel Tal breathed a bestial rumble, but the sound died in his throat when Cyrene shuddered.

She lived. How had he not seen? The faintest, barest rise of her chest betrayed the life that still beat beneath.

‘Cyrene,’ he growled, as much Raum now as Argel Tal.

‘This...’ Her voice was a child’s whisper, so breathless that it barely made a sound. ‘This was my nightmare.’ Blind eyes found his with unwavering ease. ‘To be in the dark. To hear a monster breathe.’

Claws closed around her frail form with possessive, protective strength, but the damage had long since been done. Her blood stung his fingers where it dripped onto them.

‘What have they done to you?’ Cyrene asked with a smile.

She died in his arms before he could answer.

He heard the voices, but had no reason to pay heed to them. The Other, yes, he heeded such chattering. The bleating of humanity: fleshy tongues flopping in moist mouths, and the gusting of lung-breath over meat to make a sound in the throat. Yes, the Other listened to the voices and replied in kind.

Raum did not. He barked a word of hate, drawn from the Old Tongue, hoping it would silence their nasal noises. It did not. Hngh. Ignore them. Yes.

He had sensed the need for the blood-hunt, and risen to the fore in a rush of release. The Other’s body – no, the body they shared – assumed the hunting skin with ease now.

He ran, aching with need, pained by the pursuit of prey without catching it. Humans in his way were dashed aside. Raum did not look back. He smelled them die, scenting their lifeblood and brainmeat spilling out onto walls and floors.

Frail things.

You are killing the crew.

The Other was returning? This was good. They were stronger together. The Other’s silence had been a cause for fear. As he returned, Raum felt his instincts shifting, adapting, made sharper by reason and the concept of past and future. Intellect, not mere cunning. Sentience. Better. He charged down the corridor, roaring at the humans to frighten them aside. As he passed, he did not slay them.

They are allies.

They slowed the hunt. He felt an itching reluctance to confess to his weakness of reason and forethought. We will kill no more. We are whole.

I... I am back.

Argel Tal drew in a breath, tasting the ship’s recycled air with its stale-skin tang. Like a thread to be pulled loose, he scented something snagging at the edge of his perception. His friend. Aquillon. That ozone smell of charged weapons. The oils used to maintain the golden armour.

He ran on through the hallways, moving past more corpses, ended by blades rather than claws. De Profundis was packed with the dead, with slain Euchar lining the corridors.

You were gone too long. The humans bleat and snort at us.

The vox. Argel Tal blinked at the flashing runes. ‘I am here.’

‘Where?’ Xaphen sounded as furious as Argel Tal felt. ‘The Emperor’s bastard sons have decimated half the Euchar on board. Where are you?’

‘I… I lost control. I have Aquillon’s scent now. I... Thirteenth concourse, at the port hangar deck.’ Argel Tal stormed through the great doors onto the gunship bay.

The Rising Sun’s aft thrusters flared before him, as it roared its way out through the containment field and into the void beyond.

Argel Tal’s scream echoed around the hangar.

‘Brother?’ Xaphen was shouting. ‘Brother?’

They run to hide. The prey goes to ground.

‘They flee us,’ Argel Tal raved across the general channel. ‘They’re running to the planet. Baloc! Track the Rising Sun. All batteries, track that ship and fire at will.’

‘No!’ Xaphen called. ‘Erebus wants them alive!’

‘I do not care what Erebus wants. Send them to the ground in flames.’

De Profundis came about in a ponderous arc. Along with most of the Astartes Legion fleet, it had suffered hard in the void battle, and was loath to respond to orders now. Signals and firing solutions flew between all nearby Word Bearers vessels, and seven ships let loose with their broadsides, spilling their immensely destructive firepower into space in the hopes of hitting the tiny gunship.

Less than a minute after it had blasted its way from De Profundis’s hangar bay, the Rising Sun cut through the atmosphere of Isstvan V, its hull aflame and its heat shields glowing molten orange with the stress of a spiralling, rudderless atmospheric re-entry.

The capital ship Dirge Eterna claimed the kill shot.

Argel Tal listened to the scramble of conflicting voices over the vox, and the fleetmaster’s description of the Thunderhawk falling in an uncontrolled descent, but not destroyed outright. There would come a time to dispute the Dirge Eterna’s attempt for glory, but that time was not now.

‘Gal Vorbak to the assault deck,’ he ordered. ‘Ready a drop-pod.’

The gunship lay on its side, the very picture of twisted, miserable metal.

Red shards of hull were scattered across the surrounding terrain, while one engine still valiantly coughed, wheezing smoke too oily and black to be healthy thruster emission. For almost a hundred metres behind, a furrow was carved into the soil where the Thunderhawk had come down and slid, shuddering, along the ground before ploughing headfirst into the ruins of a city wall. This eroded stone stood as warden around a long-forgotten city, home of a long-dead culture. Chunks of masonry broke off as the gunship smashed to a halt, and old stone rained onto the mangled hull plating, punctuating the abuse with a final insult.

The sky lightened over the wreckage as sunrise came to Isstvan V. An unremarkable star winked over the horizon, more white than yellow, too distant to offer much warmth. On the other side of the continent, a great funeral pyre still burned.

He breathed the cold dawn air through open jaws, tasting burning oil on the wind. His brothers, his crimson kin, hunted around and through the gunship’s wreckage, seeking any spoor. Behind them, their drop-pod still hissed and creaked as the metal strained in the aftermath of plummeting through the atmosphere.

‘They have not been down long enough to hide.’ Xaphen spoke the words as an assured threat. At his side, Malnor was a twitching, ragged creature that drooled venom. Torgal climbed the gunship like something grotesquely simian, leaping and hooking into the hull with his bone-scythes to haul himself upward. His blinded face jerked to the side as he gave canine snuffs. Argel Tal stalked around the gunship’s base, his claws folding closed into knuckly fists, then opening again into raptor talons. Like a desert jackal pack, the eleven remaining Gal Vorbak swarmed the downed Thunderhawk, sniffing out their prey. They did not need to hunt for long.

‘So, at last, comes the Crimson Lord.’ Aquillon’s voice was biting in its insincerity. ‘Revealing his true self to those he has betrayed.’

The Custodes walked from the shadow of a broken wing, their weapons held in loose hands. Each of them exuded rigid confidence. Their gait was assured, their shoulders back, their armour damaged and dented, but ostensibly whole.

The Gal Vorbak closed in. At the centre of the crimson circle, the three golden warriors went back to back. They offered the Word Bearers nothing but breastplates emblazoned with the Imperial eagle, and blades that would only ever rise in the Emperor’s service. Of the Astartes Legions, only one had ever been honoured enough to engrave the aquila upon their armour – the once-noble Emperor’s Children, now a core part of the Warmaster’s rebellion. But these were Imperial Custodians, the praetorians of the Master of Mankind, and kept their mandate far above such concerns. The Custodes wore the aquila more often than the primarchs themselves. Each eagle symbol shone on their chests in solid silver, clutching lightning bolts in their claws. Nowhere else in the Imperium were the two symbols of the Emperor’s ascension twinned like this: forged into the armour of his chosen guardians.

The hunters drew even closer. At their vanguard, Argel Tal spared a brief moment’s concern for the fact the Custodes had not fired upon them. Perhaps they lacked ammunition after the battle aboard the ship. Perhaps they wished to end this cleanly, with blades rather than bolters.

‘You killed Cyrene,’ he said, the words thickened by spite and the acidic bile stringing between his jaws.

‘I executed a traitor who had borne witness to a Legion’s sins.’ Aquillon aimed at his sword at Argel Tal’s warped visage. ‘In the name of the Emperor, what are you? You seem more nightmare than man.’

‘We are the truth,’ Xaphen barked at the trapped Custodes. ‘We are the Gal Vorbak, the chosen of the gods.’ All the while, the Word Bearers stalked closer. A noose was closing around the Custodians.

‘Look upon yourselves,’ Aquillon said in disbelief. ‘You have cast aside the Emperor’s vision of perfection. You have abandoned everything it meant to be human.’

‘We were never human!’ Hissing spit sprayed from Argel Tal’s jaws as he roared the words. ‘We. Were. Never. Human. We were taken from our families to fight the Forever War in the name of a thousand lies. Do you believe this truth is easy to bear? Look at us. Look at us! Humanity will embrace the gods, or humanity will embrace oblivion. We have seen the Imperium burn. We have seen the species brought to extinction. We have seen it happen, as it happened before. The cycle of life in a galaxy owned by laughing, thirsting gods.’

Aquillon’s voice held nothing but kindness, and that made it all the crueller. ‘My friend, my brother, you have been deceived. The Emperor–’

‘The Emperor knows far more than he has ever revealed to you,’ Xaphen cut in. ‘The Emperor knows the Primordial Truth. He has challenged the gods and damned humanity with his hubris. Only through allegiance....’

‘...through worship...’ said Malnor.

‘...through faith...’ said Torgal.

‘...will mankind endure the endless wars against the tides of blood that will drown our galaxy.’

Aquillon turned to each of the Word Bearers as they spoke their piece of the sermon. He looked back to Argel Tal at its conclusion.

‘Brother,’ he said again. ‘You have been most blackly deceived.’

‘You. Killed. Cyrene.’

‘And you count this as some unfathomable betrayal?’ Aquillon’s laughter was rich and ripe, and to hear it made Argel Tal’s teeth grind. ‘You, who stand out of the Emperor’s light, malformed into a monster. You, who binds tortured souls into the walls of your ship with forbidden lore, letting them suck in all psychic sound for forty years? You, accuse me of betrayal?’

Even through the daemon’s rage fogging his thoughts, even through his grief-born anger at Cyrene’s murder, his brother’s words struck with enough force to wound. Argel Tal had walked through that chamber himself many times, and no matter how ardently he hated the necessity of it, he had still allowed its existence.

Images assailed him with guilty stabs, each memory knifing into him before he could cast it aside. Xaphen, chanting from the Book of Lorgar, as an astropath shrieked before him. She was being disembowelled, and not quickly, her pain serving as a focus while she was chained to the chamber walls. Colchisian symbols that had been tattooed onto her flesh an hour before still bled freely. The vitae engines, maintained by an Apothecary of the Legion, would keep her alive for many months to come. The daemon Xaphen summoned within her would enslave her mind to that most simple of tasks: to draw in and digest any psychic communication from nearby minds.

No word would ever reach Terra, but for the falsified reports the Word Bearers made themselves. Compliances achieved. The perfect Legion. Lorgar, the Seventeenth Son, as loyal as any father could hope.

‘I accuse you,’ Xaphen laughed himself, ‘of being a fool. Your precious astropath has been wailing your suspicions right into the mouths of listening daemons for four decades. Every time you huddled around him and heard the Emperor’s words, you were hearing nothing more than the lies I whispered into a daemon’s ears.’

Argel Tal did not add to Xaphen’s relish. The chamber was no source of sinister pride for him. He had condemned not one woman to die in agony there, but sixty-one souls in all. The strain of possession wore the astropaths down with disgusting rapidity. Their degradation was quick, but never merciful. Stinking black cancers ate through their bodies after only a few months. Most faded fast, their minds eroded by the warp’s winds like a cliff suffering in an endless storm. Few ever lasted a year – soon enough, it was always time to bind another helpless, screaming astropath into the life support engines, and inflict horrors upon their flesh with ritual blades and burning brands.

He considered it part of his penance to watch each binding. Each time, he would wait for the moment when the captive’s eyes would glaze, not in death, but in surrender. Each time he would watch for that precious second when the daemon’s consciousness devoured its way to the fore of the victim’s mind. The screaming would cease. Silence would resume, blessed in the wake of such sounds.

Nineteen had volunteered. Nineteen members of the fleet’s astropathic choir, nourished by years of Xaphen’s sermons, had volunteered for the honour of keeping the Legion’s greatest secrets. Curiously, these burned out the fastest, succumbing to biological erosion before those who were unwillingly bound. It seemed suffering was a source of strength in the ritual – Xaphen had noted it, and informed Erebus. He received thanks in return, and the rite was amended in the Book of Lorgar. Xaphen had blazed with pride for weeks afterward.

The Custodes had found the chamber at the heart of the monastic deck, but someone, somewhere, somehow, had found it first. Aquillon had been led there. Of that, Argel Tal was certain. He vowed in silence then. Whoever that treasonous soul might be, he would pull it apart and feast upon its flesh.

‘We were never human.’ He said the words quietly, not even realising he spoke them aloud. Raum seized hold in the moment of melancholic anger, and the body they shared broke forward into a run.

‘For the Emperor!’ Aquillon cried.

The Gal Vorbak answered with the laughter of daemons.

In the years to come, Argel Tal recalled precious little of the battle. Sometimes he attributed this to Raum’s presence in ascendancy, sometimes he attributed it to his own guilt seeking to purge the night from his mind. Whatever the truth, any reminiscence left him hollow and worn, at the mercy of fragmented images and half-remembered sounds.

It was like thinking back to the moments of earliest childhood, before genetics had shaped his mind with an eidetic memory, when it was a struggle to fill a forgotten time with all five senses and make them feel real.

We were never human. He never forgot those words, nor how they were both true and false, all at once.

Malnor.

Malnor sometimes rose from the churning mess and resolved with clarity. When had Malnor died? How long had they been fighting? He wasn’t sure. Nirallus’s blade had hewn the Gal Vorbak’s head clean from his shoulders, but Malnor did not fall. A wraithly image of his helm remained, snarling and shouting in silence. Nirallus, a blade master beyond anything Argel Tal had ever seen, had been forced to carve Malnor to pieces to put the warrior down for good.

The fight was too frantic and frenetic for sanity to have any place in its motions. Thought and formality vanished, replaced by training and instinct. A blur of blades and claws. The crack of ceramite. The grunts of pain. The smells of spit, of acid, of sweat, of parchment, of bone, of panic, of confidence, of smoky bolter muzzles, of charged blades, of tear-salt, of breath, of blood, and blood, and blood.

And then, the first kill.

Nirallus. The blade master. He killed Malnor, and that left him vulnerable. Torgal and Sicar had leapt onto the Custodian’s back. Chop, chop, chop went the hacking blades, biting into armour joints at the back of the neck and the base of the spine. A life for a life.

Nirallus fell. Torgal leaped away, to safety. Sicar stayed to feed, and earned death himself. Aquillon. The Occuli Imperator. He avenged his brother’s slaughter by ending Sicar a heartbeat later with clean, bright sweeps of his sword.

Argel Tal was on him in that moment. He remembered the leap, and the soreness in his throat as he roared once more. He remembered the juicy, meaty crunch as the Custodian’s head ripped free of its neck. Like a flopping serpent, Aquillon’s spine hung down from the dripping helm. A dizzying stench of blood; a maddened laugh that may or may not have been Argel Tal at all. He never knew for certain.

Six of the Gal Vorbak still drew breath. Six possessed warriors gave their desert dog cackles and ran for the last Custodes with daemonic vigour burning in their limbs.

And this was the last moment Argel Tal could ever recall, until the air was cold again and it was all over. Sythran pulled his helm free, and faced them bareheaded. Instead of waiting with his halberd in hand, he hurled it as a spear.

The Gal Vorbak scattered, but it still struck home. One of them took the blade in the chest with a crack like a falling tree. The spear pounded through ceramite, bone and meat with enough force to burst from the Word Bearer’s back. The Astartes flipped over with the impact, his chest cavity stripped hollow, his lungs and two hearts blasted out of him, reduced to pulped meat on the ground.