The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

One The first murder / Thirst / Hunger

Two men cry out in a forgotten age. The roar of the slayer harmonises with the scream of the slain. In this earliest epoch, when humankind still fears spirits of fire and prays to false gods for the sun to rise, the murder of a brother is the darkest of deeds.

Blood marks the man’s face, just as it marks the spear in his clenched fists and the rocks beneath his brother’s body. The wound gouts and sprays – the man tastes the red wine of his brother’s veins, feeling the blood’s heat where it lands on his bearded skin, tasting of metals yet undiscovered and seas yet unseen. As the hot salt of spilt life burns his tongue, the man knows with impossible clarity:

He is the first.

Mankind – in all its myriad forms on the thousandfold path from wretched lizard-thing to warm-blooded mammal – has always fought to survive. Even as hunched ape-creatures and brutish proto-men, it waged insignificant and miserable wars upon itself with fists and teeth and rocks.

Yet this man is the first. Not the first to hate, nor even the first to kill. He is the first to take life in cold blood. He is the first to murder.

His dying brother’s thrashing hand reaches for him, raking dirty nails across his sweating skin. Seeking mercy or vengeance? The man doesn’t know, and in his rage he doesn’t care. He drives the wooden spear deeper into the yielding hardness of meat and against the scrape of bone. Still he screams, still he roars.

The scream of the first murderer cuts through the veil, echoing across reality and unreality alike.

To the things that wait in the warp, mankind will never sing a sweeter song.

Behind the veil, the scream takes a carnival of forms, riotous and infinite in variety. The frail laws of physics that so coldly govern the material universe have no power – here, those binding codes fracture into their separate fictions. Here, time itself goes to die.

On and on it plunges, crashing and dissolving and reforming in the endless storm. It ruptures a cloud-burst of other screams that haven’t yet been cried aloud. It punctures the fire-flesh of shrieking ghosts, adding to the torment of those lost and forsaken souls. It knifes through a disease that was rendered extinct by man-made cures twenty-six thousand years before.

And on. And on. And on. Clashing with moments that haven’t yet happened, that won’t happen for half an eternity. Grinding against events that took place back when the earliest Terran creatures exhaled water and – for the very first time – raked in lungfuls of air.

Behind the veil, there is no when and then. Everything is now. Always and eternally now, in the shifting tides of an infinite malignance.

Lights shine in that malignant black: the lights of sentience that draw the darkness closer. The same lights flare and shriek and dissolve at the merest touch from the forces around them. Dreams and memories take shape only to shatter amidst the claws and jaws manifesting within the nothingness.

The scream plunges on through every whisper of hatred that will ever be spoken by a human mouth or thought by a human mind. It cracks like lightning above the sky of a dying civilisation that will expire before ever grasping the wonder of space flight. It breaks the stone city-bones of a culture gone to dust thousands of years ago.

From its genesis in breath and sound the scream becomes acidic nothingness, then fury and fire. It becomes a memory that burns, a whisper that rends and a prophecy that bleeds.

And it becomes a name. A name that means nothing in any language spoken by any species, living or dead. A name that carries meaning only in the strangled, misfiring thoughts of humans breathing their last breaths, in that precious and terrifying moment when their spirits are caught between one realm and the next.

The name of a creature, a daemon born from the cold rage of one traitorous soul in one treacherous second. Its name is the deed itself, the first murder and the death rattle that followed.

In the creature’s shrieking journey across the warp, it touches the minds of every human who ever was and will ever be, from the long dead to those yet to be born. The daemon is tied to the species with such primal intimacy that every man, woman and child knows its caress – deep in their blood and bones – even if they know nothing of its name.

Billions of them stir in their sleep across the many ages of man, writhing against the unwanted touch of the creature’s birth back in the mists of time.

Millions of them wake, staring into the darkness of mud huts, palatial bedchambers, housing complexes and any one of the countless other structures that humans build for themselves across a million worlds and thousands of years.

One of them, a sleeper on Terra itself, wakes and reaches for a weapon.

Her hand slid along cool silk, inch by subtle inch, until she grasped the familiar ivory handle. Something mechanical was purring in her chamber, a droning song in the shadows.

‘Do not draw the weapon,’ said the voice of her killer. ‘You are said to be an intelligent woman, Minister Zu. I had hoped we might avoid such futility.’

The minister swallowed with a click in her throat. She didn’t release the pistol grip. Her hand felt glued to it by sudden night sweat.

How could he be here? What of her guards? A palace’s worth of warriors waited below, armed to the teeth and paid far beyond the threat of her rivals’ crude bribery. Where were they? And what of her family?

Where are the gods-cursed alarms?

‘Rise, minister.’ The voice was too low, too resonant, to be human, nor did it convey anything in the way of human emotion. If statues could speak, they would speak with this assassin’s voice. ‘You know that if I am here, you are already dead. Nothing will change that now.’

She sat up slowly, though she refused to slacken her grip on the gun. ‘Listen,’ she said to the golden shape in the darkness.

‘Negotiation is equally futile,’ the killer assured her.

‘But–’

‘As is begging.’

That set off a spark within her. She felt her features harden as her temper ignited her courage. ‘I wasn’t going to beg,’ she said, her voice cold.

‘My apologies then.’ The figure made no move.

‘What of my guards?’

‘You know what I am, Koja Zu. You can choose to die alone, or you can resist the inevitable and I will leave this palace only after killing everyone who resides within it.’

My son. The thought welled up, bleeding and hot and savage.

‘My son.’ She said the words aloud before she could help herself.

‘He is of an age to serve the Emperor.’

Koja Zu’s hand trembled as it gripped the gun.

‘No,’ she said, and how she loathed herself for the shake in her voice. ‘He’s only four. Please, no. Not the Legions.’

‘He is too young for the Legions. There are other fates, minister.’

Her eyes were adjusting even as her blood ran cold. In the half-light of the hours before dawn she could make out the ornate, overlapping edges of his burnished armour. The suit of golden plate emitted a low thrum, the source of the mechanical purr. In his hands was a long spear, lowered to aim at her. Affixed above the weapon’s arm-length blade was the bulky chassis of a boltgun, clad in re­inforced wirework.

None of this surprised her. What surprised her was that the killer stood unhelmed, showing a face that had once been human.

‘I’ve never seen one of you like this,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t even sure you had faces.’

‘Now you know otherwise.’

Koja Zu watched as the assassin tilted his head slightly, hearing the whisper of priceless mechanics in the collar of his golden armour. Though his towering form was scaled-up by whatever genetic meddling his master had performed to enhance the brute’s intellect and physicality, no gene-weaving could hide his roots. He had been human, once. An Albian heritage, perhaps, going by his features beneath the weathered flesh and battle scars.

‘May I at least know the name of my killer?’

He hesitated, and she dared to believe she’d caught him with an unexpected question. Yet his dark eyes never wavered.

‘My name is Constantin Valdor.’

‘Constantin,’ she repeated slowly. Her schooling in Old Earth’s mythology had been extensive, and she often hearkened back to old tales and legends in her speeches. All the better to inspire the teeming masses of godless, hopeless dregs who served her. Now the minister found herself smiling, no matter that her son was to be stolen away to a fate of genetic torment; no matter that her own death was mere breaths away. She smiled a madwoman’s smile, all teeth and wide eyes. ‘I am to be killed by a man with an ancient king’s name.’

‘So it seems. If you have any last words, I will ensure they reach the Emperor’s ears.’

Koja Zu’s lip curled. ‘Emperor. How I loathe that title.’

‘He is the ruler of this world and the master of our species. No title is more appropriate.’

She bared her teeth in an expression too ugly and defiant to be a smile. ‘Have you ever considered just what kind of creature you serve?’

‘Yes.’ The dark eyes stared on. ‘Have you?’

‘The “Master of Mankind”.’ She shook her head, feeling the welcome flare of righteousness. ‘He isn’t even human.’

‘Minister Zu.’ The golden warrior made a warning of her name. One she didn’t heed.

‘Does He even breathe?’ she demanded. ‘Tell me that, Custodian. Have you ever heard Him breathe? He is a relic left over from the Dark Age. A weapon left out of its box, now running rampant.’

Valdor blinked once. The first time she’d seen him blink so far. That rare human movement was unnerving – to her it felt false, like it had no right taking place upon his statuesque features.

‘Terra,’ he said, ‘is a thirsty world.’

She knew, then. With those words, she knew which of her many crimes she was to die for. The one she’d least expected.

A laugh, queasy and unwanted, tore itself from her throat. ‘Oh, you vile slave,’ she said, unable to keep the sick grin from her face.

‘Other worlds suffer a similar thirst.’ The golden killer’s eyes had glassed over with an inhuman serenity made all the more uncomfortable by the living intelligence shining behind it. ‘Yet none of them hold the war-scarred, irradiated honour of being mankind’s cradle. This world is the beating heart of the Great Crusade, minister. Do you know how many men, women and children now make their slow way back here – to humanity’s first home? Do you know how many pilgrims wish only to see the ancestral Earth with their own eyes? How many refugees flee their flawed and failing worlds now the veil of Old Night has been lifted? Already it is said that unsettled land on the Throneworld is the most valuable commodity in our nascent Imperium. But this is not so, is it? One resource is far more precious.’

She clutched the autopistol tighter as he spoke, breathing slowly and calmly. Even knowing she was to die, even knowing she had no hope of drawing the weapon, the body was reluctant to surrender its survival instincts. Instinct demanded she fight to live.

‘What I did,’ she said, ‘I did for my people.’

‘And now you will die for what you did for them,’ he said without malice.

‘For that alone?’

‘For that alone. Your other treacheries are meaningless in my master’s eyes. Your cleansing pogroms. Your trade in forbidden flesh. The army of gene-worked detritus you have sequestered in the bunkers beneath the Jermanic Steppes. The prospect of your rebellion was never a threat to the Pax Imperialis. Your crimes of apostasy are nothing. You are dying for the sin of your harvester machines drinking the Last Ocean.’

‘For stealing water?’ She felt like laughing again, and the sensation wasn’t a pleasant one. The laughter was creeping up through her blood, seeking a release. ‘All of this… because I stole water?’

‘It pleases me that you understand the situation, Minister Zu.’ He inclined his head once more, with a curious courtesy and another subtle purr of machine-muscles. ‘Goodbye.’

‘Wait. What of my son? What is his fate?’

‘He will be armed with silver, armoured in gold and burdened by the weight of ultimate expectation.’

Zu swallowed, feeling her skin crawl anew. ‘Will he live?’

The golden statue nodded. ‘If he is strong.’

In that moment, her trembles subsided. The fear bled away, leaving only naked defiance somewhere between relief and hope. She closed her eyes.

‘Then he will live,’ she said.

There was a bang, throaty and concussive, and she was falling, drowning, choking in thunder. There was pressure and heat and grey, grey, grey. And then mercifully there was nothing.

Nothing, at least, for her.

The creature formed from the twinned screams of the first murder clawed its shrieking way free from the womb of the warp. It dragged itself through a wound in the universe, breaching reality with all the exertion expected of a being forcing its own birth. Once away from the nurturing tides of the Sea of Souls, its flesh steamed and shivered. Reality immediately began to eat its corpus, gnawing at the beast that should not exist.

It rose, stretched out its limbs and senses, and shook off the slick, wet fire of its genesis.

It hungered.

It hunted.

True to its nature, it hunted alone in the cold of this sunless realm, ignoring the jealous, wrathful and fearful cries of its lesser kin. It had no capacity for kinship even with those monsters that shared similar births, considering them – insofar as it had the intelligence to form any thoughts at all – as lesser reflections of its primacy. Their existences, and the weaknesses they suffered, were nothing and less than nothing.

Had any Imperial scholar managed to pry open the daemon’s skull, and were there a brain within to dissect for answers, the creature’s mind would have been laid bare as a node of punishingly sensitive perceptions. An animal might hunt by a prey’s movement or the smell of its blood, but the daemon didn’t comprehend such miserable trails of scent and sight and sound. It hunted not by the crude mechanisms of its prey’s bodies, but by the very light of their souls.

The monster moved unseen through the great tunnels and chambers, its tread spreading corrosion through the arcane material that made up this unnatural realm. It clutched no weapon. If it needed a blade or a bludgeon, it would fashion one from its own essence, using them to break open the brittle shells of its victims and feast on the life within. More likely it would rely on its strength, its talons and its jaws. These would suffice for all but the toughest prey. They had survived when the creature had incarnated itself in the past for other hunts on other worlds.

It crawled along the shattered walls of the expansive tunnel, reaching out with its impossible perceptions. The daemon listened to the song of souls nearby, the chorus of human emotion beckoning like a siren call. The Anathema was somewhere in this realm, as were its childlings, the Golden. The daemon would find them, and rend them apart with weapons shaped from its hating heart.

The boiling oil of the creature’s thoughts locked on to the promise of prey. Instinct dragged the daemon west.

On it crawled, sometimes moving through tunnels so large they defied the daemon’s senses, seemingly great empty expanses of nothingness. It stalked through the knee-deep golden mist that pervaded so much of this realm, and it shifted as it moved, its flesh rippling and solidifying, crusting over in scales of burnished metal.

Pinpricks of life needled against its senses. The creature slowed, halted, turned. Saliva, hot as magma, dripped from between its bared teeth.

It launched forwards, shadow-silent, faster than the eye could follow.

A boundary servitor sensed the creature’s approach. AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) was a tech-slave, a woman who for fifteen years had been answering to a numerical signifier in place of the name she no longer remembered. She’d earned her sentence through the murder of a forge overseer during a food riot. Now she turned what was left of her head towards the scanner anomaly.

‘Tracking,’ AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) said aloud.

That one word began an awakening among the other servitors nearby. They stalked closer with the pathetic grace of the half-dead wretches they were. Immense weapons rose. Clouded eyes squinted through targeting lenses. Razor-thin tracer beams lanced out from cannon muzzles and targeting arrays.

As rudimentary as they were, the servitors were primed for sentry duty. They were aware that many of their number, once linked to the shared vox-grid, had fallen silent. They knew, in their own simple way, that their kin were being killed.

In a different breed of ignorance, the daemon didn’t know what a servitor was. It knew nothing of the lobotomising process that scraped a criminal’s brain free of deeper cognition, or the grafting of crude mono-tasked logic engines in place of a reasoning mind. It knew only what it sensed, which was that the diminished souls in this hunting ground were just alive enough to bleed, and the running of blood was all that mattered.

It drew closer. Their clockwork-simple machine thoughts whispered against its essence. It tasted the warp-scent of their weapons – not the fyceline primer or the vibrating magnetic coils, but the weapons themselves. Instruments of destruction with their own spiritual reflections. They were caresses of pressure prickling at the monster’s mind. The daemon sensed anything that had shed blood or taken life. A creature of murder knew its own kind, whether it was formed of aetheric ichor, mortal flesh or sanctified metal.

‘Tracking,’ said AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) again. Three of the others repeated the word, slightly out of sync. Her head snapped this way and that on an augmented spinal column, seeking, hunting. Prickles of sensory data buzzed at the sides of her slow consciousness. It was enough. ‘Engaging,’ she voiced.

‘Engaging,’ the other three repeated, still out of time, as the sensors in their skulls registered the approaching creature a moment later.

AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) devoted her stunted brain processes to two subroutines. The first was to pulse a three-beat signal of white noise across an unclosable vox-link, notifying her handler of her heightened state of alertness. The second was to brace her bionic foot against the unseen surface of the tunnel’s floor. The immense heavy bolter that replaced her right arm clunked twice, weighty with purpose. An ammunition feed rattled from the weapon’s body to where it connected to her bulky backpack.

The daemon – still nothing more than a nebulous threat throbbing at the edge of her sensory input feeds – ghosted through the shattered buildings thirty-two degrees to the left. The servitor pivoted with a snarling melody of mechanical joints and opened fire with her heavy bolter. It bellowed its roaring staccato, shaking her entire body with the force of a seizure. After a second and a half the crude recoil compensators fused to her muscles and bones kicked in to keep the weapon aimed true. The cracked fragments of her teeth had already crashed together with enough force to start her gums bleeding. She felt no pain from this. The nerves in her gums had been stripped away to immunise her from that very reaction.

The other servitors followed her lead, bracing their feet and opening up with their own salvos of explosive bolts. None of the four units registered the impacts of accurate fire. Each of them recorded their misses in the simplified data engines at the cores of their skulls.

When their weapons cycled down with the target lost, the total number of successful hits tallied at zero.

‘Committing to scout-predation subroutine,’ AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) vocalised. She walked ahead, her auspex vista narrowed and focused in search of the surely wounded foe. Even her blunted brain could process the anomaly at play. Her targeting computations suggested the creature should ha, ve been struck by between twenty-nine and forty-four .998 calibre shells. It should no longer be moving at all, let alone moving swiftly enough to ghost away into hiding again. AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) vox blurted this anomalous detail to her handler.

She never acknowledged the reply. The daemon propelled itself from somewhere beyond the detection of her sensory array with a single contortion of its unnatural muscles, burying a claw-spear of ichorous cartilage into her torso, destroying every mono-programmed engine acting in place of her removed organs and annihilating her sole biological lung, which had miraculously survived unaugmented for over a decade.

‘Enemy sighted,’ the servitor tried to say. Blood and chips of broken teeth left her lips instead, gouting across the taloned arm that had killed her. The claw-spear lashed back from her body with a whip-crack of abused meat. The servitor fell to the ground in several wet, suffering pieces.

‘Enemy sighted,’ the largest of her component pieces tried to say once more. Her torturously primitive thought processes couldn’t fathom why her primary weapon wasn’t firing. She lacked the capacity for diagnostic function and her nervous system had been chemically rethreaded after her sentencing, so she had no idea that she had been torn asunder.

Bolters roared, utterly silent to the daemon, whose senses knew nothing of sound. The beast lunged three more times, jaws grinding shut on flesh spiced with artificial oil, claws lancing through brittle armour plating to the softer tissue beneath.

The blood that ran was impure and unsuited to beat through a human heart, corrupted by the nature of the cyborging procedure, but these impurities were irrelevant to the creature. It savoured the sensation of murder, wearing different skins and shapes until it adopted a form capable of crouching over and nuzzling at the streams of blood snaking their way across the mist-shrouded ground.

Two of the downed servitors protested voicelessly and limblessly, straining to go about their duties unto their dying breaths. On the ground, half lost in the low mist, the dismembered torso and head of the lead servitor miraculously survived – in no small amount of agony – for almost two minutes. The only thing she could sense beyond the pain of her damaged mechanical organs failing to sustain her was the proximity of the entity that had destroyed her.

‘Enemy sighted,’ she tried to warn her handler across the vox, though without functioning lungs or most of her throat she was unable to make any sound at all. The last thing she heard, recorded by her fading cognition core, was her killer feasting on the remains of her counterparts.

The beast, ruled by its illogical and depthless hunger, spread its great wings with aching crackles of ragged sinew. The blood of the slain servitors was saturated with chemicals, tasting grey upon the tongue and failing to hold the creature’s interest. Hunger was pulling at the threads of the creature’s form.

Far from satisfied, it ached to devour stronger souls and fresher blood than that of these false, reforged humans. Driven by murder-lust and blood-need, the daemon born of the first murder turned its array of inhuman perceptions towards a dead city that had, in recent years, been claimed by new invaders.

Sometimes it mattered very much from whence the blood flowed.

Two The boy who would be king / A false god’s name / The Impossible City

The boy who would be king held his father’s skull in his hands. He turned it slowly, running his fingertips across the contours of skinless bone. A thumb, still browned with field dirt, traced across the blunt ivory pegs of the gap-toothed death smile.

He lifted his eyes to the stone shelf where the other skulls sat in silent vigil. They stared into the hut’s gloomy confines, their eyes replaced by smooth stones, their faces restored with the crude artistry of clay. It was the boy’s place to remake his father’s face in the same way, sculpting the familiar features with wet mud and slow swipes of a flint knife, then letting the skull bake dry in the high sun.

The boy thought he might use sea shells for the eyes, if he could barter with the coastal traders for two that were smooth enough. He would do this soon. Such things were tradition.

First he needed answers.

He turned the skull once more, circling his thumb around the ragged hole broken into the bone. He didn’t need to close his eyes and meditate to know the truth. He didn’t need to pray for his father’s spirit to tell him what happened. He simply touched the hole in his father’s head, and at once he knew. He saw the fall of the bronze knife from behind; he saw his father fall into the mud; he saw every­thing that had happened leading to this moment in time.

The boy who would be king rose from the floor of his family’s hut and walked out into the settlement, his father’s skull clutched in one hand.

Mud-brick huts lined both sides of the river. The wheat-fields to the east were a patchwork sea of dark gold beneath the eye of the setting sun. The village was never truly quiet, even after the day’s work was done. Families talked and laughed and fought. Dogs barked for attention and whined for food. The wind set the scrubland trees to singing, with the hiss of leaves and the creak of branches forming their eternal song.

A ragged dog growled as the boy passed, yet fled yelping when he gave it no more than a glance. A carrion bird, hunchbacked and evil of eye, cried out above the village. A pack of other ragged children moved aside when he drew near, their ball game fading away and their eyes lowering.

His barefooted walk took him unerringly to the home of his father’s brother. The man, darkened and hardened by his years in the fields, was sat outside the mud-brick hut, threading beads onto a string for his youngest daughter.

The boy’s uncle uttered the sound that meant the boy’s name. In response to this greeting, the boy held up his father’s skull.

Many centuries after these events, citizens of even civilised and advanced cultures would often misunderstand exactly what a myocardial infarction was. The savage, constricting pain in the chest was due to blood no longer flowing cleanly through the heart’s passages, causing harm to the myocardium tissue of the heart itself. Put simply, the core of a human being runs dry, trying to function with no oxygenated lubricant.

This happened to the boy’s uncle when he set eyes upon the skull of his murdered brother.

The boy who would be king watched with neither remorse nor any particular hostility. He looked on as his uncle slid from his crouch onto the mud, clutching at his treacherous chest. He watched as his uncle’s sun-darkened features pinched closed, ugly and tight in supreme agony as the older man shook with the onset of convulsions. He saw the necklace slip from his uncle’s grip, the necklace that was being made for his young cousin, and would now never be finished.

Others came running. They shouted. They cried. They made the noises of language that spoke of panic and sorrow in a proto-Indo-Europan tongue that would come to be known as an early precursor to the Hyttite dialect.

The boy walked away, heading back towards his family’s hut. On the way, he turned to the figure – the giant – clad in gold who walked nearby. Nordafrik war-clan tattoos curled on the towering warrior’s face, curling from his temples to follow the curves of his cheekbones. The serpentine ink-curves, white against his dark flesh, ended upon his chin just beneath his mouth.

‘Hello, Ra,’ the boy said in a tongue that wouldn’t be spoken on this world for many thousands of years. The language was called High Gothic by those who would come to speak it.

The golden warrior, Ra, went to one knee, dazed at the sight of a Terra that hadn’t existed for millennia, a clean and fertile place still untouched by war. This world wasn’t really Terra at all; it was still Earth.

With the giant kneeling and the boy standing before him, it was far easier to meet each other’s eyes.

‘My Emperor,’ said the Custodian.

The boy rested a hand on the giant’s chestplate, the fingers dark against the royal eagle. The boy’s farm-worked palm, already rough despite his youth, ran along one golden wing. His expression was reflective, if not entirely serene. He didn’t smile. The man that this boy would become never smiled either.

‘You have never shown me this memory before,’ Ra said.

The boy stared at him. ‘No, I have not. This is where it all began, Ra. Here, on the banks of the Sakarya River.’ The boy turned his old eyes to the river itself. ‘So much water. So much life. If I have been disappointed by the galaxy’s wonders, it is only because we were fortunate enough to grow in such a cradle. There was so much to learn, Ra. So much to know. It pleases me for you to see what it once was.’

Ra couldn’t help but smile at the boy’s distracted, contemplative tone. He had heard it many times before, in another man’s voice, as familiar to him as his own.

‘I’m honoured to see it, sire.’

The boy looked at him, through him, and finally lifted his hand from the eagle sigil upon the Custodian’s breastplate. ‘I sense you have suffered a grave defeat. I cannot reach Kadai or Jasac.’

‘Kadai is three days dead, my king. Jasac fell two weeks before him. I am the last tribune.’

The boy stared, unblinking. Ra noted the suggestion of a wince; the boy flinched at some unknowable pain.

‘Sire?’ the Custodian pressed.

‘The forces unleashed in the wake of Magnus’ misjudgement grow stronger. First a trickle, then a tide. Now, a storm’s wind, unremitting, unceasing.’

‘You will hold them back, sire.’

‘My loyal Custodian.’ The boy wheezed, soft and slow, his throat giving a tuberculosis rattle. For a moment his eyes unfocused. Blood ran from his nose, lining the curve of his lips.

‘Sire? Are you wounded?’

The boy’s eyes cleared. He wiped the blood away on the back of his dirty hand. ‘No. I sense a new presence within the aetheric pressure. Something old. So very old. Drawing nearer.’

Ra waited for an explanation, but the boy didn’t elaborate. ‘You must do something for me, Ra.’

‘Anything, my king.’

‘You must take word to Jenetia Krole. Tell her…’ The boy hesitated, taking a breath. ‘Tell her it is time to enact the Unspoken Sanction.’

‘It will be as you command, sire.’ The words meant nothing to Ra. Once more he waited for elaboration. Once more he was denied.

‘How did Kadai die?’ the child asked.

‘The outward tunnels are falling, my king. Kadai had advanced far from the Impossible City when the horde struck. I tried to reach his vanguard to aid their withdrawal.’ Ra exhaled softly. ‘Forgive me, sire. I tried.’

‘What of the enemy in the outward tunnels?’

‘Traitors from the Legiones Astartes have joined the Neverborn. The Eaters of Worlds, the Bearers of the Word, the Sons of Horus. Our outriders have witnessed Titans in the mist, and entities the size of Titans. They flood the main arterials and secondary capillaries.’

Unimaginable thoughts dawned and died behind the child’s dark eyes. ‘It was inevitable. We knew they would gain access to the webway before the war’s end. You have Ignatum with you, Ra. You have the Scion of Vigilant Light. You will hold.’

‘I am withdrawing all remaining forces to the Impossible City. The outward tunnels are lost, my king. Overwhelmed beyond retaking.’

‘So be it,’ the child allowed. ‘Make a stand at Calastar. Sell every step as dearly as you are able. Is there more?’

‘I am sending Diocletian to the surface to requisition more warriors. Whatever he can muster. My king, the Ten Thousand bleeds and the Silent Sisterhood bleeds with us, but if you could leave the Throne for even a brief time, sire, we could press deep back into Magnus’ Folly. We could cleanse hundreds of tunnels.’

‘I cannot leave the Golden Throne,’ said the boy, curt, sharp. ‘That will not change.’

‘Sire…’

‘I cannot leave the Golden Throne. Every route between the Imperial Dungeon and the Impossible City would shatter and flood with warp-born. You would be alone, Ra. Alone and surrounded.’

‘But we could hold until you reached us.’

‘Kadai made the same demand, as did Jasac and Helios before him. Each one of the Ten Thousand represents genetic lore acquired over many lifetimes. Each one of you is unique. A work of art never to be repeated. I am miserly with your lives, when I spend so many others without a thought. I would not order the Ten Thousand into the fire if there was another way.’

‘I understand, sire.’

‘No. You do not.’ The boy closed his eyes. ‘The moment I rise from my place here, mankind’s dreams will die.’

‘As you say, my king.’

The boy held a hand across his face, cradling his pained features. ‘What of the Mechanicum’s work? What of Mendel?’

‘The Adnector Primus is dead, sire. He fell when the outward tunnels began to collapse.’

The boy met Ra’s stare, dark-eyed and cold. ‘Mendel has fallen?’

‘At a nexus junction in one of the primary arterials. He was part of Kadai’s vanguard. I fought my way through to recover his remains.’

The boy’s eyes lost their focus. It was like looking at the shell of a child, the preserved cadaver of a boy lost too young.

‘My king?’ Ra pressed.

‘This is your war,’ said the distracted boy. ‘The Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood must hold the webway. If you fail me, you fail humanity.’

‘I will die before I fail you, Highness.’

Again, the boy winced. A cringe this time, the revelation of pain – fearless but true – flashed in the child’s eyes. It drew him back to the present. ‘Malcador and the Seventh are losing the war for the Imperium,’ he said. ‘That is a tragedy, but it is a tragedy that can be undone as long as I draw breath. The Imperium is ultimately just an empire. Empires can be reconquered, whether saved from ignorance or pulled back from the clutches of traitors.’

Ra’s grin was a crescent of weary misery. ‘We face a great many traitors, my king.’

The edges of the boy’s mouth deepened. Not a smile. Never that. A twitch perhaps. Another wince. ‘There are always traitors, Ra. After the Ten Thousand performed the Asharik Silencing, I told you all that there was one sin far graver than betrayal.’

‘Failure.’

‘Failure,’ the boy concurred. ‘That holds true now, just as it did then, just as it always has. You cannot fail here, Ra. This is the war for humanity’s soul. The webway is its battleground.’

Ra said nothing, for no words would do. He turned to look at this paradise of primitive humanity with their mud huts and their fields and their weaponless hands. Such innocence. Such unbelievable, terrifying innocence.

‘The Sixteenth sails for Terra to crown itself king,’ said the boy. ‘Can you imagine if I allowed that to happen? A weapon, held in the wrong hands, installing itself as the lord of a whole species. Terra would be in ashes before the first sunrise.’

Ra swallowed at the sudden chill in the child’s words. ‘Sire, are you well?’

The boy cast a slow gaze across their surroundings, across the rows of tall crops, around the village where every other man, woman and child was ignoring them as though they no longer existed. ‘This is where I spent my youth, working the soil and bringing life from the ground.’

The Custodian inclined his head, causing the servos in his collar to purr. ‘I have given you my report, sire. Why do you keep me here?’

‘So I may illuminate you,’ the boy replied, speaking with a patience that bordered upon the preternatural. ‘You watched that man die, did you not?’

Ra looked back over his shoulder, where the village folk were gathered around the fallen man, weeping and comforting in a loose, unwashed herd.

‘I did.’

‘That was my uncle. My father’s brother.’

‘You killed him,’ the Custodian said without judgement.

‘Yes. He struck my father from behind with a piece of sharpened bronze too poorly made to even be called a knife. Men had killed one another for generations before my birth, but this was the first slaying that had resonance to me, that changed my existence. It was illuminating.’

He paused for a moment, following Ra’s gaze back to the noisy villagers. ‘The very first murder was also a fratricide,’ he said without emotion. ‘Thousands of years before this, when men and women still owed as much to apes as to the form we know now. But it is curious to me – brothers have always killed brothers. I wonder why that is? Some evolutionary flaw, some ingrained emotional fragility written into mankind’s core, perhaps.’

Ra shook his head. ‘I have no way of knowing the emotions at hand, sire. I have no brothers.’

‘I was being rhetorical, Ra.’ The boy took a breath. ‘This night was significant not for the murder, but for the deliverance of justice. For my uncle’s deed, I stopped his heart’s function and forced him to die. In eras to come this will be called the lex talionis, the law of retaliation, or more simply “an eye for an eye”. It is justice itself. Hundreds of human cultures through time will embrace it. Some will do so out of brutality, others from ideals that they believe to be fair and enlightened, but it is a precept that runs through the marrow of our species.’

Ra pulled his gaze away from the weeping humans. He heard his sire’s words, he knew the history and philosophy behind them, but the reason for them yet eluded him. His doubt plainly showed on his face, for the boy inclined his head in recognition.

‘I told you that this is where it all began,’ the boy said.

‘Culture?’ the warrior replied. ‘Civilisation?’

The boy’s momentary silence told Ra that he had guessed wrong. ‘We are not far removed from those beginnings, Ra, either in distance or time. You could walk to the cradle of civilisation from here, where men and women made the very first city. When I leave this village, that is where I will go. That journey is coming soon. But no, that is not what I mean when I speak of beginnings.’

The boy turned the skull over in his hands, just as he had done in the hut before. ‘This is where I first learned the truth behind our species. This very eve, as I held my father’s skull and considered how to restore his features according to our burial rites. When I learned of his murder, it was a revelation into the heart of all of mankind. This is a world that has no need of you yet, Ra. It has no need for Imperial bodyguards, for it is a world that knows nothing of emperors, or warlords, or conquerors. And therefore it knows nothing of unity. Nothing of law.’

‘You speak of leadership,’ the Custodian said.

‘Not quite. Every village already had leaders. Every family had patriarchs and matriarchs. I speak of kings. Givers of law, rulers of cultures. Not merely those who give orders, but those whose decisions keep a civilisation bound together. This was the night I realised that mankind must be ruled. It could not be trusted to thrive without a master. It needed to be guided and shaped, bound by laws and set to follow the course laid by its wisest minds.’

Ra breathed in the humid air of a land that knew nothing of the ravages it would suffer in the centuries to come. He smelled the sweat of the workers and the minerals in the river water, feeling his blood sing at the sensation of a truly unspoiled world. He didn’t admire the crudeness of a people that lacked all but the rudiments of technology, but he felt awed at the species’ humble genesis. To think that the Emperor, revered above all, had risen from such beginnings.

He looked the boy in the eyes, meeting that dark and knowing gaze, and spoke with a suspicion that curled the war-clan tattoos on his cheeks into a slight smile.

‘Did this truly happen, sire? Were you really born here?’

The boy who would be king turned the skull over in his hands, his voice already distant with distraction. ‘I shall barter with the coastal traders that come at the high moon. I will use shells for my father’s eyes.’

‘My king?’

The boy turned to him and spoke in the voice of the monarch he would one day become. He touched his fingertips to the Custodian’s forehead, delivering a jolt of force.

+Awaken, Ra.+

Ra opened his eyes. He hadn’t slept, he had merely blinked. A half-second’s span, within which he saw back to the Emperor’s childhood in a time of almost primeval purity. He exhaled slowly as his senses returned to the here and now, among the monuments of a dead empire, within the necropolis of Calastar.

The eldar cathedral was silent around him. Its shattered dome let in the realm’s ceaseless, sourceless light, casting shadows at inconsistent angles and reflecting oddly against the Custodian’s golden armour. Something like mist clung to the ground with a greasy tenacity, whispering when disturbed by the tread of intruders.

And they were intruders here. Of that, there was no doubt.

A statue of an alien maiden stared down at Ra as he trained. She stood in silent reverence, her streaming robes and features sculpted from the same pillar of songspun wraithbone. One of her slender hands was outstretched in pleading benediction, the other rested, palm against her chest, perhaps warding away some unknowable heartache, perhaps simply conveying some alien torment that had once mattered to her worthless, dying species.

The spear in his hands, gifted to him by the Emperor, cast slashing silver reflections against the cathedral’s walls. Its blade showed the scratches and scrapes of endless use with the perfection of ceaseless repair. He ran his fingertips along the flat visage of his own reflection in its mirrored surface, seeing the unmasked image he so rarely presented to the world.

Unease prickled at his flesh beneath the gold war-plate. He felt the weariness of the last five years clinging to him, the way cold wind slows the bones. Exhaustion wasn’t alien to the warriors of the Ten Thousand – their strength lay in enduring pain and weariness, not banishing it – but he felt as he had in his initiate days, when the trials had seen him drained of blood by the Emperor’s vitafurtam machines before subjecting him to the rigours of Custodian training.

Disgusted with himself at his failure of focus, Ra resumed the sparring briefly interrupted by the Emperor. His spear spun and whirled, singing its bladed song in the cold air. He lashed out with fist, boot and elbow, losing himself in the harmony of emptying his mind of all else.

Ra moved before the altar, forcing his muscles through the motions of the Fifty Forms, seeking the absolute focus that came through the alignment of body and mind. He shut out his surroundings, paying no heed to the pillared cathedral or the great altar, banishing the sound of his snarling armour joints and the thudding of his boots on the cracked wraithbone floor.

Soon he was perspiring freely, rivulets of sweat painting his dark features, following the lines of his cheekbones and the tattoos that snaked from his temples to the edges of his mouth. His spear whistled and whined, cutting the misty air. Its high-pitched slicing passage joined the melody of his heaving breaths.

Midway through the Third Form, the whirling spear slipped in his grip. The hesitation was miniscule, a fractional shift of the haft in his clutches, invisible to the observing eye. Ra clenched his teeth, leaning harder into the movements, chasing the elusive serenity.

He thought back to the Emperor’s words, spoken in the memory dream of where the Master of Mankind had first risen among the fields and mud huts. Words of promise, of responsibility. The necessary command of humanity, to bring about law and progress.

He thought of his own words to Diocletian and Kaeria before sending them to the surface. Scarcely one in ten of the Ten Thousand remain here.

He thought of–

The spear slipped a second time. Ra tightened his grip before the blade could fall from his hands, but the damage was done.

He stilled in his movements, breathing heavily. The stone alien maiden still stared down at him, imploring without meaning. He turned from her, looking up through the shattered dome ceiling.

With no sun there was no day. With no sky there was no night. The Impossible City – none of its defenders used the eldar name except in amused derision – stretched on for kilometres in every direction. In every direction: to look to the east and the west was to see a cityscape of winding streets and crumbling towers rising at unbelievable angles, as though the ground curved in the shape of an unimaginably vast conduit. To look directly up was to see yet more districts of the ancient wraithbone city, kilometres distant and difficult to perceive through the realm’s haze of mist. Those tall towers of smoothly curving alien architecture reached down just as the spires on the ground reached up. In truth, once a traveller approached the city there was no way of knowing where the true ground was; gravity was unchanged no matter where one walked. None of the Mechanicum’s instruments could explain the phenomena, but precious few Martian instruments had worked reliably in this realm since first entering it years before.

It was here that the primarch Magnus had led an ocean of daemons in his wake, in his quest to warn the Emperor of Horus’ treachery. And it was here, with the naivety of a proud and wayward god-child, that Magnus had set a sword to the throat of the Emperor’s dreams. The catacombs of Calastar led directly to the Imperial Dungeon. If the Impossible City fell, Terra fell with it.

No one knew what cataclysm had ravaged Calastar in epochs past. Whatever had driven the eldar from the Impossible City was a mystery that the Imperial vanguard had no capacity to solve. Much of Calastar’s core was a labyrinth of Mechanicum-born sections bolted into place, bridging the divide between the Imperial Dungeon and the dead hub-city itself, great spans of tunnels, bridges and channels forged by the blood, sweat and oil of countless priests in the Mechanicum’s sacred red.

How the Emperor had first conceived this inconceivable project was a similar mystery, but the Mechanicum’s greatest minds had followed the many hundreds of pages in each exacting schemata nevertheless. In reverence of his vision, a new caste of tech-priest had risen unseen by Terran and Martian eyes alike: the Adnector Concillium, the Unifiers.

And they had done it. They had bound Terran steel and Martian iron to avenues of senseless, unnatural materials previously shaped by long-dead, long-forgotten alien overlords. They had unified physical machinery with the psychically resonant matter of another dimension, and rebuilt the heart of an alien city.

The Impossible City was a gateway to the webway beyond. At its borders, the web began: thousands of capillary tunnels and great thoroughfares worming through the ancient alien network, leading to other worlds and regions in the galaxy. Every junction, every tunnel, every bridge, every passage leading out of the city – whether too small for anything but a lone human or vast enough for a Battle Titan – was held secure by entrenched Mechanicum thrall-warriors, Oblivion Knights of the Sisters of Silence and the Emperor’s own Custodians.

Calastar was not made up of roads and sectors as the human mind would contextualise urban order, but was formed into winding pathways across plateaus and rises, all leading to apex structures of presumably great import. Each bridge spanned a stretch of infinite abyss. The Mechanicum’s seers had reported that anyone falling from the bridges of Calastar would die of old age before reaching the bottom. Looking down into the nothingness, one could easily believe it.

A great spire rose highest of all in this district, the long promenades on the rising approach to it lined with eroded statues of what were initially believed to be eldar heroes.

‘Gods,’ Diocletian had said half a decade before, bluntly correcting the Mechanicum overseer responsible for the initial scouting probes. A hololithic map had cast flickering half-light across his features at the time. ‘I have studied their profane and foolish lore. These are not merely statues of heroes. Many of them are depictions of the aliens’ false gods.’

And so it was named the Godspire. Tribune Endymion and the Soulless Queen now used it as a command centre.

The approach was once a scene of stunning, if alien, beauty. An eldar traveller in the time of that star-spanning empire’s glory would have made a long, sloping ascent through gardens of luminescent singing crystals, across arcing bridges that curved over the bottomless void between tier platforms, before standing at the gates that led into the tower at the city’s heart. Now the crystal formations were melted remains on their floating pedestals, many supporting the weight of automated Tarantula gun batteries. Most of the bridges were broken, their spans long since fallen into the nothingness below the Impossible City. The courtyard’s once-open expanses housed a bustling hive of Mechanicum arming stations, supply depots, prefab barracks and landing pads.

In the cathedral, Ra levelled his gaze at the statue of the alien goddess-maiden once more. A filthy creature, forever staring with her slanted eyes. Who was she to judge the species that fought this new war in the ruins of her city? Her time, and the time of her people, was over. The eldar had been weighed by the implacable whims of the universe, and they had been found wanting.

His spear began its singing spin – the first blow shattered her reaching hand, sending sundered wraithbone clattering against the floor; the second cleaved through the goddess’ neck, toppling her hooded head to the floor with an echoing ring. A great crack lightning-bolted across her pale features from forehead to throat. Her severed neck steamed from the vicious kiss of the spear’s power field.

‘A fit of temper?’ came a gentle voice from the temple’s entrance.

Ra turned slowly, irritated that he’d not sensed his visitors’ approach. Truly, his humours were more unbalanced than he had realised if it was so easy to enter his presence undetected.

A woman and a girl. He hadn’t expected them so soon.

‘Not quite,’ he admitted. ‘I disliked how the alien stared at me.’ He braced himself as they took the last few steps, resisting a hissed intake of breath at the pressure squeezing its cold fingers inside his skull. ‘Commander,’ Ra greeted the first figure, and ‘Melpomanei,’ he greeted the second.

The commander of the Silent Sisterhood had come accompanied by her aide – a girl-child of nine or ten years, her head shaved bare and marked with aquila tattoos, clad in a simple adept’s robe of white, and beribboned with trailing parchments listing observances and rites that Ra had no desire to know of.

He immediately looked away from the soulless child. The Sister-Commander was bad enough alone, but these two together threatened to steal all hope of concentration. Breaking eye contact helped. Barely.

Krole’s presence was even harder to tolerate, yet impossible to dismiss. She was a tall figure, clad in contoured silver plate and cloaked in the grey-brown fur of some great off-world beast; it was a struggle for Ra to fix his attention on her, yet difficult to concentrate on anything else. She ate at his thoughts the way the night eats light, dulling and dimming everything else around her. The sensation was far from pleasant – she pulled at the Custodian’s focus not because she outshone everything else, but because she drowned and eclipsed it. To stand near her was to be near something hollow, something starving, something that sucked at the inside of Ra’s skull.

She was empty. Nothing in the form of Something. A void masquerading as a presence.

Jenetia Krole greeted Ra with a nod, her eyes gently closing for the gesture. Her mouth remained hidden behind a great silver mouthpiece, surgically bound to her jaw and cheekbones. As she dipped her head, her high crest of red-dyed hair swayed gently. Ra knew of that ritual; the Sisters of Silence never cut their hair from the moment they took the Oath of Tranquillity. Krole’s mane, even bound at the roots into a topknot, was long enough to reach the base of her spine.

If anyone could ever be in doubt as to her authority – were the evidence of their senses somehow not enough – all lingering misunderstandings would be banished by the Zweihander sword Veracity sheathed along her cloak, its hilt and grip showing over her shoulder. The lord of an entire species had once wielded that blade, before making a gift of it to the maiden who now bore it on her back.

‘Greetings, Ra Endymion,’ said the child at the Sister-Commander’s side. Her voice was a delicate lilt at odds with the armoured warrior-maiden towering above her. Jenetia kept her sharp, dark eyes on the Custodian’s. She lifted one hand, performing an artful series of gestures with her gauntleted fingers in the air before her chestplate.

The girl-child spoke for her mistress, staring just as brazenly as the older woman. ‘You have received word from the Emperor.’

There was no accusation in Melpomanei’s tone, nor in Jenetia’s stare. An accusation would imply the possibility of doubt.

‘I have,’ admitted Ra. He didn’t bother to ask how Jenetia knew.

Jenetia signed her reply, her dark eyes fierce but her gloved hand moving patiently and slowly. Many of the Ten Thousand no longer required their Silent Sister allies to employ the signs and gestures of thoughtmark at all, having fought at their sides for years and learnt to interpret their moods and meanings from even the slightest movements or facial changes. However, no one could claim that degree of familiarity with Commander Krole. Necessity demanded that Melpomanei remain a constant presence at her side. Something in Krole’s appearance slid greasily from the senses, refusing to remain in his mind. He would be looking directly at her, watching her hands move in patterns he knew as well as any spoken language, yet sense and meaning came in fragments, as though he were hearing the barest scraps of any conversation.

‘The withdrawal proceeds apace,’ translated the bald girl. ‘All forces are en route to the Impossible City.’

‘He was so weary, Jenetia. I fear news of our failure only added to His burdens.’

‘The failure was Kadai’s,’ replied the girl-child, watching her mistress’ hands. ‘Not yours. Not mine. Kadai reached too far, with too much pride, against your counsel and my wishes. Regardless, even Kadai could not have known of the hordes infesting the outward tunnels.’

Ra found precious little reassurance in that, no matter how true it might be. Krole noticed his reluctance. ‘You and I will hold this vile city until it falls, tribune. And when it does, we will go back to fighting tunnel by tunnel, as we did when we were first ordered into the web. There is no other choice.’

Ra nodded and said nothing. There was nothing to say. Defeat was inconceivable.

‘What are our master’s wishes?’ the child asked.

Ra forced the tension from his muscles, his armour joints murmuring at the subtle change in demeanour. ‘He commanded me to tell you that you must enact what He referred to as the Unspoken Sanction.’

Krole’s pupils were pinpricks in the alien light. ‘He said this?’ asked the young girl. ‘You are truly certain?’

Ra knew better than to ask what the command might mean. The Sisters were an order apart. They had their secrets just as the Ten Thousand had theirs. Such was the Emperor’s will.

Ra met the Sister-Commander’s eyes. Sensing his sincerity, Krole nodded and signed a reply.

‘Sister Kaeria Casryn will accompany Diocletian on his return to the surface,’ said the young girl, ‘in order to enact the Emperor’s command.’

‘As you wish,’ Ra agreed.

Jenetia followed this with a question, her eyes darkly urgent.

‘Will He join us?’ Melpomanei asked.

‘He remains bound to the Golden Throne. The forces besieging him outside the webway are growing in strength. He won’t stand with us.’

Melpomanei watched her mistress’ hands with a distant gaze, her mouth moving all the while. ‘What He commands, we will enforce.’ As she finished signing, Jenetia shifted once more. Rather than gesture a full sentence, she merely reached up over her shoulder, close to the back of her neck, and tapped her fingertips to Veracity’s long grip. It was enough for the child to translate. ‘Is the Emperor well?’

‘The pressure torments Him, but He remains resolute. Beyond the assault against His psychic defences, He spoke of a new presence, drawing near. Something old. Something already in the webway.’

Jenetia cut him off with a gentle wave of her hand. The motion moved seamlessly into more sign language. ‘That is why I am here,’ said Melpomanei. ‘If you have finished your meditations, will you please come with me?’

‘As you wish.’

The Custodian followed as the commander strode from the cathedral. Together they looked across the mist-wreathed vista of Calastar as the Impossible City stretched before them, around them, above them. Gone were the times such an insane view triggered disorientation in even Ra’s enhanced senses. Now when he looked at the eldar ruins, he saw a bastion of Mechanicum-armoured and gun-platformed towers and bridges that would be infinitely easier to defend than several hundred separate tunnels – but with no margin for error. Withdrawing to the city itself meant losing any fallback point.

The entire city was an unlikely hybrid of Imperial technology grafted onto time-eaten eldar wraithbone. When it came to the Impossible City, Ra’s awe had long ago been replaced by cold calculation and concerns of logistics.

And there stood the Godspire, where a golden Stormbird swinging in to land was silhouetted by the mist of middle distance. Three propellered Mechanicum ornithopters flapped in a slow arc above the landing gunship. The Koloborinkos flyers were mercifully silent at this distance. Up close, the machines’ flapping wings and spinning rotors gave off a brutal roar.

Scarcely even a quarter of the Godspire’s height, yet standing as a colossus above the marshalling Mechanicum forces, was the Scion of Vigilant Light. Freshly returned from one of the widest and tallest tunnels, the Warlord Titan was crawling with repair crews and maintenance servitors, who swarmed over its armour plating like ants clustering over a kill.

‘Are you troubled?’ Ra asked the Sister-Commander. ‘I cannot read your expressions.’

Jenetia Krole elaborated with several gestures for the girl to speak aloud. ‘Have you heard the reports of Thoroughfare HG-245-12-12?’

Ra nodded, paying heed to the background murmur of the dimmed vox reports playing at the back of his focus, whispering of the unfolding war. Fighters at the barricades fighting, falling, launching counter-attacks. The endless cycle. He had dulled them to near-mute while sparring and meditating upon the Emperor’s will, yet he knew at once of which report the Sister-Commander spoke.

‘I have already requested the Mechanicum send one of the Uridia-caste patrols,’ Melpomanei qualified. ‘They are less efficient since Adnector Primus Mendel was slain, but they assured me it would be done. Now you tell me the Emperor Himself has sensed this being’s approach. A Protector and its war machines may not be enough. What would be powerful enough alone for the Emperor to sense? What could be out there?’

‘There are a million things out there,’ Ra replied, ‘each more impossible than the last.’

Jenetia Krole signed her reply slowly and very clearly. ‘This,’ said Melpomanei, ‘is something different.’ She hesitated then, almost awkward as she signed once more. ‘May I ask what form the Emperor’s message took?’

Ra found the concept of what he’d seen, that pure and ancient world, difficult to frame in simple words. Jenetia noted his hesitation and stared, intrigued.

‘He showed me His childhood,’ the Custodian admitted, ‘and told me of the moment He first learned that humanity needed rulers.’

It was gratifying, in a way, to see Sister-Commander Jenetia Krole – the Soulless Queen of the Imperium – show genuine shock. As much as Ra felt discomfort at the sight, it was still a revelation to witness. Her hands hesitated in the air before her breastplate before moving into another series of smooth signs.

‘His childhood?’ the young girl said. ‘Elaborate please, Custodian.’

Ra felt the cold of Krole’s fierce adamance. ‘I saw Terra. More accurately, perhaps, I saw Old Earth.’

‘Neither Kadai nor Jasaric ever spoke of receiving such a vision. The future, the present, the recent past, yes. All of those. Never a reflection of Old Earth.’

‘I saw what I saw.’

‘Yet why would He show you this?’ the girl asked, her neutral tone conveying none of Jenetia’s mute amazement.

‘You ask a stone why the wind blows, commander. I don’t know.’

‘I must think on this. Thank you, Custodian.’ The Sister-Commander clicked her fingers, beckoning the girl, and offered Ra a polite bow of farewell.

He didn’t return it. He bowed and knelt only to one man. He did however force a weary smile to Melpomanei, aping the pleasant expression in an attempt to be disarming.

For the first time, Melpomanei spoke without her mistress signing. ‘You look monstrous when you pretend to be human,’ said the little girl.

Ra kept smiling. ‘As do you, soulless one.’

Three Sunlight / First of the Ten Thousand / War council

Diocletian Coros stood upon the wall of a fortress that shouldn’t exist, bathed in a halo of unwanted sunlight. While the first natural light to grace his skin in over five years should have been a blessing, he found himself pained by its unwelcome glare. His eyes were far too used to the sunless, skyless half-light of the realm below the Palace.

He wore weariness as a cloak, dulling his senses and pulling at his limbs. Exhaustion burned off him in an aura. The battle was over for now, yet still it leeched his strength. This weakness was new to him. He found that he loathed it.

Here on the high walls, Diocletian scarcely recognised his surroundings. The curving, graceful spires of the Palace’s Ennara Towers were gone, replaced by a grey bastion of rockcrete and plasteel. Its minarets, once things of such stark wonder that pilgrims had been speechless upon seeing them, were ground down into rigid, armoured gun towers with rows of turrets and laser batteries aiming up at the sky. Crews of maintenance servitors, ant-small at this distance, worked under the guidance of robed tech-priests.

It was a truth seen across the city-sized Palace. Walls had become ramparts, towers had been rendered down into battlements, and what had once been the most glorious celebration of human ingenuity now stood as a monument to the species’ capacity for betrayal.

Rogal Dorn and his stone-hearted Imperial Fists had done their work well – the Imperial Palace had been broken apart and reborn as a fortress beyond reckoning. Exalted architecture constructed in dozens of styles over several generations had been ground down under Dorn’s cold gaze, reprocessed into something blunt and crude and inviolate.

A pair of Imperial Fists sentries marched past Diocletian and Kaeria, bolters held at rest. They saluted the Custodian and the Oblivion Knight with the symbol of Unification, banging their fists to their breastplates. Kaeria returned the salute.

Diocletian did not. He watched the two soldiers march on and felt discomfort at the sight of their pristine armour, the very same unease he’d felt upon first seeing the Palace’s horizon turned into an endless ocean of grey battlements.

‘How proud they look,’ Diocletian said. The words came out as a murmur. His voice was still suffering from the blow that had almost severed his head the day before. ‘Our noble cousins.’

Cousins. It was true, if one employed a generous licence with the truth. The warriors of the Space Marine Legions were raised through a similar process to the Ten Thousand, albeit in the coldest and crudest imitation. Diocletian had been reshaped at the fundamental level, with perfection threaded through his blood and bred into his bones. In contrast, his lesser cousins among the eighteen Legions were cut open by knives and implanted with false organs, relying on surgical ingenuity and genetic rituals to mimic the end result of better, more painstaking, more complete, work.

Kaeria said nothing. She shifted slightly, meeting his eyes with her own.

‘True,’ Diocletian allowed, replying as if she’d spoken. ‘They have the right to pride. They have never failed, after all. But there’s no honour in innocence.’

She raised an eyebrow, tilting her head just so.

‘No,’ Diocletian replied at once. ‘Why would I?’

Kaeria’s expression shifted to one of patient doubt.

‘I don’t envy them for their innocence,’ Diocletian admitted, ‘but I’m beginning to hate them for it.’

Kaeria raised an eyebrow.

‘I know it’s petty,’ Diocletian snapped. ‘That’s enough of your judgement, if you please.’

With their faces bared, the Terran melange of their heritage couldn’t be denied. Diocletian was a child of the Urshan Steppes, with the dusky skin and curiously light-brown eyes of that region’s males, the latter standing as evidence to pre-Unity programmes of genetic processing. In paler contrast, Kaeria had the sun-bronzed olive flesh of the Achaemenid region, light of eye and dark of hair. The high topknot atop her shaven head showed tawny streaks in the thin Terran daylight.

Both bore the scabbed gashes and discolorations of recent battle. The walking wounded, returning to the surface with a grave tale to tell.

Diocletian held a stolen relic in his hands, dirtied by the very fact he had to touch it. Once more he fought the urge to grind it beneath his boot – an urge he’d been resisting since the trophy first came into his possession. He left it on the battlements, relieved to be rid of it even temporarily. Soon he would leave it with the Captain-General. Let Valdor add it to whatever archives were being collected by those still on the surface.

Mere years ago, it was forbidden for any to set foot here but the Ten Thousand, the Sisterhood and their mutual king. No others were permitted to walk where the Ennara Towers had risen into the polluted sky, for here the Emperor liked to contemplate the heavens, speaking to His most loyal warriors of His dreams among the stars. Now the battlements that had risen in the tower’s place were swarming with gun-servitors and Imperial Fists overseers. The stars were eclipsed by a forest of drifting searchlights, hundreds of them aimed skywards at the gently toxic clouds. Each stabbing beam of light hunted the sky for foes that couldn’t possibly be anywhere near Terra, but their readiness was unquestionable.

‘So much has changed,’ Diocletian said, looking across the vista of squat gun towers.

Kaeria started, surprised at his tone.

Diocletian fixed his companion with a neutral look. ‘Never that,’ he said. ‘I don’t mourn the loss of the Palace’s beauty. I mourn what all of this represents. Dorn and Malcador have both conceded that Horus will reach Terra no matter what stands in the Warmaster’s way. This is not precaution. This is making ready for war.’

Kaeria turned to look across the newborn battlements once more.

‘What?’ Diocletian asked.

She favoured him with a brief glance, the light of challenge in her eyes.

‘I have no time for your disapproval, Sister. The tribune is not here. I am. Let that be the end of it.’

A low purr of servos and pistons cut into the silence that followed. Kaeria nodded towards a doorway in the nearby battlement tower. An archwright stood there, cowled by the cloak of her order. Three bronze-plated artificers with metalsmith tools rising from prehensile servo-arms linked to their hunched spines flanked the priest in silent vigil.

‘Golden One,’ came the tech-priest’s greeting. ‘Honoured Sister.’

‘Archwright,’ Diocletian replied. Many souls even among the Imperium’s hierarchs would greet such a consummate artisan with no small gravitas. Kaeria bowed out of simple respect, but no warrior of the Custodian Guard would bow to anyone but his sire.

The archwright was an iron-boned elder, locked into a posture harness to keep her withered muscles upright, her cybernetics and bionics draped in a robe of Martian red and Terran gold. Whatever was left of her original face was surgically buried under reconstruction plating and an insect’s portion of ferrotic eye-lenses. She was female only insofar as her original biological template had been female. That is to say, in the mists of centuries past, she’d been born as a girl-child on Mars. The frail construct that approached both warriors now had evolved far beyond notions of gender.

‘I am Iosos,’ the decrepit genius stated. ‘I have been appointed to attend you before tomorrow’s war council.’

‘We need no attending,’ Diocletian replied at once. ‘We have artificers already deployed where we do battle.’

‘The Captain-General believes that the sight of one of the Omnissiah’s Custodians wounded and with his armour damaged will harm morale among the Palace’s pilgrims and defenders.’

For a moment Diocletian couldn’t even frame a response. He would have laughed had the notion not been so impossibly tragic, as if the morale of the refugees sitting safe within the Palace’s new walls mattered one iota. The war was being fought and lost far from Terra, without any of those dregs even raising their weapons against the foe.

‘Their morale,’ he said with patience he didn’t feel, ‘is beyond irrelevant.’

‘That may be so,’ Iosos conceded, ‘but the Captain-General insisted, Golden One. As First of the Ten Thousand, his command takes primacy.’

Kaeria gave her companion a sideways glance. Diocletian backed down, clenching his teeth to prevent himself speaking the dismissal on the tip of his tongue. Kaeria was right: this wasn’t a fight worth having.

‘You may work,’ Diocletian said, his tone passionless in acquiescence.

The archwright drew nearer, leading the three servitors. Diocletian held himself motionless as the archwright ran skeletal metal digits across his war-plate. The shaking of the tech-priest’s limbs ceased as liquid-pressure compensators in her arm supports adjusted for stability. Several of the struts in her harness vented tiny breaths of cryo-steam in a song of quiet hisses.

‘Golden One,’ she said again. ‘I wish you to note the honour I take in being appointed to your service.’ The vox-bleating that passed for her voice was entirely starved of emotion. Diocletian stood still as her black iron fingertips circled a ragged puncture in his breastplate. Machinery clicked in her sloping, elongated skull as she calculated the necessary repairs down to levels of exactitude far beyond the human eye. The scratching and scraping of her meticulous inspection made the Custodian’s teeth ache.

‘Such incredible brutality,’ said Iosos, ‘inflicted upon such fine work. Such distinctive signatures in the ruination. Each wound in the auramite is something singular, something unique.’

A murmured hum filled the air around her augmented skull as its internal cogitators struggled to process the impossible findings.

‘Incredible,’ the archwright said at several intervals. And then once, ‘Do you see, here? These lacerations in the auramite layers are quite literally impossible. The carved segments at the manubrium bracing could only have been caused by something that violates the laws of physics. Something that moves in and out of corporeal reality, appearing inside the metal, dissipating matter rather than breaking it.’

‘Fascinating,’ Diocletian replied, his tone dead.

The archwright’s bestial allotment of eye-lenses cycled and refocused. ‘It is, isn’t it? And this, here, the metal itself is diseased. This isn’t damage, it’s infection. A contagion at the clavicle supports, taking root in the auramite layering as though it were flesh.’

‘How much longer will your inspection take?’

‘Impossible to calculate.’ Three of Iosos’ many hands reached for a particularly savage rent in Diocletian’s shoulder layering, their fingers quivering in fascination. She caressed the ripped plating with the sound of knives scraping over stone. ‘I understand you are forbidden to speak of what transpires in the Imperial Dungeon. But may I ask of the Omnissiah? How does the Machine-God fare since He exiled Himself to His sacred laboratory? What works of genius will He bring back to the surface when He once again deigns us worthy of His presence?’

Diocletian and Kaeria shared another glance. ‘The Emperor is well,’ the Custodian replied.

Iosos froze, her fingertips resting at the edges of the wound she’d been examining. The cogitators in her elongated skull whined as they struggled with what she had just heard. Before she could speak, she blurted a screed of mangled machine code.

‘Your voice patterns,’ she said, muted and low, ‘suggest you are deceiving me.’

Diocletian bared his teeth in an expression that wasn’t a smile, nor a grimace; it was a flash of fangs, the expression a lion might wear as it was backed into a corner.

‘The Emperor lives and works on,’ the Custodian said. ‘Does that reassure you?’

‘It does.’

When Diocletian picked up the war spoil from the battlements, three of Iosos’ many hands reached for the relic, the tech-priest’s inhuman fingers quivering in all-too-human awe. Diocletian pulled it back, refusing to let her steal it.

‘Where are your manners, Martian?’

The archwright was respiring heavily. ‘Where did you come by this?’

‘I am forbidden from answering.’

Kaeria interrupted with a curt hand gesture. Diocletian turned, as did Iosos.

‘You look exhausted unto death,’ came a cold voice from the arched door.

Constantin Valdor, First of the Ten Thousand, strode towards them. The bitter Terran wind breathed against the side of his nationless features, carrying the scents of distant forges and the chemical tang of the great cannons lining the battlements. The Throneworld had always borne the alkali scent of history, from the dust of a million cultures waging war upon one another down the many millennia. The cycle was now mercilessly set to begin anew. For the first time in its long history, mankind’s cradle had known peace. The Emperor had conquered all, and the Pax Imperialis rose from the rubble. Rather than do battle upon the already-wasted soil, humanity had sent its greatest, mightiest armies into the void, to wage war far from their home world.

And yet war was coming, against all reason. Terra’s peace had been nothing but an illusion, born of false and foolish hope.

Kaeria greeted the Captain-General with a brief series of hand gestures. Diocletian saluted with the symbol of Unity, fist against his heart, a salute that Valdor returned.

‘Where is Jasaric?’ Valdor asked at once.

‘Dead.’

‘Kadai?’

‘Dead. He died with Adnector Primus Mendel.’

Valdor hesitated. ‘Ra?’

‘Ra lives. He is overseeing the defences in the wake of Magnus’ ignorance,’ said Diocletian. ‘I am here in the tribune’s place.’

‘Ra, then,’ Valdor said at last, as if weighing the name and the consequences that came with it. ‘So be it.’

Iosos and her artisan servitors worked on scanning, repairing and resealing Diocletian’s battered plate. Sparks sprayed from the acetylene-bright fusion tools in the tech-priest’s fingertips where she pressed them to the wounds. The servitor standing at his back had removed the auramite layering and now worked on reattaching the severed fibre bundle cabling around his right shoulder blade. Once glorious, Diocletian now looked closer to scorched, filthy bronze than Imperial gold.

By contrast, Valdor stood resplendent in wargear that bordered on ceremonial. Although thousands of scratches and scars marked its surface, and although each one spoke of a battle won in the Emperor’s name, they were old wounds long healed. Artificers like Iosos had worked their arcane craft on each armour plate in the months since the Captain-General had last seen war, restoring it to a state of near perfection.

‘What has happened?’ asked Valdor. Hunger for knowledge of the Emperor’s fate was writ plainly across his stern features.

Kaeria answered with a series of brief hand gestures.

‘Routed?’ Valdor shook his head at the madness of her explanation. ‘How can the Silent Sisterhood and the Ten Thousand not be enough to deal with this threat?’

Kaeria repeated the gestures, a touch more emphatically.

‘That’s why we’re here,’ said Diocletian, adding his voice to her avowal. ‘We need more warriors to hold the Impossible City.’

‘What of the Ten Thousand?’

Kaeria and Diocletian exchanged glances. Weary of formality, the Custodian shook his head. ‘There is much I can’t say. So much is forbidden to be spoken here on the surface, even where no disloyal ears might hear. The last few months have taken a brutal toll, moreso than any of the preceding years. The Ten Thousand is gravely depleted. The Silent Sisterhood fares little better.’

He offered the trophy to Valdor. ‘And then there is this.’

It was undeniably a Space Marine helmet. Which was, of course, impossible.

Constantin Valdor turned the relic over in his golden hands, examining every inch of its construction. The helm belonged to no Legion that Valdor could name, and its battered, cracked ceramite was a red worn by none of the eighteen Legions on the battlefield. Sanguinius’ noble sons of the IX were clad in the rich red of arterial blood; Magnus’ traitorous dogs of the XV wore a paler, more austere shade of crimson.

This helm was neither. Its ceramite was a proud scarlet, chipped away to reveal the gunmetal grey beneath and edged with a bronze-like metal so rife with impurities that it resembled brass.

The faceplate was a Mark IV design with significant variation. Its mouthpiece was rendered into a snarling maw, with the respirator grille crafted into clenched iron teeth. The helm’s crests were a twin rise of rigid ceramite reminiscent of the angel wings of the First Legion’s officer elite and the high curves of XII Legion champions, yet these were cruder, straighter than either Legion’s crests, and emblazoned with brass bolts hammered into the red plating.

Each of these elements was unusual but not unprecedented. There were as many variants in armour mark design as there were foundries and forge worlds producing the arsenals of the Legiones Astartes. In that vein the helmet was marked with its forge of origin, but the stylistically jagged rune imprinted behind the right aural receptor wasn’t one that had yet been seen in the Solar System.

‘Sarum,’ said Valdor at last. ‘This was forged on Sarum.’ He looked at Diocletian and Kaeria, though he didn’t hand the helmet back to either of them. ‘World Eaters.’ He breathed the name like the curse it was becoming.

Diocletian nodded in agreement. ‘The dead legionary wore the devoured world on his pauldron, and the back of his head was wretched with the cybernetics so prized by the Twelfth Legion.’

For a time, Valdor said nothing. What was there to say?

‘Tell me everything,’ he ordered at last.

Kaeria’s hands wove a reply in the air.

‘Then tell me all you can.’ Valdor’s voice was cold. ‘Tell me whatever you can before we convene the war council.’

Malcador the Sigillite, Regent of Terra, wore the unadorned robes of a Terran administrator. He led the war council, leaning on his eagle-topped staff as if he truly were the ageing councillor he appeared to be.

They gathered in the Sigillite’s private sanctum, a tower that had thus far managed to evade the extensive reconstruction engineered by the Imperial Fists. Its ringed balcony was still open to the Terran night sky, and the shadows of great stone spheres drifted around the spire-top chamber in elliptical orbits, casting their shadows through the tall stained-glass windows. Nine primary globes drifted on heavy anti-gravitic suspensors, each one shaped of Albian whitestone. Dozens of secondary spheres, moons formed from dark basalt, orbited them in symbiotic turn, as though the tower’s highest chamber were the Sun at the heart of the Solar System.

Malcador referred to it as his study. He liked to have select meetings here at the heart of a three-dimensional astrolabe, claiming it gave him a perspective too easily forgotten in the bowels of the Imperial Palace. He’d refused the tower’s reconstruction on the principle of needing somewhere ‘less militant, less miserable’ to think when he was alone. Despite Dorn’s rank as Praetorian of Terra, Malcador’s will had won through. It remained a rare needle of artisanal beauty in the Palace now reborn as a fortress.

Several of the most powerful men and women of the loyal Imperium stood around the circular hololithic table in the heart of the tower-top librarium. They were surrounded by the priceless scrolls and relics of a hundred lost cultures, from the oldest of Old Earth to the many that had faded out of existence during the Dark Age of Technology. Wooden carvings, broken statue fragments of white stone and black rock, scrolls encased in stasis fields, pistols and rifles and swords long since given over to rust and the patina of time’s mercies – it was an eclectic collection to say the least.

Six souls stood opposite one another. Six souls deciding the fate of an empire. Whatever was decided here would go on to be disseminated throughout the Imperium’s byzantine hierarchy, or sealed away behind seals and sanctions forever.

Diocletian looked at each of the hierarchs in turn, gathered around a table with no sides, so that all were rendered equal: Fabricator Locum Trimejia of Mars; Malcador, the Imperial Regent; Primarch Rogal Dorn of the Imperial Fists; Kaeria, Oblivion Knight of the Silent Sisterhood; Captain-General Constantin Valdor of the Ten Thousand; and Diocletian himself.

He had not seen the Mechanicum’s new high priestess before. Trimejia was a stick-thin revenant hooded and cowled in Martian red, showing nothing but her skeletal silver fingers at the ends of her robe’s sleeves and a featureless faceplate in the shadows of her hood. She spoke only through the vox-grilles of the three servo-skulls orbiting her on tethered, hazard-striped cables. Three voices in unison, all artificially female.

‘The Fabricator General requests word from the guardians of the Great Work.’

‘We bring word,’ Diocletian replied, gesturing to the World Eaters helm on the central table. ‘And evidence.’

‘The Adnector Primus no longer conveys reports to the Fabricator General,’ Trimejia pressed. ‘Zagreus Kane, blessings upon him, believes our representative in the Great Work has met his end in the course of service to the Omnissiah.’

‘Kane believes right,’ Diocletian replied. ‘The Mechanicum forces within the webway answer to their divisional overseers now. Adnector Primus Mendel was killed several days ago in the fall of a tunnel nexus.’

‘Inconvenient,’ said Trimejia’s three servo-skulls.

‘Tribune Endymion led a counter-attack to bring aid to the survivors. He recovered Mendel’s body.’

‘An irrelevancy,’ the tech-priestess blurted back. ‘His mortal remnants are of no value to the Mechanicum. At most, his organic matter will be reprocessed for servitor sustenance fluid packs.’

Diocletian bared his teeth, resisting the urge to curse at the Martian witch. Good men and women had died in that counter-attack.

Dorn, a warrior-king among the Space Marine Legions, wore no armour. In his pale robe he looked monastic and austere, radiating a halo of impatience. He had his battles to plan and fight. He had his own wounds to lick. The stern patrician of the Imperial Fists, adamant in his cold-eyed sincerity, never lifted his gaze from the Custodian and the Sister, side by side.

‘Report in full,’ he commanded them.

Diocletian bristled at the order and caught sight of Kaeria’s subtle shift in posture. The Sister stood with her arms crossed over her breastplate, moving a single finger in a miniscule twitch. Her fingertip rested against the lightning bolt engraved on her bicep plating.

‘You think me blind to your coded warnings to one another, Oblivion Knight?’ Dorn asked Kaeria.

Kaeria showed no sign of attempting a reply. Diocletian answered for her. ‘She was merely cautioning me against a show of temper at your presumption, Lord Dorn. Only one man may give me orders. You call that man “Father”.’

The primarch watched them both, unblinking, before finally nodding with the curtest gesture of his head. ‘A thousand matters pull at my mind. Your point is made. Please continue.’

‘There is little to say,’ Diocletian admitted. ‘The last waves that struck the tunnels reaped a significant toll. All of the ground we claimed within Magnus’ Folly is swarming with the aetheric invaders, and we are being beaten back to the walls of the Impossible City. We can hold Calastar far more easily than we can maintain our grip on the outward tunnels. For now, the link between the webway and the Imperial Dungeon remains stable: the Mechanicum-made routes through the city’s catacombs remain sheathed in the Emperor’s protection and cleansed of aetheric activity.’

‘For how long?’ asked Dorn.

Diocletian steeled himself. He gestured to the helm on the table, knowing it would offer a far finer explanation than mere words. ‘You know what this portends. The Traitor Legions have gained access to the webway. Behind them march silhouettes of Titans. We were already hard-pressed, but now our foes have multiplied. We are losing tunnels in Magnus’ Folly at a faster rate than ever before. We have lost our grip on the wider web and no longer have the numbers to advance. For now, the Impossible City’s catacombs are safe. We can hold the reconstructed walls of Calastar for as long as we must.’

Malcador, silent until now, dipped his hooded head. ‘Where is Tribune Endymion?’

You know, thought Diocletian. You know Kadai and Jasar have fallen. You know Ra is the last tribune. Ah, to catch one of your spies, you cunning creature. ‘Ra is engaged in battle,’ the Custodian said. ‘I am here in his stead.’

During Diocletian’s retelling, as brief as it was, Dorn had moved to the wide windows, watching the great metal globes passing by in their elliptical drifts. The daylight sky was darkened by the passing of one of Terra’s orbital plates, leaving the primarch’s features in shadow. His face was stone, betraying no hint of emotion.

Valdor said nothing. Trimejia was equally silent. Even her skulls had ceased their circling, now bobbing in the air by her shoulders, looking at Diocletian with eye sockets filled with sensoria needle clusters. The Sigillite leaned more heavily on his staff, making no attempt to reclaim control of the command briefing in the wake of Diocletian’s confession.

Dorn turned from the window. Diocletian hated the sudden emotion that lifted the primarch’s features and brought light to his eyes.

‘If you need warriors,’ he began, ‘then my Legion…’

‘No.’ Diocletian said the word the very same moment that Kaeria signed a curt Negative.

‘No?’ As ever, Dorn was calm.

‘It is the Emperor’s will that the Imperial Fists remain outside the Dungeon.’

‘That was my father’s will when He had the Ten Thousand and the Sisterhood at full strength,’ Dorn countered. ‘When He is starved of soldiers and the Traitors mass within the webway, how can His command remain the same?’

‘How many of your Fists even remain on Terra?’ Diocletian countered. ‘Four companies? Five?’

‘I have several companies stationed in the event of rebellion from among the conquered territories.’

‘And the rest of your Legion, Rogal?’

‘Scattered across three segmentums, and principally deployed in the engagement spheres of the Solar War. Even so, I offer what I can spare.’

‘Which is next to nothing.’

‘Even so.’

‘It is the Emperor’s will,’ Diocletian repeated, ‘that the Imperial Fists remain outside the Dungeon.’

‘Tell me why.’

‘I can only guess,’ said Diocletian. His gaze flicked downwards to the deactivated helm taken as a trophy.

‘You believe that my men cannot be trusted?’ Dorn replied, perfectly calm. ‘That they would turn their coats as Angron’s dogs turned?’

‘Trust,’ said Diocletian, laying into the word. ‘I am not free with my trust these nights, Rogal Dorn. If we could trust the warriors of the Legions, the galaxy wouldn’t be aflame and severed in two by a primarch’s ambition. I won’t argue with you, Praetorian. I merely bring the Emperor’s will back to the surface.’

Dorn leaned his knuckles upon the table and breathed through closed teeth. Although all knew him as a soul of majestic composure, his dislike of Diocletian and the Ten Thousand’s secrecy was deeply etched across his being. Malcador’s exhalation was subtler, slower, somehow more tense. Only Trimejia showed no emotion whatsoever; her faceless visage was capable of none. Her hood dipped slightly. Something clicked behind her faceplate. The three skulls began drifting around her in a reversed orbit.

‘What of the Omnissiah?’ her three skulls asked in harmonic monotone.

‘He is unchanged. He remains enthroned and unmoving, unresponsive to any stimuli. He has not spoken since taking the Golden Throne. The forces He battles in the wake of Magnus’ ignorance are beyond reckoning. We know no more than we already knew.’

‘If He remains unspeaking,’ Dorn’s colourless voice enquired, ‘how has He requested more warriors?’

‘The Ten Thousand speaks for the Emperor,’ Diocletian replied at once.

‘We require more information,’ said Trimejia’s drifting servo-skulls. ‘More quantifiable data on the Omnissiah’s will. Speak. Enunciate. Explain.’

‘The Ten Thousand speaks for the Emperor. What we ask for is no different than if our lord asked Himself. It has ever been thus.’

Silence reigned.

Dorn looked back to the overcast sky. His voice was softened by the moment’s immensity.

‘Magnus, my brother, of all your mistakes this one is by far the most grievous.’ Once more he looked over his shoulder at Diocletian and Kaeria. ‘I see now why you came in person.’

Diocletian nodded. ‘If the Traitors reach Terra–’

‘It is a matter of when, prefect, not if.’

‘As you say. When the Traitors reach Terra, Lord Dorn, you must be ready to defend the Palace without the Emperor’s guidance.’

If Dorn was tormented by the notion, he showed no sign. The one implacable son, stone and stoicism in moments when all of his brothers would be fire, spite and honour.

‘I’d dared to hope the Emperor’s secret war was going well. The audacity of such optimism seems foolish in hindsight, does it not? That I dared to imagine, come the final day, we might only face annihilation from the skies above Terra, not from beneath its surface as well. Horus and his forces are already in Segmentum Solar. Now the Imperial Dungeon is at risk of falling. Tell me, Diocletian, could we lose this war before Horus even sets foot on Terra?’

‘Yes,’ Diocletian answered at once.

‘Is it likely?’

‘If all remains the same? Yes, we will lose. If our requisition demands for new warriors are not met? Yes, we will lose. If the enemy is further reinforced? Yes, we will lose.’

‘Then what is your plan? Where will you find these soldiers?’

‘I will aid them in this matter,’ Malcador said. ‘There are possibilities beyond the obvious.’

Rogal Dorn, even calm, was relentless. ‘Does the Emperor’s edict of secrecy remain in force?’

Kaeria signed a brief affirmation, to which Dorn nodded. ‘Then you are consigning any volunteers to death,’ said the primarch. ‘Sacrificing the Mechanicum’s servitors is understandable. Culling them, if necessary, is a loss but hardly immoral. Euthanising any human survivors you pull down into the webway is a far bleaker proposition.’

Kaeria’s reply was nothing more than a glance to Diocletian and the subtlest gesture of one hand. The Custodian translated: ‘The Lady Kaeria’s point takes primacy here, Praetorian Dorn. We may not need to cull any survivors at all if we continue losing ground. The enemy will see us all dead, and your concerns of morality will be meaningless.’

Dorn’s jaw tightened. ‘Listen to yourself, Diocletian. Hear the words you are speaking and the course you advocate.’

Necessity overcomes morality, Kaeria’s hands signed in the air before her breastplate. Never without regret. Never without shame. Yet even immoral victory must outweigh moral defeat. The victor will have a chance to atone if conscience demands. The vanquished lose any such opportunity.

‘You quote my own brother at me?’ Dorn narrowed his gaze. ‘Roboute is not here, Oblivion Knight. Would that he were. In his absence, I am Lord Commander of the Imperium.’

Diocletian resisted a flare of temper at the performance unfolding before his eyes. ‘This is base hypocrisy, Lord Dorn. How often have your Imperial Fists prided themselves on enduring conflicts that proved to be flesh-grinding stalemates to other forces? Now you object to the execution of… chaff… to keep the Emperor’s greatest secret. How is this even worth discussing?’

Dorn’s armoured gauntlet crashed onto the central table, causing the hololithic image of the Sol System to jump and flicker. ‘We are speaking of more than my own sons. Their lives are coin I may spend as I see fit, but you have been underground for five long, long years, and the Ten Thousand isn’t the only force to have bled itself dry. This isn’t the Great Crusade, Custodian. You cannot annihilate loyal souls on a whim. The meaning of “necessity” has changed now that we draw near to the final days of this war, Diocletian.’

The words echoed in the air between the gathered hierarchs, as solemn as any confession of guilt.

We will not argue this matter, Kaeria signed, though even she seemed hesitant now.

‘We will gather the army required,’ said Diocletian. ‘With the Sigillite’s aid, if he sees fit to grant it. And I will bring your reservations to the Emperor when circumstance allows.’

‘That is all I ask,’ Dorn acquiesced with grim consent.

Trimejia closed her left hand, summoning the servo-skulls to drift together and dock with the ports on her hunched spine. Malcador made no reply at all. Diocletian wondered how much of this the Sigillite had already known.

‘If that is all,’ said Malcador, ‘I believe we are finished here.’

Trimejia vocalised a spurt of irritated code.

‘Is that an objection, archpriestess?’

The docked servo-skulls thrummed, a chorus of skinless faces desperate to speak. ‘Mars,’ the three probes voiced at once. ‘The Mechanicum beseeches the Omnissiah for permission to retake Sacred Mars.’

Dorn stiffened. ‘Not here,’ he said, curt and clear. ‘Not now.’

‘The Fabricator General is aware of your refusal, Praetorian. He bade me take my request directly to those waging war at the Omnissiah’s side.’

She leaned closer to Kaeria and Diocletian, spindly and inhuman, so frail for one who commanded such authority. ‘Mars must be retaken.’

Malcador’s staff thudded upon the floor. ‘Mars will be reconquered when we have the resources to do so.’

Diocletian and Kaeria remained silent throughout the exchange. They shared a glance, hardly blind to the tension. Malcador’s gesture was a plain request for them to leave.

‘This meeting is concluded,’ said the Regent of Terra. ‘You have our gratitude, Sister, Custodian.’

Before any of the hierarchs could argue otherwise, Diocletian and Kaeria strode from the room. There was a great deal yet to do before they could return to the Dungeon.

Four Anomalies / Bodies in the mist / End of Empires

Alpha-Rho-25 didn’t consider himself burdened by any particular degree of sentiment. Even so, there was a pang of loss as he came across the dead servitors. Whoever had constructed them had done so over many weeks, with painstaking care and expertise, to serve in the Omnissiah’s name. And now they were reduced to… this.

Such a waste.

As one of the Mechanicum Protectors assigned to the Unifiers, his role was simple. He was to stalk through the webway, overseeing the Mechanicum’s restoration work and shoring up their defences in the outward tunnels – that region known by the vanguard as Magnus’ Folly. It fell to him and those like him to defend the outskirts of the Impossible City and guard the Unifiers working in the tunnels leading deeper into the web. Now it fell to him to watch over the retreat.

A decision that had been too long in coming, by the Protector’s analytic perceptions. Casualties had risen starkly in recent months. Too few defenders stretched too thin through far too many tunnels. Falling back to the defensible bastion offered by the Impossible City was the logical course of action.

Alpha-Rho-25 had taken part in one thousand, six hundred and eighty-three individual skirmishes since being brought into the Imperial Dungeon five years before. His recordings of individual foes destroyed were accessible to the archpriests who coded his orders, but he didn’t like to review them himself or tally the totals. That kind of behaviour seemed close to self-satisfaction – what a full-blood human might call smugness – and therein lay danger. To be satisfied with oneself was to consider oneself perfect, to abandon all hope of refinement and improvement. A tragic delusion indeed. Perfection did not exist outside the Omnissiah Himself.

No, one must always evolve. To consider the stasis of satisfaction was nothing more than a vaguely amusing heresy.

Nor did Alpha-Rho-25 find himself burdened with the weight of superstition. These creatures he had fought now for five years were hardly ‘daemons’ in the terms referred to in human mythology. They were entities of incorporeal origin, breaching the barrier between the unmapped tides of the aether and the material universe. Aliens, then. A xenos breed from the warp. It was quantifiably true.

If pressed to be truthful on the matter, he found the relentlessly warlike entities no more or less disgusting and unnatural than the perfidious eldar, in whose ruins the Imperial Vanguard had made their fortress. All alien breeds suffered from the unholy imperfections of their forms. That was the beginning and end of the matter.

Still…

Still.

These ‘daemons’ were violent beyond any other species Alpha-Rho-25 had encountered. And they took a great deal of effort to extinguish. The fact they bled was no guarantee they would die. Many of them refused to even bleed at all. That was quite galling.

He hunted alone in the dayless and nightless flow of time that shrouded the Impossible City. His hunting grounds on this operation were far from the Godspire, a full forty kilometres away, where the eldar ruins grew ever more decayed. Contact had been lost with the boundary servitors guarding one of the many thousands of capillary tunnels leading deeper into the webway, which was by no means unusual.

However, questions remained. These boundary servitors had been guarding a far-flung passageway with significant defence batteries and gun emplacements. It shouldn’t have fallen at all, let alone so swiftly and with so little warning. Subsequent contact had been lost with the reinforcement servitors, their handler and then again with the three squads of Thallax war machines sent forwards from the tunnel’s second barricade to ascertain the gravity of the situation. All of this was less than typical.

And so, while the rest of the Imperial vanguard withdrew and abandoned the outward tunnels, Alpha-Rho-25 went hunting back through them.

He loped onwards, lens-eye scanning, panning. The sloping walls of this tunnel were glossy white, something that seemed a cousin to clean marble and polished enamel, yet was entirely unrelated to either.

Like walking through the marrow of something’s bones, thought the Protector, finding the notion disturbingly organic. Who had they been, those that ruled here before the interloping eldar colonists had even dreamed of setting down foundations? Had the original creators of this realm used the bodies of their immense, fallen god-foes as material for its construction? Nothing would surprise Alpha-Rho-25 about those long-dead entities’ intentions or methods. He had seen too much in the last five years to cling to surety about anything here.

En route he passed Mechanicum Unifier priests and their battle-servitor defenders in droves, returning to Calastar. The mist swirled with the passage of bulk conveyors and tracked lab-platforms, yet it never dissipated.

Even the vastest tunnels, their sides invisible to visual or echo­locating perception, had a clinging oppressiveness that sat ill within the Protector’s mechanical guts. As honoured as he was to have been activated and deployed within the labyrinth of the Great Work, he would not miss the eerily human pressures it placed upon his thoughts. Discomforts he’d believed himself long past pulled at his perceptions every time he left the web’s Mechanicum-engineered sections.

Troubling reports crackled across the vox of warden servitors in other outward tunnels committing sacred prayers of violence and failing to destroy their target. Something – a single entity – was testing their defences, then drawing back each time. Tunnels that had long since been repaired and which had seen no battles in years were reporting the expenditure of horrendous amounts of ammunition. Many then ceased reporting at all. Other Protectors were being released to cover the webwide retreat, but Alpha-Rho-25 was the first, already close to his destination by the time the Godspire unleashed more of his kindred.

With his back-jointed legs propelling him into a ragged sprint capable of outrunning a Triaros conveyor, he reached the outward tunnel barricade swiftly after setting out from the Godspire. A series of Mechanicum-constructed barriers and gunnery platforms faced away into the tunnel’s mist, the empty cannons tracking on unoiled mechanics, panning left and right over a vista of eldar rubble. Perhaps it had once been a smaller outpost far from Calastar, in the age of eldar supremacy. There was no way of knowing. There would never be a way.

He found AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) first, which was fitting. She had been the lead servitor of the boundary team. Her torso lay across a low broken wall of eldar architecture – wraithbone, they called the material, with their species’ pathetic sense of melodrama – with her skull cracked open and leaking into the ground mist. The mist possessed some kind of preservative properties for the destruction had occurred hours ago, yet the cranial residue was still wet. Another reality deviation that wasn’t the Protector’s duty or place to analyse and codify.

Alpha-Rho-25 crouched by the remains, the claws in place of his feet finding easy purchase on the rubble and his piston-legs hissing as he lowered himself. His cloaked robe rippled briefly in a sourceless breeze. Another anomaly. He ignored it, drumming his taloned metal fingers on his sphere-jointed knees as he mused.

The nearby passageway leading deeper into the webway was ringed with what seemed to be eldar bone plating and their ridiculous gemstone circuitry. Alpha-Rho-25 had seen the Mechanicum’s ana­lyses describing the extent of eldar colonisation within the web. The original creators of this realm had constructed the webway from psychically resistant materials that defied corporeal understanding, but evidence of eldar habitation and restructuring was evident throughout the web. The sprawling necropolis of Calastar was only one of its kind, albeit the largest yet found, and eldar ruins lay throughout many dozens of outward tunnels.

The bodies of the other battle-servitors were in similar states, as were the Thallaxi robots several dozen metres to the north. Intriguingly their lightning guns’ chainblade attachments, fallen from slack hands into the mist, still sniggered in idle activation.

The servitors were dismembered but undefiled by further punishment. The Thallaxi’s body-shells were broken, their cranial domes shattered, and the organic cognitive slurry within now ran out, congealing greasily in the golden fog.

The daemon sensed movement. Motion prickled at its perception, jabs knifing against the searing muck of its thoughts. It abandoned its idle prowl, turning away from its explorations through the outward tunnels, drawn back to the site of its first hunt in this cold realm. It had to feed. Already its flesh steamed with the slow smoke of threatened dissolution. Stalking the infinite tunnels was, thus far, achieving little. Boundary servitors were chemical-blooded and grey of soul – their deaths offered scarce sustenance, yet they flooded the tunnels in numbers beyond the creature’s crude reckoning.

The soul it sensed now was brighter than those it had devoured before. The light of this new spirit gleamed through air and stone alike, a beacon amidst oily black vision. The pain of starvation lent conviction to the creature’s movements. It moved faster and faster, wraithing through the tunnels, between the ruins that populated them.

With no one else nearby – no one capable of intelligent conversation, at least – Alpha-Rho-25 allowed his annoyance to show across his angular and not particularly attractive features. In public, he looked like a man always on the edge of scowling. In private, he crossed over that edge and consistently indulged.

Servo-skulls drifted around him, scanning, always scanning. Their anti-gravitic gliding dispersed some of the higher tendrils of mist in their wake. Alpha-Rho-25 paid scant heed to the drones’ empty readings scrolling in Martian hieroglyphs across his vambrace monitor. If the osseous probes found what had done this, well, then he’d pay attention.

Instinctively, the prehensile mechadendrite attached to his spine slipped free from the bottom of his robes. The tail-whip gleamed with an armoured dataspike at its tip, more than capable of punching through a daemon’s ectoplasmic corpus. Alpha-Rho-25 let the coccyx-bonded tail rise up, scorpion-like, over his left shoulder.

Five years, he thought, stalking away from the Thallaxi and back to the slain servitors. Five years since he strode across the red dunes of Sacred Mars. Five years since he filled his respiratory tract with the metal-tasting holiness of Martian air.

And soon the conflict would be over, one way or another. All the violence and loss of life and materiel to reach beyond the Mechanicum’s sections of the webway, at last establishing a fortress at Calastar – meaningless. Each crusade vanguard that pushed out from Calastar to fight through the outward tunnels – meaningless. Tribune Kadai Vilaccan had led the most recent foray, and all calculations had signified a crushing victory. Yet not every qualifying factor had been available to insert into those equations. How could they have known what was streaming towards them through the outward tunnels?

Triumph had been torn from their grasp by sheer weight of numbers.

Severe casualties had been expected given the nature of their foes in this fascinating realm, but Alpha-Rho-25 had high enough clearance to know the truth. Their losses were far beyond the point of sustainability. The last five years had practically bled the Mechanicum’s Unifiers and their defenders dry, while the Ten Thousand could – at best – call upon perhaps a thousand remaining warriors. The Silent Sisterhood kept their numbers a mystery to all outside their order, but it was irrelevant – they had always been the rarest of breeds. They, like the Legio Custodes, like the Unifiers themselves, were a precision blade. Not a bludgeon.

Tribune Endymion had sent ambassadors to the surface but Alpha-Rho-25 was a pragmatic being. Reinforcements from outside the Imperial Dungeon, if they were even acquired, would be from weaker souls far less trustworthy than the vanguard’s current elite.

The fact that they would have to be extinguished for the secrets they had seen in the webway was irrelevant to the Protector. Let them die. There was no greater testament to a life than to lay it down for the Omnissiah’s Great Work.

Still, they might make useful daemon-fodder. Reborn as he was for the holy act of slaughter, the possibility of more briefly warmed him.

And the daemon sensed that warmth. It hunted a soul that knew death, one that had reaped life in the long years of its existence. Every butchered life was a scent and a flavour in its own right, needling at the meat of the daemon’s mind.

The creature latched its senses upon those memories of violence now, reaching for those bloodied edges of the soul’s aura, and its stalking sprint became a shrieking wind.

Alpha-Rho-25 crouched by AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) once more, scanning her with the ectoplasmic detectors in his palm-auspex. The cyborged woman had been thoroughly dismembered. Torn apart not by bladed weaponry but by brute strength. The wounds were rife with aetheric signifiers.

Alpha-Rho-25 began the process of harvesting her final cognitions, which necessitated sawing through the brain pan and plunging a dataspike into one of her internal cranial connectors. Intriguingly, in all the info-feeds that spilled out in numerical echo of the servitor’s last thoughts, there was nothing identifying her warp-born assailant. She hadn’t been able to make out any visuals of her killer. For all intents and purposes, AL-141-0-CVI-55-(0023) and her cohorts had been firing at nothing.

There was more – somehow, the lobotomised woman’s very last thoughts had been of her human life, and the weeping children that had been pulled from her hands as she was hauled away, screaming, on her way to reprocessing. Alpha-Rho-25 discarded the data as irrelevant: a tediously emotional misfire of a dying, imperfect biological engine.

The Protector rose and stalked over to the next slain servitor, his bloodied saw still whining.

One of the servo-skulls ceased its circling, turning to stare out across the eldar ruins. A few seconds later it started emitting a lengthy vocal chime. A screed of data spilled across Alpha-Rho-25’s vambrace screen, none of it giving any insight beyond the detection of unspecified inhuman movement, though in this case that was detail enough.

The Protector stood straight, closing his human eye as he focused through his chunky bionic lens. His false eye immediately began to flash with warning pulses of its own, vision filters clicking and purring as they overlaid one another. All he could see was the detritus of the dead eldar settlement scattered across the tunnel. Its low, time-eaten walls were an amusing monument in the webway to a race too arrogant to realise it was dead.

Although it had deeply offended his sense of competency, Alpha-Rho-25 had brought some companions with him via Triaros conveyors. Without looking, he keyed a series of commands into his bracer’s runepad. The cohort of nine Castellax battle-automata at his back began active seek-and-destroy protocols, circling him with their great iron strides shaking the ground. The belt-fed cannons on their shoulders panned around with hydraulic whines. He didn’t like them – the smoother-hulled Kastelan robots were far more reliable and not born of erratic mongrel intelligences – but a man worked with what he had at hand. He’d recognised the potential need for firepower, and the automata provided it.

Movement drew his gaze to the east, though his focusing lens wouldn’t align and his scanning reticule kept slipping its locks. Something was there in the distance, defying his scrutiny.

Alpha-Rho-25 cycled through vision filters, overlaying display upon display, negating those that showed no new data. During this round of perplexed and increasingly irritated staring that took, by human perceptions, almost no time at all, he deployed all four of his primary weapons from all four of his arms: two long-taloned chordclaws thrumming with hostile sonic fields, two transonic stabbing blades scraping against one another in anticipation. The propulsion vanes on his back-mounted power unit began to spin, setting his cloak rippling.

The last vision filter he tried was a confused blend of thermoptical intensifiers with echolocation results rendered as precise binaric data instead of a visual impression.

That one worked.

Behind him, with their sensory feeds linked to his, the Castellax automata saw what he’d just seen. They reacted with the savage crashing of nine mauler-pattern bolt cannons opening up in brutal harmony.

The daemon took form at the hunt’s apex, coalescing into a thing of claws and blades and spines – the idea of evisceration made flesh. It roared its name as it descended on burning wings, a name that was a sound and a memory as much as a word. It screamed the hot-blooded yells made by the first man ever to take another man’s life, and in the same chorused cry was the gurgling death-rattle of the first man ever to fall to murder.

Alpha-Rho-25’s aural receptors registered the sound as a shrieked series of syllables very close to language.

His first and last action upon seeing the entity he had come to hunt was to beam audiovisual data through a tight-lance signal back to his overseers in the Godspire. Sending the pulse took less than the span of a human heartbeat, yet he had no time to do anything else. The jaws and claws of the creature closed in an impossible alignment of rending snaps, wrenching him into almost thirty pieces even as he was being swallowed.

The component chunks of Protector Alpha-Rho-25 tumbled into the monster’s several gullets, throat-muscled down to splash into the acid of its guts, still twitching and bleeding as they started to dissolve. Unfortunately for Alpha-Rho-25 there was just enough of his consciousness left to know a brief, searing, transcendent moment of pain as digestion began.

The Protector’s message reached its destination less than a minute after it was sent – simultaneously as his destroyer was standing amidst the wreckage of nine Castellax battle-automata, regurgitating the melted slag of the Protector’s bionics.

The message spurted from the speakers either side of a blank viewing monitor, manifesting as a distortion-flawed approximation of what the daemon had shrieked as it descended for the kill.

The speakers crackled and squealed with the same words roared three times, eerily close to a bellowed chant from some heathen ritual. They came with the rhythm of a heartbeat, in no language known to humankind.

I Harvest

This is not now. This is then. This is when she was seventeen years old.

Moonlight bathes her as she lies in the long meadow grass and stares up at the stars. Around her, the night insects sing their clicking songs.

The wind is faint tonight but she hears the voices within the breeze, their murmured lilt at the very edge of her senses. Her father’s fathers and her mother’s mothers are murmuring softly this eve, the spirits lulled by the calm night. It isn’t always this way. The dead are rarely quiet. Sometimes – even often – the voices plead with her or rage at her, desiring that she carry their wishes to the living. A rare few even threaten her, though she doesn’t know what a mere spirit might do to cause her harm.

The girl stares at the three moons in their ascendancy, at their familiar, cratered faces. Thunder peals far away, rumbling over the southern mountains and drowning out the evening’s subdued voices.

She rises, turning south, seeking the storm. Instead of the black-grey thunderheads she expects, the sky over the mountains glows with flames. The clouds churn, orange-bellied as they writhe above the peaks, flickering with inner torment that lights up the distant night.

A spaceship, she thinks. A spaceship is landing.

It streams through the clouds, black-hulled and streaming smoky fire, shaking the entire world as it roars overhead. A castle in the sky, descending, drifting down towards the villages and the great city beyond.

The spirits coalesce around her, their murmuring voices coloured by an emotion she has never heard in their tones before. She didn’t know ghosts could feel fear.

She hides in the forest, not far from her village. Not far enough, not as far as she wishes to be, but as far as her legs will take her. Like a panting beast she half digs her way into the wet earth, curling herself into the shadow of a fallen tree. Her throat is raw with straining breath. Her lips are cracked and dry.

‘The Imperium has returned,’ her mother had said. Her eyes were wet, her voice was shaking. ‘They are gathering the shamans and the spirit-speakers from every village.’

‘Why?’ the girl had asked. She heard the fear in her voice. Never had she felt less like a revered witch-priestess of her people.

‘A tithe. Another tithe. One of souls and magic, not wheat and grain.’

‘Run, Skoia,’ said her father, looking into her eyes. ‘Run and hide.’

The mothers of her mother and the fathers of her father had besieged her with agreement. The spirits, all of her ancestors, screamed at her to flee.

Skoia fled, white dress streaming, hair loose, into the forest.

Her people are part of the Imperium, so they are taught. Her grandmother told her of the Crusaders’ Coming, when the warriors from the Cradleworld landed almost a century ago and brought the word of peace from humanity’s Emperor. The First Earth, now called Terra, silent all these thousands of years, wasn’t a myth after all.

The First Earth warriors had demanded compliance, and it had been given. They demanded tithes, and these were also given. Every year the grain haulers carry great portions of the annual harvest into the heavens, to dock with the orbital platforms and await collection. This, it has always been believed, was enough. Mankind has been brought back together, each rediscovered world a jewel in the unknown Emperor’s crown.

But no Imperial spaceships have made planetfall since the Crusaders departed all those years before. Not until now.

Skoia hears dogs among her pursuers, barking and growling. The fear is enough to force her to her feet once more, staggering into a weak run. The spirits are hissing and agitated, yet she can scarcely hear them over the heaving of her breaths and the beat of her straining heart.

Through the trees ahead she sees one of the hunting dogs, as much machine as beast, its fur stripped in places in favour of robot parts, as though it had suffered in an accident and its owner had the credits required for expensive machine-fusion. Its jaws are locked open with a weapon pointing from inside its mouth. Behind it stands a woman, an Imperial woman, her head shaven, her flesh marked with tattoos of eagles. She wears gold and bronze beneath a red cloak. Her eyes are as dead as the gaze of a body upon an unlit funeral pyre.

Skoia turns and stumbles west. It’s no use. She hears the dog bearing down behind her, its machine parts whining. It shoulders into her, throwing her from her feet. It stands above her, growling. The weapon in its mouth aims down at her face.

The gold woman with the dead eyes draws nearer, and – for the very first time Skoia can remember – the spirits fall silent.

No, not just silent. Banished. Gone.

‘Leave me alone,’ the girl manages to say. ‘Please. I’ve done nothing wrong.’

The older woman says nothing.

Skoia breathes raggedly in the silence left by the spirits’ absence, staring up into the ice of the woman’s corpse-eyes.

‘I see nothing inside you,’ she murmurs through trembling lips. ‘You have no soul.’

Five Bringer of Sorrow / Refugees / Requisition

Zephon’s hands betrayed him, as they betrayed him every day. The metal fingers lifted from the hair strings of the antique harp, their shuddering subsiding as he ceased focusing on them.

Zephon was familiar with the science behind this malfunction, having memorised the reports on the various failures of biology/technology linkage taking place where his stumped arms met his bionic limbs at both elbows. The pathways of nerve and muscle were poor at conducting the information from his brain. A common enough failure of fusion surgery when dealing with crude implants grafted to the human form, but to his knowledge he was one of the only living Space Marines to suffer such complete augmetic rejection.

That was why he was here, of course. He knew it, even if his brothers had been too compassionate to call it exile. You couldn’t fight in a Legion, let alone lead a strike force, if you couldn’t pull a trigger or wield a blade.

And so he had come, willingly to all outward perception, to Terra. He’d accepted his exile, pretending it was an accolade, as part of the Crusader Host. He stood with the other representatives of each Space Marine Legion, garrisoned on the Throneworld and charged to speak for their brothers.

In Hoc Officio Gloriam, read the words on the Preceptory’s basalt declaration plaques. There is honour in this duty.

A dubious honour at best, Zephon knew. Especially now that the Throneworld no longer trusted the eighteen Legions. He was one of only two Blood Angels present in the thirty-strong monastic ambassadorship that the Crusader Host represented. Of the other warriors, even his Legion-brother Marcus, he saw no sign. He had retreated from the hollow duties of the Preceptory, content no more to work through the unreliable lists of the dead and record their names. With the galaxy burning, no reports reaching Terra were anything close to reliable. Of his Legion and primarch, there was no word at all. Was he to painstakingly etch the name of every single Blood Angel into the bronze funeral slabs in the Halls of the Fallen?

Madness. Worse than madness. Futility.

Sanguinius lived. The Legion lived.

So he had retreated to his personal chambers, where other work awaited him.

It was a truth known to relatively few souls that many of the most beautiful works of art in the entire Imperium – indeed, in the span of human history – were displayed only in the bowels of Blood Angels warships and frontier fortresses. Stained-glass windows that would never see the flare of true sunlight; statues of metaphorical gods and demigods at war with creatures of legend and myth; paintings wrought with forgotten and rediscovered techniques rendered in agonising detail, going unseen amid orchestral compositions of instruments that would never be played for human ears.

The warriors of the IX Legion didn’t strive in the same way as the soldier-artisans of the III. The Emperor’s Children sculpted, painted, composed to achieve perfection. They crafted great works to bring about something superior to anything shaped by lesser hands. In the act of creation, they exalted themselves above others.

This external, proud focus was anathema to Zephon and many of his brothers. The creation of art in song, in prose, in stone, was to reflect on the nature of humanity; a step forwards in understanding the distance between mankind and their Legion-evolved guardians. Like all of the Legions, the Blood Angels were born and shaped for battle, with rolls of honour a match for any other, with valour beyond question. But away from the eyes of their cousin Legions, they celebrated a culture of enlightenment: a quest not merely to understand the nature of man, but to understand their distance from the root species they were destined to fight and die for.

Zephon, a tribal boy who had eaten dust in the starvation seasons and slaughtered mutants with packs of his kindred before his twelfth summer of life, had learned to play the harp. For a century he’d excelled, his gift for harmony a match for his talents on the field of war.

Until a single battle had stolen both of his gifts. All hope was swept away by the alien sword that had severed both of his arms, mutilated both of his legs and cut him down in indignity.

After the ninth bionic surgery, the Legion’s Apothecaries had bade him face the unwelcome reality. The grafts had taken as well as they would take. His physiology was simply not suited to the process of augmentation.

He still practised his music, jangling out discordant melodies with his shaking, slipping metal fingers, just as he still trained with his boltgun, able now to fire one in five times when he tried to pull the trigger. That was a significant improvement.

His aim was similarly ruined. Though his new arms had the strength of his old limbs, even their microtrembles threw off the razor precision of his former marksmanship. His blade-work suffered just as savagely. All of his precise balance and easy footwork was lost in the random tenses and spasms of his reconstructed leg joints.

Hence his exile. Hence this assignment to Terra.

In Hoc Officio Gloriam. There is honour in this duty. How those words made him smile.

His hands rested on the fine strings once more, their twitching just beginning again when the door klaxon gave its monotone whine.

Zephon froze, instinct pulling his eyes to the where his weapons were racked against the wall. He’d had no visitors in well over a year, since his last meeting with the Sigillite, when Malcador had refused yet another of the Blood Angel’s requests to be granted command of a small frigate and set out in search of his Legion. The thirtieth such request.

Zephon rose from the seat, laid the harp aside and moved across the spartan chamber to turn the door’s wheel lock. His left leg whirred with smooth mechanics where his thigh and knee had once been, the four-taloned claw that had replaced his right foot clanking down upon the floor.

When the door swung open on hinges badly in need of oiling, Zephon was faced with the towering figure of a Custodian, a four-metre tall guardian spear clutched at the warrior’s side. The immense suit of armour hummed. The eye-lenses of his conical helmet blazed.

‘I seek the Bringer of Sorrow,’ the Custodian said.

Out of his armour and clad only in a black tunic, the Blood Angel felt curiously at odds with the warrior in full battleplate. ‘You have found him.’

‘You are far from my expectation,’ the Custodian admitted. He disengaged the seals at his collar and removed the helm, revealing an ageless face with Urhan ritual scarring, like rivulets of saliva running in five lines down his chin and throat. ‘I am Diocletian. Are you truly the Bringer of Sorrow?’

The title stabbed at Zephon harder the second time. He wasn’t sure why. ‘That was my title when I led men into war,’ he replied. ‘You sound disappointed.’

‘That’s because I am. I expected a champion in exile, and I find a bionic cripple. However, my disappointment is irrelevant. Activate your arming servitors and make ready for battle.’

Zephon hated the palpable sense of hope that surged through him with those words. The shame of it burned him. ‘I assume you are aware that the Sigillite has forbidden any of the Crusader Host from acting without his seal of authority.’

‘I will spare you a lesson in where the Sigillite’s authority begins and ends regarding the Custodian Guard and the actions we may undertake. In this instance, he was the one to commend you to our service. Now arm yourself at once, Bringer of Sorrow.’

With reluctance, the Blood Angel lifted his hands, showing his arms composed entirely of metal struts, plating and muscle-cabling from the elbows down. His treacherous fingers twitched as if on cue.

Diocletian looked for several seconds. He blinked once. ‘Is there some significance in your mutilation that I’m supposed to acknowledge?’

Zephon lowered his hands. ‘I cannot fire my bolter. My hands do not obey me.’

‘Can you at least hold a sword?’

Zephon wondered if he was being mocked, though he couldn’t guess to what purpose. ‘Not reliably,’ he admitted.

‘Your invalidity is noted. Now activate your arming servitors. Once you’re ready, you’ll come with me.’

‘To where?’

‘First to the Seberakan Isolation Compound via the Ophiukus Colonnades, then to the Halls of Unity Memoria.’

‘I do not understand. Why?’

‘Understanding will dawn in time. Let obedience come first.’ Diocletian gave another of his long, emotionless stares, marred by only a single blink.

How, Zephon wondered, could these golden avatars ever be considered more human than us?

‘Custodian?’ he asked.

‘I’m waiting for you,’ Diocletian replied. ‘My patience isn’t infinite, Bringer of Sorrow.’

Zephon moved to the wall-comm, keying in the code to summon his armoury thralls. ‘Given the circumstances, “Zephon” is fine, thank you.’

‘If you prefer. I agree that the title is unbearably theatrical, especially for a cripple.’

Zephon felt the first stirrings of anger, and by the blood of Sanguinius it was a welcome thing indeed.

‘You are the first Custodian I have ever spoken to,’ he said. ‘Are all of your kind so direct?’

‘Are all of your kind so intoxicated with self-pity?’ Diocletian looked almost as if he might smile, but the expression was stillborn. ‘Now be swift, please. You aren’t the only lost soul I need to reclaim today.’

‘Lost soul?’

‘I told you we are bound for the Seberakan Isolation Compound.’

The Blood Angel narrowed his pale eyes. Seberakan was home to traitors who had marched beneath the Warmaster’s banner. ‘Perhaps I am missing some aspect of humour in your words, Custodian.’

‘There is never any humour in my words. Now come with me. You and I are going to free some prisoners.’

Together they stalked through the Imperial Palace. Diocletian was displeased by all he saw. He and Zephon walked side by side through the bustling hallways, scattering pilgrims and refugees before them. Helmed, the two warriors had the option of immunising themselves against the sweaty salt-stink of unwashed skin and unclean breath. Diocletian grunted in disgust as he sealed his vox-grille, relying on his armour’s internal air supply. The processional halls of the Ophiukus Colonnades were choked with the homeless detritus of war, coughing and sniffing and muttering. In some cases, weeping.

He felt their eyes upon him. Their judging eyes, doubtless wondering why Diocletian and his brethren hadn’t saved them all and won the galactic war already. He felt their ignorance as a weight on his shoulders. That, at least, was a response that edged upon nobility. Far less honourable was his irritation at the moronic, animal weakness in their helpless gazes. Why were they here? Why were they not still among the stars, fighting for their home worlds?

‘Something ails you?’ asked Zephon.

‘This detritus,’ Diocletian replied. He regretted his honesty at once, for the Space Marine gave a dismissive grunt, and the Custodian felt himself suddenly at risk of being drawn into a conversation.

‘This detritus is what we fight for,’ said Zephon. The Blood Angel gestured with his gauntleted hand, forcing a snarl of armour servos. Several of the humans nearby flinched back, their awe briefly turned to fear. ‘These men and women,’ Zephon continued. ‘They are what we fight for.’

Diocletian snorted, the sound wet and ugly. ‘I fight for the Emperor.’

‘We fight for the Emperor’s dream.’ Zephon replied at once. ‘For the Imperium.’

‘Semantics. Without the Emperor, His dream could never be realised. He alone can bring it to pass. No other.’

‘Then we are both right,’ Zephon replied.

You are deluded as well as crippled, thought Diocletian. ‘It seems to me, Space Marine,’ he ventured, ‘that too many of your kind decided they were fighting for the Imperium rather than the Emperor. Perhaps if more of you thought as the Ten Thousand do, we would not stand where we stand today, preparing for the end of all we know.’

Zephon fell blessedly silent.

Diocletian took in the great hall – once a place of ranked statues and great, wide windows, now a place of huddling scum and cowards who should be issued with lasrifles and packed into transport ships back to the front lines. He let his gaze – and the accompanying target locks – drift across the crowds of filthy refugees lining the processional hall’s sides. Clusters of them were gathered around servitors carrying pallets of dried rations and dehydrated protein potables.

But the Blood Angel’s silence was short-lived. ‘You say we fight for the Emperor, not for His Imperium. The natural question then is to wonder: without Him, would we still fight? Is there any reason to raise this great empire if He is the only soul capable of leading it? We would be committing ourselves to a futile battle.’

‘You speak of impossibilities,’ Diocletian chorused, loyally adamant. ‘Mankind must be ruled. It has a ruler. Let that be the end of it.’

Yet his flesh crawled at the unfamiliar philosophising. Without the Emperor, who would rule? What lesser minds would take up the mantle of command in His place? In what thousands of ways would they fail to meet the Emperor’s vision?

Such thoughts were unwelcome and distracting. He felt slowed by them, felt them running like black poison through his veins.

Both warriors snapped to mechanical halts as two figures manifested before them. Diocletian’s spear was free in a blur of ruthless precision, levelled down across one of the refugee’s throats. Its keen edge sang with a soft metallic chime from cutting the air so swiftly.

‘Sacred Unity!’ Zephon hissed the curse across the vox. ‘What are you doing?’

Diocletian looked down into the wide eyes of a young boy, no more than seven or eight Terran standard years old. The figure at the youth’s side was even more diminutive: a girl, the boy’s sister by the uniformity in skin tone and facial structure, a year or two younger. Diocletian had no talent for estimating the ages of unmodified humans. She looked up at the Custodian with wide, terrified eyes. A scream sounded from the crowd, the plaintive cry of their mother. Both children’s mouths were wide, their lips shaking.

Diocletian lifted his blade away from the boy’s throat and reactivated his helm’s mouth grille to speak aloud. ‘My apologies,’ he said with grave formality. The children flinched at the rawness of his vox-altered tones.

Zephon moved slowly, reaching up to remove his own helm. He stood bareheaded before the two children as their mother reached them. The boy, resisting his mother’s attempts to herd him, tore free and stood before Diocletian once more.

‘Are you the Emperor?’

Diocletian stood motionless. ‘Is that a jest?’ he asked, making the boy flinch at the tone.

Zephon’s smile was bittersweet as he looked down upon the boy. He lowered himself slowly, his red war-plate grinding loudly through the motion, until he was on one knee before the child. Even then, he was still thrice the boy’s height.

‘No, child,’ the Blood Angel replied. ‘He is not the Emperor. Though he knows the Emperor very well.’

Tears ran from the edges of the boy’s eyes. The immensity of the armoured giants before him filled his senses, from the assault of overwhelming red and gold to the thrum of active battleplate. Awe was writ plain across his young features. Awe and desperation and an expression of fearful need.

Diocletian would have voxed his irritation had Zephon still been wearing his helm to hear it. Zephon was blind and deaf to the Custodian’s annoyance, or simply chose to ignore it.

‘What is your name, young one?’

‘Darak.’

‘Darak,’ the Blood Angel repeated. ‘My name is Zephon. And as grand as my companion appears, he is not the Emperor. What is wrong, child?’

The boy stammered his words. ‘I… I want to ask the Emperor when we can go home. My parents are still there. We left them behind. We had to get to the evacuation ships.’

Diocletian glanced to the woman protecting the little girl. Not their mother, then. Her facial structure bore the signs of familial resemblance, so there was some genetic linkage. An aunt or older cousin, perhaps. He removed the target lock playing over her filthy face, dismissing it along with his cursory interest.

Zephon wasn’t as compelled to move on. ‘I see,’ the Blood Angel said. ‘And what world do you call home?’

‘Bleys. We’re from Bleys.’

Zephon nodded as if he knew the world well. Diocletian doubted that any of the IX Legion had ever set foot upon it, useless backwater that it was. ‘Then you’ve travelled far,’ said the Blood Angel. ‘Welcome to Terra, Darak. You’re safe here.’

Safe for now, Diocletian added silently.

‘What are your parents’ trades?’ Zephon asked the boy. ‘If they were fighting, they must be soldiers?’

The boy nodded. ‘They were fighting the grey machine men from Mars.’

‘My parents are warriors, as well,’ said Zephon, neglecting to mention that they had died over a century ago on the radiation-choked deserts of Baal’s second moon. Their ashes would be nothing more than blight dust on the wasteland winds by now.

The boy, Darak, turned his eyes up to Diocletian. ‘Are your parents soldiers?’

‘No,’ said Diocletian. ‘They are long dead. My mother was a slave who died of intestinal flux, and my father was a barbarian king executed by the Emperor’s own hand for opposing the principles of Unity.’

‘The… what?’

‘I’ve finished speaking with you,’ Diocletian told the boy.

Darak narrowed his eyes at Diocletian before returning his gaze to Zephon. ‘I want to go back for my parents. I want to ask the Emperor to send the Space Marines,’ he vowed with painful conviction. ‘The Emperor could send you, couldn’t He?’

‘He could,’ Zephon agreed, ‘and perhaps He will. I will ask Him of His plans for Bleys the next time I stand before Him.’

The hope in the boy’s eyes made Diocletian’s gorge rise. He was all too aware of the many eyes upon them at the heart of this ludicrous exchange.

‘Our duty awaits,’ he said, his tone terse.

‘Indeed,’ replied Zephon. ‘Now, Darak, I must do my duty to the Emperor. Thank you for taking the time to speak with me.’

The boy nodded, mute. Zephon replaced his helm. His voice emerged through the harsh, drawling rasp of his vox-grille. ‘Look after your sister, Darak.’

Darak moved to his aunt and sister, the latter weeping softly after the scare Diocletian had given her. Diocletian walked on with Zephon at his side. If the refugee herd’s stares had been an irritant before, they were practically boring through the Custodian’s armour now.

‘You are a creature of pointless sentiment,’ Diocletian voxed to his new companion.

He heard Zephon’s sigh as they walked onwards. ‘You said I disappointed you, Custodian. I assure you that the feeling is mutual. I had not imagined conversing with one of the Ten Thousand to be such an exercise in soulless discourse.’

Diocletian didn’t believe that deserved a reply.

He hoped Kaeria was having better luck with the Fabricator General.

Intruder.

That was Kane’s first thought. Not the intruder’s identity, nor how long it must have taken this defiler to reach his inner sanctum. He didn’t even consider the severity of any event that would drive an outsider to venture this far into the catacombs. The trespasser’s materialisation alone occupied his first, hostile thought. The audacity of her presence.

Intruder.

Intruders disrupted the music. They were flawed notes amidst the rhythm of crashing hammers and the breath of the forge flames. And this one was a disruption uglier than most.

Zagreus Kane let himself drop from the harmony at the heart of the foundry’s song of iron and fire. It was a detachment that took place on three levels – spiritually, physically, cognitively. First he exloaded his conscious focus from the noospheric dataclusters that allowed him to oversee the administration and management of several thousand menials at once. The abrupt loss of infinite information was a hole in his soul, as the Voice of the Great Work was sucked into sudden silence.

Then he physically removed himself from his command cradle, hauling himself along the overhanging steel beams using his four mechanical arms, and lowering himself into the waiting tank treads that comprised the lower half of his body. The lancing pressures of connection/reconnection stabbed dully through his nerve-numbed innards as the metal tendrils of union snaked their way into his augmented guts. The racked volkite and graviton weapons snaked their linkage feeds into his back, shoulders and spine. Each one of them powered up, folding close to his tracked thorax or aligning against his hunched back.

Lastly, as the armoured tank treads ground their way along the gantry, bringing him on his juddering way closer to the visitor – the intruder – he readied himself for the tedium and inevitable inaccuracies that came with dealing with those unenlightened souls forced to communicate through the impurity of uncanted language.

As the foundry hammered and roared and clanked and crashed around him, the overseer came to a shuddering halt before the slender figure of an Oblivion Knight. She wore the overlapping gold armour plating of her order over the traditional bronzed mail body­suit, which was to be expected. Her hair was crested into a warrior’s topknot, which also ran according to his expectations; similarly, her portcullised rebreather mask was entirely in keeping with the equipment customarily attributed to the Sisters of Silence. She had marked her face with designs of ink – an Imperial aquila tattooed in red upon her forehead – as if her allegiance were in some way not entirely obvious.

What he found interesting, however, were the signs of wear and tear upon her wargear. The sensoria cluster in place of his left eye flickered a brief hololithic beam across the Oblivion Knight’s armour plating, recording signs of unfamiliar damage inflicted upon the various layers. Intriguing. Very much so.

She greeted him with a series of hand gestures. He was impressed that she included all twelve of his long-form titles. That was a formality few outside the Martian Mechanicum would know to offer.

Zagreus Kane looked down at her. His voice emerged from an augmitter in his neck, shaped from human teeth mounted in a framework of black steel and polished bronze. It gave him a snarling grin in the middle of his throat.

‘State the necessity of your intrusion.’

She made three brief gestures with a single hand.

‘I do not consider myself to have “changed” at all,’ said the Fabricator General of Sacred Mars. He adjusted his forge-blackened, ash-darkened red hood with one of his four hands. ‘Change implies the possibility of degeneration. My alterations are evolution, Oblivion Knight. Each one a step towards divinity. Now, I repeat, state the necessity of your intrusion.’

She told him her name without saying a word. Her identity was an irrelevancy, but one that Kane let pass. Still, frustration burned. Had they been linked to the noospheric data array, this exchange – and every single nuance within it – would already be over, rather than lurking at the very beginning of the pleasantries.

‘I am overseeing the disposition, deployment and armament of several million troops and several hundred fleets, Kaeria. In addition, Fabricator Locum Trimejia is transbonded to me in accordance with the New Precepts of Mars. I am aware of all that took place at the hierarchs’ council and the loss of Adnector Primus Mendel. Your expositional formality is a drain on my time.’

She replied in hand gestures, none of which were an apology. At last, they were cutting to the matter’s core. As her hands moved, Kane’s iron-sealed mouth – his true, human mouth – trickled oil-lubricated coolant saliva as he wheezed, briefly taking over from the auto-respiratory processes of his cyborged lungs. The gesture made the heavy graviton cannons wired into his spine cycle in a brazen sign of his speculation.

‘I understand,’ he said. ‘Supply me with the specifics.’

Kaeria offered a data-slate, which Kane took by deploying one of his many secondary multi-segmented abdominal servo-arms. Three thin fingers snatched it from the Oblivion Knight’s grip and immediately drew it into the folds of his robe, slotting it into a data-inload cavity between his ribs.

For the ghost of a second, information danced behind his eyes.

And for the first time in many months, Fabricator General Zagreus Kane hesitated. ‘This is a significant order of requisition,’ he stated. He made no move to return the data-slate in the wake of his understatement. In a single requisition demand, she was requesting as much battle-iron and war-flesh as the Mechanicum had supplied to the Great Work in the last two years alone.

Kaeria nodded, asking a question with her hands.

‘Yes,’ was the reply. ‘Ammunition is the easiest to provide, and it will be done. We can also harvest forge workers for the thralls and battle-servitors you require. A recall of Cybernetica cohorts will be issued at once from all unthreatened systems within Segmentum Solar, and a clarion call can be raised to attract Myrmidia cultists in nearby systems, in order to replace the significant drain you are proposing. But it is of immense import that you understand what you are requesting. This will severely and potentially gravely deplete the Mechanicum’s forces on Terra, as well as our involvement in the active spheres of conflict in the Solar War.’

Kaeria signed her understanding, resolute in her motions.

Kane paused, calculating, calculating…

‘The divine armours you request can also be provided, though not in the numbers you require. Those numbers simply do not exist on Terra. And they will be salvaged or otherwise remastered from war spoil, requiring reconsecration in the Omnissiah’s name. Even House Terryn has sent its divine armours into the stars to engage the Warmaster and the false Fabricator General.’

Kaeria signed a reply.

‘Your acceptance is noted,’ said Kane. ‘And I return a question of my own – what of the Legio Ignatum forces already deployed to aid in the Great Work?’

Kaeria’s reply was curt and simple. Kane felt the synthetic fluids in his veins heat briefly in reassuring warmth. The Fire Wasps yet functioned. Good, good.

‘So be it. I shall admit, then, that there are no Legio Titanicus elements remaining upon Terra at this time. As with the Knight Households, all are deployed and garrisoned off-world.’

Kaeria hesitated, then signed her understanding.

‘Now,’ said Kane, ‘to the final element in your order of requisition. This is a request of particular magnitude.’

The Sister’s hands moved in a graceful query.

Kane mused over his answer. He didn’t like the effortless confidence in her eyes. Perhaps ordering Trimejia to raise the issue of Mars’ reconquest at the gathering of hierarchs had been an error of tact. The Fabricator General retreated into the shadows of his hood, thinking, considering, processing.

It could be done. Of course it could be done. And with that hidebound fool Mendel dead, beautiful new possibilities were suddenly dawning.

He turned in his socket, twisting his torso to look back over his shoulder at the seemingly endless production lines in the hellish amber light of dancing forge flames. He would need to retake his place in the omni-cradle to oversee the fulfilment of the requisition order, and he would need the genius of his trusted kindred to complete the list’s last element.

Someone would have to submit to reforging. Someone would need to be reforged on a level so absolute and fundamental that it bordered on rebirth – if Kane agreed to arrange it.

If.

Such power in such a little word.

Swivelling back to face the Oblivion Knight, Kane looked down upon the warrior, amusement shining in his remaining human eye. To outward appearances, it was all that was left of the man he’d been only five years before.

‘No.’

Kaeria was under no similar compunction to hide her surprise. She signed another query.

Kane emitted a crackle of code. ‘The Mechanicum’s ability to comply is not the question, Oblivion Knight. Its willingness is. Am I able to fulfil this last element of requisition? Yes. Am I willing to do so? No.’

She was more cautious now, her hands moving slower, her eyes locked to his shadowed features.

Kane’s spinal-linked weapons deactivated in sympathy with his rising confidence. ‘Then it is my pleasure to enlighten you, Sister. The Priesthood of Mars has been instrumental in the webway’s reconstruction. The Omnissiah has shared many of its details with those of us wearing the Holy Red, whom He took into His service within those tunnels. But He is silent now. He has been silent for some time. So much has gone unspoken. You ask a great deal of the Martian Mechanicum, and we give. We provide. We supply. We feed our iron and toil into the webway. Now the time for answers has come.’

Kaeria’s caution crystallised. Her signed reply was lengthy, her glare laden with accusation.

‘So we have been told,’ Kane replied. ‘And none of my priesthood doubts that the Omnissiah’s Great Work will be the salvation of the species. I am not holding the Great Work to ransom. I am making known my desire for enlightenment.’

Kaeria signed nothing. After a long moment, she gave a curt nod. Kane continued, sensing how close he was coming to the truth.

‘These orders of requisition come from the Ten Thousand and the Sisterhood of Silence, not the Master of Mankind. Not even from the Sigillite, who speaks with the Omnissiah’s voice. You desire the final, most vital element on this list for your war. I will grant it, at the price of a single answer.’

Another nod. The Oblivion Knight could have been carved from sandstone for all the emotion she showed on her dusky features.

Kane leaned down. His tank treads grumbled as they turned him slightly. ‘The webway is a resource beyond value. Tactically. Logistically. It is recorded in my predecessor’s archives that the Omnissiah Himself spoke of its passages being used to return to Mars. Will this avenue of return be made available to us in the near future?’ Kane heard the too-human emotion in his vocalisation. He didn’t care. A momentary weakness was permissible. The answer meant everything.

Kaeria’s reply was both blunt and brief. Unknown.

Kane had expected no less – but unknown was not forbidden, and he would take every shred of hope he could salvage from the situation. He’d recorded Kaeria’s ocular and respiratory response to pore over later, whereupon he would run the dilation of her pupils and the sound of her breathing through myriad filters to determine even the slightest determinant.

‘Mars must be retaken,’ he said softly, slowly, as if hypnotised into sounding human. ‘The alternatives are unacceptable.’

Kaeria said nothing, did nothing, merely looked up at him. Kane felt an all-too-familiar frustration tighten its clutch around his innards. The Sigillite had refused many times to launch a full reclamation of Sacred Mars. The Seventh Primarch mirrored that refusal. But Kane was no longer a Locum trailing at Kelbor-Hal’s heels in the dark forges of the Red Planet. He was Fabricator General in his own right, the rightful lord of humanity’s twin capital Mars, and his rank matched theirs in influence and authority.

It was time he was respected and heeded in accordance with his position.

‘The Mechanicum will supply your war on this single condition – the Omnissiah Himself once spoke of a route within this alien webway that reaches back to Sacred Mars. Adnector Primus Mendel named it the Aresian Path. No matter the cost, no matter the effort, you will see it reinforced and held, ready for use once the Omnissiah’s Great Work is completed. Even if thousands of other routes and passages must fall, you will ensure that the way to Mars remains in Imperial control.’

To his surprise Kaeria replied at once, signing a simple affirmation. She signed a question of her own.

‘Yes,’ Kane replied, feeling the prickling creep of suspicion. ‘That is all I require. For now.’

Kaeria nodded, signing her thanks.

‘How easily you give your word,’ Kane vocalised with an emission of crackling background code.

Her reply was far longer this time, her hands weaving for several seconds.

Kane watched, seeing her assurances, allowing himself to be appeased by them. He did not know whether to believe her – or indeed if her kind could lie at all – but it was of no consequence. The first and most crucial step had been taken. Opportunity had at last presented itself and been firmly seized.

That poor, mind-stunted fool Mendel. So proud of his place at the Omnissiah’s side, now achieving in death far more than he ever had in life.

‘Then the last element on your list of requisition will be carried out at once, Kaeria of the Silent Sisterhood. The Mechanicum will provide you with a general.’

Six Faith and fear / Unity / Mortis-pulse

The boy who would be king was a boy no more. The Emperor in His ageless adulthood walked the war-scarred tundra, cloaked against the cold. He held a naked blade low in one hand. The sword was dull in deactivation, the circuitry lining the blade cold and unlit.

Evidence of battle lay strewn in every direction, from the churned earth of shell craters to the remains of warriors on both sides. He walked between the bodies, knee-deep and in their thousands, as the snow began to fall in a miserable grey spill. Around Him, warriors in clanking, crunching armour plate strode among the fallen, dragging comrades from the corpse-heaps and executing wounded foes with swift plunges of cackling chainblades.

The Emperor paid heed to none of this. The theatre of a battle’s aftermath held no claim on His attention. He walked on, stepping over His own injured men who called for His aid, approaching a ring of His elite warriors. They guarded a lone, grey-haired figure, clad in an unreliably cloned fur cloak. The captured man hugged himself against the biting cold, standing a little hunched over from his wounds.

He looked up as the Emperor approached. He smiled without mirth, showing bloody teeth.

‘So this is how it ends.’

The Emperor stood still, saying nothing. The wind pulled at His long hair. The weak sun glinted in flashes from His lowered sword.

‘Why?’ the captive asked bitterly. ‘Why annihilate my people like this?’

‘Your people will be allowed to live on,’ replied the Emperor. ‘Your army, and you yourself, could not.’

‘The “Emperor of Terra”,’ the grey-haired captive said with a laughing sneer. Blood ran from the corner of his mouth. The wound in his gut was eating him alive.

‘No,’ said the Emperor. ‘The Emperor of Mankind.’

The prisoner hawked blood onto the snow. ‘Of mankind now? One nation wasn’t enough for you, nor even one world, so you’ll take your cancerous touch to the stars.’

‘Your defiance is ill-placed,’ the Emperor replied.

‘Arrogant beast!’ He wheezed through the ruination of his chest. ‘Hubris beyond reckoning. Madness beyond definition.’

The Emperor turned into the wind, narrowing His eyes as He looked across the ravaged battlefield. ‘And yet, victory.’

‘Tyrant!’ the captive screamed. ‘Butcher of the enlightened!’ Spit sprayed into the evening air, steaming where it landed. ‘Apostate! Heretic!’

The Emperor endured this spittle-punctuated tirade with a quiet patience somewhere between dignity and immunity. ‘I bring illumination,’ He said.

‘You bring damnation!’ the captured warlord raged.

‘I warned you, priest,’ said the Emperor. ‘Long ago, I warned you. We stand here now because of the choices you made.’

‘I pissed on your warnings then,’ the captive snapped back. ‘As I piss on your enlightenment now. Let the sword fall! I go to my god’s embrace. And with my last breath, I will curse the blood in your veins.’

One of the Custodians encircling him moved forwards, pounding the butt of his guardian spear into the side of the man’s head. Though he pulled the blow, scarcely seeking to injure let alone kill, it was enough to break the man’s eye socket and burst the orb within, turning it to shattered jelly.

The captive warlord went down into the snow, howling, clutching his savaged skull.

‘Restrain yourself, Sagittarus,’ the Emperor said. The Custodian hesitated, bowed his head to his master, then returned to the ranks.

And then, as the kneeling prisoner cried out and pressed frostbitten hands to his broken face, the Emperor spoke to a soul that shouldn’t be there at all.

‘Greetings, Ra.’

Ra remained back from the gathering, his gaze drifting between the Emperor and the Custodians. The latter wore suits of armour far less ornate than the one he wore himself. These were his kindred in the years before he joined them. They still waged wars against the techno-barbarian hordes claiming dominion over Terra, before the rise of the Legions and the commencement of the Great Crusade.

‘Sire,’ he greeted the Emperor. As ever, nothing about his surroundings felt like a dream or a vision. The wind whipped at Ra’s royal crimson cloak. The charnel house reek of the battlefield threaded its way through his helm’s filtration systems. Somehow, it always did.

His master turned, leaving the Custodians ringing the wounded prisoner. The Emperor’s face was serenely troubled – within it, Ra saw several shifting visages: the worried concern of the boy who would be king; the stern resolve of the Great Crusader; the tranquil caution of the Ruler of All Mankind.

‘You received a mortis-pulse, I suspect.’

‘From the Protector,’ said Ra. ‘You sensed it?’

‘No. I sensed the entity in the outward tunnels. The ancient presence drawing nearer to the walls of the Impossible City. I sensed when it struck. No Protector could survive that. When it struck, I sensed its name. I imagine your slain Protector sought to inform you of this in the only way he was able, via his mortis-pulse. Most likely the message conveyed the creature’s name.’

‘The Protector’s audio transmission was nothing more than aetheric shrieking.’

‘You have heard the warp-creatures speak Gothic in battle, Ra. They draw such knowledge from the minds of the slain, leeching human thought to form threats, challenges and the like. Yet they lack language and identity as human cognition recognises such things. The aetheric shrieking was its name. I heard it, felt it, myself.’

At Ra’s boots, a fallen warrior – one of the crudely armoured Thunder Warriors who had once marched at the Emperor’s side – sought to crawl across the frozen ground. Ra ignored the dying man, doubting he even existed to the wounded warrior.

The Emperor noted the Custodian’s hesitation. ‘Do you doubt me, Ra?’

‘I don’t know if it’s doubt, sire. More a lack of comprehension.’

‘Your comprehension of psychic and aetheric principles has never been as effortless as Jasaric’s or as accepting as Constantin’s, but this concept should not be beyond you.’

Despite their surroundings, Ra snorted a brief laugh. ‘How you flatter me, my Emperor.’

The Emperor ignored the weak attempt at sarcasm. ‘When I speak to you, to others, am I speaking aloud? Does my mouth move and form the shapes of human language? Does a human voice emerge? Or is it merely how mortal minds process my presence and my psychic will?’

Ra nodded. This, at least, was familiar ground. Many were the times that the Emperor had faced allies or foes, speaking countless tongues without hesitation, and even those with no grasp of the same languages and lexicons had perfectly understood the Master of Mankind’s words.

‘It is a similar principle,’ the Emperor stated.

‘Why would a daemon cry out its name?’

The Emperor’s dark eyes flickered at his bodyguard’s choice of words. ‘They do so almost unceasingly. They emanate the concepts and moments of emotion that gave them form. Humankind interprets those emanations as sound – the shrieking and roaring you hear when you do battle with them. They are declaring what they are. You hear it as who they are. The one we speak of now is the entity born from the first murder, when a human first took the life of another outside of the need to survive.’

Ra said nothing. The Emperor’s eyes unfocused, as if He looked back to that very moment in antiquity. When He spoke again, His voice was softer, mellifluous with distraction. ‘So many minds look to the taming of fire as the moment humanity tore itself apart from the melange of biological life on Old Earth, elevating mankind above the level of beasts. They point to many such moments and no two insights agree – fire, the wheel, gunpowder, jet propulsion, the Navigator gene… All wrong. It was that moment, Ra. A deed that even false, inane, insane religions have cursed throughout history. That one act set humanity irrevocably apart, feeding the beings of the warp, putting us on the first step of a long, long path.’

The Emperor’s eyes cleared. He looked at Ra once more, not through him. ‘And here we are, so much further along the path. Still seeking to leave it.’

Ra stood in silence, feeling the wind caressing his face with unwanted fingers. The Ten Thousand were blessed above any others and philosophical discussions with the Emperor were hardly unknown to them, but the bleak severity of his master’s words turned Ra’s blood slow, sluggish and cold.

‘The End of Empires,’ the Emperor said.

‘My king?’

‘You cannot reweave warp creatures’ names from base concept to human language without an element of psychic adaptation in the translation. As close as it can be rendered into Gothic, that is what the entity’s name means. The End of Empires.’

Now, truly, Ra’s blood ran cold. Ice flooded his veins in its place. ‘Sire, why did you summon me again so soon?’

The Emperor turned, and Ra followed without needing to be beckoned. Together they walked back through the battle’s aftermath, accompanied by the cries of the wounded and the snap-crack of execution gunfire. As they approached the circle of Custodians and the kneeling, bleeding warlord, Ra couldn’t help but look at the past incarnations of his own kindred. There was Jasaric, tall and proud; Constantin, stoic and observant; Sagittarus, choleric and wild.

To human eyes each of the gathered warriors would look scarcely different to any other, but to Ra each was as distinct as separate songs. How humbling it was, to see them like this, walking the scarred earth of Terra in the time before he stood among their number. A handful of years after this moment, Constantin Valdor would come for him, taking him as a child from–

‘Tell me, Ra,’ said the Emperor. He aimed His blade at the kneeling warlord. ‘Tell me what you see.’

Ra followed the silver sword down to the wounded man. He knew of this battle from the archives, had seen picts ripped from primitive helmet footage of the conflict playing out. He had even seen a few rare surviving murals depicting the man in robes of flowing red, addressing vast crowds. Ra knew who the defeated warlord was.

‘The Priest-King of Maulland Sen,’ Ra said. ‘In the moments before you executed him.’

‘That is a title and a moment in time. What do you see?’

‘A man. A man kneeling on the snow.’

‘That is better,’ the Emperor agreed. He stepped closer to the kneeling man, activating His blade. Fire cobwebbed down the circuits lining both sides of His sword. None of the gathered warriors paid any notice, nor did the warlord himself.

‘I met him long before he was the priest-king,’ the Emperor said. ‘He began as a holy man, a mendicant preacher wandering the northern wastes, gathering untainted food and purified water, giving it freely to those in need. He claimed it was his calling, and that his god lived in his kindness. It was a calling, of course. A call that was answered by the beings of the immaterium. They gave him the power to feed his beleaguered tribe and heal their ills, and his clan grew. When savage winters ate away at the other tribes, his clan sheltered beneath the protection of his power. He kept them fed, protected and unseen from the eyes of their hunting foes. Soon, hundreds of men and women were huddling for warmth within his mercy, and offered their thanks to the god that he believed he served.

‘Yet each miracle took more effort, Ra. More sacrifice. The end always justified the means. First the conundrums were moral in nature. What does it matter if another clan starves, if it allows his tribe to survive? Soon enough the rituals grew more occult in order to achieve their ends. What is the murder of a rival, if that death guarantees another ten years of peace? What is the life of one child, if the offer of its bloody, beating heart will ensure a monarch’s immortality? Do you see?’

Ra saw. Just as he had seen the monuments to massacre in the pict archives, from the fall of Maulland Sen.

‘The warp rarely makes itself known in manifest form. The damnation flooding the webway is the crescendo of its siren song. Its immensity and physicality is what makes the threat so unprecedented. Far more often, the warp seethes behind the veil, it curdles thoughts inside a skull, it inks the blood in men and women’s veins. And that is enough. More than enough. It brings us to moments like these, in the company of ambitious, faithful men, too proud to see their own deception.’

Ra stared down at the kneeling, bleeding priest-king. Gone were the gene-abominations and witchcraft-marked men in their thousands that had formed his ragged armies. He was alone, moments from breathing his last. Soon his sick blood would taint the Emperor’s blade.

‘Think of this man’s clan,’ continued the Emperor. ‘As a holy man he had begun with offers of food and the promise of survival. Sensing his susceptibility, the warp darkened around the candle flame of his life’s light. He prayed, and the warp answered.

‘Soon his people were too numerous to hide. Other tribes came for his clan’s riches. This man, this revered holy lord, led his people to the machines of the Old Ages, cloning and replicating and gene-forging flawed warriors to wage war for territory.

‘The clan branded their own flesh and ran to war alongside these genetic brutes, crying up to the sky for the same power their overlord enjoyed. And how far they had fallen. Committing any act in the belief of their own righteousness. All from superstition. All from ignorance.

‘All because one charismatic man believed that the powers that heeded his calls could be trusted. By the time he realised they could not, he believed himself powerful enough to control them, independent enough to resist them. What harm in one more gift, if it allowed his clan to thrive? What harm in one more sacrifice, if it ensured a strong harvest or victory in a coming war? And when it came time to die, what would this powerful, independent man do? Would he go silently into the ground? Would he slumber upon a funeral pyre? Or would he – for the good of his people – reach for longer life at any cost?’

Ra still stared at the defeated monarch. The Custodian knew all there was to know from the archives. He knew of the barbarity practised by the Maulland Sen Confederacy. He had seen pict evidence of the bone pits, those golgothan barrows; every day of his adult life he had fought alongside other gold-armoured warriors who had been there for the dismantling of the confederacy itself.

‘Superstition and ignorance always attract the warp’s denizens,’ continued the Emperor. ‘For the core of religion is the twinned principle of arrogance and fear. Fear of oblivion. Fear of an unfair life and an arbitrary universe. Fear of there simply being nothing, no great and grand scheme to existence. The fear, ultimately, of being powerless.’

The Custodian narrowed his eyes. Rarely did the Emperor elucidate His reasoning in such stark terms. And why now? To what end? Ra felt the prickle of unease making its threading way up his spine.

‘Look at him, Ra. Truly look at him.’

Ra looked. The priest-king could hardly have appeared less like his treacherously magnificent depictions, with his red robes of office reduced to scorched rags hanging at the edges of his broken armour, and the cloak of cloned fur blackened from flamer burns. The great demagogue stared up at the Emperor with the unshattered half of his face dirtied by blood and matted hair.

‘Sire, I don’t…’

But he did. Talons rippled in the shadows cast by the man’s cloak, glassy and obsidian, impossibly liquid in their caresses. Claws clicked and scratched against one another inside the wide pupil that looked like a hole drilled into the yellowing white of the priest-king’s remaining eye.Bulges wormed their maggoty way through the man’s veins, bubonically swollen.

The defeated warlord, this impoverished and humbled ruler, was riven from within.

‘What am I looking at, sire? What is this?’

‘Faith,’ said the Emperor. ‘You are seeing his faith, through my eyes. Maulland Sen’s massacring priest-king is… what? Another of the Unification Wars’ warlords? Terra had hundreds of them. He died beneath my executing blade, and history’s pages will mark him as nothing more.

‘And yet, his life is the path of faith in microcosm. Once a wandering preacher feeding the weak and the lost, ending as a blood-soaked monarch overseeing pogroms and genocides – his teeth stained by cannibal ritual, his skull a shell for the toying touch of warp-entities he does not realise he serves. Every act of violence or pain that he performs is a prayer to those entities, fuelling them, making them stronger behind the veil. What he believes no longer matters, when everything he does feeds their influence.

‘This is why we strip the comfort of religion from humanity. These are the slivers of vulnerability that faith cracks open in the human heart. Even if a belief in a lie leads us to do good, eventually it leads to the truth – that we are a species alone in the dark, threatened by the laughing games of sentient malignancies that mortals would call gods.’

Ra wiped his snow-flecked face with a gauntleted palm. His breathing was calm. His heart was slow. Yet his fingers trembled.

‘Are they gods?’

‘What is a god?’ the Emperor replied at once, though without challenge. He sounded curious, not defiant.

‘I don’t know, sire.’

‘A being of great power, perhaps. Am I then a god?’

‘Of course not.’

‘Is a god the focus of prayer and ritual, then? You are named in a god’s honour. Ra – a god of the sun. How many cultures have worshipped the sun or given its arcing journey into the responsibility of a godling’s care? More than even I can count. More than even I have seen. Each sun god or goddess bore a different name, and was revered by different people. The sun rose and fell, as it always has. Did it do so because of their prayers and offerings?’

Against all odds, Ra gave a mirthless, unpleasant smile. ‘No, my king.’

‘Look at the sky above us now, overcast with the coming storm. Most humans would name the shade of the clouds grey, in various languages. How are we to know if the grey one man sees is the same hue seen by the woman at his side? Or the grey his mother and father saw? A blind woman would see nothing, but she still feels the storm’s approach on the wind. She knows the sky is grey because she has been told it is so, yet she has never seen it. What, then, is grey? Is it the shade I see, or the hue seen by another man’s eyes? Is it only a colour, or is it also the feeling of the wind against your skin, promising a storm?’

Ra exhaled. ‘I understand.’

The Emperor seemed suddenly weary. He shook His head, a rare moment of human expression. ‘Beings of varying sentience and influence exist, given different names by different cultures and species. Gods. Aliens. Entities. It matters not.’

‘I don’t think I want to know these things, sire.’

‘Your wishes are irrelevant, Ra. You will fight harder once you understand what you are fighting for. That is why I tell you all of this.’

‘A matter of practicality?’ he asked the Emperor, taking no offence. ‘Not trust?’

‘A matter of victory. You still see the war in the webway as the battle for my dreams and ambitions as a ruler. But I have told you – it is the war for humanity’s survival.’

The sudden crack of an aggravated power field snapped Ra’s focus back to the snowy tundra. Blood sizzled on the Emperor’s blade. The priest-king’s headless body toppled, neck stump steaming, into the dirty snow.

Sagittarus gripped the severed head by its long hair, holding it up to the miserable sky. He roared, and thousands of Thunder Warriors roared with him.

The Emperor cleaned His deactivated blade on the dead man’s cloak, then sheathed the sword across His back.

‘Always so barbaric, Sagittarus.’

The Custodian tossed the head onto the ground. ‘Exultant in victory, my king. That’s all.’

The Emperor rested an armoured boot on the priest-king’s head. Knee servos thrummed. He hesitated, for the span of a single breath, as all eyes fell upon Him.

Then the boot came down, grinding the trophy into the dirt beneath the snow. When He lifted His tread, nothing but wet, red shards remained, stringy with slick hair.

‘Burn the body,’ said the Emperor. ‘Burn all of their bodies.’

Thunder Warriors came forwards, armed with flamers.

+Awaken, Ra.+

Sagittarus dreamed of unity, of his days at the Emperor’s side. The title itself – Imperator they had named him in High Gothic – was still new in those days. The Emperor was a warlord, a battle king, but not yet a king of kings. Terra had yet to be brought to its knees by bolter and blade.

The dreamer was a warlord in his own right, then. He’d breathed in the body-stink and faecal-scent of a hundred battlefields in the hours after victory. He’d felt the caress of charnel winds against his flesh, and carried a golden spear in his bloodstained hands across an entire continent.

Days of strength. Days of glory.

He was the first of his kind to die. And for this indignity, this unquenchable shame, they had actually honoured him.

The Battle of Maulland Sen. That was the last day of joy, the last day before his bones were bound inside a cradle of penetrating cold and his mind set aflame with the shame of failure.

‘Sagittarus.’

That had been his name. His prime name. His golden armour had been wrought with etchings of his many names, all earned in triumph and honour, all granted by the Emperor Himself.

The Emperor as He was, not as He became. The would-be Ruler of Terra, still so far from His ascension as the Master of Mankind.

The Imperator was there at Maulland Sen, in the hours before the Thunder Legion met the priest-king’s ravening hordes. Armoured in archeotech and anachronism, his armour as much baked leather and bronze as ceramite, He stood upon a high rock as the rising sun turned the eagles on his armour to virgin gold.

His army stood to the south, occupying the low ground. Their march to the enemy would be uphill, moving to ascend the rocky inclines in whatever formation they could hold. To the north were the enemy, a horde of branded zealots and dirty wildlanders on the plateaus of their last mountain fastness, clad in motorised plate armour and cloaked in poorly cloned furs to brace against the cold. Lumbering brutes fleshed out their numbers, more evidence of gene-forging gone awry with witchery instead of vision.

They would bleed. At last, with the fall of Maulland Sen, Nordyc would be brought to heel. That blasted, frozen land. In Sagittarus’ memories it was freezing to the bone – and surely it had been that way – but the cold was no surprise to him when he recalled it now. All of his memories were cold.

The Emperor had looked down upon the armoured ranks closest to Him, crudely armoured warriors in patched and remade suits of damaged ceramite. The campaign had been a long one, far more gruelling than predicted. His forces at the final battle were outnumbered by seven to one, though such numbers would mean nothing come the dawn. The enemy’s high walls meant equally little, and the treacherous ascent to lay siege meant the least of all. The Emperor’s army would sustain casualties, as every army always did. But sacrifice was bred into their bones. Victory would be theirs by the day’s end.

The lives beneath His banner were there to be spent in the purchase of peace.

Sagittarus had chafed against promised inaction that day. No warrior was ever truly still before a battle. They shifted, they shuffled. The rattle of so many suits of ceramite plating was a dull, constant clanking to rival an ocean’s tide. The angry thrum of fibre bundle muscle cabling and active back-mounted power packs was the drone of a locust swarm, a monotone buzz that drowned out spoken words. The only reliable way to speak was over the radioracle network, which was still flawed by occasional static interference.

The warriors closest to the Emperor – a mere thirty souls with Sagittarus among them – wore layered, precious auramite gold, reflecting the warlord’s own wargear. In the years to follow, their trappings would become cloaked in red and bulked by additional plating, but as they stood at Maulland Sen they wore half-suits of sacred gold, and the men themselves were a jewel at the army’s vanguard, guarding their master. Their war banner was the eagle’s head of their royal lord crossed by four bolts of lightning.

Beyond the Custodians were the ranks of the proto-legionaries in their grim, battered plate. Thunder Warriors. Even then Sagittarus had known what fate these soldiers of Unity would face. Their place was here and their time was now: they would be the conquerors of Terra… and then they would be discarded. Their armour was destined to stand in rows within the Emperor’s private chambers and various war museums across Terra, and their deeds would be recorded in rich detail throughout Imperial archives.

But far finer soldiers would be required to take the Emperor’s war into the stars. Sagittarus, fallen yet not allowed to die, would be one of the many to spill Thunder Warrior blood.

But not yet. Not today. Not on the morning of Maulland Sen.

Here they would lose seven thousand, five hundred and eighty-one warriors against the defiant tides of Maulland Sen’s last defenders.

He recalled how the Emperor ran a gloved hand through His wind-claimed hair, pulling it back from His dusky features. The wind had battered the crests atop the Thunder Warriors’ helms.

‘Sagittarus,’ the Emperor had said in a voice that carried above the drone of armour. Sagittarus, his helm adorned with a rearing eagle, turned to regard his liege.

‘My king?’

‘It is time. Your spear, please.’

Sagittarus offered it without hesitation, raising his spear for the warlord’s reaching hand. The Emperor took the weapon, holding it fast in one gloved fist halfway along the haft, and lifted it high. He held it horizontally, ordering His men to hold position, as officers in the Bronze Epoch and Iron Era of Old Earth had done in the centuries before radioracle systems and the vox-networks that would follow.

Sagittarus felt the army shift, their focus tightening as they turned their attention to the Emperor, watching, waiting.

There was no speech, for the army had its orders set in stone the night before. There were no curses or oaths, for those had already been given and made before the horde assembled. The Emperor said nothing at all. He signalled the advance, punching the horizontal spear three times towards the lightening sky.

And there He remained as the regiments of the Thunder Legion shook the earth beneath their marching boots, advancing up into the foothills. His honour guard of thirty Custodians waited with Him, as did a host of banner bearers, aides, runners, attendants and advisors, each with their own stewards and guardians.

Sagittarus watched the disorganised tide of soldiers making their way up the inclines. Their chaotic advance was as far from the implacable order of the Legiones Astartes as could be imagined. Nor could they rely on the same arsenal of biological enhancements implanted within the true Space Marines. These hordes were a force to crush the techno-savages of the Unification Wars, no doubt, but against the alien breeds of the galaxy? The Thunder Warriors would have been annihilated.

The Emperor was paying scant heed to the battle’s opening, His patient gaze resting on the higher peaks. From there, the killing machines would soon rise. He handed the spear back to Sagittarus, who took it with due reverence.

The Emperor checked the ornate bolter at His hip. One of the very first boltguns; a progenitor for its kind – not a relic rediscovered from the Dark Age of Technology but an invention of the Emperor’s own design.

‘Sagittarus.’ This time the Emperor’s mouth didn’t move. And His voice was low, too low, to be the warlord’s true tone. ‘Sagittarus.’

What remained of Sagittarus leaned his forehead against the cold surface of his vision lenses, staring out through the greasy red smears of reinforced transplastic.

‘Sagittarus,’ said one of his own kind, looking up at the armoured cradle that held his revenant bones.

Ra, he mouthed, his toothless, scarred mouth full of a thick, oxygen-rich synthetic oil.

‘Ra,’ intoned the speakers mounted in the armoured chassis of his walking tomb.

‘My apologies for interrupting your reflections,’ said the tribune.

The Dreadnought didn’t move as a living being moved. It had none of the incidental and unnecessary gestures of natural motion. Its movements were statuesque and reserved, coming between bouts of unnatural stillness. It was easy to forget there was a living warrior interred within, though the exact parameters for a Contemptor chassis to sustain life at the point of death was a philosophical argument the warriors of the Ten Thousand had engaged in more than once before. The life support systems suggested the warrior lived, yet the hull itself cradled a remnant in a sarcophagus that would truly die the moment the biological husk was disconnected.

Internment within a Dreadnought chassis straddled the border between both life and death – an intolerable weakness that required sacred machinery to maintain, coupled with a strength of purpose so unquenchably fierce that it defied the grave.

The Ten Thousand, supremely educated and philosophical souls all, had ultimately reached the only conclusion that mattered: their hesitancies and doubts meant nothing. It was the Emperor’s will that His warriors live and fight until they could no longer do either. That very testament was inscribed upon Sagittarus’ armoured hull by the Emperor’s own carving hand: Only in death does duty end.

‘Memories,’ the great golden machine replied. ‘They cling to me, Ra. Sometimes it seems as though the mist brings them.’

Ra had entertained the same thought more than once. The two Custodians stood in the Godspire’s courtyard, where whole stretches of the long-dead alien botanical garden were given over to prefab Mechanicum architecture. A shanty town of Martian industrial ingenuity, dark against the pale eldar bone and grey Mechanicum gunmetal of the resurrected city.

Sagittarus was undergoing maintenance within an open-sided engineering-barracks. Sparks sprayed. The air reeked of sacred oils and fusing metal. A coterie of arming servitors and archwrights worked the Dreadnought’s shell, repairing the hull and reloading the arm-mounted weaponry. Each of Sagittarus’ movements disturbed the technical ballet taking place around him, generating a chorus of complaints that he duly ignored.

Ra stood before the tall Dreadnought shell – which bore enough cracks and pits and dents across its golden surface that it resembled the surface of some asteroid-tortured planetoid – and tried not to see Sagittarus’ ruination as a statement for the entire Ten Thousand. Those who remained had all seen better days.

‘Sometimes I see ghosts in the mist,’ said the Dreadnought.

‘There is no such thing, my noble friend. Ghosts are a fiction.’

‘Most of them are eldar. I think they’re begging. They reach out towards me. Not all of them are alien. I see familiar faces turned to smoke, the images of the Ten Thousand that have already fallen.’

Ra watched as the war machine’s weapons cycled, evidently eager to fire. Death hadn’t soothed Sagittarus’ easy and willing wrath. The Dreadnought turned its hull in a grind of servos, and several of the attending machine-adepts emitted binaric curses. ‘Do you ever see ghosts in the mist, Ra?’

‘No,’ Ra lied.

There came the sound of a machine slipping its gears, the Dreadnought shell’s attempt to vocalise the laughter of the revenant within. ‘Very well. What do you need of me? There is much to do before the foe reaches us.’

‘Nothing more than you already give. I bring a warning for the battle to come.’

The Dreadnought opened and closed its immense fist as if testing its knuckle joints, then rotated its hand at the wrist with a grinding whirr. Ra saw the pale face of the corpse within move behind the murk of the machine’s eye-lenses.

‘What warning?’

‘The Emperor and the Soulless Queen have warned of a warp-entity possessing surpassing strength among the enemy hosts. It destroyed the Protector released by Commander Krole, along with its warhost.’

The Dreadnought shifted with a clanking thud. Protectors, the Sicarian Alphas at least, rarely died easily, but it was the notion of the Emperor’s warning that sat ill in Sagittarus’ heart.

‘Do we know its capabilities?’

‘Little beyond its lethality.’

The golden war machine cycled its autoloaders slowly and smoothly, allowing the tech-priests to study the motion for flaws.

‘We should destroy it, Ra. Destroy it before it reaches the walls and we lose it inside the city. Once the fighting is street to street, disorder will reign.’

‘As it happens I agree, but we can hardly sally forth in a grand charge when we’re still evacuating the outward tunnels. The rearguard forces are aware of the threat and the Unifiers are seeking to map the creature’s likely routes of attack. If we have that, we can lay an ambush.’

‘An ambush, then. Before it’s loose in Calastar.’

‘Truthfully, Sagittarus, I’m more worried about it slipping past us and reaching the throne room.’

The Dreadnought mused, its knuckles closing and opening, opening and closing, betraying a habit its pilot had performed in life. Within its hollow palm, the magnetic coils of an embedded plasma gun ticked in metronomic idleness. Within the shell, the revenant of Sagittarus was studying the data-streams, seeking reports.

‘Did the Protector send a mortis-pulse?’ asked Sagittarus.

Ra keyed in a command on his ornate vambrace, the buttons elegantly forming part of the soaring eagle sculpted upon the auramite. He threaded Alpha-Rho-25’s final audiovisual transmission across a private vox-link directly to the Dreadnought.

The playback repeated. After several seconds Sagittarus rose to his feet in a harmony of whining snarls. ‘What does that mean? That word?’

‘You hear a word within that mess?’ Ra’s surprise was brazen. ‘The Emperor sensed it, as well. I hear nothing but Alpha-Rho-Twenty-Five’s death.’

‘It repeats, like the static of disconnection is breathing. Drach’nyen. Drach’nyen. Drach’nyen.’

Ra heard it then. The Emperor’s voice came back to him, when his master had spoken of the name’s meaning.

‘Drach’nyen,’ he repeated. ‘The End of Empires.’