The Horus Heresy: The Master of Mankind

Seven Land’s Raider and Land’s Crawler / The Twelfth / Disciple of the Unmaker God

Arkhan Land considered himself a man of peace. He was first and foremost a technoarchaeologist, devoting his life to the rediscovery of schematics and Standard Template Construct data lost since the Dark Age of Technology. He was rather renowned in that field, and accordingly proud of the fact.

Who had ventured for years through the deep crust and mantle vaults of the Librarius Omnis with its horde of lethal traps and hardcoded defensive systems? Why, that would be Arkhan Land. Who had mapped a region of the catacombs beneath the surface of Sacred Mars equal to that of a small nation? Well, that would also be Arkhan Land. Who had uncovered the ancient schematics necessary to reintroduce production of the Raider-pattern main battle tank into the sphere of human knowledge? Once more, it was none other than Arkhan Land.

There was an irritating habit emerging among the Legions of calling it the ‘Land Raider’, with no regard for the distinction in its rediscovery. Arkhan had penned a long and detailed essay in rebuttal of the trend, entitled Worthy Notes and Treatises of Direct Relevance to Land’s Raider-Pattern Main Battle Tank: The Rebirth of an Ancient Miracle.

And then when he’d returned to the surface of the Red Planet with the extensive – and thoroughly decoded – plans for the Crawler-pattern agriculture harvester, his awed superiors had requested he give a presentation to various worthies from various forges. The machine wasn’t merely efficient in its use, it was also an icon of that trifecta of mass-production utility: inexpensive to construct; simple to maintain; easy for untrained users to safely control.

The Crawler, his patrons assured him, would revolutionise life on the emergent Imperium’s agri worlds.

Arkhan Land knew that, though. He didn’t need to be told. Why else did they think he’d worked so hard to bring its plans back to the surface?

His presentation speech at the symposium had lasted almost three hours. Some of his peers and patrons considered that degree of self-congratulation to be excessive, but Arkhan Land was a pragmatic man. The Crawler was already seeing use on several hundred reconquered Imperial worlds. Until his peers had also revolutionised the human race’s approach to agriculture, he couldn’t care less for their views on what constituted speechworthy achievement.

He had always been a creature of vision. A prodigy, beyond doubt. By the time he’d turned five Terran standard years old, Arkhan was fluent in fifty Gothic-variant languages and was passable in several dozen more. When it came to augmentation he was something of a purist; at age eleven he refused mnemonic implantation and cognitive bracing because he didn’t want his thoughts to be ‘slowed down by someone else’s engineering’.

He’d augmented himself as he aged, of course. Every hierarch of Sacred Mars indulged in the practice of engineered evolution. Only through bionic and augmetic improvement could adepts bring themselves closer to the purity of the Omnissiah. However, he kept his modifications subtle to the point of invisibility, seeming to relish his human form in its original incarnation.

The best reason he gave to support this decision was the example of the Emperor.

‘The Omnissiah,’ Arkhan would say in response to his critics, ‘shows little in the way of outward augmentation. For those of you that worry about my piety, consider just who I emulate with my restraint.’

That tended to silence his critics.

His penchant for collecting archeotech was legendary, as was the length and breadth of his collection. Herein lay his true passion rather than the extensive body reconstruction that enraptured many of his peers. Arkhan Land was deeply fond of his tools, gadgets and instruments, many of which defied current Terran and Martian understanding.

One of these weapons – quite possibly the delightful capstone of his armoury thus far – was a bulky sidearm with a curious array of focusing lenses, rotating magnetic vanes, spiralling accelerator coils and the capacity to spit solid micro-atomic rounds the size of a child’s fingertip. He’d re-engineered the weapon with aural dampeners to offset how horrendously loud it was when fired, then attached it to a mounting fixed to his shoulder so he could carry his favourite war relic around without needing to bear it at his hip or in his robes like some tediously self-aware gunslinger out to impress his lessers with a martial aspect.

As a final touch he’d slaved the harness to his hind-thoughts, so once the weapon was activated by a thought command it would then follow every tilt and turn of his head, aiming wherever he looked.

Yes, he considered himself a man of peace, even though he possessed a firearm capable of weaponised nuclear fission every time it fired. In no way did he see this as hypocrisy. The very suggestion would have made him balk; Arkhan Land took his personal integrity almost as seriously as he took his duty.

These days, he was a very busy man indeed. There was, after all, a war to win – and being asked to help win it by the guardians of a living god was rather flattering. He’d been instrumental in designing the gravitic suspensor plates in Legio Custodes’ battle tanks, as well as their – rather beautiful, in his opinion – Paragon-pattern jetbikes. How those engines howled! A noisy engine was a sacrament to the Omnissiah. A machine with silent function was a machine with a weak soul. That’s simply all there was to it.

Quite when he had been reduced to the whipping boy of the new Fabricator General was beyond him, but the situation was what it was, and he suspected that complaining about it now would be considered arch and petty.

The new Fabricator General. How fresh that title still seemed, despite Kane bearing the mantle since the fall of Mars. Perhaps that’s because he has done so little with the position, Land thought. He knew the thought was uncharitable the moment it occurred to him, yet it felt righteous enough. Nor was he alone among his kind in thinking it. As long as Sacred Mars turned in the Archtraitor’s grip, no number of triumphs elsewhere in the galaxy mattered to the priests and seers of the Martian Mechanicum.

Sapien rode on Arkhan’s shoulder, the artificimian watching the people of the Palace with wide, clicking eyes. Occasionally it hissed at passing servitors, baring its blunt teeth. The little fellow was in a foul mood of late, the reason for which eluded Arkhan completely. Sometimes he regretted constructing his nimble companion with no method of binaric cant or human communication. But then, that would have been a deviation from the historical ledgers in his possession, which clearly described just what a monkey had and had not been, back when there were such things on Terra.

He’d argued with several scholars – Terran, Martian and out-system alike – regarding the veracity of those archives. It seemed everyone had their own viewpoint, backed up by their own research, on just what monkeys had actually been. A particularly misguided rival of Arkhan’s had insisted the creatures could hang from trees by their tails, which was patently nonsense. Any serious scholar could see the beast’s tail was designed as a lash and a puncturing weapon to deliver venom.

Arkhan’s boots echoed across the skyway gantries that linked one tower to another. The bitter Terran breeze was weak even this high, thousands of feet above one of the hundreds of flat plains that had been geoshaped in order to lay the Imperial Palace’s foundations. It was said that the Palace had taken almost two centuries to build. Arkhan could believe it.

That meant Rogal Dorn and his Imperial Fists had remade it in less than one-twentieth of the time, turning the regal Palace into a fortress bastion, which – again – Arkhan found easy to believe. Space Marines were ever industrious when they set their limited minds to something.

And therein lay the problem, the very heart of the whole matter. The galaxy burned because of that very fact. The Omnissiah’s great vision was under threat, all because of the jealousies of lesser beings.

Arkhan himself had enjoyed the tremendous honour of working with the Omnissiah once. It was at once the most notable and mystifying experience of his life. The summons had come to him on Mars, necessitating a brief journey to Terra, which he’d gladly undertaken. Rather than make planetfall at one of the many star ports, the specific instructions in the summons led his landing craft to the war-scarred tundra of the farthest northlands.

There, he had the supreme privilege of entering one of the Omnissiah’s secret, sacred laboratories at the heart of an inactive volcano. There, he had navigated a maze of sealed doorways and active defensive systems, at several points picking through the bones of failed, fallen intruders, until he stood in the Emperor’s presence. And there, for the first time, he had seen the Machine-God with his own eyes.

‘Do not bow,’ the Emperor had said. His voice was as machine-like and pure as Arkhan had imagined, devoid of all tone and emphasis. Such monotone purity usually only came with significant augmentation.

Arkhan rose, as instructed. He didn’t see a warlord, as so many claimed to see. He saw a scientist. Gone was the armour of the brazen Terran conqueror, replaced by a protective hazard suit suitable for work in sterile and hostile conditions alike. The Emperor stood in the heart of His great laboratory, where fluid bubbled in racked vials and organs pulsated in cylinders brimming with preservative gel. Machines and engines whose use defied common understanding purred and rattled and hummed. To the untrained eye they would seem to be operating independently, but Arkhan saw the truth at once: they were slaved to the Emperor’s will, each of them functioning as part of a harmonic chorus in order to do the Omnissiah’s intellectual bidding.

Several of the tables housed meticulously written notes upon fresh paper, neatly layered with printed schematics and thin plastic sheets of blueprinted plans. Others were monuments to the past, with ancient scrolls and parchments held open at the corners by whatever served to hand as a paperweight. Arkhan had expected an eclectic mix of orderly High Science and the disorder seen in the sanctums of many geniuses, and that’s exactly what he saw.

‘Please accept my gratitude,’ said the Machine-God, ‘for attending me.’

‘The honour is mine,’ Arkhan replied, feeling the bitter annoyance of tears threatening to ruin the moment. How irritating emotions could be, sometimes. Still, there was strength in overcoming them, not scraping them away with bionics. In this as well, he emulated the Omnissiah above all else.

‘I need your expertise, Arkhan.’

There was something in the way the Emperor said his name. His aural sensors registered no sound, yet he heard his name spoken aloud. Arkhan found it somewhat unnerving and terribly fascinating, promising himself he would enquire as to the nature of the effect. He never did.

The Emperor worked alone, sole lord within this sanctum of forbidden, forgotten knowledge. Lightning drew scars across the night sky far above, followed by guttural peals of thunder. Despite the chamber’s depth underground, the lights of the laboratory flickered in gothic sympathy with the storm.

A body lay on the central slab. A hulking thing, a creature of overdeveloped musculature and thumb-thick veins that had deviated as far from the template of humanity as imaginable while still being able to lay claim to mankind as its root species. In truth it closer resembled something from myth: the frost giants of the Ancient Nordycii clans, or the godborn of the pre-Dark Age Jarrish conclaves. What was human about it had been swelled to grotesque and militant proportions. Even in death its scabrous face was twisted into a rictus leer, as if, in life, it had known nothing but pain.

The Emperor, clad as any scientist might be clad, stood by the central slab with one hand upon the obscene muscle topography of the monstrous man’s chest. His attention was directed towards several nearby monitors and their constant scrolling data. Each screen showed a digital, binaric or runic variation of biodata in an unfolding stream. Arkhan realised then that the body on the slab wasn’t a body after all; it still registered a pulse and a confused distortion of brain activity.

The technoarchaeologist moved from the shadows beyond the harsh glare of downward lighting aimed at the body. He found he couldn’t look away from the patient’s face, and the crude, vicious cybernetics implanted upon the unconscious monster’s skull.

‘Teeth of the Cog,’ he swore softly.

The Emperor seemed too distracted to note his blasphemy. Minute circuitry on the fingertips of the Omnissiah’s bloodstained surgical gloves pressed to the giant’s chest. They generated an aura of ultrasound – wherever they touched, crude internal scans of the spine and surrounding flesh drew themselves upon several of the nearby monitors, at various angles. The slumbering body gave a heavy twitch and a grunt as pain spiked through its nervous system.

Arkhan moved around to the giant’s pained features. The metal teeth. The furrowed brow. The scars upon scars. The cables tendrilling out from his scalp like cybernetic dreadlocks.

‘Angron,’ he breathed the name.

‘Yes,’ the Emperor confirmed, inhumanly toneless. ‘I am trying to undo the damage that has been done to the Twelfth.’

The Emperor gestured a free hand, similarly smeared with blood, to three screens that still projected a flickering hololithic of the giant’s skull, brain and spinal column. The image was riven with dozens of slender black tendrils that were anything but organic. Arkhan stared at the scanned images in slow-dawning understanding. His comprehension of human anatomy was absolute, given his experience and education, but the images on the screens weren’t entirely human. Nor were they in accordance with the sacred and approved pathways to augmetic ascension.

This was rather more profane.

‘It is my belief that you have seen this device before,’ said the Emperor. ‘Is that so?’

‘Yes, Divine One. In my expedition down to the Hexarchion Vaults.’

‘Vaults that were resealed by your own decree, ratified by Fabricator General Kelbor-Hal and all findings within unrecorded.’

‘Yes, Divine One. The lore within represented a moral threat and a potential perversion of cognition.’

The Emperor’s fingers pressed to the unconscious primarch’s temple. ‘But you saw a device like this.’

Arkhan Land nodded. ‘The profane texts entombed within the Hexarchion Vaults named it a cruciamen.’

The Emperor continued his fingertip scans, saying nothing.

‘I have never seen one implanted and operational,’ Arkhan confessed. ‘And never of this specific pattern and intensity, in the repose of stasis or storage. The devices in the sealed vault were rather more crude than this construct.’

‘That is to be expected.’

‘Why, in your infinite wisdom, would you implant this device inside a primarch?’

‘I did not do so, Arkhan.’

‘Then… with great shame, I confess that I am not certain what I am looking at, Divine One.’

‘The Twelfth and its Legion call them the “Butcher’s Nails”.’ The Emperor kept staring at the screens. ‘You are looking at modifications to my original template of the Twelfth. More precisely, you are looking at modifications of primitive genius. Before these examinations, I had believed the enhancements performed upon the Twelfth on Nuceria were the source of its emotional instability. My hypothesis was that they stirred the Twelfth to a sense of perpetual but ultimately artificial rage. Yet the opposite is true. With the alterations made to the limbic lobe and insular cortex, the surgeons have impaired the Twelfth’s ability to regulate any emotion at all. Furthermore, they have rethreaded its capacity to take pleasure in anything but the sensation of anger. They are the only chemicals and electrical signals that flow freely through, and from, its brain. All else is either dulled to nothingness or rewired to inspire a supreme degree of agony. It is a testament to the durability of my primarch project that the Twelfth has managed to survive this long.’

‘His own emotions cause him pain?’

‘No, Arkhan. Everything. Everything causes it pain. Thinking. Feeling. Breathing. The only respite it has is in the rewired neurological pleasure it receives from the chemicals of anger and aggression.’

‘That’s vile,’ said the technoarchaeologist. ‘Perversion of cognition, rather than purification.’

The Emperor showed nothing but passionless interest. ‘Such rewriting of physiology certainly hinders the Twelfth’s higher brain function. The device is cunningly wrought, for something so crude.’

‘Can you remove it?’

‘Of course,’ the Emperor answered, still looking at the screens.

Arkhan did his best to hide his surprise. ‘Then, Divine One, why would you leave it there?’

‘This is why.’ The Emperor rested both hands on Angron’s head, one with the fingertips pressed to the primarch’s temple and cheek, the other pressed to the crown of his shaven head where the cable-tendrils joined the flesh and bone. The images on several screens immediately resolved to a clearer imprint of a brutishly dense skull miserable with crude cybernetics and the bone-scarring of powerful surgical laser cuts.

‘Do you see?’ the Emperor asked.

Arkhan saw. The tendrils were sunk deep, rooted in the meat of the brain, threaded to the nervous system, and down in roughly serpentine coils around the spinal column. Every movement must have been agony for the primarch, feeding back into the base emotions of anger and spite.

Worse, the brain’s limbic lobe and insular cortex were more than just savaged by the pain engine’s insertion; they had been surgically attacked and removed even before implantation. The device hammered into his skull hadn’t ruined those sections of the brain – it had replaced them. Ugly black cybernetics showed on the internal scans, in place of entire sections of the primarch’s brain tissue.

‘They are the only thing keeping him alive,’ Arkhan said.

The Emperor lifted His hands from the somnolent primarch’s skull. Most of the screens instantly went black. He spoke as He removed His surgical gloves. ‘This has been educational.’

‘I don’t understand, Divine One. Can I be of use to you?’

‘You have been of immense use, Arkhan. You have confirmed what I suspected regarding the cruciamen’s origins. No one else could have done so. I am accordingly grateful.’

Arkhan had expected the Omnissiah’s dispassionate demeanour, but to witness it in so intimate a context was inspiring in the extreme. So neutral. So inhumanly neutral.

‘Divine One,’ he said, before he knew he was going to say anything at all.

‘A compromised primarch is still a primarch,’ the Emperor mused, still distracted. ‘What is it, Arkhan?’

Land hesitated. ‘You are more sanguine than I would have imagined in this moment, even knowing of your holy detachment from emotion.’

‘What would the alternative be?’ The Emperor laid the bloodstained gloves on a nearby surgical trolley, where red-marked knives and other instruments lay wet and freshly used. ‘That I might mourn the Twelfth as though it were my injured son, and I its grieving father?’

‘Never that, Divine One.’ Arkhan chose his words with care. ‘Though some might expect that.’

The Emperor unlocked the sealed vambraces of His hazard suit, then removed the surgical mask that had covered His face until now. ‘It is not my son, Arkhan. None of them are. They are warlords, generals, tools bred to serve a purpose. Just as the Legions were bred to serve a purpose.’

Arkhan looked down at the sleeping demigod, watching Angron’s facial features twitch and tense in painful harmony with a ravaged nervous system.

‘With your blessing, Divine One, I would ask something of you.’

The Emperor turned His eyes upon Land for the first time. Falling beneath the Omnissiah’s gaze made the Motive Force in Arkhan’s bloodstream flow faster, tingling like weak acid.

‘Ask.’

‘The primarchs. It is said they have always called you father. It seems so… sentimental. I’ve never understood why you allow it.’

The Emperor was silent for some time. When He spoke, His eyes had returned to the hulking form on the surgical slab. ‘There was once a writer,’ he said, ‘a penner of children’s stories who told the tale of a wooden puppet that wished to be reborn as a human child. And this puppet, this automaton of painted, carved wood that sought to be a thing of flesh and blood and bone – do you know what it called its maker? What would such a creature call the creator that gave it shape and form and life?’

Father. Arkhan felt his skin crawl. ‘I understand, Divine One.’

‘I see that you do.’ The Emperor turned back to the body on the slab. ‘The Twelfth’s lifespan and tactical acuity may be reduced but the pain engine amplifies its effectiveness in other ways to compensate. I believe I will return the Twelfth to its Legion. You have my gratitude once more, Arkhan. Thank you for coming.’

It had been the first and only time he’d stood alone in the Omnissiah’s presence. He could have clutched at the singular honour of the moment, bringing it to light and riding the resulting fame. But he hadn’t. Arkhan Land, for all that his detractors called him vain and pompous, kept the truest honour of his life a secret from all others. It would’ve cheapened it to milk the moment for personal gain. He was content to keep it as his private hour of joy, that glorious evening when a living god had needed his knowledge.

The rattling of the elevator brought him back to the present, where the descent into the Ordo Reductor’s stronghold had finally ended. The tri-layered doors unbolted with an opera of metallic crunches, then moaned open one by one. Hazard striping slid away in every direction as the last of the airlock doors finally parted.

Kane was waiting for him on the concourse beyond. The Fabricator General had sanctified himself with severe weaponisation since Arkhan had last been in his presence. It suits you, Arkhan thought, in your blunt and uninspired approach to existence.

‘Fabricator General,’ he greeted the exiled ruler of Sacred Mars.

‘Arkhan Land,’ replied his lord and master. ‘Come with me.’

‘At once, dominus.’ You tedious gargoyle. ‘May I enquire as to your need?’

‘All will be revealed.’ Kane turned, backing up on his grinding tracks, curling his arms close to his red cloak. ‘Follow.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘To converse with the Bringers of Blessed Ruin. No more questions for now. Merely follow.’

Kane juddered along on his armoured tank treads, roving between the power generator columns. The air was thick with incense, and humming filtrators pumped carbon dioxide and argon into the entire complex, thinning the nitrogen and oxygen to unpleasantly breathable levels analogous to the terraformed Martian atmosphere. Kane greedily sucked the artificial smog through his respiratory filters. Each breath he took was a holy observance.

The temperature had a tendency to fluctuate this deep in the complex’s innards, with the climate controls regulated by overworked processors running to figures that changed by necessity from chamber to chamber. In this particular vault, the shift from forge heat to cryonic cold was stark enough to be felt as a physical barrier. His torso shook in its cable-thick cradle as his treads ran over the uneven floor.

Arkhan Land, that monumental irritant, walked at his side. Really, it was a grievous shame that the technoarchaeologist was necessary at all, but Kane would have been a fool not to use every tool at his disposal. Land was a vainglorious and self-serving wretch, but he was a vainglorious and self-serving wretch with an insight – and vital schematics – possessed by few others.

And, crucially, he had been instrumental in the anti-gravitic designs favoured by the Legio Custodes’ war machines. The respect granted to Land by the Ten Thousand was more valuable to Kane than any imaginable currency.

Once inside the next vault, Kane pulled back his hood. The wires and needle-cables that replaced his hair were tugged none too gently by the movement. He drove on, red-dot sights beaming here and there as he turned his head, seeking by eye and scanning by internal auspex.

The inhabitants of the chamber scattered before his rolling advance. Miserable things still consisting mostly of flesh, their robes stained by beggars’ filth, they should have been beneath the Fabricator General’s notice. On Mars they wouldn’t have dared approach him, but the loss of their homeland had ruined their sense of decorum as it had harmed the cognitive processes and emotional restraints of so many other Mechanicum adepts. Several of them tried to pray to him as he trundled past, believing him to be the Omnissiah Incarnate, descending into the purgatory of their lives.

Kane caught sight of Arkhan Land’s smile. Evidently the blasphemy on display amused him.

If these forge-vermin believed in their weeping praise that their Fabricator General intended to save them, they were grotesquely mistaken. He drew an elegant phosphor serpenta pistol of pseudowood and Martian red gold and casually shot one of the braying miscreants through the chest. That sent the others fleeing.

Kane was far past the ability to smile, but he felt warmed by silencing their petty, mistaken little blasphemy all the same. The rush of brain chemicals triggering a sense of all-too-human satisfaction was a guilty pleasure indeed. He holstered the slim pistol beneath his robes, the secondary arm that had drawn it curling back close to his torso.

‘You are such an inspiring leader,’ Arkhan Land noted. Kane glanced towards the man, reading his facial features for any sign of amusement. He detected none, though the artificimian on Land’s shoulder made a chittering sound resembling primate laughter.

Once we have retaken our homeland, Kane thought, I will end you.

‘You think me ignorant of your sarcasm?’ the Fabricator General asked, gambling that it had been a disingenuous comment.

‘No, dominus. Never that.’

Land seemed sincere. Kane suspected a deception but refused to engage with such petty behaviour. On he rolled, the technoarchaeologist at his side, eventually reaching another airlock. They both endured an aura-spray of cleansing chemicals in a fine mist before they were permitted to enter the next chamber. Kane’s treads gripped the contoured gantry slope as he descended through the sloped workshop-laboratory that spread before him in a vast expanse. Arkhan’s boots thud-thudded on.

Here, hundreds of menials and thralls laboured at the slabs of deactivated automata, building, repairing and resealing armoured carapaces of blessed iron and sacred steel. Adepts and priests, low of rank yet still commanding positions eclipsing their thrall minions, bent their expertise to the construction and rethreading of complicated internal circuitry, or managed the integration and installation of bio-mechanical organ container tanks.

Ranks of half-built war robots lined the walls, slouched by work tables or lying in disassembled repose upon surgical slabs. The recreated Martian air was beautifully spiced with the reek of blood, oil and toxma, the holy synthetic petrochemical blend that served in place of either natural fluid.

Head after head turned to regard him. Some of the adepts bowed, some murmured greetings in binaric cant or exloaded welcomes onto the noospheric net as data across the Fabricator General’s visual feed. He ignored most and canted back greetings to a few, moving between the hive of dead robots lying on their surgery tables. Emblazoned on every wall in great sigils of dark metal and Martian red gold was the fortress and lightning bolt symbol of the Unmaker God’s blessed artisans of destruction, the Ordo Reductor.

He spurted a binaric query to Land, who, to the Fabricator General’s irritation, kept choosing to reply aloud in unaugmented vocalisation.

‘No,’ said Land. ‘I’ve never ventured here before.’

‘Impressive, is it not?’

‘Oh, yes. Very impressive.’

‘The delay and tone of your reply suggests deception.’

‘You should learn to accept a polite lie for the value it has,’ Land replied, adding Kane’s title after another conversationally significant pause.

Sapien clicked its tongue and chittered, a sound quite unlike anything Terran monkeys had ever made, many thousands of years ago when they’d still drawn breath.

Kane’s internal curse was a screed of binaric invective that he was far too dignified to transmit.

A circular elevator platform in the floor took them even deeper into the complex. The fortress symbol was repeated on the walls of the elevator shaft, and Kane expressed a moment of revelatory admiration across the noosphere for just how deep his people had dug into Terra’s crust, and how tenacious they were in their resolve to have accomplished so much in their brief banishment from the Red Planet.

Land evidently had a different perspective. ‘Look how we spread our tendrils, gripping tight to the soil of our exile, the way trees spread roots, never to be moved.’

Kane felt a flicker of camaraderie, at long last. An alignment of vision. ‘You fear we will never see Sacred Mars again.’

Arkhan nodded. All sons and daughters of Mars knew that he had left a lifetime of work unfinished. For once there was no suggestion of a snide comeback or disrespectful glance.

‘I fear we are becoming comfortable. Complacency will only make this exile permanent.’

Kane vocalised a code of solidarity, the canted equivalent of a reassuring smile, and moved onwards. Another accord between them. This was good. This was promising.

They descended another nine levels, leaving the platform at the bottom of the shaft. Bulkheads whined and groaned open, admitting them with gearborn mechanical songs. Another workshop stretched out in every direction, indistinguishable from the first but for one utterly significant aspect – the temperature was glacial, maintained thus by mist-breathing climate processor units in the low ceiling.

Here the adepts and their minions worked on the most complicated brain function cogitators of the ordo’s siege engine automata and anti-infantry hunter-killer machines. Their work involved the preservation and linkage of delicate biological components, bonding man and machine at an inseparable level. The craft on this sublevel was of the highest, most precise quality, and it was here that Kane finally found the adept he had been seeking.

Hieronyma was working alone, which was no surprise; Kane knew her idiosyncrasies well. She stood bent over a surgical slab, all four of her mechanical hands devoted to a bowl of preservative soup that contained a nest of wires and cables binding a human brain. Kane always enjoyed watching her work. Her fingers were designed to divide into three slender sections at the tips, each able to move independently from its neighbours, giving her a level of precise digital control few tech-priests could begin to match.

A great hunch marked her curved back. Whatever augmentations lay beneath her robe were enthusiastically inhuman in nature. Kane greatly approved.

She didn’t look up, though she canted a very polite greeting from beneath her red hood. The stream of code not only welcomed the Fabricator General to her workstation, but also expressed the honour of being deemed worthy of a visit. Would that all of his people were so dutiful, Mars would never have fallen. She greeted Arkhan Land with a much briefer vocalised spurt. The technoarchaeologist returned a shallow bow.

Kane canted, spilling the numerical code of her name aloud on an almost subsonic frequency. The barest flicker of her divided fingertips showed her surprise as she worked on delicately puncturing the soaking brain. Around them both, work continued on.

‘The event I bring to your attention cannot be trusted to the noosphere,’ he clarified, quenching her dignified confusion.

Her reply was similarly quiet, pitched and transmitted for his personal receptors and Land’s ears. In the heart of the Mechanicum’s fortress on Terra, the most secure way to converse was the most primitive: they whispered.

Her hood twitched as she tilted her head, still focusing on her work. ‘What brings you here, Lord of Mars?’

‘The Great Work,’ he said, trans-shaping the reply so muted, so fine, that it was barely even subsonic.

He was gratified to see another hesitation in her divided fingertips. She was too dutiful, and too aware of the Mechanicum’s depleting resources, to risk abandoning her work for lesser hands, but her fascination with Kane’s presence was becoming a very real distraction.

‘You honour me,’ she said, bluntly honest. Her private tone was yearning, practically starving for more data.

‘I do,’ Kane confirmed. ‘The Omnissiah’s war rages on. The Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood, praise upon their names for their most glorious of duties, bring the Machine-God’s will to us in the form of a requisition list.’

Land raised a thin eyebrow but said nothing. Hieronyma turned her hooded features to face the Fabricator General, eyeing him with a shadowed visage of variously sized green lenses. To compensate, a mechadendrite uncoiled from her spine and aimed its eye-lens tip down at her work. With her vision doubled, she examined Kane and continued working at the same time. Bio-sign monitors hanging from the ceiling in a loose ring showed a spill of data detailing the brain’s function as Hieronyma manipulated it beneath her tender touch.

She said nothing, for she needed to say nothing. Not yet. The Fabricator General of Sacred Mars wouldn’t come here to trouble her for a requisition order consisting of crates of bolt shells and robots to serve as blade fodder for the enemy. This was something else. Something unexpected.

‘And,’ Kane added, ‘opportunity has arisen at last. Adnector Primus Mendel has fallen. His demise leaves a void in the Unifiers’ leadership.’

Still Hieronyma said nothing. Kane appreciated her appropriate reverence and attention. Instinct almost had him exload the requisition manifest directly to her, but he was not ready to trust the noosphere. As united as Mars and Terra were, they were still two empires beneath the same banner, two kingdoms sharing a king. Their interests were not always strictly and perfectly aligned, and Zagreus Kane was a man short on trust these days. Being forced to flee one’s home world in panicked disgrace could have that effect on a soul.

Land’s psyber-monkey hopped from the explorer’s shoulder onto Hieronyma’s workstation. It watched the motions of her slender bionic fingers, chittering to itself. Its antics went ignored, even by Land himself.

The Fabricator General continued, ‘In addition to thousands of new troops and a forge-harvest’s worth of materiel, the Ten Thousand, with the Omnissiah’s blessing, have requested the Mechanicum provide their new army with a general to replace Mendel. To meet this demand, your disciples of the Unmaker God will proceed with the Archimandrite Venture.’

Now, against all code and creed, Hieronyma ceased her ministrations. The mechadendrite tentacle lashed back beneath her robe, and her four hands snicked and clicked back into clawed completion. Every single one of her eye-lenses, the only features of her face, whirred and refocused.

‘You require this of me, Fabricator General?’

Kane blurted a forceful shunt of code.

Hieronyma bowed deeply. ‘You honour me,’ she said again with appropriate reverence. ‘As you will it, it shall be so.’

‘Your work honours the Mechanicum in kind,’ Kane replied. ‘Harvest the materials you require to enact the process and infuse yourself with the Motive Force. May the Omnissiah bless you upon your ascension.’

Arkhan Land cleared his throat with disgusting humanity. ‘As fascinating as this is…’

Both archpriests turned their eye-lenses upon the still-human, far shorter member of their triumvirate.

‘…what do you need of me?’

How it galled Kane to admit this. ‘Your vision. Your insight into the process of forbidden weaponisation. Your knowledge of the secrets within the Hexarchion Vaults.’

Arkhan turned his head slightly, eyes narrowed. ‘What you ask is sealed unto eternal silence, by order of the Fabricator General. You know this.’

‘I am the Fabricator General!’

Land chuckled. ‘The real Fa–’

‘Abandon your attempts at humour,’ Kane warned. ‘Do not even breathe such a sentiment, Technoarchaeologist Land. My patience has its limits.’

Land acquiesced with an amused nod. ‘Even so, they ask much of us and offer little.’

Kane responded with a negative/abort chime equating derisive laughter, mocking the very idea. He no longer had enough of a human face remaining to smile, which was, briefly, something he regretted. The effect of biological smugness had its usefully deployable moments.

‘They ask much, this is true. Yet in exchange I have secured their word that an avenue to Mars will remain within Imperial and Mechanicum control.’

‘Home,’ Hieronyma said, hissing and urgent. ‘Red Mars. Sacred Mars. Mother Mars.’

Arkhan Land seemed rather less impressed. ‘Hollow promises. The Imperium can offer us no such guarantees. We cannot return home while the skies of Mars remain caged.’

Kane emitted an abort code-spurt at the ludicrous imprecision of the technoarchaeologist’s hyperbole. ‘I speak not of an orbital assault, nor of any other traditional attack. I speak of another avenue. One known only among the highest echelons of Imperial command.’

Amidst the rattle and crash of the repair cavern’s ceaseless industry, Kane leaned in close to his confidants, feeling the words caressing their way through his vocabulator. He felt himself drooling. Lubricant stalactited from his mouth grille.

‘The Omnissiah Himself once spoke of a route between the Imperial Dungeon and the timelocked gates of the Aresian Vault. I have seen no such reference even among the Antiquitous Archives, but His word to me is All. This avenue lies within a network of galactic thoroughfares and pathways metaphysically connected to His principal soul engine.’

Hieronyma stared at him in silence. By some unguessable miracle, even Arkhan Land had nothing to say.

‘I speak the truth,’ Kane said. ‘I speak the gravest and greatest secret truth in the twin empires of Terra and Mars, and I speak it to those that must hear it. The fate of the Mechanicum rests upon the triumvirate gathered here now.’

And still the others said nothing.

‘This is the avenue I have demanded reinforced and defended against all costs,’ said Kane. ‘Through this “Aresian Path” we shall return to Mars.’

Now, Kane saw Land’s thoughts working behind his human eyes. Musing over the principles of flight and distance, of teleportation, of this undiscovered void-lateral technology, too sacred to speak of and too precious to share. He didn’t understand the idea of the webway. And how could he? The structure, if it even was a structure, defied explanation.

But he would soon see. Yes, he would.

‘How can this be?’ Arkhan asked.

‘Irrelevant,’ replied Kane. ‘You shall learn all you need to learn in the fullness of time.’

‘You mean you don’t know.’

‘Irrelevant.’

Hieronyma was an altogether more obedient and dignified ally. She said nothing, waiting for her overlord’s input. Kane was wearily grateful for that.

‘Adnector Primus Mendel was a soul of weak vision and anaemic patriotism,’ said the Fabricator General. ‘Thus it falls to us to work in the Red World’s best interests. We three will oversee the rendering and weaponisation of the Archimandrite’s ascension. We will aid the Ten Thousand in their secret war and record the various avenues of this alien webway. And then, once we have secured the Aresian Path, we will lead our people home.’

Eight Imprisoned / Trial upon the battlements / Banners of the III Legion

Jaya still counted the days, though it was a matter of instinct rather than intent. Time had little meaning between the unchanging walls of her confinement cell, but the regularity of her two meals a day made for a schedule that couldn’t easily be forgotten. Especially since there was nothing else to do but eat and sleep.

And wait, of course. There was always waiting to do.

The servitor that brought her the nutrient paste was mono-tasked to the point of lobotomy, rendering it useless for information let alone conversation. On the few occasions she’d pressed it for details regarding the date of her execution, all that had emerged from its wet mouth were a few wordless grunts. She didn’t think the thing had long left to live. It looked halfway dead already with its cataract-milked eyes and black teeth showing between its eternally slack lips.

The cell had been comfortable at first, a fact that had surprised her given the nature of her crime. The sleeping slab was padded, and the walls were a smooth, dry granite with a thermal strip emanating a modest breath of warmth, rather than the dank, moss-covered stone of the prison cells her family had maintained in the dungeons of her ancestral home, Castle Highrock. There was even a chest for her possessions, few though they were in captivity – she used the chest to store the cheap tin pots of nutrient paste they had been feeding her since she arrived. Jaya, at fifty-one years of age, had never been imprisoned before but she was a cautious soul; leaving a little in each pot and building up a stockpile seemed wise, just in case they suspended her rations as a form of punishment.

She could have broken and bent the tin pots, fashioning them into slivers of knives, but as weapons such shards would be flimsy and next to useless. She could slash up the servitor that brought her meals, but wounding the damn thing wouldn’t do anything to improve her situation. For one, it might cut off her food supply completely. For two, it would be the pettiest of acts, striking a defenceless and mindless cyborg like that. A truly honourless kill. No war banner would fly in the great hall of Castle Highrock to celebrate that little victory.

So she let the thing live.

Her other option was to cut her own wrists, which was no option at all. It wasn’t that she found the notion distasteful – it was that suicide could only be sanctioned as penance for sins against the code of chivalry, not to escape the consequences of crime. Honour demanded that she live until her execution.

The fact that her captors left her access to ways of killing herself showed their true disregard. It would likely be a convenience for them if she did end her own life.

She exercised to maintain her health, pushing herself up from the stone floor until the sweat ran from her thinning form, gluing her worn and filthy uniform to her flesh. She ate the thick nutrient paste and drank the brackish, repeatedly filtered water they gave her. She slept in her clothes, refusing to shed her uniform even in captivity. For the first few weeks she’d been appalled and increasingly sickened by the smell rising from her unwashed body, but by the second month the stench had simply gone away. She suspected it was still there, she was merely so used to her own stink that it no longer registered to her senses. Finger-combing her hair had only worked for the first week. Soon enough she’d been reduced to binding it back in a ponytail using one of her bootlaces.

When she went to her cell’s metal door, all she could see were the smooth walls of the corridor stretching in either direction, lit by dull and flickering lumen orbs. It wasn’t until the third day that she’d realised she wasn’t alone down here – a shout, more of a frustrated scream in truth, had echoed down the corridor. She’d called back, her lungs raw from the dungeon’s bad air, asking who was out there.

‘Baroness?’ the reply had come, miserable with hope.

She’d burst into laughter. One of her courtiers was caged nearby. ‘Sevik?’

‘Baroness! I don’t suppose you have a comb, do you?’

One courtier had turned out to be several. They conducted shouted conversations in the days that followed, such behaviour simply ignored by their captors.

They grew quieter over time. What was there to say? How many times could they force good-natured laughter about their fate as they all started losing weight and feeling their teeth loosening in their gums?

The baroness understood. She fell silent too, in the same way, for the same reasons. She withdrew within herself, not to hide but to survive. She refused to be dragged before a firing squad as a ruined echo of herself – so she exercised. She stored her rations, just in case. She composed battle verses in her mind or recited old saga-poems, singing them aloud in a voice that grew shakier week by week. At first she’d tried to sing once a day, and her courtiers had joined in. As their strength failed, the real silence took hold. She’d sometimes hear one or two of them groaning or murmuring in their cells, far down the corridor. Starvation walked among them, caressing with gnawed fingers.

On the one hundred and fifty-first day, the servitor came with no food. It stood before her door, the interface slot drawn back and open, and mimed pushing the tin pot through the gap. Its pale hand was empty but the mimed action was perfect. It behaved as it always did, not acknowledging that it was delivering a handful of stale air.

She watched it from where she’d been exercising, performing slow sit-ups with her boots to the wall. She watched the servitor slide the flask of water through next, no different from usual. She saw the powdery filtration crystals, like silt at the bottom of the flask, spreading their bitter purity through the drink.

And then she watched the servitor leave.

Was this punishment? A mistake in allotting food rations? The possibility passed through her mind, icy and unwelcome, that this was the form her execution would take. Perhaps they wouldn’t haul her before a firing squad after all, to let her die proud in her uniform. They’d starve her instead. At best she would be buried in a pauper’s grave on Terra itself, a malnourished husk of her former self. At worst they would throw her body into a funereal incinerator along with worn-down servitors and the prisoners who ended their own lives in dishonour.

She took the flask of water, not yet giving in to panic. She had supplies. She had a few weeks’ worth of the nutrient-rich gruel built up that she could fall back on.

The shouting started up again as the day passed. The other prisoners were going through the same farce, being served nothing by the servitor jailor too mindlocked to realise what it was doing wrong.

All the baroness could do was wait. If the servitor returned later that night and repeated its hollow actions, then she would know something was amiss. Until then, she wouldn’t give in to the rush of fear. Fear was useful: it told you when you should be alert and aware, but it became a poison if allowed to take root. The deeper it nestled in the heart, the more it affected judgement and played havoc with reason.

She passed the hours exercising, meditating and letting the stale water fill her stomach in place of the rationed paste. When the servitor returned exactly eight hours later, right on cue, she rose to her feet and approached, watching the cyborg’s pallid hands.

Again it went through the motions of feeding her, with nothing in its grip. This time it repeated the gesture – the flask it offered to quench her thirst was empty. The filtration crystals were piled at the bottom, as dry as desert sand.

No food. No water.

The baroness closed her eyes, listening to the servitor’s retreating tread. She could accept the fall of a headsman’s axe or the gunline stare of a firing squad. But a life spent sheathed in steel had ill prepared her to feel this helpless.

Her hands closed into fists, slowly, firmly, her knuckles showing white.

‘If I breathe, I am unbeaten. If I fight, I am unbroken.’

She raced to the door, pounding on it with the heels of her fists, shouting the words over and over, letting them fill the long corridors of the prison complex.

‘If I breathe, I am unbeaten. If I fight, I am unbroken.’

The words echoed back at her, shouted by dozens of throats, taking up the old, familiar banner-cry.

One day became two. That was all the evidence she needed. The baroness decided to act before two days became three.

There was moisture in the nutrient paste, though scarcely enough to sustain a human body. Soon enough the baroness was looking at her cell through gummy, dehydrated eyes, and clutching a shard of can that she’d shaped into a flimsy knife after all. She was under no illusions that killing her servitor jailor would improve her lot in life, but destroying it might trip some kind of system alarm, letting her real captors know that she and her courtiers were dying of thirst and starvation. If no one came to deal with the slain jailor, then at least she’d know whether this was to be her execution.

It wouldn’t be difficult. The servitor lacked any obvious counter-threat systems or retaliatory weapons beyond its cylindrical shock maul, which it was far too slow and rundown to use with any speed. All she’d need to do is drag the jailor’s hands into the food slot, stun the thing by crashing its face against the door, then cut its wrists with the crude knife. It would likely go back to its duties, bleeding out along the way and hopefully triggering some kind of prison-wide alarm.

Hopefully.

When she heard the distant thump of its bionic-legged tread, she clutched the knife tight enough that blood ran from her palm. Dehydration greyed out the edges of her senses, dulling her hearing and making every vein in her skull throb with abandon, but she still managed to rise to her feet and – without consciously realising she was doing it – straighten her ragged, sweat-soiled uniform.

‘If I breathe, I am unbeaten.’ The words were a savage whisper. ‘If I fight, I am unbroken.’

‘Please stand away from the door,’ the servitor intoned from behind the sealed metal portal. The gaoler had never spoken before. She doubted it even could. For a moment she wondered if her thirst-slowed thoughts had conjured the words as an auditory hallucination. It certainly didn’t sound the way she’d expected. A flash of gold metal shone on the other side of the food slot.

What the–

That wonder was banished as a metre-long spear-blade rammed through the reinforced door with a ringing crash. It slid back out to be replaced by golden fingers reaching into the wound. She saw them curl and grip, then wrench the puncture open with a horrendous whine of abused iron. The door came free of the wall, sending tremors through the ground. She flinched at the bang of its twisted remains dropping onto the corridor’s stone floor.

The figure that entered wasn’t the servitor. It had to stoop to fit through the doorway.

‘Baroness Jaya D’Arcus, Warden of Highrock?’

‘A Custodian. I’m honoured.’ Her voice was a parched ruin. It shamed her to show any weakness at all before a foe, but she’d be damned before she stood there in silence. ‘Have you come to execute me at last?’

‘I’ll accept that as an affirmation. My name is Diocletian Coros of the Ten Thousand, Prefect of the Hykanatoi. Come with me please, baroness.’

‘I request the right to die in a clean uniform.’

‘Very civilised. And I’m sure that one day you’ll die in that exact manner. However, I’m not going to kill you. You’ve been pardoned.’

‘The Sigillite would never overturn my sentence.’

‘The Sigillite had never sentenced you at all. Amidst the war’s endless bureaucracy, I suspect he forgot you even existed until you were needed. You are pardoned in the Emperor’s name. Now come with me, unless you want your baronial court to keep rotting in their cells.’

She followed, though cautiously. ‘Needed?’ she asked. ‘We are needed?’

The Custodian didn’t reply.

Immediately outside her cell stood another towering warrior, not quite as tall as the Custodian but still two heads above her. He was clad in red rather than gold and carried his helmet under his arm – a crested portcullis-faceplate of a thing, with a green visor dulled in deactivation. Symbols of white wings adorned his armour plating, as did elaborate silver filigree.

His features held nothing of sensuality, yet the truth remained: he was quite literally the most beautiful man Jaya d’Arcus had ever seen. The artistry of living beauty rendered in marble. An angel of myth, stricken by the hauntingly elegant pallor of consumption.

‘I am Zephon,’ he said with a polite bow. His voice, low yet brutally soft, was made to sing beneath the stars.

Jaya looked between the two warriors. ‘Free my court. Then, for the love of all that is holy, please tell me what’s going on.’

Dozens of them stood blinking and sore in the weak sunlight. Clad in the faded and filthy uniforms in which they’d been imprisoned, they nevertheless stood in orderly ranks as they would upon the Highrock parade ground. Jaya’s spirits soared to see them muster in such defiant order on the back of enduring such privation. Her hopes sank soon after – with the courtiers were their attendants, several sacristans for every scion, and the robed tech-adepts had seemingly suffered far more than their masters. They gathered in loose, wheezing, shaking packs; it smote the baroness’ heart to see that her house’s revered engineers had been treated so poorly.

The Court of Highrock, ragged and worse for wear but free at last, stood on the battlements of the mountainous Outer Palace. Thrusting up from among the lance-like spires to the west was the Seberekan Tower, haloed by the watery eye of the setting sun. Jaya resisted the urge to spit at the sight. Engines whined, plaintive and distant, somewhere in the clouds above them.

Three figures faced them as they waited in ranks. Jaya regarded each of them in turn, cautious of each and mistrusting them equally. The Blood Angel watched the gathered courtiers and their attendants, standing unhelmed in the acrid, polluted breeze. The gentle wind’s fingers plucked at his golden hair. His arms, both bionic replacements, were crossed over the X made by the reinforced cables across his breastplate. He was at once fiercely focused and utterly serene, making no threatening move. Making no move at all that wasn’t inspired by the breeze.

By contrast, the Custodian paced before them, his burnished features set in neutral regard. The long spear that marked his order was held at his side in one gloved hand. Eyes so pale they were practically colourless stared from his oversized tanned features, catching the gaze of every man and woman willing to meet it.

The woman seemed to be their leader, or at least they deferred to her in some unknowable way. She was human to Jaya’s eyes, externally unaugmented, tattooed with an Imperial aquila upon her keen features and clad in archaic armour of bronze chain links and golden platework. A hand-and-a-half power sword rode upon her back, the weapon sheathed and deactivated. The power generator in its hilt took the form of a golden eagle spreading its wings to form the quillions.

‘I haven’t seen her blink,’ Sevik murmured beside Jaya. The baroness hushed him with a glance. She still suspected this all to be some bizarre ritual before their mass execution.

The Custodian looked back over his shoulder. The sword-maiden nodded, and the golden warrior began.

‘Baroness,’ said the warrior of the Ten Thousand. ‘Step forwards.’

Jaya did so. She walked towards him, and as proud and straight-backed as she was after over thirty years of leading armies in Highrock’s name, she barely reached the Custodian’s armoured stomach. The warrior towered three heads taller than her. She held back a little, to maintain her dignified posture and not indulge in the foolishness of craning her neck.

‘You are Jaya D’Arcus, Warden of Highrock, Baroness of House Vyridion. Is that so?’

‘Actually, I have rather more titles than that.’ Since being fed and watered, albeit with a brief and dubious feast of yet more stale water and nutrient gruel, she was finding her voice again. ‘Marcher Lady of the Eastern Barrens, First Scion of the Envolius Reach, Crusader of the… Well, I won’t bore you with my list of honours.’

‘We would be here for some time if she did,’ said Devram Sevik with immaculate politeness, from the first rank of courtiers.

Behind the Custodian, the tattooed woman smiled faintly, as did the Blood Angel. The Custodian did not.

‘I am Diocletian of the Ten Thousand,’ he told her again, this time including all of her court in the proclamation of his name. ‘With me are Dominion Zephon of the Ninth Legion, and Sister Kaeria Casryn, one of the Emperor’s own Oblivion Knights.’

The latter title meant nothing to the courtiers. Diocletian’s sonorous voice carried to them with little effort, even against the wind that pulled gently at his red plume. ‘It’s said that House Vyridion abandoned the Emperor and turned its cloak to march beneath the rebel banners of the Warmaster.’

Silence greeted this announcement, into which the Custodian cast his lure. ‘So tell me, scions of Highrock. Are you guilty or innocent?’

The courtiers stood resolute in silence, dignity incarnate, bound by oaths of fealty considered arcane even here at the heart of the Imperium. The baroness would speak for them. And speak she did.

‘Guilty.’

The Custodian seemed to hesitate. He turned back to the Oblivion Knight, who dipped her head, bidding him continue. From the golden warrior’s pause, Jaya wondered if her admission of guilt had taken the man by surprise.

‘Guilty,’ Diocletian repeated her confession. ‘And yet your hearth-ship entered Terran skies and you surrendered into imprisonment. That speaks of repentance, or at least a willingness to be punished for your sins.’

‘You did not ask of repentance or punishment,’ Jaya replied. She stood straight, her hands clasped behind her back, loathing the unwashed smell rising from her dirty uniform. ‘You asked if we had marched with the Warmaster’s rebels, and we have done exactly that. We have fired our weapons in anger upon souls loyal to the Emperor.’

‘I see.’ Diocletian rested his spear upon one shoulder guard. The setting sun turned his armour to fiery bronze. ‘Your scions marched alongside the Third Legion, conquering two worlds. You are responsible for the destruction of several hundred warriors and war machines of the Iron Hands, as well as innumerable thousands of their Army reserve elements. You personally slew Baron Kells of House Riathan at the Battle of Mount Galheim.’

‘In single combat,’ Sevik pointed out.

Diocletian’s attention snapped to the courtier. ‘Are you your mistress’ herald?’

‘No, Custodian.’

‘Does she need you singing her achievements to the sky as if this were some tawdry baronial procession?’

‘I suspect not, Golden One.’

‘Indeed she doesn’t. So be silent.’ Diocletian paused again, and then added, ‘Slew Baron Kells of House Riathan… in single combat.’

Jaya nodded. ‘As you say.’

‘That’s an impressive roster of treachery for such a brief involvement in the war. Tell me why you fired upon souls loyal to the Emperor, baroness.’

‘Vyridion’s oldest oaths are to the Children of the Emperor. It was Prince Fulgrim who descended to Highrock, bringing the Emperor’s light to spell the end of Old Night. We marched with his Legion throughout the Great Crusade for three generations, as we vowed in our Declaration of Allegiance. When he called us to war again, we answered.’

‘A matter of loyalty, then.’

‘As you say,’ she repeated. ‘The war is no clean-cut matter away from Terra. Rumours fly over who is the betrayer and who is the betrayed. Worlds and battles are named with no knowledge of why they were held, lost or fought. The Iron Hands sought to destroy our allies in the Third Legion. We held to our oaths, fighting for the sons of Prince Fulgrim.’

‘And attacked several Imperial bastions.’

‘A fact I do not deny, Custodian Diocletian. Is this a trial?’

‘Yes, of sorts. So let us speak of regret and punishment, baroness. Tell me what brings a very well-armed, well-supplied two-thirds of House Vyridion from fighting at the side of the Emperor’s Children to surrendering their arms in the skies of Terra?’

‘We were ordered into the field against the remnants of House Kells. We laid siege to their last citadel. Rather than curse us for our treachery as the Tenth Legion had done, they implored us to see reason, transmitting details of the wider war to our hearth-ship. Maps and charts of the collapsing Great Crusade. Reports of other battles. Names of fallen worlds. Word of the Warmaster’s apostasy.’

Diocletian snorted, the sound a mechanical bark through his helm’s vocaliser. ‘And you simply believed them? You weren’t concerned that this was enemy propaganda?’

Jaya felt the threat of anger. ‘We had no way of knowing for certain. One name emerged, again and again, wretched in its terrible possibility.’

‘I can guess that name.’ It was Zephon who spoke, his voice soft. ‘Isstvan.’

Jaya nodded. ‘Isstvan. We could not break the truth apart from the lies. That day we refused to march against Kells. The Emperor’s Children fleet fired upon us as we withdrew. Our support fleet sailed to Highrock with our sacred armours, to return them to the Great Vault. My courtiers and I made the long journey to Terra aboard our empty hearth-ship, with a small contingent of our sacristans.’

Diocletian’s gaze raked across the orderly ranks once more. ‘And when you arrived?’

‘When we arrived, seeking answers, we were imprisoned at once. And there we have remained until you freed us.’

Diocletian shook his head. ‘You must have known execution awaited you on Terra.’

‘Perhaps. We are oathbreakers, thus we knew execution was deserved. Is that why we were being starved?’

Diocletian sighed, but didn’t answer. The Blood Angel did.

‘No,’ Zephon said. ‘That was merely the degeneration of unmonitored servitors. The Palace’s hierarchs are forced to turn their attention to a thousand matters at once, and the breaking down of your servitor jailors was unlikely to have registered at all, until it was far too late.’

Jaya clenched her teeth. Well. That answered that question. She had almost been executed by the stalled processes of disgusting Terran bureaucracy.

‘You were speaking of Terra,’ Diocletian prompted her, ‘and the execution that awaited you.’

‘We knew execution was possible. But the truth awaited us, Custodian, and that meant more than death. Better an honourable end than a life spent wallowing in ignorant treason. We made a choice to risk death rather than become the generation whose entry in the Highrock archives records them as deceived into dishonour.’

Again, Diocletian turned to Kaeria. And again, she nodded. Something in the Oblivion Knight’s eyes made Jaya wonder if the silent sword-maiden was granting permission at all. Surely no one but the Emperor held authority over the Ten Thousand. Perhaps she was offering some subtle advice or judgement instead.

Diocletian turned back to the baroness with a whir of active armour joints. ‘I can offer you a fate you wouldn’t be ashamed to etch into those archives, Baroness D’Arcus. But I will need more than your word. I will need your life. I will need you to march, fight and likely die for the Emperor.’

There was no hesitation at all. ‘Send to Highrock for our sacred armours,’ she replied, ‘and our blood and steel will be the Emperor’s coin to spend until the Imperium’s last breath.’

‘I can’t do that.’

For the first time in all of this madness, Jaya felt the creeping chill of an unease that threatened to become fear. ‘Please explain yourself,’ she said, breathy with restrained panic.

‘You made the right choice,’ Diocletian replied. ‘To bring your war suits here would have risked them being melted down out of hate, or gifted to other houses as war spoil. But we can’t send word to Highrock, baroness. Highrock as you knew it no longer exists. It fell to the Warmaster’s forces mere weeks after you were first imprisoned. A dead world orbits the sun in its place.’

The stunned silence didn’t last long. The unbelievable order and dignity held by the massed ranks slowly dissolved, and the gathered courtiers and tech-adepts became the starving remnants of the Seberekan Isolation Compound once again. Jaya, above all the others, looked ravaged. She fell to her knees, struggling to breathe.

‘The whole world. The whole world.’

‘The whole world,’ Diocletian confirmed. ‘The Emperor’s Children punished you for seeking the truth behind their treachery. They brought fire and ruin to Highrock. Now Third Legion banners wave in the wind above the ashes.’

Jaya was beyond words. The archives of a noble house that had endured the millennia of Old Night, marching to guard the people whose towns clung to the walls of its fortresses. Hundreds of generations of honourable vigil, defending the weak, adhering to oaths, watching over the sacred armours that had been the lifeblood and salvation of Highrock for thousands of years.

Fourteen million people, in freeholds and fortress-towns, across the world.

Gone. All gone.

Failed by House Vyridion, who had not been there to defend them. Whose refusal to fight with the Warmaster’s armies had brought annihilation.

Jaya forced herself to her feet, too hollow to weep. She felt pain in a way starvation hadn’t harmed her, deep and cold and cancerous.

Above them, the engine sounds beyond the clouds drew closer. The sun had almost set now, lingering as a thin sliver, murky with pollution, above the horizon.

‘We… we will need confirmation.’

‘It will be provided to you,’ Diocletian promised. ‘We have orbital picts and surface imagery for you to study, baroness.’

Jaya nodded, unblinking, flensed to her core.

The Oblivion Knight approached her, then. Kaeria met the older woman’s eyes for several long seconds, and the baroness stood before the stare, unflinching.

Kaeria broke the gaze and looked to Diocletian.

‘You’re certain?’ the Custodian replied.

The Oblivion Knight didn’t answer. She returned to her place by the Blood Angel’s side.

Diocletian looked down into the baroness’ eyes. ‘I can offer you the Emperor’s forgiveness,’ he said. ‘And I can offer you revenge.’

Jaya cleared her still-raw throat. ‘I… we… House Vyridion will take both.’

Diocletian’s cold eye-lenses and golden faceplate revealed nothing of his rare admiration for how the human woman fought back her devastating grief. ‘I thought you might. You have a week to prepare. Perhaps ten days. We can spare no longer.’

‘How are we to fight?’ she asked, closing her eyes. ‘How can we serve the Emperor without our sacred armours?’

‘I anticipated those very questions, baroness.’ The sky darkened with the arrival of a bulk lander. Its huge silhouette juddered overhead, great clawed landing gear grinding free of its housings.

‘And here,’ said Diocletian, ‘is your answer.’

Nine In ambition’s shadow / In the mist / Chimaera

Ra scraped an Imperial Army bayonet along his cheek, shaving dark stubble with the spit-wet edge as he watched the input monitors detailing the reports from the last of the outrider forces. The Godspire was heaving with activity as of the last few days, with the Unifiers and their attendant hosts of servitors returned from mapping and repairing the outward tunnels.

Squad after squad of Custodians and Sisters alike were reporting the enemy hordes’ advance, divided now across almost forty principal arterials. Grainy pict-feeds showed the hideous shapes of deformed Titans marching behind swarms of marching legionaries, though these were few in number compared to the endless blurred imagery of warp-born entities spilling through the passages.

Most of the warp’s creatures were repelled by the automated defences established under his predecessors’ ambitious reigns. They had taken their first steps into the webway, originally fighting blade to blade against daemons and devilry, only to turn the defence of the Imperial Dungeon into a gruelling crusade in this secret realm. Now the tide had reached its highest point, and the inevitable backslide was in full effect.

Jasaric, Kadai, Helios. All dead. Slain in the throes of their glorious ambitions, in their assured need to serve the Emperor’s will as they saw fit.

Three artificers worked on Ra’s armour as he watched the feeds, drinking in all the information the screens could offer. He had always made a point of acknowledging their patience and expertise in all the years they had served him; today he barely noticed their existence at all. Acetylene-bright sparks flickered from their tools as they re-fused and reworked the tribune’s battle-worn auramite. He had been out in the tunnels for days himself, overseeing the withdrawals personally and adding his blade to the butchery.

‘Tribune?’ called a Mechanicum serf from his console.

‘Speak.’ Ra didn’t look away from the three dozen screens. He didn’t stop shaving. He didn’t disturb his artificers’ work by turning to face the speaker.

‘Word from Sister-Vigilator Marei Yul.’

‘Relay it.’

The thrall did so at once, augmitting a series of acutely timed clicks – the kind of coded burst from a Sister’s hand-held messenger. For the first time in over a century of life, Ra Endymion winced and held a hand to his half-shaven cheek, drawing away bloody fingers.

Marei was far from the Impossible City when she heard the echolocation chime. The sound was a familiar one after so long dwelling inside the realm of mist-choked tunnels, but its intensity made her skin crawl. She felt it not only in her instruments but humming through the ground, through whatever aether-resistant materials had been used in the webway’s construction by whatever xenos ancients had dreamed it into being.

This was new. She’d never felt the Neverborn in such a way before. Always their manifestations were limited to what she could see, hear and kill.

And there should be silence in this section of tunnels. Rare, blessed silence. The evacuated tunnels were stripped of Mechanicum workers and materials, but Marei had appealed to Commander Krole and Tribune Endymion to remain in the tunnels of western descension, for suspicion of the warp entity that had devoured the Protector and its honour guard of war robots navigating their way here.

Map triangulation was its own special nightmare in the extra-dimensional realm in which they waged war, but the officers of the Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood had several possible delineated paths for the creature to take, given the tunnels it had so far retreated from in apparent wounded haste. Marei’s case had been simple and clear: the creature was testing the automated defences in several dozen tunnels, seeking a way into the city ahead of the enemy horde. Assassination, she reasoned, not warfare, was its intent. If the automated defences continued to herd it into a path of least resistance, that made one route far likelier than any others. First the tunnels of western descension, then the region called the Bone Garden, where the husks of eldar war machines lay in pitiful state.

Marei had volunteered, with Custodian Hyaric Ostianus, to lead the outriders charged with finding the creature and destroying it if possible. Ra had even sent Titan support, one of Ignatum’s precious engines, striding alongside their small warband of grav-vehicles.

The echolocation chime sounded again. Far from here, but webway readings were erratic at best. More than once the Imperials had been confronted by forces that registered as several kilometres away, or chased nothingness that read as an enemy tide.

The first thing she did upon hearing the chime was send a mono-beam spurt to Commander Krole via the thumb-sized message beamer in her belt pouch. Several clicks in one of the Sisterhood’s coded non-verbal languages was all it took, rapidly signifying her position and the imminent threat swifter than a spoken explanation.

The second thing she did was go to Hyaric. The Custodian sat in his saddle, his guardian spear over one shoulder, watching his own hand-held auspex. The great Warhound Titan Ascraeus stood on station nearby, rotating its top half upon its waist axis, panning and scanning, watching and waiting.

Marei appeared next to Hyaric as if she’d been born from the mist. Her transbonded chainmail whispered with her walk. He looked at her, his rent and restitched face grim.

‘My readings cite a single entity,’ he said. ‘Ascraeus’ auspex confirms it. This isn’t the horde.’

Marei and her Fire Wyrms had served alongside Squad Ostianus since their first days within the webway. She had no need to sign; Hyaric could read her as easily as a data-slate.

‘Yes,’ he replied to her expression.

She glanced to the east, to the endless mist of the labyrinthine tunnels that had brought them here.

‘No, remain here and establish a defensive position. We’ll return once we have ascertained the truth of the readings.’

She met his eyes, and then his eye-lenses once he had sealed his helm into place.

‘Jasaric’s death has made Endymion and Commander Krole far too cautious,’ he told her. ‘I appreciate your warning but there’s a world of difference between patience and hesitation, and only one of those is considered virtuous.’

Within moments he was accelerating at a strained whine, the suspensors of his jetbike ululating in protest at the sudden speed. The rest of his squad followed, falling into effortless alignment through ease of habit. They were gone into the mist of the tunnel ahead within the span of a single breath.

Commander Krole’s reply set the message beamer vibrating in Marei’s hand, against her palm. Receipt of Marei’s position and progress, and a warning to redouble her caution.

But that had been an hour ago, when everyone was still alive.

Marei moved through the mist alone, her blade held before in a traditional garde position, embodying the first form in the Principles of Alertness. She stalked rather than walked, careful that her passage wouldn’t disturb the golden fog. Elsewhere within the mist, impossible to know where, she heard the daemon growl. After that came a series of wet cracks and crunches. It was feeding again. If she came upon it now, she might have a chance.

Though now was also her best chance to run.

She found Varujan before long. One of Squad Ostianus’ warriors, she came upon his jetbike first, a clawed thing of tormented wreckage, the sleek eagles broken, the engine ripped apart. The Custodian lay not far from his vehicle, unbreathing, missing both legs and one of his arms. His breastplate and the body beneath was lost to ruination, and his guardian spear was snapped midway down the haft where it had sundered on impact at high speed.

Leaving him untouched, she moved on. A shape loomed in the mist ahead, not a wall as she’d first thought but the fallen form of Ascraeus. She drew nearer to its cockpit, the great metal canine head crooked where its collapse had driven its chin into the ground. The Warhound’s eye windows were shattered, leaving the war machine’s corpse staring sightlessly out into the shrouded webway. Marei could make out the silhouette of one of the crew, slumped in a restraint throne.

‘Sister…’

She moved closer still, drawn by the voice from the ruptured cockpit. Two of the crew were dead, bent and slouched at unnatural angles. The surviving steersman had removed his helm and stared towards her. Closer now, she could hear the shallow, swift rhythm of his breathing.

‘Which… which one are you?’ He spoke in a whisper, seemingly from shock and his wounds rather than tact.

She signed her name with one hand and gestured for him to remain quiet.

He didn’t obey. Both of his eyes were black with dilation. ‘Where is it? Where did it go? Help. Please. Help me, Sister.’

Marei looked into the ruined, slanted cockpit. The steersman’s control panel had twisted in the impact, crushing his legs and trapping him in his throne. Leaning in, Marei saw his malformed shins and broken ankles wedged within the wreckage. The pain must have been immense. The fact he wasn’t screaming was either a testament to his resolve or to the depths of his shock.

He was dead whether she freed him from the debris or not, and she couldn’t even do that without industrial cutting tools.

‘Sister,’ he said again, louder this time. Marei pressed a gloved finger to her lips, to no avail. ‘Help me,’ the steersman repeated. Elsewhere in the mist, she heard the daemon cease its feast and grunt, sniffing the air.

‘Sist–’ He spoke no more. The steersman stared at her for several trembling seconds, unable to do anything more than gurgle breathlessly around the blade lancing through his neck. Marei pulled her longsword free of his throat, letting him fall limp.

The daemon moved nearby. She heard the creaking and crackling of its stretching limbs, smelt the rancid mammalian stink of its spread wings.

She moved again, staying close to the downed Titan, drawing her incinerator pistol. The dead Warhound wasn’t silent; its internals still ticked and clicked as they cooled, its joints still gave infrequent creaks and scrapes as the machine settled into what would be its grave.

It had struck Ascraeus first. With the Custodians still setting up a perimeter and the Sisters of the Fire Wyrms Cadre taking up defensive positions, a bolt of winged darkness had dropped from the featureless sky, landing atop the Warhound with an insane screech of claws tearing through consecrated metal. The plaintive whine of rent armour plating and the hammer-hiss of bursting pistons ringing through the mist had made the outcome clear even before the immense crash of the Titan’s collapse. Reactor-guts and spinal stanchions flew wide from the creature’s plunging talons, tumbling through the mist and resonating with metallic bangs as they spilled across the ground.

Marei could scarcely see the thrashing creature’s outline. It seemed out of phase with human senses – there and not there. As much as it was harrowing its way through Ascraeus’ armour plating with great swings of its claws, its very presence seemed to rend corporeal matter apart, leaving reinforced ceramite and adamantium as fluid as protein mush.

It took to the sky, kicking off from the toppling Warhound, and vanished once more into the gold.

The next time it landed, it had started on the Sisters.

Marei thumbed her pistol to a thin jet setting, intending to get close enough that a full spread of flame would be useless. As she reached the Warhound’s rear, ducking beneath one of the ungainly raised clawed feet, she heard the thrum of active power armour.

Marei turned, sword aimed at Hyaric’s face. The steel point was a finger’s breadth from his nose. His stitched face was a mapwork of fresh bruising and blood spatters. His eyes, at least, were undamaged and clear. Judging by the damage to his gorget, the daemon had torn his helmet clean free when it had almost killed him.

She lowered her blade and stared at him. She kept nothing from her expression. Relief, unease, her belief on where they should move – it was all present upon her features.

He didn’t reply. He didn’t even acknowledge her meaning. That was how she knew.

Sister and Custodian moved in the same moment, both blades coming up as if in reflection of one another. The Custodian thrust forwards with his spear, the Sister spun aside and parried the blade with an echoing cry of steel on steel.

The creature wearing Hyaric’s corpse swung uselessly at her, the unpowered blade whistling through the air. Fury lit its dead eyes, the daemon enraged at its own sluggishness.

Marei cracked the pommel of her blade into Hyaric’s face, shattering the already crooked nose with a snap. She was already moving away, twisting and spinning, levelling her pistol and disgorging a slick torrent of liquid flame.

It wasn’t enough. The guardian spear pounded through her stomach and burst from her back, driving deep into the layered armour plating of the downed Warhound behind her. Her weapons fell from her hands, dropping into the mist.

Pinned in place, Marei still struggled to pull herself forwards, dragging her impaled body along the spear’s haft, inch by agonising inch. Gutting herself for the chance to get free.

Hyaric stood there, watching her with a loose jaw showing a spread of lengthening teeth.

‘Anathema’s Daughter,’ he said aloud, in a voice that was too wet and slack to be his own, the unformed tone of a child practising speech.

Marei’s leeched strength would carry her no further. Blood ran hot and dark from her mouth, cascading in bitter torrents down her breastplate each time she tried to breathe. Weakening hands clutched at the message beamer at her belt, only for it to almost fall from nerveless fingers. She thumbed a brief code before dropping it, the messenger following her weapons down into the ground fog.

Her last thought, as Hyaric stepped closer, was that she would still be alive when he started eating her. Fortunately, she was wrong.

Ten The way home / Archimandrite / Mistress of the Black Fleet

Hieronyma, that redoubtable archpriestess of the Ordo Reductor, didn’t scream even when they drilled out her eyes. She was a war-priestess of the Unmaker God, responsible for the nerve-stripping torture of countless thousands of prisoners and criminals, binding them into holy robotic shells through sacred rituals. Given her role and authority, she had deadened most of her nerves along with her conscience. It was simply the way of things.

The procedure was never going to be painless. Having been responsible for much of the schematics that her reforging was operating from, she was well aware of the torment involved. Willingly she made the sacrifice, offering up her flesh for transmogrification and ascension. Her operator-surgeons expected her to show her pain; it had been calculated in the factors of reforging, which made her even more eager to show no reaction at all. She couldn’t stop the tics and twitches of dead nerves briefly rekindled to life, but she could at least prevent herself screaming aloud.

She had done so with a minor and forgivable deception, however. Before the surgeries began, she had removed her vocal cords during her isolated preparations. The only sounds she could make at all were sighing, weakling huffs.

She had to be awake for the process itself, so her neural activity could be carefully monitored. The physical implants were only a portion of her ascension. The mental implantation was of greater importance.

Arkhan Land was present by virtue of expertise, if not by rank. At his side was Diocletian, the Custodian present by virtue of the fact no one had the authority to tell him to go anywhere else. They remained outside the surgery chamber, with Diocletian watching the operation taking place and Land watching the data-feeds flooding into Hieronyma’s mind.

Seven monitors, each fed from separate cogitators, spilled reams of code across their flickering faces. Land stared, scratching his bald head, doing his very best to follow what he was seeing unfold. He had provided the schematics and references for the machinery necessary to cradle unequalled degrees of lore in a semi-biological brain. He had added recovered plans and schema from his personal collection to weaponise the tech-priestess beyond anything her ordo had seen before. It had been with a heavy heart he’d passed over the forbidden texts from his deepest excavations, but truth be told that weight came with no shortage of curiosity. If all went according to plan, those weapon systems would be instrumental in retaking Sacred Mars.

Now all he could do was wait and see if Hieronyma survived.

He doubted she would. Land was under no illusions that she would come through the surgery itself – a staggeringly unlikely outcome – let alone survive long enough to lead them back to Mars via this so-called Aresian Path. Given his doubts, one might then ask why he had agreed to the Archimandrite Venture at all. The answer was deliciously, ambitiously simple. Agreement with the Fabricator General’s desperate hopes had been the only way to learn all of the details pertaining to the Emperor’s Great Work.

And oh, the things Land was learning.

Much as a painting was formed not only of pigments and water and parchment, but also the individual hairs that made up a brush and the years of expertise at the artist’s fingertips, the many layered codes running through the cogitators amounted to one thing.

A map.

A map in impossible dimensions of a realm that couldn’t exist. A map that was being poured piecemeal into Hieronyma’s mind.

He smiled as he watched the data flood. ‘Poured into’ is the wrong term, Land thought. More like ‘etched upon’.

The pain must have been monumental, even to her stripped nervous system. Having a world’s worth of data inloaded like this would send reason screaming from the mortal consciousness. Frankly, he was impressed she was still alive four hours into the procedure. If she survived it would be unlikely that Hieronyma would be able to entertain any other thoughts in her skull. The map would swallow her consciousness and all of her concentration. It was simply that vast.

Through the viewing window, he caught sight of Hieronyma thrashing on the surgical table. The attendants – the Fabricator General among them – were bleating and murmuring about convulsions. The immense metal limbs of Hieronyma’s new form crashed and twitched. A huge three-barrelled energy cannon rotated on her forearm, trying to fire, whirring in starvation. A tremor of the nervous system most likely, or a randomly firing synapse in the brain. He doubted she was genuinely trying to kill the surgeons attending her, though… Well. With what was going on in her mind, one couldn’t be sure.

Land took no particular joy in the pain she must be feeling, but nor did her torment exactly inspire him to the precious heights of sympathy. She chose this fate, after all. The yearning of homesickness had driven her to it, which Land could understand – and even consider admirable, in its rather petulant earnestness – but she’d also been led by her faith in the Fabricator General, and that was something the technoarchaeologist considered endlessly mystifying.

He returned his attention to the map’s code, partly due to the worry it would stop flowing once Hieronyma died. He had to learn what he could while there was still time.

The heart of the map was a city. It had catacombs, which were a laby­rinth with several hundred passages abruptly severed or otherwise unfinished, and thousands of other routes leading out from its edges like capillary veins. The city existed in three hundred and sixty degrees, as if it covered the entire inside of a great shaft or tunnel. It called to mind the tales of Old Earth space installations that rolled in the void to create artificial gravity, though this city was ultimately motionless. It merely existed, static, at every angle, including the impossible ones.

Nor were the city and its catacombs the entirety of the map. They weren’t even the majority of it. From the city’s edges, thousands of capillary tunnels branched out in a seemingly endless and random network, following no sense of human order and leading to no specific destinations.

Land could grasp all of this. That wasn’t the problem.

No, the problem was the way the map evolved even as it was being imprinted within Hieronyma’s mind. It shifted and changed moment by moment, as if the realm it was mapping had only the loosest relationship with the corporeal flow of time. Since the expeditionary teams had started surveying this hidden region, thousands upon thousands of subtle shiftings had occurred, as if the labyrinth reacted to something – some outward pressure – and sought to stabilise itself. And all of the shifts, in excruciating detail, were being scarred onto Hieronyma’s brain.

The map-code’s intricacies would have been on the edge of mortal comprehension even in three dimensions. In four, it was almost laughably, terrifyingly fascinating.

In the surgical chamber, Hieronyma’s mouth worked in silent futility. Land spared a moment to watch Kane injecting her with something pale blue and milky, something that in no way lessened her thrashing and completely failed to stabilise her spiking vital signs. As her head bucked, its bevy of mechanical replacements bared without her hood, Land saw her staring through the chamber’s window, right at him. Her eye-lenses revolved and refocused. He was certain he detected something pleading in her machine-gaze. And, perhaps, something of regret?

Land looked back to the monitors. On and on the data streamed.

Soon the cartography and chronology were joined by archival data that defied belief, let alone possibility. Scans and analyses made by the Unifier-caste tech-priests, quantifying the nature of the realm in which they worked, and… and the foes they faced.

Land’s eyes widened. His mouth slowly, almost delicately, parted and hung open. In the chamber, the thrashing, writhing machine that Hieronyma was becoming suddenly fell still, motionless but for her trembling.

‘Teeth of the Cog,’ said Land. Awe softened his curse to a whisper.

His eyes flickered. A realm of psychically resistant passageways. A realm that existed not within the warp but in spite of it. A realm that allowed travel across vast distances without ever once entering the reach of the warp’s unreliable and treacherous tendrils. A realm that shifted as part of its resistance to the warp’s corrosive touch, realigning itself to remain immune.

A web. The webway.

His eyes flickered. A realm flooded by warp entities. Beings formed from hatred and madness and emotion. Creatures born of every emotion ever felt, taking form and twisted behind the veil of reality. Monsters formed of the warp’s matter and flooding into this ancient, precious sanctuary.

His eyes flickered. A realm shattered by Magnus the Red. A realm gouged open with lethal wounds in its protective psychic sheath. A realm sundered by immense releases of sorcerous power that allowed the infection of these beings – the daemons – to spread.

His eyes flickered, shining with the threat of tears. Vulnerabilities! Weaknesses in the process! Signs of decay in the alien-made sections of the webway, and worse, the flaws of incomplete human knowledge in the Mechanicum-built sections. They weren’t psychically sheathed, as the ancient and original structures were. The human-engineered halls of the endless labyrinth were protected by…

His eyes flickered, and now he wept. A great machine. A machine of such power and purity as to defy mortal thought. A throne of gold, built to house the Emperor’s power. The Omnissiah’s Throne, the seat of the Machine-God Himself, harnessing and focusing His psychic might into the webway, bolstering the Mechanicum-made conduits. A soul-engine that roared power into this secret and sacred realm, shielding the Mechanicum’s iron and steel against the daemons clawing against it.

His eyes flickered and streamed with awed tears, just as Ancient Terran tales told of men and women weeping before the faces of their false gods. The abandonment of the Great Crusade. The appointment of Horus as Warmaster. The Emperor’s retreat into the Imperial Dungeon. The treachery of Magnus the Red. The Custodian Guard. The Silent Sisterhood. The Unifiers. The War in the Webway. The Emperor’s Great Work. The magnum opus that was the very reason the Omnissiah had reached up into the night sky and united the two empires of Mars and Terra. It was for this. It was all for this. It was all for this.

And – through the disobedience of a primarch, the ignorance of a weapon that moronically believed itself a man – the magnum opus stood upon the precipice of failure.

His eyes closed. Finally, as Hieronyma wheezed her last breath upon the table where she had been promised rebirth – at long last Arkhan Land understood.

‘I must come with you…’ he said, turning to Diocletian. The need in his voice bordered upon begging. He gripped the Custodian’s bracer, staring up at the warrior’s impassive faceplate. ‘I must join you in the Great Work.’

The Custodian had stood in silence during the entirety of the surgery. He moved for the first time, turning to look down at the technoarchaeologist through emotionless eye-lenses. The whine of flat-lining vital signs echoed in the air around both men.

‘She keeps dying,’ was Diocletian’s reply. ‘You said this was the preparatory phase of the surgery.’

‘Custodian, please…’

Diocletian looked back into the chamber, his features clear of any emotion.

Something shivered inside the priestess’ skull. It curled and uncurled with revolting physicality, a tendril of prehensile ice dredging her brain matter. Its tremors caused no pain, but the pressure of its presence was the burden of high gravity applied directly to her skull and spine. She felt hunched, compacted, and the moment she tried to stretch to free herself was the moment she realised she wasn’t breathing.

Not only that she wasn’t, she couldn’t. Heaving in to breathe met a wall of solid cold barricading her throat. Her lungs didn’t even twitch. Her body didn’t answer her urges to rise, to fight, to thrash, to do anything at all, to breathe, breathe, breathe.

‘Pulmonary instability,’ said a voice. Distant. Dispassionate. Sacred in its serenity. Without identity in the reddening black of her blindness. ‘Mark the ninth instance. Illuminate her.’

Code flared through her reddening senses, numerals written in fire upon the wet meat of her mind. Its meaning eluded her.

She screamed in mouthless, breathless silence.

‘Pulmonary spasms,’ came another voice, just as cold, just as enlightened.

‘Teeth of the Cog. She is trying to breathe again.’

‘Illuminate her.’

Acid-numerals raked across the inside of her skull again. For all the pain of them, they were more distant now, harder to see, impossible to read.

Strangling on her own silence, drowning in uncolour, she fell silently screaming away from everything.

‘Illumi–’

The tendril uncurled slowly through the silt and sludge of her mind, coaxing her back. She felt slow, dense, her blood and thoughts alike turned sludgy with toxins.

Dazed, drained and strangled, she fought to open her eyes.

‘Reactivation,’ said a voice from beyond.

I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe. I can’t breathe!

‘Convulsions. Pulmonary spasms. Mark the tenth inst–’

‘Illuminate her before–’

The words weren’t fire or acid this time, they were pain itself. Scrawled directly onto the inside of her skull with talons of code.

She stared at them. She felt them. She knew them.

She stopped trying to drag air through the blockage in her throat.

‘Stabilising.’

‘Praise the Omnissiah.’

She felt air whisper into her system, then flood her, cold and purified and rich in as much incense as oxygen. She could only breathe when she didn’t try to breathe. When she tried to work lungs she no longer had, she overrode the automated systems that respired for her.

‘Awakening.’

She opened her eyes.

The world exploded in red-stained holy light. Target locks saturated her vision. Prayer text and sacred code bathed her sight in layers of algebraic mandalas. Beneath what she could see was what she knew, a latticework map of impossible spatial distances that defied conventional physics. She shut that madness away and turned from the knowledge for now, needing to focus only on the immediacy of her surroundings.

Hooded faces and surgical servitors looked down at her. No, not down. Up. She had thought she would be lying on her back, but the faces tilted towards hers were below her. She was bound to a standing gurney.

Bindings cracked away in sweet hisses of released air pressure. Grinding machinery lowered her the half-metre to the ground as the last cabling snapped free.

Behind the worshipful surgery-priests and their mindlocked cyborg slaves, a heavily augmented corpse lay upon another table. The cadaver was ostensibly female, headless, gored through autopsy, medicae drilling and organ harvesting.

She knew that corpse. Even headless, its remains were brutally familiar.

Hieronyma, the priestess thought. Me. I.

Her clawed foot ground down on the polished metal floor. It shook the chamber.

‘Archimandrite,’ said one of the hooded priests. Tall. Many-armed. Savagely weaponised. Zagreus Kane Divine Bishopric of the Cult Mechanicum Fabricator General of Sacred Mars my lord my master – the knowledge was there once she accessed the data-stream, albeit with a slight delay.

‘Fabricator General,’ she said. Her voice, even to her own ears, was almost wholly human. A vox-simulation of her biological tone. At the sound of her voice, several of the adepts went to their knees, murmuring a mono-note ohm prayer, linking their knuckles in the sign of the cog.

‘Do you know?’ Kane asked, rumbling forwards on his tracked lower half. ‘Do you see the way back to Mars?’

Her second step shook the chamber, the same as the first. As did the third. As did the fourth.

As the weeks passed after the Archimandrite’s rebirth, Diocletian found himself alone more often than not. Kaeria was gone. He knew not where, only that she was dealing with the secret intricacies of her silent order elsewhere in the Palace. He had little to say to Baroness D’Arcus and her knightly kindred, nor did he find much worth in the stoic computations of the Mechanicum’s various overseers.

Two souls consistently sought out his company: the pleading figure of Arkhan Land, and the serenely lost presence of Dominion Zephon. Now that the Archimandrite Venture had succeeded, Diocletian had no further use for the former. He would likely allow the technoarchaeologist to join the expedition back to the Impossible City, even if only on the rare chance the explorator’s knowledge would prove useful. And as for the Blood Angel, the so-called Bringer of Sorrow would serve well enough merely by accompanying them into the webway when the time came.

It was the delay that wore at the Custodian’s patience. The Mechanicum’s requisitioned supplies were already proceeding through in a convey stream, thousands of battle-servitors, tracked conveyors, robots and even the rare sicarii funnelled through to their fates within the Great Work. The first shipments would already have reached Ra by now, reinforcing the Impossible City.

And yet Diocletian waited. Impatient, but without any show of temper. House Vyridion drew ever closer to war readiness; the Archimandrite was adjusting to its new form and its enhanced cognition. Things were proceeding as expected, even if not with a swiftness Diocletian would have preferred.

His place was to oversee every item of requisition, and he wouldn’t return to Calastar without doing so. He felt no frustration in doing his duty, only the vague concern that he could better be serving the Emperor elsewhere. Next to Ra on the walls of Calastar, perhaps, or slowing the foe in the outer tunnels, making them pay for each metre of misted ground they took. Something proactive. Something where he felt as though he were contributing to the defence of his master’s vision.

The one thing he was not, however, was bored. He spent much of his time isolated within the Tower of Hegemon, the command core of the Legio Custodes’ efforts in the Emperor’s defence. Here Diocletian watched the continual streams of population data, materiel transport, and the aerial and orbital traffic entering and exiting the Solar System, maintained by bank upon bank of cogitators and life-bonded savant-serfs in robes of Imperial scarlet. These data-artisans – each one tattooed with the aquila – dwelled within the Watchroom, where only those lifesworn to the Emperor were permitted. Rather than the dregs enslaved and augmented by the Machine Cult of Mars, none of the Ten Thousand’s serfs were cyborged to their stations or bound to live and die in their life support cradles. These men and women had sworn themselves to the All-Seeing Eye of the Emperor’s Custodians; they wore jewellery of sculpted bone made from the bodies of their mothers and fathers who served before them, and of the grandparents before them. In time their mortal remains would be harvested and ritual trinkets of their own bones gifted to their specifically bred children. To serve the Custodian Guard wasn’t merely a life sentence, it was an eternal, generational one.

Much of the Watchroom’s information centred on the Palace itself, with Unified Biometric Verification feeds forming a living web of several million souls entering and exiting the Palace’s myriad districts.

Diocletian watched this calculation of life taking place. Perhaps another soul might have seen something harmonic or musical in the display. Even among the Ten Thousand, such vigils usually took note of the hundreds of potential infiltration threats that might somehow slip past even the Imperial Fists. Yet Diocletian saw something unexpected in the patternless mess.

He saw diminishing supplies even as Terra itself was broken down for materials, even as the Himalazia Mountains themselves were ground down for rock and ore. He saw fewer and fewer convoy fleets reaching the Solar System as the war raged on. He saw Terra strangled beneath the weight of off-world refugees, devouring their way through ever-diminishing resources. He saw fewer and fewer successful attempts to land reinforcements on Mars or bring materiel back through the Imperial blockade. He saw all of this written as plainly as the eight hundred and seventy-one words of his full name, laser-etched upon the inside of his breastplate, as familiar to him as the weight of the spear in his hands.

Defeat. He was looking at defeat. The rebels were winning the war. Though their conquests across the galaxy were far from absolute, Horus didn’t need wholesale victory among the stars; the Warmaster needed only to amass enough support on the way to Terra and deny Imperial reinforcement reaching the Solar System. And, overwhelmingly, these ugly calculations painted a portrait of the Warmaster doing just that.

Diocletian spent several days immersing himself in the reports and cogitations, seeking a wider view of the escalating conflict. It was in studying the movements of the rarest of all Imperial resources – the Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisterhood not currently deployed in the webway – that he discovered something tentative in the millions of cogitations. Something in the pattern was flawed, and it gnawed at Diocletian. Silent sections of code revealed shadows in the streaming figures. Equations were buried in the cogitations that returned half-truths as answers.

Data deletions? he first wondered. But no, no. These weren’t holes in the pattern, merely patches of occlusion. Shrouded, not deleted. Hidden, not forbidden.

Diocletian followed the patterns, watching them unfurl with a savant’s understanding of mathematic and algebraic principles. At first it seemed the serfs were themselves ignorant of the patterns, but soon enough he realised this wasn’t so: they were clearly aware, they were simply not flagging the curious elements for archival examination.

He saw fleets of ships in the numbers. We have an entire fleet out there, scattered across three segmentums. Sailing the stars, avoiding the war.

And more than that. Displacement calculations and void logistical data suggested these ships would descend on loyal worlds in the days and weeks before Horus’ forces committed to an invasion, yet they extracted nothing of any military significance, they landed no reinforcements and they evacuated none of the established regent-governments put in place by the Great Crusade.

What, then, are they doing?

None of the vessels were accounted for in the Great Crusade’s tallies, each one unattached to any expeditionary fleets. Nor were their dealings translated off-world, with no word transmitted by common routes, nothing from the divisions of the Astra Telepathica, and–

There.

Word had come in the form of a cursory transmission by a modest rogue trader fleet returning from the spiral arm of the Halo Stars. Her family’s armada had been negotiating for orbital resupply above the capital city of some nameless backwater still going by its allocated colonial code, when one of these logistically occluded vessels showed itself. Despite its obvious Imperial allegiance, it had refused all communication, completed several planetary operations, and left orbit for the system’s Mandeville point without illuminating the rogue trader fleet as to its purpose.

The trader scion’s report concluded with a message from the planet itself, stating what little dealings its provincial quorum government had managed to have with the ships’ commander, including the vessel’s intent.

‘They came for our psychically attuned citizens.’

Diocletian breathed a disbelieving laugh. A Black Ship. The Black Ships of the Silent Sisterhood are sailing across three segmentums, un­escorted, hiding from battle and harvesting psykers on an unprecedented scale. And they are doing it practically unseen by anyone, oath-binding whole governments to silence.

Once he knew what ships were causing the flaws in the galactic pattern, the calculations solved themselves. Dozens of similarly shrouded equations noted Black Ships in Terra’s orbit, committing shuttles, loaders and transports of cargo to the planet’s surface without registering upon terrestrial traffic. And dozens more were drawing towards Terra from across the galaxy.

Diocletian had a fair suspicion of just where Kaeria had gone. He turned to a nearby serf at a cogitation console and narrowed his eyes.

‘You.’

The worker halted but didn’t look away from his screen. Numeric runes flashed upon his unblinking eyes. ‘Golden One?’

‘Arrange for a vox-link to the Magadan Orbital Construct. I wish to speak with the Mistress of the Black Fleet.’

It came as no surprise to Diocletian when, two hours later, he saw a familiar figure on the crackling hololith connection. Kaeria stood at the side of a robed and cowled fellow Sister, the former armed and armoured just as Diocletian had last seen her, the latter with her eyes hidden by the fall of her hood. The Mistress of the Black Ships wore leather gloves with reinforced knuckles and dagger-length knives for fingernails. In the rippling holo image, she seemed to be clicking them together.

‘Mistress Varonika,’ he greeted the spindly creature clad in black, adding ‘Sister Kaeria,’ a moment later.

The older Sister wove an elaborately formal greeting with her brutal finger-blades. Kaeria offered no more than a nod.

Diocletian wasted no time. The door to the communications suite was sealed. He was entirely alone, bathed in blue holo-light. ‘What is the Black Fleet doing?’

Both Sisters signed a reply at once, curt without rudeness.

‘And what is the Unspoken Sanction?’

Another brief reply. One that Diocletian had expected.

‘Forbidden,’ Diocletian replied. Well, the Sisters of Silence were entitled to their secrets in the Emperor’s service. Never would they act without the Emperor’s command.

‘Where are you housing these harvested psykers?’ he asked.

Again, a curt reply from both Sisters. Forbidden.

‘Be that as it may,’ the Custodian replied, ‘you cannot ship tens of thousands of psykers to Terra and hide them indefinitely. Have you taken their sustenance into consideration? Half of the Throneworld’s granaries already stand hollow. Water farms across the Afrik Swathe stand mute in rainless thirst.’

He expected another blunt, curt response. To his mild surprise, Varonika replied by signing a longer reply with both hands. Diocletian could almost imagine the click-clack of her bladed talons meeting on several of the words.

‘Then I will press no more on the matter,’ said the Custodian. ‘But in the Emperor’s name, tell me whether I might expect reinforcements in the webway as a result of your scheming.’

The merest flicker of the older Sister’s finger-blades was enough to betray her hesitation. She signed a negative response, but Diocletian found her hesitation intriguing.

‘Very well. Am I to assume you will be returning when I lead House Vyridion and the Archimandrite’s convoy into the Dungeon, Kaeria?’

The Oblivion Knight bowed her head once more, more formally this time. He needed no sign language to see her respect in the reply, nor any further explanation to note her refusal. She was staying there.

‘So be it. Good eve, Sisters.’ Diocletian terminated the link and exhaled slowly. He knew better than to pry further into whatever secrets they sought so ardently to protect. If they required his aid, they would ask for it.

The Custodian turned back to the closest bank of monitors, resuming the staring absorption of limitless, scrolling data.

II Cargo

This is not now. This is then. This is when she was caged away from everything she had ever known.

Skoia sits on the floor, breathing slowly, listening to the voices of those trapped here with her. They don’t speak often; few of them know one another and no one has any answers to offer to the others. Sometimes there are brief outbursts of fury that begin with the aggressors beating their hands bloody on the sealed metal doors and end with them sinking, weak-limbed and no freer, to the floor. Others give in to despair and wail, or weep quietly alone, which achieves just as much – just as little – as angry defiance.

At first there had been a sense of community and shared suffering, when the villagers and townspeople came to realise they were all ancestor-speakers and witch-priests, taken in a harvest tithe up into the belly of an Imperial spaceship. But the days became weeks, then months, and the cargo hold grew cramped with more and more people – these spoke in different languages and came from different worlds, and soon enough everyone was weak and weary enough to see out their suffering alone.

‘Astropaths,’ another man declares. He, too, is from another world. ‘Astropaths. We are to be trained as astropaths. You will see. You shall see. Astropaths.’ He repeats the word as if it were talismanic. Skoia isn’t certain if he seeks to reassure the others or convince himself. Whatever the truth, she has no conception of his meaning. He doesn’t answer when anyone asks him.

The spirits are silent, have been silent since she first looked up and saw the dead-eyed woman above her back in the forest. Not once has Skoia heard their whispers, perhaps because they are the ghosts of her own planet and she’s far from home, or perhaps because she has been severed from the Wheel of Life by the soulless women who crew this vessel.

Servitors bring them their food in strange sealed pouches. The food is a rendered brown paste that tastes of nothing natural. Skoia has to force it down with a wash of the powdery water that tastes of machinery and recyc-processing.

The more violent souls among the captive community have tried to kill the servitors before, but several of the soulless women now stand watch each ration hour. They remain by the doors with their blades held in their hands and bulky pistols that eternally sigh with the threat of breathing fire. Approaching them is impossible. Anyone who tries is wracked with cramps and sickness, vomiting onto the deck, seemingly poisoned for hours afterwards. One man collapsed and didn’t wake for three days.

‘Devils,’ some of the captives call the eagle-tattooed women. ‘Banshees.’ ‘Husks.’ ‘Undead.’ Each culture has its own words for the creatures that have captured them.

‘They have no sixth sense,’ explains one of the others in a bizarrely accented variation of Gothic. Skoia can follow his words if she concentrates. ‘No anima. No psychic capability.’

She looks away, saying nothing. His words are without meaning or relevance. She knows the only truth that matters, that these women have no souls.

The ship often shakes around them, buffeted by the eddies of its voyage through the galaxy. It does so now, but more violently than ever before. Nervous voices begin to clamour. Wide eyes meet other open gazes. The turbulence is enough to send the captives sprawling. Some of them collide with the iron walls, and their voices rise higher, bordering upon panic in proto- or post-Gothic languages Skoia can’t understand. Those that she can are mumbling of crashes and attacks and their own helplessness.

‘We are not crashing,’ she says aloud. The men and women nearest to her turn and stare. She swallows her own fear in the face of theirs. ‘I think… I think we are landing.’

Eleven Ossuary / A shattered silence / He will live

They laid the trap in the region known as the Ossuary. Only hours distant from the Impossible City and its main arterial, the Garden of Bones existed in a modest span of the webway where the tunnel walls and ceilings pressed in with vanished into the omnipresent mist. If Calastar was a fallen eldar city, the Ossuary was a ruined monument to that worthless race.

‘We only have one chance at this,’ Ra had said at a gathering of leaders in the Godspire.

Nishome Alvarek, appearing via hololith and clad in her full Ignatum wargear as she sat upon her princeps throne on the command deck of the Scion of Vigilant Light, had resisted the choice of ambush site. It was too small for her Titan to walk, and she had insisted that her Warlord’s weapons would be more than capable of destroying the creature in open battle.

‘Your zealotry is invaluable,’ Ra began. Her perspective had been gently argued down: an ambush was critical and it had to be handled with meticulous care. The larger tunnels allowed too easy an opportunity for the creature to escape or get past the Imperial line. ‘You will stay and oversee operations within the Impossible City,’ Ra had decided.

‘Do you seek to appease me with charitable morsels of honour, Endymion?’

Ra had forced a smile and said nothing. Princeps Alvarek had chuckled, letting the matter lie.

Commander Krole had signed her fervent avowal for Ra’s plan, as had her underofficers.

Zhanmadao, one of the Tharanatoi Terminator caste, had noted that the creature remained tentative, seeking easy ingress rather than a frontal siege. There would be no better time, he reasoned, than now. It had been herded far enough, by fortune if not by intent.

Ra had nodded, agreed and let fly the gunships.

The Ossuary was an aisle, a narrow tunnel path fit for alien processions back when the failed eldar empire had still enjoyed events worth celebrating. Either side of the main roadway, nothing but organic powder residue and gemstone dust remained of whatever botanical and crystalline wonders had once grown in sorcery-touched beauty. Now the misty landscape was given over to broken statuary and the wraithbone husks of unpowered eldar automata. It was as if a culture had brought its funereal artistry here to be forgotten, left in this ill-maintained route of the vast web.

The Unifiers had spent little time here, initially reporting brief and tense encounters with eldar pilgrims and that species’ kaleidoscopic high priests and priestesses, yet considering that the eldar were known to still use the webway, they had judiciously and fervently avoided almost all Imperial expansion. Many among the Ten Thousand who had ventured deeper into the web suspected the abruptly fused passageways or sealed gateways led to eldar craftworlds, and the aliens were barring human entry into their far-flung domains. What it must it cost them to seal themselves away from their own means of travelling across the galaxy, however, none could guess.

Ra had originally expected to encounter the eldar a great deal as the Imperial vanguard ventured beyond the Mechanicum’s portions of the webway. Instead he found them recalcitrant and furtive, ghosting back rather than engaging, often sealing themselves away, even to the degree of damaging the webway to enforce their isolation.

The Ossuary was one such mystery. It seemed to be some xeno-logic amalgamation of graveyard and scrapyard, almost in the form of a refuse tunnel. None knew why it existed. Did the eldar not remake and reuse their wraithbone via the sacred art of bonesinging? Was this a deliberate abandonment of tainted material, discarding resources that were flawed in a manner indecipherable to the human eye? Or was it merely a monument to loss, and thus a place the eldar were unwilling to desecrate with even their own presence?

He loathed the unknown, even as he and his Custodian kindred were trained to react and adapt to it, perhaps better than any other living beings.

Ra had studied the eldar in depth, as had all of the Ten Thousand. A wise warrior’s creed was to know your enemy, but the Custodian Guard lived their lives to an extreme beyond desiring typical insight into their foes. They pushed themselves cognitively as much as physically, learning the languages, cultures and histories of their enemies in order to attain an almost enlightened sense of understanding with every one they faced. All in order to counter and oppose them; to stand against their foes and anticipate every action, answering with commensurate, consummate reaction. It wasn’t enough to be able to stop an enemy from doing something – purity of purpose and perfection in duty lay in knowing what they would do before they did it, and what the perfect response would be. By necessity that meant knowing when and why actions would be undertaken at all.

Yet this mindset held little rigidity. Almost nothing was codified. Lore was gathered not only to predict patterns but also to create a fluid sense of potential and awareness. Perceiving potential threats didn’t mean adhering to formulaic responses.

There were civilisations in the galaxy, human and alien alike, that had known little but the savagery of Legion conquest or Imperial Army compliance, yet the warriors of the Ten Thousand could speak their local tongues and recite the virtues and pitfalls of their historical military leaders, with deep insight into the cultures’ characters. All done in service to protecting the most powerful and important soul who had ever lived.

It was what galled Ra more than anything else when facing the creatures calling themselves Neverborn. These daemons were so varied, so populous, so in flux and so utterly alien that attaining any useful comprehension of them was next to impossible.

The silence of the Ossuary was shattered with the daemon’s arrival. It was no longer alone; it led a shrieking, roaring swarm of its lessers, creatures that had started flocking to its leavings, like the carrion-feeders that trailed after predators in the wild lands of countless worlds.

Its shape defied sight even when one looked directly towards it. It appeared as a smear across the vision of everyone who sought to follow its advance. Vast wings stood proud of its back, yet it ran on all fours. Its eyes blazed; the warriors who couldn’t describe the creature’s appearance at all could still feel when it turned its attention upon them, even at great distance.

It loped from the mist at the tunnel’s far end a full kilometre distant, a catalyst for the wretches at its back, sustaining these new followers with its bloodshed. Ra watched through magnoculars, applying filter after filter to pierce the preternatural fog with little effect. Flies surrounded its swollen corpus. Tendrils rose from its back like the curved tails of aggravated scorpions.

The creature nosed, hound-like, at the carpet of broken eldar wraithbone covering the tunnel floor. The lesser daemons kept back from its inquisitions, cowed from venturing too close in case they suffered the apex beast’s rage.

Ra lowered his magnoculars and thudded the butt of his spear down against the mist-hidden ground. The sound carried, resonating through the webway’s unearthly material, and the creature’s head rose with inhuman smoothness.

The Custodians at his side did the same, lifting and pounding their spear butts down in continual rhythm. It was the marching song of some ancient army, echoing for the first time here in an alien realm. Only twenty of them stood together; Ra had refused to risk any more of the dwindling Ten Thousand when the true battle was yet to be fought. Twenty warriors, each drawn from different squads. Twenty souls to serve as bait.

The creatures responded with roars of their own, none louder than the winged monster in their vanguard. They began to charge. The Custodians kept hammering their spears down in cold, rhythmic unity.

Ra’s retinal display couldn’t lock on to the approaching figures, but approximations of their shrinking distance ticked along the edges of his eye-lenses. He thumped his spear once more, then whirled the blade forwards, levelling it at the charging daemons. The Custodians at his side did the same, in the very same breaths.

‘Kill it,’ Ra voxed.

The wraithbone cairns shifted, dead eldar machines slipping and tumbling as they were cast aside. Imperial robots rose from their blanketing shrouds of alien bone, their somnolent life sparks kindling at the behest of their Mechanicum masters. Fifty of them lined the narrow avenue, each one standing in ragged harmony with its cousins, cannons whirring and joints snarling. They wore the red plate of Sacred Mars, dented and battered from so many years of fighting away from their stolen home world, but loyal to the last.

They opened up as one. Castellax, Vorax, Kastelan – pattern after pattern, no two weapon arrays truly alike – each of the robots lit the tunnel with an unremitting salvo of fire. Laser weapons flashed and cut. Energy cannons flared and roared. Spheres of seething plasma spat from scorched muzzles. Torrents of flame belched forth. Maxim bolters thundered and darkfire beams daggered into the heaving pack of charging creatures.

The daemons went down as if scythed. Those that fell were flayed and taken apart by the ceaseless barrage. Those that kept running were forced down a gauntlet of relentless firepower. At the Ossuary’s end, Ra and his Custodians fired their spears’ bolters, adding to the cannonade.

Battle tanks rolled forwards from the mist on heavy treads, grinding eldar wraithbone into fragments. The Mechanicum’s transports added their heavy weapons to the assault, as did three of the Ten Thousand’s grav-tanks.

A squad of axe-bearing Sisters leapt from a golden grav-Rhino, led by Jenetia Krole. They moved to take position behind Ra and the Custodians, weapons raised in readiness.

All twenty Custodians reloaded in the same two-heartbeat span. All twenty fired again, straight ahead, aiming for the burning, dissolving creature still racing towards them.

This, then, was pain. This was uncreation. The daemon of the first murder felt itself being taken apart, but keener still was the acid of a thwarted hunt. To be trapped like this, to be unmade by mortal anger. This was pain.

Escape. Survive. What passed for its cognition plunged into a ravenous loop of primal urges. Escape. Survive. Escape. Survive.

Still they charged. Hundreds lay dead and dissolving, soon to be thousands, yet still the survivors charged. They answered each of the alpha creature’s bellows, peeling off from the collapsing pack and launching themselves at the closest robots cutting off their escape. Automata fell in smoking, exploding husks. Daemons burst apart with them, willingly sacrificing themselves at their overlord’s whim.

The creature, the End of Empires, reached the Custodians’ battle-line first. There it met the plunging spears and hacking axes of the Ten Thousand and the Silent Sisters, ignoring their first blows as it shifted into a chimaeric thing of thrashing serpent-limbs and curved claws. It killed even as aetheric blood rained from its devastated form. It killed even as hanks of sizzling flesh were ripped from its corpus, laying it bare to where a true beast would have bones.

Several of the Castellax battle-automata lumbered forwards, engaging it alongside the humans, tearing at the daemon’s ichorous flesh with their whining buzz saws and industrial fists. They fared no better, their cranial domes and chestplates hammered and mangled, their vital internals torn free in clawed fistfuls of fluid-slick artificial life. They detonated, bathing the daemon in eviscerating shrapnel and petrochemical burns, and still – still – it killed.

It melted its way through forms, shifting and seeking lethality above all, survival-urge and blood-hunger fusing together to force it through change after change, seeking to escape its cage by butchering those that had trapped it here.

The Custodians fell back, the Sisters with them. It gave chase, panic granting it aggression, doing all it needed to do in order to rip itself free of the ambush. It fell upon the very beings slaughtering it because to run from them would only mean swifter destruction. Human blood ran. Golden limbs crashed to the ground. Axes fell from dead hands.

Ra and Jenetia struck in the very same second. The Custodian drove his spear up through the shapeless mass, wrenching it deeper, lodging it within and emptying his bolter inside its body. The Sister-Commander plunged her two-handed blade in alongside Ra’s, tearing a mirrored wound. Scalding filth poured upon both of them, steaming on their armour, burning patches of exposed skin.

A snake-like limb battered Krole aside. The creature staggered, then fell, crashing into the metal-strewn debris of dead robot and abandoned wraithbone. It reached a grasping claw from its seething mess of limbs, its structure breaking down into something amoebic and many-eyed.

End of Empires, it said in Ra’s mind, using Ra’s thoughts. It sounded so weak. Almost fearful, though such a thing could feel no fear. End… of…

The daemon rose from the wreckage like a fire cloud above an annihilated city, haemorrhaging thunder as it roared. Debris and machine oil rose into the air in glistening ropes. Inferno heat rolled from its resurrecting carcass. Black smoke and the blood of its kills congealed into muscle and sinew as its presence billowed higher.

Gunfire from the survivors yet tore into it, changing nothing, doing nothing. A head formed at its apex, rows of eyes burning as bolt-rounds ripped harmless cinders from its torso. Plates of mangled armour rose from the wrecks of the war machines, charring to black as they folded over the daemon’s form.

Ra stood beneath it, bathed in its heat, the coldness of the wounded Sisters beside him pressing back against the naked hunger of the thing that filled the tunnelway. It opened its mouth and breathed in the golden mist.

‘He will live,’ it rasped in a voice that felt like memory.

‘Kill it!’ Ra cried the order, desperate fury turning his tone to adrenal fire. Yet there was almost no one left alive to obey.

The daemon pulled reality towards itself, binding wraithbone and iron and even fire into a new form. It ensconced itself in corporeal armour to ward off the rage of corporeal weaponry.

‘Kill it!’ one of the Golden roared.

Escape. Survive. Anathema. End of Empires.

And, for the first time in its existence, savaged almost unto uncreation, it truly fled. The survivors’ parting fire tore at its temporary form, breaking armour away, but not enough, not enough. The echo of the first murder fled in bleeding, shambling defeat, puppeting a mongrel form of broken robots that fell apart with each step.

It would find the horde. It would join the war. It would hide among its lessers, and it would survive.

Twelve Sacristan Apex / Starved of ammunition / Renewal

Weeks into the realignment process, Jaya was still struggling. She slid the last five metres down the ladder, tearing off her helmet and breathing in the crisp, hot metal tang of the hangar bay. Torolec, her Sacristan Apex, was waiting for her.

‘It’s the pressure valves in the left knee’s pneumatics,’ she said to the robed figure. ‘It’s affecting the turning circle.’

Torolec was tall and slender beneath his hooded robe, proud to wear the black and laurel-green and rearing pegasus of House Vyridion. He was beribboned at all times by devotional parchments, often fluttering in the heat wash of engine exhaust as he attended to his sacred work. As Sacristan Apex he was the house’s foremost machine-seer, and at three hundred years of age, he had known and served Jaya her entire life. He’d refused to return to Highrock with the rest of the fleet, and Jaya had respected the wishes of her family’s oldest retainer. Given the circumstances and how events had played out, she was doubly grateful for his presence.

‘I have re-attuned them twice now,’ the old man replied. Around his words, the breath of the ventilation systems roared on. Air filtration gargoyles breathed in the forge scent and exhaled recycled air, dragon-keen, doing little to diminish the sweltering heat. ‘And I say again, baroness – the flaw is with the Merging. You are blaming consecrated metal and obedient mechanisms when all evidence points to a disconnect between scion and Knight.’

Two servitors walked forwards to remove her breastplate and pauldrons, but Jaya warned them back. ‘I spent all of last night in meditative reflection,’ she argued. ‘I feel no such disconnect.’

Torolec moved away, heading towards the idle Knight, giving Jaya little choice but to follow. The sacristan held up two bionic hands extending from the same elbow, placing twin palms on the unpainted Knight’s armoured toe-plating.

‘You resist its noble spirit. It resists yours. Two stubborn souls locked in discord.’

Jaya pursed her lips. Only Torolec would be allowed to speak to her so. ‘My spirit is at ease,’ she lied.

‘Then I shan’t argue with you, baroness.’ Torolec looked up at the towering war machine in all its bleak glory. Where proud and bright house colours should show, only bare and scratched metal met the eye. Where war banners should hang, depicting the Knight’s own deeds and the honourable service of its scion pilot, there was nothing at all. Soon they would march to war in these cast-offs and jury-rigged exiles from still-living houses, and do battle for the first time without Vyridion’s pennants waving in the wind.

‘I find you in a mood of rare charity if you are unwilling to argue,’ said Jaya.

Torolec’s amusement showed on his wizened features, sparkling in his eyes. ‘You should reboard, baroness. Perhaps the next exercise will work towards merging you with your new armour. We are scheduled for weapons trials.’

‘I have dry-fired that decrepit thing’s guns a hundred times.’

‘Indeed! Today, however, you are to be loaded for live fire.’

Jaya stared at him. They had been waiting over a week for the anticipated shipment from House Mortan. ‘We have ammunition?’

‘At long last, being ferried to us as we speak.’ He paused, his amusement darkening. ‘You will of course be expected to make an appropriate display of gratitude to House Krast for the sharing of sacred resources from their forges.’

‘Krast?’ Jaya’s tone rang with disbelief. ‘Those vainglorious…’

‘Ah, ah,’ Torolec chided. ‘Those generous and noble souls, you were about to say?’

‘…but of course. What of their earlier refusal?’

‘The Sigillite is said to have leaned upon them in this matter.’

Jaya watched as another gunmetal grey and badly dented Knight stalked past, shaking the hangar ground with its tread. The machine was in dire need of cleansing and re-oiling; the whining of protesting iron was torture on the ears.

Torolec saw her wince. ‘Perhaps you might easier win the suit’s regard if you stopped referring to it as “that decrepit thing”. The others of our court seem to be adapting well.’

Jaya had the grace to accept the rebuke. ‘Most are, yes.’

‘Your resentment is understandable, baroness. But I know you do not need me to caution you on the vice of ingratitude.’

Again, she nodded. At least they had suits. Even these unmarked and untended exiles were a treasure any Knight House would consider a fortune in their own right. But to have fallen so far, so fast, to be relying on the scrapyard charity of indignant and indifferent houses…

Jaya took a breath. ‘Summon me when the ammunition shipment arrives.’

Torolec said nothing. He merely bowed.

The throne rocked beneath her, its suspensors worn down through a gestalt of time, damage and poor maintenance. Jaya’s spinal plate locked into a groove along the chair’s backrest, the connection triggering a flare in the cockpit’s red lights and kindling three more monitors. Her weighted boots crunched into their stirrup-locks. Her gloved hands gripped the guidance levers that rose up from the throne’s armrests.

Torolec had ascended the gantry ladder after his mistress, and now crouched his emaciated form at the airlock door above her. He reached in with several bionic hands, locking buckles and inserting penetrative interface cables into the baroness’ helm. But the sacristan didn’t linger beyond his murmured blessings. He bade her well and sealed her in with a ringing, echoing clang.

Jaya watched the hangar through her vision feeds, waiting for the gantries to be pulled away. Three Errants, unmarked and unbannered, were marching back to their boarding cradles for maintenance and reblessing, and far more importantly, for rearming. One of them turned to her as it passed with its ground-shaking tread, its hunched shoulders and faceplate grinding down in approximation of a brief half-bow. Jaya couldn’t return the gesture with her boarding gantries still locked in, but she reached for the vox-plate to send an acknowledgement pulse back to the pilot.

She didn’t know who it was. Gone forever were the days of knowing each scion by the heraldry their Knights wore and the banners they bore. Even the painted artistry of kill-markings was absent.

Shame burned fresh. House Vyridion and Highrock itself had died under her guardianship. And, with dark hilarity, her shame couldn’t even be recorded in the familial archives, for they were ash along with the world that had been Vyridion’s home for thousands of generations.

I am becoming maudlin, Jaya thought with a sigh. Less than a month ago I was expecting execution.

Torolec was right. Ingratitude was an impious vice.

The cockpit’s bleak redness flickered once, twice, then the light around her was suddenly pale yellow instead of oppressive scarlet.

‘Gantry cradle clear,’ came Torolec’s voice across the vox.

Jaya clenched the control levers and eased them forwards. The cockpit tilted forwards in sympathy, leaning with the motion. Jaya’s throne stabilisers lagged a few seconds behind, but the heavy tilting and lurching as the Knight began its stride was nothing more than a vague irritation to a scion who had lived her life in the saddle.

And yet, everything was different. The machine didn’t walk as her baronial Lancer had walked. Its piston-tendons compressed and extended with different air-hisses and at different speeds. Its gait rattled and clanged and clanked in an entirely different chorus of sound. The throne reacted differently to her weight and movements. The Knight’s posture and rhythm required different compensational adjustment when moving at speed. The visual monitors were in different places, and slaved to feeds and target locks and aura-scryers that operated on momentary circuit-lags, or detuned if exerted a certain way. The cockpit even smelt different; rather than the sacred incense of Highrock’s iluva herbs, no amount of Torolec’s consecrations could rid the cockpit of that scorched blood and burned-metal scent lingering beneath the smell of old corrosion. Every one of Vyridion’s new Knights had been acquired from wreckships and unused war spoil from local, loyal houses, and each one of them smelt exactly as one would expect a machine from such a fate to smell.

Even so, it wasn’t that she couldn’t endure these changes or that cataloguing them led to distraction. The truth was far blunter than anyone not of a noble Knightly bloodline could ever easily grasp. After a lifetime of piloting her own machine, Jaya was living inside a body that wasn’t her own. She was wearing someone else’s skin.

She walked the still-unfamiliar Knight through the hangar, swaying against the buckles of her throne with its graceless gait. Runic signifiers on her weapon monitors showed her ammunition by weight instead of exact numerals, estimating payloads. She felt her teeth clenching at the prickle along her skin, the blood-rush of bearing lethal armament once more.

For the first time since setting eyes upon this war machine, she felt the tremble of a connection. She could kill again. She could destroy.

This was strength. This was power.

What was your name? she wondered, looking around the cockpit. Who were you before you were beaten, shamed and left for dead?

She brought the Knight around towards the hangar’s rear, where the massed wreckage of tanks and troop transports was serving as obstacles to manoeuvre around or assault with arm-mounted melee weaponry. Recognising their baroness’ approach, two other scions walked their machines back out of the way, giving her the field.

And she swore in that moment that she felt the immense engine block housed in the armoured compartment behind her growl just a little louder.

She glanced to the crackling monitor linked to her left arm’s gun-feed. Target locks refused to hold. Alignment chimes that should be ringing in clear, constant signals instead stuttered and hiccupped. How typical of this machine. How–

No. No more excuses. She didn’t care. She leaned forwards in the throne, riding the uncomfortable, shaking gait, and guided the war machine’s left arm upwards. No trajectory calculations. No aiming. No hesitation. She raised the arm and fired.

Stabilisers kicked in late, subjecting her to two seconds of teeth-clacking shivers, but Jaya scarcely noticed. Her grin was morbid with black laughter as a stream of tracer fire roared forth and pulverised the wreckage of a loader transport, punching molten yellow holes in its scorched hull. By the time her heart had beat six times, the flyer was barely recognisable. In its place lay a steaming mangle of blighted metal.

Jaya strode forwards, her clawed mechanical feet crushing thousands of spent shells into the deck. The sword that formed her right arm thunder-cracked into life, sheathed in an energy-spitting power field. A second peal of thunder rang out across the great hangar as she battered the annihilated wreckage aside with the swinging blade.

Later, she would remember hearing cheers across the vox. Later, she’d recall Torolec’s pleased murmurs of benediction. Later, she’d rest well for the first time in months.

The Knight-Castigator overbalanced on the backswing, almost stumbling; Jaya slammed the opposing foot down, catching herself from falling, and immediately reared back up to full height. Another skull-rattling volley spat in a tracer stream from the over-under twin barrels of her primary cannon, stitching a trail across the hulls of three trashed Rhinos.

The blade fell again, swinging down in an impaling execution – a warrior finishing off a fallen foe. Jaya slammed a foot down on the shattered civilian transport beneath her, keeping it in place as she wrenched the sword free again. This time she didn’t overbalance. Flakes and scraps of metal sizzled along the sword’s edge as they dissolved in the power field’s heat.

The towering Knight raised its blade high before an audience of menial hangar crews, servitor slaves and their sacristan overseers; yet the gesture wasn’t for them. In ragged mimicry, the active Knights present each answered as best they could. Some raised blades or bullet-starved barrels of their own, others blared raw noise from their bullhorns, while those rendered unarmed and otherwise silent lowered their unpainted faceplates in respect.

Sacristan Apex Torolec consulted the data-slate in two of his four hands, allowing himself a thin smile at the sight of his baroness’ cockpit feed. Perhaps this was going to work, after all.

Thirteen What has happened before / The use of glory / Prophecy and foresight

Ra opened his eyes to absolute blackness. A darkness deep enough to penetrate the senses, filling his eye sockets like pools of spilled oil. He waited for his perceptions to align. There was no fear. He knew the sensation of his master’s summons.

Remorse sat within his heart, this time. The ambush at the Ossuary still tore at him, its questions presenting no easy answers.

We were so close.

No answer came from the Emperor – if his king had even heard.

Soon, there was light. Faint. Fractured. Tormentingly distant. Light manifesting in pinpricks, the iota-eyes of faraway suns. They speckled the void in a milky rash, glinting, winking, each one staring with a light that took a brief eternity to reach Ra’s senses.

He was without form and shape. He merely existed in the void, a presence above a world cradled in the infinite black, a war-eaten planet bathed by the fusion glare of its insignificant yellow sun.

‘Terra,’ he said, without mouth, breath, teeth or tongue.

+Terra.+ The Emperor’s voice thrummed through his skull. Disembodied, as eternal as any star. +Mere centuries ago, in the thrall of the Unification Wars. Warlords and archpriestesses and magician-kings and clan chiefs fight over the harrowed territory of a broken world. My Thunder Legion marches to war against them. Against all of them.+

‘It grieves me not to have fought at your side in those days, my king.’

+Your loyalty is noted, yet your grief is irrelevant.+

‘Why am I here?’ Ra thought and spoke at once. No discernible separation existed between what was in his mind and what he vocalised into the void.

+Because I will it.+

It was the only answer he required, but he had hoped for more. Whatever purpose this illumination served was, so far, beyond Ra’s guesswork.

With a wrenching lurch, the stars spun. Light bent and folded. The infinite blackness at once welcomed and rejected him, embracing his presence but defying his senses as he sought to process the speed at which he flew through the void. Nebulae bloomed before him, around him, as thick to the eyes as the poison gas clouds of forbidden weaponry, yet perfectly dark to all other senses. Worlds turned around god’s-eye stars, some seared beneath the fat blue heat of swollen suns, some left cold on the outermost edges of the stellar ballet, travelling almost in exile among the frozen rocks that tumbled through deep and lifeless space.

So many of these globular jewels were not jewels at all, as unsuited as they were to cradling human life. For all of the terraforming pushed upon the galaxy’s scattered worlds during the wonderworking of the Dark Age of Technology, an infinity of planets still revolved in the savage, storm-wracked, gaseous serenity that rendered human habitation impossible.

The true gems were just as varied in shade and hue. The alkali ochre of desert land predominated, planed smooth by the industry of colonisation or shattered in great chasm-rents by tectonic unrest. Oceanic worlds were turbulent sapphires and aquamarines swallowing sunlight beneath their immense depths – and many defied even water’s pure hue, instead saturated by endless seas stained chrysoberyl by choking clouds of bacterium life, or rippling carnelian depths playing haven to hosts of aquacarnosaurs.

Colour upon colour upon colour, many worlds blending their offerings together, landmass by varied landmass. And yet the blue-green of unriven Terran antiquity was rarest of all. Such an innocent shade defied inevitability: everywhere mankind set foot, it tore from the earth and sucked from the seas, it harvested and wrought. It claimed. It conquered. It destroyed.

Nowhere was this truer than amidst the worlds turning around Terra’s own sun. Ra hadn’t been surprised when he first saw Terra from orbit, seeing the Throneworld herself a sickly beige, strangled by pollution, raked by the scars of endless war. Mars, once terraformed into a place of palatial idyll where human ingenuity had brought forth vegetation from dead soil, had been war-torn back into the dustbowl barrenness of its pre-colonisation era.

Ra was far from those worlds now. He twisted bodilessly in the black, facing another cloud-wreathed sphere, this one a Pangaean orb of earthen continents and only modest seas. Cityscapes showed as grey bruising across the landmasses, becoming pinprick-lit beacons as night fell swiftly across the hemisphere. Mere heartbeats later, dawn returned to the visible hemisphere, extinguishing the cityscapes’ multitude of lights, restoring them to the grey blotches of any civilisation viewed from orbit. Millions of people must have called the world home. Billions.

‘What world is this?’ Ra asked the void.

There was no answer. With the ease of taking a breath, he was flung through the night heavens once more, soaring dreamlike without weight or momentum.

A migraine took form before his senses, painting the void with the retinal smearing of terminal brain cancer. Stars burned the nebulaic gases around them, sending streams of shimmering poison back into the void. They burned and strangled in the shifting tides of some alien substance that was and wasn’t gas; that was and wasn’t real.

The Ocularis Malifica. A warp storm. The warp storm, where the alternate reality of the warp had shattered its way into truespace and curdled dozens of star systems in its hostile miasma. Here was where two universes met, and both suffered with the union.

He stared at the rotting eye polluting the void. It stared back, somehow seething, malevolent without sentience.

‘Why are you showing me all of this, sire?’

+I am not. Not really. This is merely how you process what you are learning when our thoughts are linked. Your mind is attuning to the scale of what I am imprinting upon it.+

Absolute loyalty meant he took reassurance at the Emperor’s words. He did not, however, take much in the way of easy understanding.

‘Sire?’ he asked the void.

The void’s answer was to send him hurling through space, weightless and ethereal, surrounded by the scream of a dying species. Years ago. Centuries ago, when much of the galaxy’s human territories sweltered beneath the choking fire of Old Night’s warp storms.

Here, among the eldar, all was at peace. He saw orbital platforms of sorcery-spun bone, so delicate that a breath of solar wind would surely shatter their tenuous frailty. He saw lush worlds of vegetation where spires of crystal and psychically sung wraithbone formed great spires and connecting walkways, while webway gates flared with endless use inside the towers of grand bloodlines. He saw a race crying out for more, always for more; for music that stimulated the biology of their brains; for wine that sent fire through their nervous systems; for entertainment and pleasures that replaced dignity with the harmony of madness.

He saw things wearing eldar skin moving in the shadows of their society, caressing with blades, killing with biting kisses, drinking blood and eating forbidden flesh with filed-fang smiles.

The truth burst from pale, alien flesh. It erupted free. Claws tore eldar open from within, doorways of bloody meat ripping open in bodies and minds grown soft by decadence and indolence. Warp-things crawled from ears, from nostrils, from tear ducts, shattering the skulls of their hosts as they swelled and grew. Daemons of hybrid gender, as much scorpion as maiden and man, shrieked – newborn and blood-wet – at the burning skies.

And far, far from such horrors, the human race was locked away in the isolation of Old Night. A million different worlds with no capacity to contact one another, each one alone in the fiery twilight of eternal warp storms raking through truespace. Only as one species died could another rise.

The eldar fall, damned by their own vices eating into the wards around their psychic souls. Warp storms that had wracked every world bleed away, focusing in final clusters: the Maelstrom, the Ocularis Malifica, and others far lesser besides. The human race rises, Old Night giving way to the dawn as the eternal storms recede.

A new godling has been born – ‘Slaanesh!’ the eldar weep and cry, ‘Slaanesh! Slaanesh!’ – but the rest of the suddenly silent galaxy takes its first breaths in a new age.

Ships begin to sail. Stellar empires form. One of those empires will become the only empire: the Imperium of Man, the twin kingdoms of Terra and Mars binding together to conquer the now-serene night sky.

A crusade, then an empire, all beneath one man’s banner.

+Everything that has happened, will happen again. It is the way of things. Yet humanity’s death will eclipse the eldar’s annihilation tenfold, for we are evolving into a far more psychically powerful race. Uncontrolled psychic energy will tear reality apart. The warp’s entities will feed on the carcass of the galaxy. There must be control, and control must be maintained.+

‘Control…’ Ra repeated. The scale of such ambition…

+The necessity of it. Lest mankind face a far harsher extinction than the eldar. Their souls shine bright within the warp, drawing the predations of the beasts within its tides. Soon, every human soul will become a beacon of fire.+

How, Ra wondered. How can you know? What other unbelievable futures have you foreseen? How can evolution itself be conquered and controlled?

+Through vision, Ra. We see the warp as an alternate reality, and this is so. It is a mirror, reflecting our every thought and action. Every hate, every death, every nightmare and dream, echoing into eternity. We break into this place, into a realm that harbours the pain and suffering of every man and woman and child to ever live, and we use it to sail between the stars. Because we must. Because until now there has been no other choice.+

‘The webway,’ Ra murmured into the silent night.

+The webway. Mankind is ascending, Ra. Humanity is taking a great developmental step, evolving into a psychic race. Uncontrolled psykers are lodestones for the warp’s touch. A species comprising them would suffer as the eldar suffered. And for the eldar, this evolutionary juncture was their final step before destruction. I will not let humanity be destroyed by the same fate. The eldar had the answers within their grasp but were too naive and too proud to save themselves. They had the webway, which could have been their salvation. But they never fully severed their connection to the warp. Their soulfires drew damnation upon their entire species.’

Ra knew this, yet never had it been related to him in these exact words, flavoured as they were by the promise of prophecy. With the webway, humanity would need no Navigators. They would never need to rely on the unreliable warp-whispers of astropaths. Vessels would never enter the warp to be lost or torn apart by the entities that dwelt within it. But the eldar had done the same, had they not?

+No. They eradicated their reliance on the warp but they never severed their species’ connection to it. I will do that for humanity, once and for all.+

Ra twisted in the nothingness, turning to stare at the light of so many distant stars. He faced Terra without knowing how he knew its direction, only knowing that he was right. One of those pinprick starlights was Sol, so far away.

+I have conquered humanity’s cradle-world. I have conquered the galaxy, in order to shape mankind’s development as it at last evolves into a psychic race. No isolated pockets of our species may remain free, lest in their ignorance they invite destruction upon us all. I have shattered the hold of faith and fear over the human mind. Superstition and religion must continue to be outlawed, for they are easy doors for the warp’s denizens to enter the human heart. This is what we have already done. And soon I will offer humanity a way of interstellar travel without reliance upon Geller fields and Navigators. I will offer them means of communicating between worlds without reliance on the warp-dreams of astropaths. And when the Imperium shields the entire species within the laws of my Pax Imperialis, when humanity is freed from the warp and united beneath my vision, I can at last shepherd mankind’s growth into a psychic race.+

The primarchs, thought Ra. The Thunder Legion. The Unification Wars. The Great Crusade. The Space Marine Legions. The Imperial Truth. The Webway Project. The Black Ships, with psykers huddled in the holds, watched over by the Silent Sisterhood. It is all about–

+Control. Tyranny is not the end, Ra. Absolute control is but the means to the end.+

The hubris… Ra couldn’t fight the insidiously treacherous thought, to see the hidden depths of his master’s ambitions. The sheer, unrivalled hubris.

+The necessity.+ The Emperor’s voice was iced iron. +Not arrogance. Not vainglory. Necessity. I have already told you, Ra. Humans need rulers. Now you see why. A single murder is on one end of the spectrum, for rulers bring law. The hope of the entire race is at the far end of the continuum, for I – as ruler – bring salvation.+

Ra stared towards distant Terra, unsure if he was humbled or touched by the alien sensation of something akin to terror.

+You are shedding tears, Ra.+

Surprised, the Custodian touched gold-clad fingertips to his tattooed cheeks. They came away glinting with faint wetness in the light of distant suns.

‘I have never done so before.’

+That is not true. You wept on the night your mother died. You merely do not remember it.+

Ra still looked at the faint moisture on his fingertip. How curious. ‘Forgive the indignity, sire.’

+There is nothing to forgive. The immensity of my ambitions sit ill within mortal minds. Even among mortals that will live as close to eternally as my Ten Thousand.+

And yet, Ra thought in another treasonous whisper, it is all threatened, coming apart at the seams.

+The primarchs,+ agreed the Emperor. +Witness them.+

Ra dragged in a cold breath. He was on guard immediately, his spear in his hands, razor gaze flicking across his surroundings, seeking threats. But in every direction, all he saw was a featureless landscape far too flat to be of natural origin. No matter where he looked, the horizon was a pale line of useless, bare land meeting a cloudless sky. Even his retinal gauges registered his surroundings as impossibly even. This was the work of the Mechanicum and their continental geoplaning engines.

In that moment, he knew where he was.

‘Ullanor.’ His voice echoed strangely. For all he knew, he was the only living soul on the whole world. The wind took his word and carried it away.

‘Ullanor,’ the Emperor confirmed. Ra turned to see his master clad in the brazen light of layered golden plate, festooned with Imperial aquilas the way a shaman might decorate his flesh with wards against black magic. ‘Do you remember when you last walked the earth of this world, Ra?’

How could he not? It had been at the Triumph, when millions of troops had gathered to bid the Emperor farewell from the Great Crusade, in the final hours before He returned to Terra. The day that nine – nine! – primarchs had gathered together at their father’s side.

The day that Horus had been proclaimed Warmaster.

A single breath later, Ra was back there once more. The salt flats of geoplaned banality were host to a sea of colours: banners, flags, soldiers, tanks, Titans. The eye couldn’t take in the immensity of the sight. The mind couldn’t process it. The Martian Mechanicum had cleaved an entire continent to make the procession possible, dismantling mountain ranges, filling valleys, contouring the planet’s crust for the most monumental gathering since the declaration of the Great Crusade.

And the sound, the sound. The thrum of so many engines was a living, draconic roar. Regiments of pristine warriors standing beneath remade war standards cried their victories to the sky. A single Titan’s footsteps made for infrequent, rhythmic thunder. A battle division’s worth of giant war machines made for a storm capable of shaking a city to its foundations. Here walked thrice that number, and thrice again, and thrice more beyond that. The Martian behemoths strode over and through the millions of troops at their ankles, leaving immense footprints that served to finally carve features upon the plain plateau.

The Luna Wolves had mustered in unified ranks at the procession’s vanguard, still clad in the pearly white of their nobler incarnation rather than the murky green of their self-damnation as the Sons of Horus.

And with them? Phalanx upon phalanx of warriors from every Legion. Even those without primarchs present still stood proud beneath the million war banners waving in the desert wind.

The primarchs stood apart, occupying the colossal dais erected for their specific purpose. They towered above even the great Imperators and Warmongers that no other war machine could match, and each of the Emperor’s geneforged generals variously bathed in or endured the shouted jubilation of the organised masses below.

One by one they walked forwards to greet the assembled host. Angron, raising his weapons high, consecrated by the army’s roars just as he had once been exalted by the cries of arena crowds in his life as Angronius of Nuceria, Lord of the Red Sands.

Lorgar Aurelian, Herald of the Emperor, throwing his arms wide and beckoning the millions of loyal souls to shout louder, harder. He was a demagogue presented with a crowd that offered nothing but vindication.

Sanguinius was next, reluctant and wrathful and soulful Sanguinius, the Emperor’s eagle-winged son and the living avatar of the Imperium. The cries that met his presentation rang loudest of all, and the tens of millions of men and women gathered below were too far distant to ever see how their near-worship flickered uneasily in the Angel’s eyes. Even so, as they bayed and begged, he drew his sword in salute to the masses of humanity arrayed across the plain. They cried their throats raw as he spread his great wings wide. A single feather flew free, descending upon the wind in slow whirls. It would become a sacred relic to the Imperial Army regiment that claimed it, with the image of a single white feather forever after emblazoned in a place of honour upon their campaign banners.

One by one they came and presented themselves, until, at last, the Master of Mankind took His place.

And all of that raucous, rapturous cheering died. Every eye looked to the golden figure holding court at the centre of the dais. Those too far removed, kilometres away from the processional core, looked to erected monitors connected to drifting servo-skull feeds, relaying the images.

The Emperor stood before them all, armoured and armed but never again to march with them to war. Men and women stared up at Him, unaware they were weeping. Even many legionaries’ faces would have shown tear trails down their gene-altered features, had they not been hidden by the grilles of Crusade- and Iron-pattern helms.

Horus was declared Warmaster. The cheers returned. Victory was celebrated. Glory to the Imperium. Glory to the Emperor. Glory to the Warmaster.

All proceeded as expected. No one thought the Emperor would speak again at the Triumph’s conclusion. What was there that He could say? Every soul gathered knew what He intended to do. He would leave the Great Crusade in the hands of His sons, returning to Terra to oversee the workings of the ever-expanding Imperium. Surely nothing He could say would lessen the blow of His abandonment.

And yet, He had spoken once more, one last time, after all.

‘I leave not by choice,’ He promised them. His voice carried across the geoburned plateau, aided by the speaker-drones and vox-emitters liberally populating the muster. ‘I leave not by choice. I leave only because I must. Know this, and know my regret, but know also that I return to Terra for the good of our Imperium.’

From among the Custodian Guard stationed nearby, in a rank behind the primarchs, two incarnations of Ra stood watching in silence. The first was helmed and at attention, his guardian spear clutched in one gloved hand, the warrior himself a perfect mirror of the Custodians standing at his side. The second was unhelmed, smiling faintly, to so vividly recall this breathtaking moment once more.

The Emperor turned from the crowd, moving through the pack of demigods around Him. Already they were regarding their father, and each other, with newfound caution. One of their number had been elevated above the rest – no longer merely first among equals, but definitively named first. Like any family, their reactions and emotions at such a development would prove… variable.

‘Ra,’ the Emperor greeted him. The worthies around them both continued speaking, no longer paying either of them any heed at all.

‘All of this,’ the Custodian said. He gestured not only to the primarchs, but the amassed pomp itself – the geoscaped continent, the sky pregnant with dropships, the gathered regimental masses weeping and cheering below. ‘Why, sire? I never asked it then, and I have always wondered since. Why all of this?’

‘For glory,’ the Emperor replied. ‘To honour the creatures that call themselves my sons. My necessary tools. They feed on glory as if it were a palpable sustenance. Their own glory, of course, no different from the kings and emperors of old. It scarcely crosses their mind that glory matters nothing to me. I could have had a planet’s worth of glory any time I wished it when I walked in the species’ shadow throughout prehistory. Only three of them ever thought to ask why I timed my emergence as I did.’

Ra looked at the gathered pantheon of primarchs. He didn’t ask which three had questioned the Emperor. In truth, he didn’t care. Such lore was irrelevant.

‘And so I gave them Ullanor,’ the Emperor said. ‘They crave recognition for their honour and achievements, and the Triumph was the ultimate expression of that. In that regard, they are just as the Akhean gods and goddesses of Ulimpos were believed to be.’

Ra knew the legends. Zoas Lightningfather. Avena Warbringer. Hermios Swiftrunner. Heraklus Halfgod. Bickering, violent divinities who were powerful enough to act with impunity over the mortals that prayed to them.

‘Humanity’s perception of god-beings has never been consistent,’ the Emperor mused. ‘Give any being great power and the largesse to act with impunity, and what you have is indivisible from those ancient myths. The rage of thunder gods. The battle drums of nations that prayed to war gods. The madness and decadence of powerful kings. That is what true power has always done to the mortal mind – elements of humanity become magnified, more human than human. In that light, are the primarchs not deities?’

Ra grunted, noncommittal. ‘That is not what I meant, my liege. I mean… how could they betray you without warning? Why did you not foresee it?’

For the first time in Ra’s memory, the Emperor hesitated. He wondered if he was the first of the Custodian Guard – perhaps even the first Imperial soul – to ask such a thing. The Ten Thousand had spoken of it amongst themselves many hundreds of times. Consensus on the truth was impossible to reach. Their place was to live in loyalty and die in duty, not question in doubt.

‘You ask about the very nature of foresight,’ said the Emperor. ‘From your words and tone, you suggest it is no different to looking back down a road already travelled, and seeing the places and people you have passed.’

Ra couldn’t tear his eyes from the primarchs. Fulgrim, smiling, always smiling; Magnus, stern in the guarded pretence that none must perceive he bore a troubled mind. Proximity to them even in this moment of glory – especially in this moment of glory – sickened the Custodian, heart and soul. How he ached to strike them down.

‘Is that not the function of foresight, my king? To see the future before it unfolds?’

‘You imply omniscience.’

‘I imply nothing, unless by my own ignorance. I merely seek enlightenment.’

The Emperor seemed to weigh His guardian’s words. ‘I see.’

‘I mean no disrespect, my liege.’

‘I know, Ra. I take no umbrage at your questions. Think on this, then. I prepared them all, this pantheon of proud godlings that insist they are my heirs. I warned them of the warp’s perils. Coupled with this, they knew of those dangers themselves. The Imperium has relied on Navigators to sail the stars and astropaths to communicate between worlds since the empire’s very first breath. The Imperium itself is only possible because of those enduring souls. No void sailor or psychically touched soul can help but know of the warp’s insidious predation. Ships have always been lost during their unstable journeys. Astropaths have always suffered for their powers. Navigators have always seen horrors swimming through those strange tides. I commanded the cessation of Legion Librarius divisions as a warning against the unrestrained use of psychic power. One of our most precious technologies, the Geller field, exists to shield vessels from the warp’s corrosive touch. These are not secrets, Ra, nor mystical lore known only to a select few. Even possession by warp-wrought beings is not unknown. The Sixteenth witnessed it with his own eyes long before he convinced his kindred to walk a traitor’s path with him. That which we call the warp is a universe alongside our own, seething with limitless, alien hostility. The primarchs have always known this. What difference would it have made had I labelled the warp’s entities “daemons” or “dark gods”?’

‘I don’t know, sire. I can’t see what might have changed. I cannot see into the skeins of fate.’

The Emperor was silent for a moment. ‘You speak of seeing the future,’ He finally said, ‘without knowing the limits of what you speak.’

In a heartbeat the Ullanor Triumph was gone, banished between breaths. Ra and the Emperor stood alone on a rocky shore, ankle-deep in icy saltwater. They faced a great cliff, reaching up hundreds of metres – sheer in many places, sloped in others. Even as Ra stared, loose rocks clattered down its surface, splashing into the rising water not far from where they stood.

‘Where you stand now,’ the Emperor said, ‘is the present. Do you see the top of the cliff?’

‘Of course, sire.’

‘That is the future. You see it. You know what it is. Now reach it.’

Ra hesitated. ‘Now?’

‘Climb, Custodian. You questioned the nature of my foresight. I am granting you an answer.’

Ra moved to the rock face, looking over the stone, finding his first grips. He tested them, finding them strong, even against the weight of his armour. The weaker ones, he avoided.

Less than ten heartbeats had passed when a rock cracked and crumbled in his gauntleted hand. Ra skidded, arresting his fall by clutching at the stone; another gave way, sending him the last few metres to the rocky ground in a breathy cloud of white dust.

‘You looked for places to safely grip,’ said the Emperor, ‘yet you have already stumbled. You did not know the stone was weak.’

‘It looked strong.’

The Emperor smiled, and it was by far the most unpleasant sight Ra had ever witnessed. Emotion painted across a human face, as false as the grotesques at any masquerade. ‘Yes,’ the Emperor agreed. ‘It did, and you only learned the truth too late. Now climb.’

Ra hesitated once more, a hesitation that bordered upon defiance. As if such an action were even possible for one such as he in the presence of his master.

‘It is not necessary, sire. I believe I understand now.’

‘Do you? Look out across the water, Ra.’

Ra returned to the Emperor’s side and did as he was bid. The water rippled in sedate waves, sloshing around the rocks that lined the shore. At the horizon’s very edge, he could see the mirroring lip of another landmass.

‘I see another land. An island, perhaps.’

‘It is Albia, many thousands of years ago. But that is unimportant. You see the shore. You know it is there. You know you could reach it by ship, or by swimming, or by flight. That is what you know.’

The Emperor’s dark eyes lost their focus. He faced towards the distant shore but Ra doubted He was still seeing it. ‘So you journey towards it. But all you can see is your destination. You cannot see the beasts below the water that devour travellers. You cannot know if the wind will blow and throw you aside from your course. And if the wind does blow, will it send you east? West? North? South? Will it shatter your craft completely? Perhaps there are rocks beneath the water, impossible to see until they grind and tear at the hull of your ship. Perhaps the inhabitants of that far shore will fire upon your craft before you can make landfall.’

The Emperor turned back to Ra, though curiously His eyes didn’t clear. ‘But you can see the shore, Ra. Did you fail to predict any of those possible flaws between here and there?’

‘Perhaps I predicted them all, sire. Perhaps I factored in the possibilities of each one occurring.’

‘Maybe so. And what of the eventualities you could not predict? Each passing moment is rich with a hundred thousand possible pathways. The craftswoman making your boat may suffer a heart failure before she can gift it to you. Or she decides not to offer you the boat at all. You say the wrong words to her. You offer the wrong currency. She lies to you, for she is a thief. An enemy sabotages your boat before you set sail. You reach halfway across this channel of water, only to see a more appealing coast to the east or west. Minute after minute, possibility upon possibility, path after path. All variables you are unable to see from where you stand at this moment.’

The Emperor reached out as if He could crush the coast in His golden gauntlet. His expression was cold in its pale ferocity. ‘I can see the coast, Ra. I know what awaits me there. But I cannot see all the infinite vicissitudes between here and there.’

At last, He lowered His hand.

‘That is foresight, Ra. To know a trillion possible futures, and to be left to guess at the infinite ways of arriving at each one. To map out even one possible eventuality, taking into account every decision that every living being will make that will impact upon the others around it, would take all of the lifetimes I have already lived. The only way to know anything for certain…’

He trailed off, gesturing to the distant shore.

‘Is to reach the other side,’ said Ra.

The Emperor nodded. ‘When the vault was attacked and the Primarch Project compromised, should I have destroyed them all? Or do as I did, and trust that I would be able to restore them to grandeur? If I had destroyed them to prevent their abduction, would the Imperium have risen as it has now done? Or would the Great Crusade have stuttered and failed without its generals? There are no answers yet, Ra. We are in the middle of the sea, beset by strange tides and unexpected beasts, but not yet thrown off course.’

‘I won’t fail you, sire.’

The Emperor closed His eyes and winced as pain flickered across His dusky features. He touched all ten fingertips to His face beneath the weight of some silent strain.

‘My liege?’

‘The forces of Magnus’ Folly press harder against the Mechanicum’s junctions. I do not know how this can be. Their efforts were already relentless and monumental. Coupled with the intrusions within the original web, I fear time is growing short.’

‘We’ve failed to destroy the Echo of the First Murder. Why did it pull back from us? How can it be stopped?’

The Emperor swallowed, His eyes bloodshot and haunted in their distraction.

+Awaken, Ra.+

Ra opened his eyes, his senses immediately attuning to the sound of sirens.

Fourteen

Zephon’s bandoliers rattled as he walked, the bound arsenal of rad-grenades clinking against his red ceramite. He felt like an imposter in his own skin: the volkite pistols holstered on his thigh plates hadn’t been fired in years, nor had he sparred with the power sword sheathed on his backpack. Similarly, he’d done nothing more than clean and maintain the bolter he now carried over one shoulder, hanging by its thick strap of Baalite mutant hide-leather.

After an airspeeder conveyance had carried him halfway across Himalazia to the Palace’s high-security core, he walked ever-downwards through the beating heart of the Imperium, occasionally resorting to subterranean transit pods or the elevator platforms in constant operation.

He had spoken to Diocletian and Arkhan Land, the former telling him of the dark wonders of the Impossible City and the foes faced by the Ten Thousand, the latter waxing loud and long about the structure of the webway and its potential for mankind. He had reviewed the Archimandrite’s implanted map, and yet… doubts lingered. Or perhaps it was hope that lingered. Zephon wished feverishly for such enlightenment to be lies.

The Blood Angel had no idea what to believe. He knew only that the Ten Thousand had chosen him to serve the Emperor, and he would do so to his dying breath.

And so, he journeyed to join them.

Through districts that had evolved into librarium archives; through museum sectors given over to the teeming refugee masses; through storage chambers and arsenals and even old Terran foundries, the Blood Angel walked in solemn silence, his gait exaggerated slightly by the bulky twin turbines of his jump pack. The double engines rose above his pauldrons, wings in intent if not in form. Servo-skulls drifted endlessly past, pausing to aim their sensoria-cluster eye needles at him, scanning him for Unified Biometric Identification. Inevitably they would give a satisfied click and drift away.

Towards the end of the first day he passed the first seal. The ever-locked iris gate wasn’t locked for him; he entered without hesitation, passing a phalanx of one hundred Imperial Fists on one side of the gate, then five Custodians on the other. The former greeted him with grim formality. The latter ignored him completely.

His descending path converged with those of his fellow pilgrims. A stream of tracked battle-servitors rumbled along the hallways in their hundreds, en route to the Imperial Dungeon for whatever purpose the Custodians had in mind.

Not long after Zephon joined this lobo-chipped convoy, they were joined by the tall and striding forms of House Vyridion. The great Knights shook the stone chambers and corridors with their thunderous march, and Zephon felt his bleak heart stir at the sight of Jaya and her war court. Gone was the gunmetal grey and bare steel of the unpainted dregs-machines donated and begged from other houses. Zephon might have expected the blue-green of their former heraldry, but this too was absent. Vyridion’s armour plates had turned black and gold, and while they lacked the banners of their past deeds, they once more showed a sigil on their tilting shields: the Imperial aquila symbolising the unity of Terra and Mars. The simplest, purest symbol they could have chosen.

Looking at the monstrous form of Baroness Jaya as she strode over and ahead of him, Zephon kindled a shared vox-link.

‘Vyridion marches,’ he said with a faint smile.

‘Vyridion marches,’ came the crackling reply.

The lead Knight turned, a great bronze aquila hanging on chains from its bolt cannon swaying with the motion, and sounded its alarm horn through the stone hallways. It was answered by the horns and klaxons of every other Knight in the procession as House Vyridion celebrated its march.

By the second day’s dawn, the travellers were far from the sun’s light. Zephon’s trudging tread was marked by the clank of pistons and the thunder of heavy metal feet in silent corridors. Billions lived and toiled within the walls of the Palace, but the procession saw none of them, as though this was not the heart of the Imperium after all, merely an empty realm, a kingdom of stone and shadow.

On they walked. Every few hours they would pass one of the seals, the irises of each gateway open and waiting: unpatrolled, unguarded, unbarred.

They passed the Hibran Arch, vaulted above the fires of torches that had burned through Old Night and burned still. They walked the Processional of the Eternals, beneath the painted eyes of vanquished warlords. They walked until they had sunk into the underworld of the Palace’s foundations, gouged into the living rock of the planet’s Himalazian spine, and still they descended.

Servitor workers began to appear at infrequent intervals, along with robed adepts tending to machines and engines squatting in the basalt rock. The earthen corridors remained tall and wide – the Knights never once had to hunch or double back to seek another way – and the ground showed the erosion of countless feet and vehicle tracks.

Despite an eidetic recollection, Zephon wasn’t certain of the exact moment he realised the convoy was no longer being presented with alternate routes. After the fifth seal? At the sixth? When had the many tributary corridors converged at last into this one final path?

His instinctive sense of direction slowly began to tell another truth – the twists and turns betrayed his route, not always downwards but never ascending, remaining deep within the planet’s crust: he was walking a labyrinth. Not one akin to the eclectic garden mazes of the wealthy or the prisons of the mythologically monstrous, but a true labyrinth out of Ancient Terran lore, of the kind once seen in holy temples and places of pilgrimage. He knew them from his studies into pre-Imperial spirituality, when they had been embossed onto cathedral floors or etched upon the earth, forming a path for pilgrims to walk every step until reaching the centre. They were meant to be journeys of understanding, from ignorance to enlightenment. Was this such a journey?

I hear thunder.

Almost as soon as the thought came he realised its untruth. Not thunder at all, no matter how similar in sound. The false thunder grew louder with the passing of time, turn by turn, tunnel by tunnel.

Zephon saw faint markings along the walls and brushed aside the dust as delicately as he could with a sweep of one bionic hand. Simple, primal pictures met his curious touch, resembling the cave paintings exhibited by the most primitive human cultures. He walked on, stopping at random to study the primeval artwork: hunting scenes of simple figures bearing spears against great beasts; a community of shadowy humans gathered around the red-orange curls of a fire; dozens of figures with arms raised in worship to the high sphere of the sun.

It wasn’t long before the travellers reached the bridge, and with it, the thunder.

The path before them spanned an abyss. The servitors stalked and rolled onwards. The Knights hesitated, reining their war suits to a halt. Zephon stopped with them, sliding from the conveyor upon which he’d been riding, looking with unbelieving eyes at the source of the thunder pouring down into the infinite black. The water of Terra, harvested for the Palace’s underground reservoirs, plunged in vast, roaring falls from the cavern’s roof high above.

Zephon found himself first smiling, then laughing at the breathtaking sight, such was its scale and the deafening pressure of its crashing bellow. He had fought on oceanic worlds, on monsoon worlds, but the effect was no less majestic to him. He was a child of Baal, and few planets could claim such a radiation-soaked, thirsty legacy as that distant globe.

Yet on they walked, steps becoming metres, metres becoming kilometres.

Eventually the thunder receded.

Zephon’s focus drifted with uneasy wonder as he ventured through the labyrinth, beneath the vast stone statues of humanity’s first false gods, over bridge-spanned chasms that cradled the bones of long-dead settlements. As he traversed another wide stone archbridge he saw the cold, sunless remains of an entire city. Even from his maddening altitude above the grave-city he sensed movement inside the black eyes of glassless windows: the ghosts of a distant past, staring up in hollow and sullen silence at the passing of their descendants and inheritors.

What was this place when it stood in the sun? He wasn’t certain whether he thought the words or whispered them aloud, until he received an answer.

‘Kath Mandau,’ a voice murmured across the vox.

Zephon didn’t tear his eyes from the dead city five hundred metres below. Impossibly, there was wind here. A soft breeze that tasted of dust.

‘Diocletian?’ he voxed back.

‘You asked what this place once was. It was the city Kath Mandau. Capital of the nation Sagarmatha, also called Nehpal. It was once the roof of the world.’

‘That is very poetic.’ And now it lies dead, part of the Palace’s foundations, remaining only in name in the precincts above. ‘Thank you, Diocletian.’

The Custodian, far ahead at the front of the column, didn’t respond again.

The next bridge was reinforced by support stanchions and black iron gantries binding the stone pathway to the cavern’s far-off walls. The air itself gleamed orange from the underworld’s light. Heat assailed Zephon in a rising miasma.

Molten rock seethed and sludged in the abyss below. The bridge spanned a wound in Terra’s crust, seemingly torn open to the planet’s mantle. A great lake of the world’s liquid blood-fire burned in the darkness far, far below, somehow only breeding more shadows instead of banishing them.

More and more images showed upon the chamber walls as the procession made its way through the labyrinth. Cave paintings of ochre and charcoal became artful mosaics and impressionist vistas. Images of suns, of the heavens, of the blue Terran sky and the black void beyond. Pictographs of satellites, those earliest machines that sung their songs into the silent night.

Then came the artistry of the Dark Age, of Old Night, and the Unification Wars that ravaged Terra. Wars of unrivalled savagery wracked cities that couldn’t possibly exist. Men of flesh fought men of stone and men of steel. Zephon swallowed at the sight of Baal among the painted heavens, far too high on a ceiling mural for him to touch. He held his knuckles to his heart in solemn salute and walked on, passing yet more scenes of devastation on a scale never again to be matched, followed in turn by scenes showing the salvation of a species brought together after Old Night by the guiding golden hand of the species’ master.

Then came the monsters. Devilish forms conjured from human nightmare waged war in realms of fire and ice and smoke and flood. Horned beasts, red-fleshed and armoured in brass. Carrion-eating skeletal dancers with the faces and features of ancient birds. Zephon saw creatures from his own childhood dreams, monsters conjured by his own youthful, slumbering imagination.

How can they be here?

No answer presented itself.

Soon enough, Zephon noted another change. A shift in the surroundings.

Machines – engines – became far more numerous, set into the ground or half projecting out from unfinished murals and incomplete mosaics. The crash and bang of industry’s metallic song grew louder and louder with each twist and turn. Where the artistry of ages had marked the walls, soon space was given over to the primacy of cables and pipes to feed the machines, seemingly pushed into place and bolted to the Palace’s stone foundations out of rushed necessity.

Some of the engines spun chemicals the way a centrifuge spins blood. Others juddered as they sucked power, or generated it, or acted as junctions to spit it elsewhere. Towers of crates lined the walls of each chamber, eclipsing the incomplete architecture. Workers, robed or coated or suited, were everywhere.

Zephon removed his helmet to wipe silent tears from his eyes. The agony of the journey, of this entire labyrinth, burned at his core in place of the doubts he’d previously held.

This journey would have been the first step of humanity’s life without the warp. This was the route to the webway… Mankind should have walked through this labyrinth as a journey of understanding, bathing in the symbolism, preparing to step into the stars anew. A species reborn, saved from damnation by one man’s vision.

Yet it stood darkened and unfinished, so much stone yet undressed, the passageways that were supposed to lead to enlightenment now blighted and defaced by archeotech machines bolted into place in the wake of Magnus’ Folly. War had touched this place of last hope.

Suddenly it was all too easy to see this place defiled in the months to come, suffering at the rabid, iconoclastic hands of Horus’ rebels when they reached Terra. Would they care for the promise of this unfinished labyrinth, or would they desecrate it with the wrath of the ignorant?

Zephon’s smile was a weak, dark little thing. Mere days before, he’d not been sure what to believe. Now he mourned the incompleteness of the Emperor’s vision of salvation. He had walked the labyrinth and learned all he needed to know.

He closed his pale eyes.

‘Why do you weep, Blood Angel?’

Zephon turned to see Jaya’s Sacristan Apex. He’d believed only servitors were nearby in this section of the processional. Torolec, that was the priest-artisan’s name. Zephon had only met the man once before, on the battlements weeks ago.

‘Loss,’ he said, and added nothing more.

‘Are we close?’ Baroness Jaya voxed across the general channel.

‘Close to what?’ Diocletian’s reply was blithe.

‘To the Imperial Dungeon. To the Emperor’s laboratory.’

The Custodian’s reply was immediate. ‘They are the same thing,’ he said. ‘We have been in the Imperial Dungeon since passing the final seal. This is the Emperor’s laboratory. All of it.’

Zephon replaced his helm, sealing his collar lock with a snap-hiss of air pressure. He breathed the recycled air of his battleplate and walked on.

Less than an hour later, they reached the Eternity Gate.

The procession stopped at the heart of the labyrinth.

Zephon stood in the final promenade, surrounded by a multitude of banners standing in honoured rows. A cavalcade of colours stretched out on both sides of the downward-staired marble avenue, each woven standard showing the names, numbers, sigils, worlds or proud avataric beasts that embodied one of the Imperium’s regiments. Every regiment that had ever worn the Imperial eagle and fought under the Emperor’s aegis was represented by a flag, banner, trophy or pennant. A field of markers stretching in their tens of thousands, all leading ever-downwards toward the door of the Emperor’s throne room.

The great doors of the Gate stood open at the end of the descending avenue, their two-hundred metre height reaching up to the cavern’s arched roof. Moisture wept from the sedimentary rock sky, painting a thousand shining trickle-rivers down the surface of the metal doors. An image of the Emperor was bisected by their parting: a great embossed mural of the Master of Mankind wielding a spear against the draconic beasts and machine horrors of Old Night.

And between those wide doors, only darkness.

For the first time in several hours, no machinery was bolted to the walls and floor, and no workstations or storage crates obscured the beauty of what lay before him. Yet Zephon sensed the subsonic thrum of power cables beneath his boots, as energy cobwebbed throughout the labyrinth. Ostentation may have eclipsed pragmatism here at the Eternity Gate, but it hadn’t replaced it.

Shadows and spectres stood at the edges of Zephon’s sight, overlaying the truth of his senses with stories not yet told. Each time he shifted his gaze he witnessed some other echoing ghost, some other suggestion of what might yet be.

The great doors were unguarded, yet there stood two towering Reaver Titans either side of the arch, their armour plating cast in the aggressive blazonry of Mars’ own Legio Ignatum.

The ocean of banners stood in windless silence, yet there walked a host of hunchbacked priests dressed in the flayed skin of their forefathers, swinging incense braziers and chanting prayers to the souls of those men and women who fought beneath the icons across the galaxy.

The air above the avenue was empty, yet there circled the ungainly anti-gravitic forms of cherub-like drones, seemingly cloned child-angels wheeling through the air. They trailed banners from their ankles and rang hand-held bells, tolling who knew what.

The doors were wide open, yet they stood closed in their ethereal echo, and the rendition of the Emperor showed Him surrounded by a wheeling cosmos of daemons and mythological beasts. He was haloed by the sun, triumphant above the impaled body of something horned and serpentine.

Each baroque ghost glimpse told a tale from a time when the Imperial Dungeon seemed more of a cathedral than a laboratory, a time when the Emperor Himself was worshipped rather than revered.

And there, last of all, out of tune with the other echoes… An Angel stood before the gate, armoured in bleeding gold, bearing a sword of silver fire. Its great white wings spread wide in defiance, the swan feathers ragged and bloody red.

‘Father,’ said Zephon through numb lips, but the Angel was gone and the words were fading behind him as he stepped forwards. The gate yawned wide before him.

Alongside rumbling tank-treaded servitors unable to acknowledge their surroundings beyond track/kill subroutines, Zephon entered the Emperor’s throne room.

The darkness was a falsehood, one that cleared as soon as he passed through it. The first thing to hit Zephon’s senses was a retinal smear of migraine light, bright enough that even his occulobe implant was useless in defending his eyes against it. He narrowed his gaze to a slit, one hand raised against the fierce illumination.

The second thing to strike was the burning machine-stink of overworked metal. He’d fought in manufactories on several worlds, breathing in the charcoal and scorched iron reek of machinery slowly dying, wearing out its moving parts. He knew that same smell at once, even spiced as it was by the acidic tang of charged ozone.

The third element was the sound. The shouting voices. The lightning lash of sparking machines. The primeval hum of running engines. He felt it as much as heard it; he felt it in his blood, in his bones.

‘Keep walking.’ Diocletian’s voice.

He kept walking, seeing little, sensing everything. Ahead of him, someone shrieked.

‘Keep walking!’ shouted Diocletian across the vox.

Pivoting to find who had called out, Zephon saw only the faintest silhouettes. Maddening. Insane. His genetic modifications were born of the Emperor’s own genius; a Space Marine saw in near-darkness and overcame blinding light with equal ease. Yet he could see almost nothing.

Another cry, this time from his side. An unknowable distance away, there was the crash of falling metal beams or perhaps a collapsing gantry. He saw none of it.

Am I blind?

‘I cannot see,’ he said aloud.

‘You don’t need to,’ replied Diocletian. ‘Move forwards. Keep walking.’

His eyes did adjust, though far slower than he’d ever known. Zephon saw the pale stone floor beneath his boots, and the dark bronze of immense, humming machines at the edges of his vision. Pain knifed awkward cuts at his eye sockets as he raised his head to see what lay before the marching procession.

An archway. A door. A portal. A construct of light-stained marble that disgorged golden mist into the chamber. He couldn’t make out its exact shape – Circular? Oval? – nor its exact boundaries, where the alien mist ended and the structure’s sides began.

‘Don’t look back,’ came Diocletian’s voice once more.

Row after row of battle-servitors rumbled into the golden fog, mind-dead to all but their orders. A Krios tank was swallowed a moment later, its passage doing nothing to disturb the mist.

One of Jaya’s Knights strode in alongside another servitor host, enveloped by the portal’s exhalations. Another of them stood inactive by the portal’s edge, grasped by tendrils of golden fog, half turned away to look back over the rest of the marching column. Zephon could hear the baroness shouting at the courtier, demanding he keep moving.

The pilot’s voice came back stammering, shattered. ‘The Emperor. My Emperor. The Omnissiah.’

‘Don’t look back,’ Diocletian snapped. ‘Baroness, lead your scions through now.’

Jaya’s towering form lurched in a heavy stride, shaking the ground as she clanked forwards. The remaining Knights followed in a ragged march, moving between and stepping over the servitor horde.

When Zephon reached the portal’s cusp, the curling wisps of mist formed breathy tendrils against his armour plating. It carried no scent, no taste, no presence beyond what he could see. Above him swayed the idle form of the awestruck Knight. Either side of him, Thallaxi cyborgs marched into the mist. Their blood-filled face domes reflected the golden fog.

Zephon turned – and ceased. What would he see if he looked back? The light’s intensity as a sun’s flare, ringing a structure raised above the ground? A core of blackness in the heart of a thunderstorm’s flickering light? A throne, with a corona of energy, and a figure upon it, a figure that–

‘Don’t look back!’ Diocletian was there, shoving the Blood Angel with the haft of his spear.

But the Emperor… The very Throne of Terra…

‘Move, Bringer of Sorrow. Move now.’

Zephon swallowed, faced the golden mist head-on, and took his first step into the webway.