The Horus Heresy: Vengeful Spirit

Where are the tombs of dead gods? What wailing mourner pours wine over their grave-mounds? There was a time when a being known as Zeus was the king of all the gods, and any man who doubted his might and majesty was a heathen and an enemy. But where in all the Imperium is there the man who worships Zeus?

And what of Huitzilopochtli? Forty thousand maidens were slain in sacrifice to him, their dripping hearts burned in vast pyramid temples. When he frowned, the sun stood still, when he raged earthquakes destroyed entire cities, when he thirsted he was watered with oceans of blood.

But today Huitzilopochtli is magnificently forgotten.

And what of his brother, Tezcatilpoca?

The ancients believed that Tezcatilpoca was almost as powerful as his brother. He consumed the hearts of almost thirty thousand virgins a year, but does anyone guard his tomb or know where it is to be found? Does anyone weep or hang mourning wreaths upon his graven image?

And what of Balor of the Eye, or the Lady of Cythera? Or of Dis, whom the Romanii Qaysar found to be the chief god of the Keltos? Or the dreaming serpent, Kajura? Of Taranis, only dimly recalled by a dead order of Knights and early historians of Unity? Or the flesh-hungry King Nzambi? Or the serpentine hosts of Cromm Crúaich, driven from their island lair by the Priest of Ravenglass?

Where are their bones? Where is the tree of woe upon which to hang memorial garlands? In what forgotten abode of oblivion do they await their hour of resurrection?

They are not alone in eternity, for the tombs of dead gods are crowded. Urusix is there, and Esus, and Baldur, and Silvana, and Mithras, and Phoenicia, and Deva, and Kratus, and Uxellimus, and Borvo, and Grannos, and Mogons. All mighty gods in their day, worshipped by billions, replete with demands and commandments, ascribed the power to bind the elements and shake the foundations of the world.

Civilisations laboured for generations to build vast temples to them; towering structures of stone and steel, fashioned by technologies now lost in the unknowing of Old Night. Interpreting their divine desires fell to thousands of holy men; lunatic priests, dung-smeared shamans and opium-ravaged oracles. To doubt their pronouncements was to die in agony. Great armies took to the field to defend the gods against infidels and carry their will to heathen peoples in far off lands. Continents were burned, innocents butchered and worlds laid waste in their name. Yet in the end they all withered and died, cast down and justly unremembered. Today there are few so deranged as to do them reverence.

All were gods of the highest eminence, many of them mentioned with fear and trembling awe in the ancient texts of the White God. They ranked with the Highest Power; yet time has trampled them all underfoot and mocks the ashes of their bones.

They were gods of the highest dignity – gods of civilised peoples – worshipped by entire worlds. All were omnipotent, omniscient and immortal.

And all are dead.

If any of them ever really existed, they were but aspects of the true Pantheon, masks behind which hide the first gods of the universe in all their terrible beauty.

Lorgar has been vociferous in his proselytising of this fact, wearily so.

But he does not know as much as he believes.

Imperial Truth? Primordial Truth?

Both are irrelevant.

There is a god who has raised Himself higher than all the others, mightier than any imagined deity or hell-spawned monster dreamed into being.

He is the Emperor.

My father.

And I have to kill Him.

That is the only Truth that matters.

ONE The Mausolytica / Confraternity / Brothers

The dead of Dwell were screaming. The Mausolytic Precinct was a place of terror for them now, where the cessation of mortal functions offered no respite from continual torment. A thousand tech-adepts died by the sword before enough had finally been compelled to repair the damage done in the wake of the Sons of Horus’s assault, but repair it they had.

The dead of the Mausolytic screamed from dawn till dusk, through the night and across every day since Aximand had captured it in the name of the Warmaster. They screamed in fear, in horror and revulsion.

But most of all they screamed in anger.

Only the Warmaster heard them, and he cared nothing for their anger. His only interest was in what they could tell him of the past; as they had experienced it and as they had learned it.

A vaulted sprawl of colonnaded stone structures that possessed the same scale as the palace of a mighty Terran patrician, was here a repository of the dead and librarium in one. Plain facades of ochre granite shone like burnished copper in the dying sunlight, and the cries of circling seabirds almost made Horus Aximand forget a war had been fought here.

Could almost make him forget that he nearly died here.

The battle for the Mausolytic Precinct had been won by bloody, shoulder-charging bodywork, blade to blade, muscle to muscle. There had been collateral damage of course; machinery destroyed, stasis capsules smashed open and preserved flesh turned to hard leather upon exposure to the unforgiving atmospherics.

Blood still stained its walls in the catastrophic spray patterns of bodies detonated within ruptured personal shields. The ruined corpses of the Compulsories were gone, but no one cared enough to wash away their blood.

Aximand stood at a knee-high wall of sun-blushed stone, one foot on the parapet, forearms resting on his raised knee. The sound of waves far below was peaceful and when the wind blew in from the ocean, the burned metal smell of the port was replaced with the tang of salt and wildflowers. From his vantage point upon the high plateau, the tumbled city of Tyjun was much as it had been when the Sons of Horus made their first landings.

His first impression was that a vast tidal surge had swept along the rift valley and deposited the forgotten detritus of an ocean upon its retreat. There appeared to be no order to the city, but Aximand had long since come to appreciate the organic subtleties of the city’s ancient designers.

‘It is protean,’ he would say, when he found a willing ear, ‘a city that thrives on its disregard for clean lines and imposed clarity. The ostensive lack of cohesion is deceptive, for order exists within the chaos, which only becomes apparent when you walk its twisting paths and find that your destination has been set from the very beginning.’

Every building was unique in its own way, as though an army of architects had come to Tyjun and each designed a wealth of structures from the salvaged steel and glass and stone.

The only exception was the Dwellan Palace, a recent addition to the city that bore the utilitarian hallmarks of classical Macraggian architecture. Taller than anything else in Tyjun, it was a domed palace of Imperial governance, a monument to the Great Crusade and an expression of Primarch Guilliman’s vanity all in one. It had mathematically precise proportions and though Lupercal thought it austere, Aximand liked the restraint he saw in its elegantly crisp design.

Exquisite statuary of Imperial heroes stood proud around the circumference of the main azure dome and in recessed alcoves running the full height of the central arch. Aximand had learned the identity of every one before they were smashed; Chapter Masters and captains of the Ultramarines and Iron Hands, Army generals, Titan princeps, Munitorum pontiffs and even a few aexactor tithe-takers.

Evening sunlight honeyed the city’s rooftops and the Sea of Enna was glassy and still. The water became a golden mirror streaked with phosphor-bright reflections of orbiting warships, the occasional moon and void-war debris falling far out to sea.

The prow of a sunken cargo tanker jutted from the water at the quayside, petrochemical gels frothing its surface with oily scum.

Far to the north, a glowing star clung stubbornly to the horizon, the twin of the sun setting in the south. This, Aximand knew, was no star, but the still burning remains of the Budayan ship school, its orbit degrading with each planetary revolution.

‘Won’t be long until that impacts,’ said a voice behind him.

‘True,’ agreed Aximand without turning.

‘It’s not going to be pretty,’ said another. ‘Best we’re gone before then.’

‘We should have left here long ago,’ added a fourth.

Aximand finally turned from the bucolic vision of Tyjun and nodded to his battle-brothers.

‘Mournival,’ he said. ‘The Warmaster calls for us.’

The Mournival. Restored. But then, it had never been lost, just broken awhile.

Aximand marched with Ezekyle Abaddon. In his spiked warrior-plate, the First Captain of the Sons of Horus was more than a head taller than Aximand. His body language was savagely aggressive, cruelly planed features pulled hard over jutting bones. His skull was hairless, save for a glossy black topknot jutting from his crown like a tribal fetish.

He and Abaddon were old hands, Mournival from the time before the galaxy had slipped a gear and turned to a very different hand at the crank. They had spilled blood on a hundred worlds in the name of the Emperor; hundreds more for the Warmaster.

And they had once laughed as they fought.

The two newest members of the Mournival marched alongside their proposers, lunar marks graven upon their helms by the reflected light of Dwell’s moon. One was a warrior with a reputation, the other a sergeant who’d earned his during the disaster of Dwell’s fall.

Widowmaker Kibre commanded the Justaerin Terminators. One of Abaddon’s men and a true son. Where Kibre was seasoned and war-known, Grael Noctua of the Warlocked was new to the men of the Legion. A warrior possessed of a mind like a steel trap, his intellect was likened by Abaddon to a slow blade.

With Kibre’s investiture, a potent weight of choler lay to one side of the Mournival. Aximand hoped Noctua’s phlegmatic presence would counterbalance it. There had been rumblings at the favour Aximand showed Noctua, but Dwell silenced them all.

With their two newest brothers, Aximand and Abaddon led the way to the central Mausolytic Hall in answer to the Warmaster’s summons.

‘Do you think it will be a mobilisation order?’ asked Noctua.

Like all of them, he was eager to be unleashed. The war here was long-ended, and but for a handful of forays beyond the system, the bulk of the Legion had remained in place while their primarch sequestered himself with the dead.

‘Perhaps,’ said Aximand, unwilling to speculate on the Warmaster’s motives for remaining on Dwell. ‘We will know soon enough.’

‘We should be on the move,’ said Kibre. ‘The war gathers momentum while we stagnate with inaction.’

Abaddon halted their march and placed a hand in the centre of the Widowmaker’s breastplate. ‘You think you know the course of war better than your primarch?’

Kibre shook his head. ‘Of course not, I just–’

‘First lesson of the Mournival,’ said Aximand. ‘Never second guess Lupercal.’

‘I wasn’t second guessing him,’ snapped Kibre.

‘Good,’ said Aximand. ‘Then you’ve learned something useful today. Perhaps the Warmaster has found what he needed, perhaps not. Maybe we will have mobilisation orders, maybe we won’t.’

Kibre nodded and Aximand saw him force his volatile humours into balance. ‘As you say, Little Horus. The molten Cthonian core that burns in us all waxes stronger in me than most.’

Aximand chuckled, though the sound was not as he once knew it, the muscles beneath the skin moving in subtly different ways.

‘You say that like it’s a bad thing,’ he said. ‘Just remember that fire needs to be controlled to be useful.’

‘Most of the time,’ added Abaddon, and they moved off again.

They traversed high-vaulted antechambers of fallen pillars and halls of bolt-cratered frescos that had once been battlefields. The air thrummed with the vibration of buried generators and tasted like an embalming workshop. Between murals of cobalt-blue Legion warriors being welcomed with garlands, tens of thousands of names were inlaid on coffered panels with gold leaf.

The interred dead of the Mausolytica.

‘Like the Avenue of Glory and Lament on the Spirit,’ said Aximand, pointing out the fine scriptwork.

Abaddon snorted, not even glancing at the names. ‘It hasn’t been called that since Isstvan.’

‘The necrologists may be gone,’ sighed Aximand, ‘but it is as it has always been, a place to remember the dead.’

They climbed a wide set of marbled steps, crunching over the powdered remains of toppled statues and emerging into a transverse hallway Aximand had fought the length and breadth of; shield raised, Mourn-it-all’s blade high, shoulders squared. Soaked in blood to the elbow.

‘Dreaming again?’ asked Abaddon, noting his fractional pause.

‘I don’t dream,’ snapped Aximand. ‘I’m just thinking how ridiculous it was that an army of men were able to trouble us here. When have we ever faced mortals and found them bothersome?’

Abaddon nodded. ‘The Chainveil fought in the City of Elders. They delayed me.’

No more needed to be said. That any army, mortal or transhuman, could delay Ezekyle Abaddon spoke volumes to their competency and courage.

‘But they all died in the end,’ said Kibre as they passed beneath a great, funerary arch and moved deeper into the tomb complex. ‘Chainveil or ordinary soldiers, they stood against us in the line and we killed them all.’

‘That they stood at all should have told us there were was something else waiting for us,’ said Grael Noctua.

‘How so?’ said Aximand, knowing the answer, but wanting to hear it articulated.

‘The men who fought us here, they believed they could win.’

‘Their defence was orchestrated by Meduson of the Iron Tenth,’ said Aximand. ‘It’s understandable they believed him.’

‘Only Legion presence gives mortals that kind of backbone,’ continued Noctua. ‘With the Tenth Legion’s war-leader and the kill teams of the Fifth Legion in place, they thought they had a chance. They thought they could kill the Warmaster.’

Kibre shook his head. ‘Even if Lupercal had fallen for their transparent ploy and come himself, he would have easily slain them.’

More than likely Kibre was right. It was inconceivable that a mere five legionaries could have ended the Warmaster. Even with surprise in their corner, the idea that Horus could be brought low by a rush team of blade killers seemed ludicrous.

‘He outwitted a sniper’s bullet on Dagonet, and he evaded the assassins’ swords on Dwell,’ said Abaddon, kicking over an engraved urn emblazoned with a splintered Ultima. ‘Meduson must have been desperate to think the Scars stood a chance.’

‘Desperate is exactly what he was,’ said Aximand, feeling the itch where his face had been reattached. ‘Just imagine if they had succeeded.’

No one answered, no one could conceive of the Legion without Lupercal at its head. Without one, the other did not exist.

But Shadrak Meduson had failed to lure the Warmaster into his trap, and Dwell had fallen hard.

Against Horus Lupercal’s armies, everything fell eventually.

‘Why defend the dead at all?’ said Kibre. ‘Aside from commanding the high ground over an open city, holding the Mausolytica offers no tangible strategic merit. We could have simply shelled it flat, and sent Lithonan’s Army auxiliaries in to kill any survivors.’

‘They knew the Warmaster would want so precious a resource captured intact,’ said Noctua.

‘It’s a house of the dead,’ pressed Kibre. ‘What kind of resource is that?’

‘Now you’re Mournival, why don’t you ask him yourself?’ answered Noctua. Kibre’s head snapped around, unused to being addressed with such informality by a junior officer. Mournival equality was going to take time to bed in with the Widowmaker.

‘Tread lightly, Noctua,’ warned Abaddon. ‘You might be one of us now, but don’t think that exempts you from respect.’

Aximand grinned at Abaddon’s ire. Ezekyle was a warhound on a fraying leash, and Aximand wondered if he knew that was his role.

Of course Ezekyle knew. A warrior did not become First Captain of the Sons of Horus by being too stupid to know his place.

‘Apologies,’ said Noctua, turning to address Kibre directly. ‘No disrespect was intended.’

‘Good,’ said Aximand. ‘Now give Falkus a proper answer.’

‘The Mausolytica occupies the best defensive terrain in the rift valley, but it’s barely fortified,’ said Noctua. ‘Which suggests the Dwellers valued it highly, but didn’t think of it as a military target until Meduson told them it was.’

Aximand nodded and slapped a gauntleted hand on the polished plates of Noctua’s shoulder guard.

‘So why did the Iron Hands think this place was valuable?’ asked Kibre.

‘I have no idea,’ said Aximand.

Only later would he come to understand that the Dwellers would have been far better demolishing the Mausolytic Halls and smashing its machinery to shards than allowing it to fall to the Sons of Horus.

Only much later, when the last violent spasms of galactic war were stilled for a heartbeat, would Aximand learn the colossal mistake they had made in allowing the Mausolytic to endure.

They found the primarch in Pilgrim’s Hall, where ancient machinery allowed the Mausolytic’s custodians to access and consult the memories of the dead. The custodians had joined their charges in death, and Horus Lupercal commanded the machines alone.

A colossal cryo-generator throbbed with power in the centre of the echoing chamber, like a templum organ with a multitude of frost-limmed ducts emerging from its misting condensers. Smeared charnel dust patterned its base where the White Scars kill team had thrown off their disguises.

Radiating outward from the generator like the spokes of an illuminated wheel were row upon row of supine bodies in stacked glass cylinders. Aximand had logged twenty-five thousand bodies in this hall alone, and there were fifty similar sized spaces above ground. He hadn’t yet catalogued how many chambers were carved into the plateau’s bedrock.

The Warmaster was easy to see.

His back was to them as he bent over a cylindrical tube hinged out from its gravimetric support field. Twenty Justaerin Terminators stood between them and the Warmaster, armed with photonic-edged falchions and twin-barrelled bolters. Nominally the Warmaster’s bodyguard, the Justaerin were a throwback to a time when war-leaders actually required protection. Horus no more needed their strength of arms to defend him than he needed that of the Mournival, but after Hibou Khan’s ambush, no one was taking any chances.

As ever, the primarch was a lodestone to the eyes, a towering presence to which it was right and proper to offer devotion. An easy smile suggested Horus had only just noticed them, but Aximand didn’t doubt he had been aware of them long before they entered the hall.

Titanic plates of brass-edged jet encased him, the plastron emblazoned with a slitted amber eye flanked by golden wolves. Horus’s right hand was a killing talon, and his left rested upon an enormous mace. Its name was Worldbreaker, and its adamantium haft was featureless save for an eagle pommel-stone, its murder head bronze and black.

The Warmaster had the face of a conquerer, a warrior, a diplomat and a statesman. It could be a kindly face of paternal concern or the last face you ever saw.

Aximand could not yet tell which it was at this moment, but on a day like this such ambiguity was good. To have Lupercal’s humours unknown to those who stood with him would vex those who might yet stand against him.

‘Little Horus,’ said the Warmaster as the Justaerin parted before them like the gates of a ceramite fortress.

The uncanny resemblance Aximand shared with his gene-father had earned him that name, but Hibou Khan had cut that from him with a blade of hard Medusan steel. Legion Apothecaries had done what they could, but the damage was too severe, the edge too sharp and his wounded flesh too melancholic.

Yet for all that his face was raw with disfigurement, the resemblance between Aximand and his primarch had, by some strange physiological alchemy, become even more pronounced.

‘Warmaster,’ said Aximand. ‘Your Mournival.’

Horus nodded and studied each of them in turn, as though assessing the alloyed composition of the restored confraternity.

‘I approve,’ he said. ‘The blend looks to be a good one.’

‘Time will tell,’ said Aximand.

‘As it does in all things,’ answered Horus, coming forward to stand before the sergeant of the Warlocked.

‘Aximand’s protégé, a true son indeed,’ said Horus with a hint of pride. ‘I hear good things about you, Grael. Are they true?’

To his credit, Noctua retained his senses in the face of the Warmaster’s appraisal, but he could not meet his gaze for long.

‘Yes, my lord,’ he managed. ‘Maybe… I do not know what you have heard.’

‘Good things,’ said Horus, nodding and moving on to take the Widowmaker’s gauntlet in his taloned grip.

‘You’re tense, Falkus,’ he said. ‘Inaction doesn’t suit you.’

‘What can I say? I was built for war,’ said Kibre, with more tact than Aximand expected.

‘More than most,’ agreed Horus. ‘Don’t worry, I’ll not have you and the Justaerin idle for much longer.’

The Warmaster came to Abaddon and said, ‘And you, Ezekyle, you hide it better than the Widowmaker, but I see you also chafe at our enforced stay on Dwell.’

‘There is a war to be won, my lord,’ said Abaddon, his tone barely on the right side of rebuke. ‘And I won’t have it said that the Sons of Horus let other Legions do their fighting for them.’

‘Nor would I, my son,’ said Horus, placing his talon upon Abaddon’s shoulders. ‘We have been distracted by the schemes and petty vengeances of others, but that time is over.’

Horus turned and accepted a blood-red war-cloak from one of the Justaerin. He snapped it around his shoulders, fixing it in place with a pair of wolf-claw pins at each pauldron.

‘Aximand, are they here?’ asked Horus.

‘They are,’ said Aximand. ‘But you already know that.’

‘True,’ agreed Horus. ‘Even when we were without form, I always knew if they were close.’

Aximand saw a rogue glint in Horus’s eye, and decided he was joking. Rare were the moments when Horus spoke of his years with the Emperor. Rarer still were insights to the time before that.

‘In my more arrogant moments, I used to think that was why the Emperor came to me first,’ continued Horus, and Aximand saw he’d been mistaken. Horus was, most assuredly, not joking. ‘I thought He needed my help to find the rest of his lost sons. Then sometimes I think it was a cruel punishment, to feel so deep a connection to my gene-kin, only to be set apart from them.’

Horus fell silent and Aximand said, ‘They wait for you in the Dome of Revivification.’

‘Good, I am eager to join them.’

Abaddon’s fists clenched. ‘Then we are to rejoin the war?’

‘Ezekyle, my son, we never left it,’ said Horus.

The Dome of Revivification was a vast hemisphere of glass and transparisteel atop the largest of the Mausolytic’s stone structures. It was a place of reverence and solemn purpose, a place where the preserved memories of the dead could be returned to life.

Access was gained via a latticework elevator that rose into the centre of the dome. Horus and the Mournival stood at the centre of the platform as it made its stately ascent. Over Kibre’s protests, the Justaerin had been left below, leaving the five of them alone. Aximand looked up to the wide opening in the floor high above them. He saw the cracked structure of the crystalline dome beyond, sunset darkening to nightfall.

Slanted columns of moonlight slid over the elevator as it emerged into the dome. A rogue shell had damaged its hemispherical structure, and shards of hardened glass lay strewn across the polished metal floor like diamond-bladed knives. Spaced at equidistant intervals around the outer circumference of the elevator were berths for dozens of cryo-cylinders. None were currently occupied.

Aximand took a shocked breath of frosted air as he saw the demigods awaiting within. He had known, of course, who the Warmaster had summoned, but to see two such numinous beings before him was still a moment of revelation.

One was a being of immaterial flesh, the other stolidly physical.

Horus spread his arms in greeting.

‘My brothers,’ said Horus, his voice filling the dome. ‘Welcome to Dwell.’

Rumours had reached the Sons of Horus of the changes wrought in some of the Warmaster’s brothers, but nothing could have prepared Aximand for just how profound those changes were.

The last time he had seen the primarch of the Emperor’s Children, Fulgrim had been the perfect warrior, a snow-maned hero in purple and gold plate. Now the Phoenician was the physical embodiment of an ancient, many-armed destroyer god. Serpentine of body and clad in exquisite fragments of his once-magnificent armour, Fulgrim was a beautiful monster. A being to be mourned for the splendour he had lost, and admired for the power he had gained.

Mortarion of the Death Guard stood apart from Fulgrim’s sinuous form and, at first glance, appeared unchanged. A closer look into his sunken eyes revealed the pain of recent hurts worn like a ragged mourning shroud. Silence, the Death Lord’s towering battle-reaper was serrated with battle-notches, and a long looping chain affixed to its pommel was wrapped around his waist like a belt. Jangling censers hung from the chains, each one venting tiny puffs of hot vapour.

His baroquely-fashioned Barbaran plate bore numerous marks of the artificer, ceramite infill, fresh paint and lapping powder. From the amount of repair work, whatever battle he had recently fought must have been ferocious.

As Horus had dismissed the Justaerin, so too had his brother primarchs come unescorted; Fulgrim absent the Phoenix Guard, Mortarion without his Deathshroud, though Aximand didn’t doubt both were close. Being in the presence of the Warmaster was an honour, but to be present at a moment where three primarchs came together was intoxicating.

Fulgrim and Mortarion had travelled to Dwell to see Horus Lupercal, but the Warmaster had not come to be seen.

He had come to be heard.

Fulgrim’s body coiled beneath him with a hiss of rasping scales, raising him up higher than Mortarion and the Warmaster.

‘Horus,’ said Fulgrim, each syllable veiled with subtle meaning. ‘We live in the greatest tumult the galaxy has known and you haven’t changed at all. How disappointing.’

‘Whereas you have changed beyond all recognition,’ said Horus.

A pair of slick, draconic wings unfolded from Fulgrim’s back, and dark pigmentation rippled through his body.

‘More than you know,’ whispered Fulgrim.

‘Less than you think,’ answered Horus. ‘But tell me, does Perturabo yet live? I’m going to need his Legion when the walls of Terra are brought down.’

‘I left him alive,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Though what has become of him since my elevation is a mystery to me. The… what did he name it? Ah, yes, the Eye of Terror is no place for one so firmly rooted in material concerns.’

‘What did you do to the Lord of Iron?’ demanded Mortarion, his voice rasping from behind the bronze breather apparatus covering the lower half of his face.

‘I freed him from foolish notions of permanence,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I honoured him by allowing his strength to fuel my ascension to this higher state of being. But in the end he would not sacrifice all for his beloved brother.’

Fulgrim sniggered. ‘I think I broke him a little bit.’

‘You used him?’ said Mortarion. ‘To become… this?’

‘We are all using one another, didn’t you know that?’ laughed Fulgrim, sliding over the floor of the chamber and admiring himself in broken glass reflections. ‘To achieve greatness, we must accept the blessing of new things and new forms of power. I have taken that teaching to heart, and embrace such change willingly. You would do well to follow my example, Horus.’

‘The spear aimed at the Emperor’s heart must not be pliant, but unyielding iron,’ said Horus. ‘I am that unyielding iron.’

Horus turned to Mortarion, who didn’t even bother to hide his revulsion at what had become of the Phoenician.

‘As are you, my brother,’ said Horus, coming forward to grip the Death Lord’s wrist, warrior to warrior. ‘You are a wonder to me, my indomitable friend. If not even the Khan’s strength could lay you low, what hope have any others?’

‘His fleetness of war is a thing of wonder,’ admitted Mortarion. ‘But rob him of it and he is nothing. I will reap him yet.’

‘And I would see it so,’ promised Horus, releasing his grip. ‘On the soil of Terra we shall hobble the Khan and see how well he fights.’

‘I am your servant,’ said Mortarion.

Horus shook his head. ‘No, never that. Never a servant. We fight this war so we need be no man’s slave. I would not have you exchange one master for another. I need you at my side as an equal, not a vassal.’

Mortarion nodded, and Aximand saw the Death Guard primarch stand taller at Lupercal’s words.

‘And your sons?’ said Horus. ‘Does Typhon still bait the Lion’s hunters?’

‘Since Perditus he has been leading the monks of Caliban a merry dance through the stars, leaving death and misery in his wake,’ replied Mortarion with a grunt of amusement that puffed toxic emanations from his gorget. ‘By your leave I will soon join him and turn the hunters into the hunted.’

‘Soon enough, Mortarion, soon enough,’ said Horus. ‘With your Legion mustered for war, I almost feel sorry for the Lion.’

Fulgrim bristled that he had received no words of praise, but Horus wasn’t done.

‘Now more than ever I need you both at my side, not as allies and not as subordinates, but as equals. I hold to the name Warmaster, not because of what it represented when it was bestowed, but because of what it means now.’

‘And what it that?’ asked Fulgrim.

Horus looked into the Phoenician’s aquiline features, alabaster in their cold perfection. Aximand felt the power of connection that flowed between them, a struggle for dominance that could have only one victor.

Fulgrim looked away and Horus said, ‘It means that only I have the strength to do what must be done. Only I can bring my brothers together under one banner and remake the Imperium.’

‘You always were prideful,’ said Fulgrim, and Aximand felt the urge to grip Mourn-it-all’s hilt at the Phoenician’s tone, but the sword was no longer belted at his side, its blade badly notched and still in need of repair.

Horus ignored the barb and said, ‘If I am prideful, it is pride in my brothers. Pride in what you have accomplished since last we stood together. It is why I have summoned you and no others to my side now.’

Fulgrim grinned and said, ‘Then what would you have of me, Warmaster?’

‘The thing I spoke to in the wake of Isstvan, is it gone from you now? You are Fulgrim once again?’

‘I have scoured my flesh of the creature’s presence.’

‘Good,’ said Horus. ‘What I say here is Legion business, and does not concern the things that dwell beyond our world.’

‘I cast the warp-thing out, but I learned a great many things from it while our souls were entwined.’

‘What things?’ asked Mortarion.

‘We have bargained with their masters, made pacts,’ hissed Fulgrim, pointing a sickle blade talon at Horus. ‘You have made blood pacts with gods, and oaths to gods should not lightly be broken.’

‘It sickens me to my bones to hear you speak of keeping faith with oaths,’ said Mortarion.

The Warmaster raised a hand to ward off Fulgrim’s venomous response, and said, ‘You are both here because I have need of your unique talents. The wrath of the Sons of Horus is to be unleashed once more, and I would not see it so without my brothers at my side.’

Horus walked a slow circle, weaving his words around Mortarion and Fulgrim like a web.

‘Erebus raised his great Ruinstorm on Calth and split the galaxy asunder. Beyond its tempests, the Five Hundred Worlds burned in Lorgar and Angron’s “shadow crusade”, but their wanton slaughters are of no consequence for now. What happens here, with us, with you, is what will make the difference between victory or defeat.’

The Warmaster’s words were lure and balm all in one, obvious even to Aximand, but they were having the desired effect.

‘Are we to march on Terra at last?’ asked Mortarion.

Horus laughed. ‘Not yet, but soon. It is in preparation for that day that I have called you here.’

Horus stepped back and lifted his arms as ancient machinery rose from the floor like rapid outgrowths of coral, unfolding and expanding with mechanised precision. A hundred or more glass cylinders rose with them, each containing a body lying forever on the threshold of existence and oblivion.

From previously unseen entrances, a host of weeping tech-adepts and black-robed Mechanicum entered, taking up positions alongside the gently glowing cylinders.

‘By any mortal reckoning, our father is a god,’ said Horus. ‘And for all that He has allowed His dominion to fall to rebellion, He is still too powerful to face.’

‘Even for you?’ said Fulgrim with a grin.

‘Even for me,’ agreed Horus. ‘To slay a god, a warrior must first become a god himself.’

Horus paused. ‘At least, that’s what the dead tell me.’

TWO Solid roots / Molech / Medusa’s fire

A kilometre-high dome enclosed the Hegemon, a feat of civic engineering that perfectly encapsulated the vision at the heart of the Palace’s construction. Situated within the Kath Mandau Precinct of Old Himalazia, the Hegemon was the seat of Imperial governance, a metropolis of activity that never stopped nor paused for breath in its unceasing labours.

Lord Dorn had, of course, wanted to fortify it, to layer its golden walls in adamantium and stone, but that order had been quietly rescinded at the highest level. If the Warmaster’s armies reached this far into the Palace then the war was already lost.

A million rooms and corridors veined its bones, from soulless scrivener cubicles of bare brick to soaring chambers of ouslite, marble and gold that were filled with the greatest artistic treasures of the ages. Tens of thousands of robed scribes and clerks hurried along raised concourses, escorted by document-laden servitors and trotting menials. Ambassadors and nobility from across the globe gathered to petition the lords of Terra while ministers guided the affairs of innumerable departments.

The Hegemon had long ceased to be a building as defined by the term. Rather, it had sprawled beyond the dome to become a vast city unto itself, a knotted mass of plunging archive-chasms, towers of office, petitioner’s domes, palaces of bureaucracy and stepped terraces of hanging gardens. Over the centuries it had become a barely-understood organ within the Imperial body that functioned despite – or perhaps because of – its very complexity. This was the slow beating heart of the Emperor’s domain, where decisions affecting billions were dispatched across the galaxy by functionaries who had never lived a day beyond the winding circuits of the Palace.

And the Kath Mandau Precinct was just one of many hundreds of such regions enclosed by the iron-cased walls of the mightiest fortress on Terra.

Beneath the cloud-hung apex of the Hegemon’s central dome was a secluded rift valley, where the last remaining examples of natural foliage on Terra could be found. So enormous was the dome that varying microclimates held sway at different elevations, creating miniature weather patterns that belied any notions of enclosure.

Glittering white cliffs were shawled with mountain evergreens and brocaded by cascading ice-waterfalls that fed a crystal lake of shimmerskin koi. Clinging to a spur of rock partway up the cliffs was the ruin of an ancient citadel. Its outer wall had long since toppled, and the remains of an inner keep were demarcated by a series of concentric rings of glassily volcanic stone.

The valley had existed prior to the construction of the Palace, and rumour told that it held special significance to the Master of Mankind himself.

One man knew the truth of this, but he would never tell.

Malcador the Sigillite sat at the rippling shore of the lake, deliberating whether to advance steadily on the right or throw caution to the wind in an all-out assault. He had the superior force, but his opponent was much larger than him, a towering giant encased in battleplate the colour of moonlit ice and draped in a furred cloak. Long braids of russet hair, woven with polished gems and yellowed fangs, were pulled back from his face, that of a noble savage rendered marble white in the dome’s artificial daylight.

‘Are you going to make a move?’ asked the Wolf King.

‘Patience, Leman,’ said Malcador. ‘The subtleties of hnefatafl are manifold, and each move requires careful thought. Especially when one is the attacker.’

‘I’m aware of the game’s subtleties,’ replied Leman Russ, his voice the throaty threat-rasp of a predator. ‘I invented this variant.’

‘Then you should know not to rush me.’

Mighty beyond all sense of the word, Leman Russ was a tsunami that begins life far out to sea and builds its power over thousands of kilometres as it draws near the shore. His physical form was the instant before impact, and all who looked upon him knew it. Even when apparently at peace, it felt as though Leman Russ was only holding back some explosive violence with great effort.

A bone-handled hunting blade was belted at his waist; a dagger to one of his post-human scale, a sword to everyone else.

Next to Leman Russ, Malcador was a frail, hunch-shouldered old man. Which was, as time went by, less a carefully cultivated image, more a true reflection of his soul-deep weariness. White hair spilled from his crown and lay across his shoulders like the snow on the towering flanks of Chomolungma.

He might bind his hair up when in the company of Sanguinius or Rogal Dorn, but with Russ the observation of physical niceties were secondary to the matters at hand.

Malcador studied the board, a hexagon divided into irregular segments with a raised octagon at its centre. Each segment was pierced with slots into which were placed the playing pieces carved from yellowed hrosshvalur teeth; a mix of warriors, kings, monsters and elemental forces. Portions of the board were movable, able to slide over one another and occlude or reveal fresh segments, and rods set in each side could be rotated to block or open slots. All of which enabled a canny player to radically alter the character of the game at a stroke.

One player had a king and a small band of retainers, the other an army, and as in most such games, the object was to kill the enemy king. Or keep him alive, depending on which colour you chose. Russ always chose to play the outnumbered king.

Malcador removed a hearth-jarl and pushed it towards the octagon where the Wolf King’s pieces had gathered, then twisted one of the side rods. Clicking mechanisms rotated within the board, though it was impossible to know for certain which slots had opened up and which had closed until a player had committed to a move.

‘Bold,’ noted Russ. ‘Nemo would say you hadn’t given that move enough thought.’

‘You were pressing me.’

‘And you let yourself be goaded?’ mused Russ. ‘I’m surprised.’

‘There is not the time for deep reflection now.’

‘You’ve made that point before.’

‘It’s an important point to make.’

‘Nor yet is it a time for recklessness,’ said Russ, moving his Warhawk and twisting a side rod. Malcador’s hearth-jarl fell onto its side as the slot it had occupied was sealed.

‘Foolish,’ said Malcador, foregoing the opportunity to alter the board to advance an extra piece. ‘You are exposed now.’

Russ shook his head and pressed the segment of board before him, rotating it by ninety degrees. As it clicked back into place, Malcador saw the king’s retainers were now poised to flank his army and execute its cardinal piece.

‘You say exposed,’ said Russ. ‘I say berkutra.’

‘The hunter’s cut,’ translated Malcador. ‘That’s Chogorian.’

‘The Khan taught me his name for it,’ said Russ, never one to take another’s virtue for his own. ‘We call it almáttigrbíta, but I like his word better.’

Malcador graciously tipped his cardinal piece onto its side, knowing there would be no escape from the Wolf King’s trap, only a slow attrition that would see his leaderless army scattered to the corners of the board.

‘Well played, Leman,’ said Malcador.

Russ nodded and bent to lift a wide-necked ewer of wine from beside the table. He held a pair of pewter goblets in his other hand and kept one for himself before handing the second to Malcador. The Sigillite took note of the wine’s provenance and raised a curious eyebrow.

Russ shrugged. ‘Not everything of the Sons was bitter with sorcery.’

The wine was poured, and Malcador was forced to agree.

‘How long until your fleet is battle ready?’ asked Malcador, though he had already digested the work schedules of the Fenrisian vessels from Fabricator Kane at the Novopangean orbital yards.

‘Alpharius’s whelps tried to tear the Hrafnkel’s heart out, but her bones are strong and she’ll sail again,’ said Russ with a phlegmatic grunt. ‘The shipwrights tell me it’ll be another three months at least before she’s void-worthy, and not even Bear’s threats are getting them to move faster.’

‘Bear?’

‘A misnomer that’s stuck,’ was all Russ would say.

‘And the rest of the fleet?’

‘Probably longer,’ said Russ. ‘The delay chafes, but if Caliban’s angels hadn’t arrived when they did, there wouldn’t be a fleet left to rebuild at all. We fill our time though. We train, we fight and prepare for what’s ahead.’

‘Have you given any thought to the alternative I broached?’

‘I have,’ said Russ.

‘And?’

‘My answer is no,’ answered Russ. ‘It stinks of revenge and last resort.’

‘It’s strategy,’ said Malcador. ‘Pre-emption, if you will.’

‘Semantics,’ said Russ, a warning burr in his voice. ‘Don’t think to weave linguistic knots around me, Sigillite. I know why you want that planet burned, but I’m a warrior, not a destroyer.’

‘A slender distinction, my friend, but if any world’s death would turn the Warmaster from his course it would be that one.’

‘Perhaps, but that is a murder for another day,’ said Russ. ‘My fleet’s guns will be better directed against Horus himself.’

‘So you are set on this course?’

‘As the cursed ice-rigger of bróðirgráta is doomed to follow the bad star.’

‘Dorn would have you stay,’ said Malcador, passing the red pieces to Russ. ‘You know Terra would be mightier with the Great Wolf lying in wait, fangs bared and claws sharp.’

‘If Rogal wants me so much, he should ask himself.’

‘He is in absentia just now.’

‘I know where he is,’ said Russ. ‘You think I fought my way back from Alaxxes and didn’t leave silent hunters in the shadows to see who follows my wake? I know of the intruder ship and I saw Rogal’s men take it.’

‘Rogal is proud,’ said Malcador. ‘But I am not. Stay, Leman. Range your wolves on Terra’s walls.’

The Wolf King shook his head. ‘I’m not built for waiting, Sigillite. I don’t fight well from behind stone, waiting for the enemy to try and dig me out. I’m the executioner, and the executioner lands the first blow, a killing strike that ends dispute before it begins.’

Malcador nodded. He’d suspected this would be Russ’s answer, but had to present an alternative nonetheless. He looked up at the highest reaches of the dome, where distant anabatic winds tugged at the clouds. A soothsayer or astromancer might read omens and signs of the future in their form, but Malcador just saw clouds.

‘Has the exiled cub been summoned?’ said Russ, sitting back and draining his wine as though it were water.

Malcador returned his gaze to Russ. ‘You should not call him that, my friend. He faced the Warmaster’s decision to betray the Emperor and refused to follow it. Do not underestimate the strength of character that took, strength a great many others singularly failed to show.’

Russ nodded, conceding the point, as Malcador continued. ‘The Somnus Citadel’s shuttle arrived at Yasu’s villa this morning. He approaches the Hegemon as we speak.’

‘And you still believe him to be the best?’

‘The best?’ said Malcador. ‘A hard thing to quantify. He is uniquely capable, no doubt, but is he the best? The best what? The best fighter, the best shot, the best heart? I don’t know if he is the best of them, but he won’t fail you.’

Russ let out a heavy, animal breath and said, ‘I’ve read the one-time slates you gave me, and they don’t make for comforting reading. When Nathaniel Garro found him he was a maddened killer, a slayer of innocents.’

‘That he survived the massacre at all was a miracle.’

‘Aye, maybe so,’ said Russ.

‘Trust me, Leman, this one stands with us, as straight up and down as any I have known.’

‘What if you’re wrong?’ asked Russ, leaning over the board and toppling his own king. ‘What if he goes back to the Warmaster? The things he’s seen and done. The things he knows. Even if he is as loyal as you believe, you can’t know what will happen when he enters the belly of the beast. You know how much rests upon this.’

‘Only too well, old friend,’ said Malcador. ‘Your life, the Emperor’s. Perhaps all of our lives. The Emperor wrought you for a terrible purpose, but a necessary one. If anyone can stop Horus before he gets to Terra, it is you.’

Russ’s head snapped up and his top lip curled back over his teeth, like an animal sensing danger. ‘He’s here.’

Malcador looked down the valley and saw a lone figure cresting the Sigillite’s bridge far below. At this distance, he was little more than a speck of steeldust grey against the white of the cliffs, but his poise was unmistakable.

Russ rose to his feet and watched the distant figure approach, regarding him as though he were a wounded hound that might turn on its master at any moment.

‘So that’s Garviel Loken,’ said Russ.

Shimmering fluorescent light filled the Dome of Revivification with the arrival of the cryo-cylinders, and Aximand felt the not unreasonable discomfort at seeing those who were alive and yet ought to be dead. The thought triggered a memory of a dream, a half-heard echo of something best forgotten.

‘Who are they?’ asked Mortarion, his deathly pallor made even more corpse-like by the glow of the life-sustaining mechanisms of the Mausolytic.

‘They are Dwell’s greatest resource,’ said Horus, as Fulgrim moved through the suspended cylinders with the leathery scrape of unnatural flesh over broken glass. ‘A thousand generations of its most brilliant minds, held forever at death’s threshold in the final instant of their life.’

Horus waved Aximand forward and he took his place at the Warmaster’s right hand. Horus placed the taloned gauntlet on his shoulder guard.

‘Aximand here led the assault to take the Mausolytic Precincts,’ said Horus with pride. ‘At no small personal cost.’

Fulgrim turned to him, and Aximand saw the change in the Phoenician went far deeper than his physical transformation. The narcissism Aximand always suspected lay at the heart of the Emperor’s Children’s obsessive drive for perfection was rampant in Fulgrim. Nothing he said could be taken at face value, and Aximand wondered if trusting Fulgrim had been Perturabo’s downfall. Surely Horus would not make the same mistake?

‘Your face,’ said the Phoenician. ‘What happened to it?’

‘I got careless in the vicinity of a Medusan blade.’

Fulgrim reached out with one of his upper arms and took hold of Aximand’s chin, turning his head to either side. The touch was repellent and exhilarating.

‘Your whole face removed in one cut,’ said Fulgrim with grudging admiration. ‘How did it feel?’

‘Painful.’

‘Lucius would approve,’ said Fulgrim. ‘But you shouldn’t have re-attached it. Imagine the bliss of that pain each time you were helmed. And one less of you looking like my brother is no bad thing.’

The Phoenician moved on and Aximand felt a curious mix of relief and regret that the primarch’s touch was no longer upon him.

‘So you can talk to them?’ asked Mortarion, examining the controls of a cryo-cylinder. The tech-adept next to him dropped to his knees, soiled and weeping in terror.

The Warmaster nodded. ‘Everything these people knew is preserved and blended with the hundreds of remembrancers and iterators who came to this world after Guilliman restored it to the Imperium.’

‘And what do they say?’

Horus made his way to a gently glowing cylinder in which lay the recumbent form of an elderly man. The Mournival followed him and Aximand saw the body within was draped in a red-gold aquila flag, the planes and contours of his features suggesting he was not a native Dweller.

‘They try to say nothing,’ grinned Horus. ‘How the galaxy has changed isn’t to their taste. They scream and rage, trying to keep me from hearing what I want, but they can’t scream all the time.’

Fulgrim coiled his serpentine lower body around the mechanisms of the cylinder, rearing up and peering through the frosted glass.

‘I know this man,’ he said, and Aximand saw that he also recognised him, picturing the preserved face as it had been nearly two centuries ago when its owner had boarded the Vengeful Spirit.

‘Arthis Varfell,’ said Horus. ‘His iterations during the latter days of Unity were instrumental in the pacification of the Sol system. And his monographs on the long-term benefits of pre-introducing advocatus agents into indigenous cultures prior to compliance overtures became required reading.’

‘What’s he doing here?’ asked Mortarion.

‘Varfell was part of the Thirteenth’s expeditionary forces when they reached this world,’ said Horus. ‘Roboute gave him much credit for making Dwell’s reintegration to the Imperium bloodless. But soon after compliance the old man’s heart finally started rejecting the juvenat treatments, and he chose to be implanted within the Mausolytic rather than continue onwards. He rather liked the idea of becoming part a whole world’s shared memory.’

‘He told you this?’

‘Eventually,’ said Horus. ‘The dead don’t easily give up their secrets, but I didn’t ask gently.’

‘What do the dead of this world know of gods and their doom?’ demanded Fulgrim.

‘More than you or I,’ said Horus.

‘What does that mean?’

Horus strolled through the rows of cryo-cylinders, touching some and pausing momentarily to peer at their glowing occupants. He spoke as he walked, as though recounting nothing of consequence, though Aximand saw the studied nonchalance veiled great import.

‘I came to Dwell because I recently become aware of several lacunae in my memories, voids where there ought to be perfect recall.’

‘What couldn’t you remember?’ said Fulgrim.

‘If that isn’t a stupid question, I don’t know what is,’ grunted Mortarion with a sound that might have been laughter.

Fulgrim hissed in anger, but the Death Lord took no notice.

‘I’d read the Great Crusade log concerning Dwell decades ago, of course,’ continued Horus, ‘though I’d put it from my mind since there hadn’t been any conflict. But when I sent the Seventeenth to Calth, Roboute spoke of the great library his highest epistolary had constructed. He said it was a treasure-house of knowledge to rival the Mausolytic of Dwell and its great repository of the dead.’

‘So you came to Dwell to see if you could fill the void in your memory?’ said Fulgrim.

‘After a fashion,’ agreed Horus, circling back to where he had begun his circuit of the cylinders. ‘Every man and woman interred here over the millennia has become part of a shared consciousness, a world memory containing everything each individual had learned, from the first great diaspora to the present day.’

‘Impressive,’ agreed Mortarion.

‘Hardly,’ said Fulgrim. ‘We all have eidetic memories. What is there here of value I do not already know?’

‘Do you remember all your battles, Fulgrim?’ asked Horus.

‘Of course. Every sword swing, every manoeuvre, every shot. Every kill.’

‘Squad names, warriors? Places, people?’

‘All of it,’ insisted Fulgrim.

‘Then tell me of Molech,’ said Horus. ‘Tell me what you remember of that compliance.’

Fulgrim opened his mouth to speak, but no words came out. His expression was that of a blank-faced novitiate as he sought the answer to a drill sergeant’s rhetorical question.

‘I don’t understand,’ said Fulgrim. ‘I remember Molech, I do, its wilds and its high castles and its Knights, but…’

His words trailed off, putting Aximand in the mind of a warrior suffering severe head trauma. ‘We were both there, you and I, before the Third Legion had numbers to operate alone. And the Lion? Wait, was Jaghatai there too?’

Horus nodded. ‘So the logs say,’ he said. ‘We four and the Emperor travelled to Molech. It complied, of course. What planet would offer resistance to Legion forces led by the Emperor?’

‘An overwhelming force,’ said Mortarion. ‘Was heavy resistance expected?’

‘Far from it,’ said Horus. ‘Molech’s rulers were inveterate record keepers, and they remembered Terra. Its people had weathered Old Night, and when the Emperor descended to the surface it was inevitable they would accept compliance.’

‘We remained there for some months, did we not?’ asked Fulgrim.

Aximand glanced at Abaddon and saw the same look on the First Captain’s face he felt he wore. He too remembered Molech, but like the primarchs was having difficulty in recalling specific details. Aximand had almost certainly visited the planet’s surface, but found it hard to form a coherent picture of its environs.

‘According to the Vengeful Spirit’s horologs, we were there for a hundred and eleven standard Terran days, one hundred and nine local. After we left nearly a hundred regiments of Army, three Titanicus cohorts and garrison detachments from two Legions were left in place.’

‘For a planet that embraced compliance?’ said Mortarion. ‘A waste of resources if ever I heard it. What need did the Emperor have to fortify Molech with such strength?’

Horus snapped his fingers and said, ‘Exactly.’

‘I’m guessing you have an answer for that question,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Otherwise why summon us here?’

‘I have an answer of sorts,’ said Horus, tapping the cryo-cylinder containing Arthis Varfell. ‘A specialty of this particular iterator was the early history of the Emperor, the wars of Unity and the various myths and legends surrounding His assumption of Old Earth’s throne. The memories of Dwell are untainted, and many of its earliest settlers were driven here by the raging tides of Old Night. What they remember goes back a very long way, and Varfell assimilated it all.’

‘What do you mean?’ asked Fulgrim.

‘I mean that some of the oldest Dwellers came from Molech, and they remember the Emperor’s first appearance on their world.’

‘First?’ said Fulgrim.

Mortarion gripped Silence tightly. ‘He had been there before? When?’

‘If I’m interpreting the dreams of the dead right, then our father first set foot on Molech many centuries, or even millennia before the wars of Unity. He came in a starship that never returned to Earth, a starship I believe now forms the heart of the Dawn Citadel.’

‘The Dawn Citadel… I remember that,’ said Fulgrim. ‘Yes, there was an ugly, cannibalised structure of ship parts at the end of a mountain valley! The Lion built one of his sombre castles around it did he not?’

‘He did indeed,’ said Horus. ‘The Emperor needed a starship to reach Molech, but didn’t need it to get back. Whatever He found there made Him into a god, or as near as makes no difference.’

‘And you think whatever that was is still there?’ said Fulgrim with heady anticipation. ‘Even after all this time?’

‘Why else leave the planet so heavily defended?’ said Mortarion. ‘It’s the only explanation.’

Horus nodded. ‘Through Arthis Varfell, I learned a great deal of Molech’s early years, together with what the four of us did there. Some of it I even remembered.’

‘The Emperor erased your memories of Molech?’ said Abaddon, forgetting himself for a moment.

‘Ezekyle!’ hissed Aximand.

Abaddon’s outrage eclipsed his decorum, his choler roused as he sought to vent his anger. Beyond him, the stars were out, casting a glittering light over Tyjun. Stablights from patrolling aircraft swept the city. Some close, some far away, but none came near the skeletal structure of the dome.

‘No, not erased,’ said Horus, overlooking his First Captain’s outburst. ‘Something so drastic would quickly result in a form of cognitive dissonance that would draw attention to its very existence. This was more a… manipulation, the lessening of some memories and the strengthening others to overshadow the gaps.’

‘But to alter the memories of three entire Legions,’ breathed Fulgrim. ‘The power that would require…’

‘So, it’s to Molech then?’ said Mortarion.

‘Yes, brothers,’ said Horus, spreading his arms. ‘We are to follow in the footsteps of a god and become gods ourselves.’

‘Our Legions stand ready,’ said Fulgrim, febrile anticipation making his body shimmer with corposant.

‘No, brother, I require only Mortarion’s Legion for this war-making,’ said Horus.

‘Then why summon me at all?’ snapped Fulgrim. ‘Why insult my warriors by excluding them from your designs?’

‘Because it’s not your Legion I need, it’s you,’ said Horus, spearing to the heart of Fulgrim’s vanity. ‘My Phoenician brother, I need you most of all.’

Aximand’s ocular filters dimmed as a stablight swept through the buckled struts of the dome. Stark shadows bowed and twisted.

Everyone looked up.

The dark outline of an aircraft rose up beyond the dome, its engines bellowing with downdraft. A blizzard of broken glass took to the air. Glittering reflections dazzled like snow.

‘Who the hell’s flying so close?’ said Abaddon, shielding his eyes from the blinding glare. More noise, fresh stablights from the other side of the dome.

Another two aircraft.

Fire Raptors. Horde killers that had made their name at Ullanor. Coated in non-reflective black. Hovering, circling the dome. Icons on their glacis shone proudly after months of being obscured.

Silver gauntlets on a black field.

‘It’s Meduson!’ shouted Aximand. ‘It’s Shadrak bloody Meduson!’

Three centreline Avenger cannons roared in unison. Braying quad guns on waist turrets followed an instant later.

And the Dome of Revivification vanished in a sheeting inferno of orange flame.

The game was called hnefatafl, and Loken found himself in the presence of a Titan he’d never expected to see again, much less be sat opposite. He’d met primarchs before, had even talked to some of them without making a fool of himself, but the Wolf King was another entity altogether. Primal force bound to immortal form, elemental fury woven around a frame of invincible meat and bone.

And yet, of all the post-human demigods he had met, Russ gave the impression of being the most human.

Until ten hours ago, Loken been ensconced within a lunar biodome on the edge of the Mare Tranquillitatis. Since returning from the mission to Caliban, he’d spent most of his time tending to the gardens within the dome, seeking a peace that remained forever out of reach.

Iacton Qruze had brought Malcador’s summons, together with his bare, steeldust grey armour, but his fellow Knight Errant had not joined him on the Stormbird to Terra, claiming he had heavy duty elsewhere. The Half-heard had changed markedly since their time together aboard the Vengeful Spirit, becoming a sadder, but wiser man. Loken was not sure if that was a good thing or not.

The Stormbird set down by a villa in the mountains beyond the palace, and a young girl with skin like burnished coal who had introduced herself as Ekata had offered him refreshments. He’d declined, finding her appearance unsettling, like a reminder of someone he’d once known. She led him to a black-armoured skimmer emblazoned with a serpentine dragon. It flew into the heart of the Palace Precincts, beneath the shadow of one of the great orbital plates moored to a mountainside, until coming to land within sight of the vast dome of the Hegemon. He’d climbed the valley alone, pausing only as he reached the Sigillite’s bridge as he saw the two figures at the side of the lake.

Malcador sat on a stool at the side of the board and Loken favoured him with a puzzled look.

‘You summoned me to Terra just to play a game?’

‘No,’ answered Russ, ‘but play it anyway.’

‘A good game is like a mirror that allows you to look into yourself,’ said Malcador. ‘And you can learn a lot about a man by watching how he plays a game.’

Loken looked down at the board, with its movable segments, rotating rods and one outnumbered force.

‘I don’t know how to play,’ he said.

‘It’s simple,’ said Russ, moving a piece forward and rotating a slot. ‘It’s like war. You learn the rules fast and then you have to play better than everyone else.’

Loken nodded and moved a piece forward in the centre. His was the larger army, but he had no doubt that would be of little advantage against the man he suspected had devised the game. He spent the opening moves in what he hoped was an all-out assault, provoking responses from the Wolf King, who didn’t even deign to look at the board or appear to give his strategy any consideration whatsoever.

Within six moves, it was clear that Loken had lost, but he had a better idea of how the game was played. In ten moves, his army had been split and its cardinal piece eliminated.

‘Again,’ said Russ, and Malcador reset the pieces.

They played another two games, with Loken defeated both times, but like any warrior of the Legiones Astartes, Loken was a quick study. With every move, his appreciation of the game was growing until, by the midpoint of the third game, he felt he had a good grasp of its rules and their applications.

This latest game ended as the three before it, with Loken’s army scattered and lost. He sat back and grinned.

‘Another game, my lord?’ he said. ‘I almost had you until you changed the board.’

‘It’s a favourite endgame of Leman’s to finish with a bold reshaping of the landscape,’ said Malcador. ‘But I think we’ve played enough, don’t you?’

Russ leaned over the board and said, ‘You don’t learn quick enough. He doesn’t learn quick enough.’

This last part was addressed to Malcador.

‘He already plays better than I,’ said the Sigillite.

‘Even the Balt play better than you,’ said Russ. ‘And they have minds like clubbed vatnkýr. He didn’t listen to what I told him, he didn’t learn the rules fast and didn’t play better than everyone else.’

‘Another game then,’ snapped Loken. ‘I’ll show you how quick I learn. Or are you afraid I’ll beat you at your own game?’

Russ stared at him from beneath hooded brows and Loken saw death in those eyes, the sure and certain knowledge of his own doom. He’d goaded a primarch of notorious unpredictability and saw his earlier impression of Russ being the most human of primarchs had been so very wide of the mark.

He was now about to pay for that mistake.

And he didn’t care.

Russ nodded and his killing mood lifted with a wide grin that exposed teeth that looked too large for his mouth to contain.

‘He’s a lousy player, but I like him,’ said the Wolf King. ‘Maybe you were right about him, Sigillite. There’s solid roots to him after all. He’ll do.’

Loken said nothing, wondering what manner of test he had just passed and what had been said of him before his arrival.

‘I’ll do for what?’ he asked.

‘You’ll do to find me a way to kill Horus,’ said the Wolf King.

Horus knew the capabilities of the Fire Raptor intimately. Its range, weapon mounts, rate of fire. Ullanor had shown just how savage a gunship it was. It had been integral to the victory.

I should be dead.

He breathed in sulphur-hot fumes. Fyceline, scorched metal, burning flesh. Horus rolled onto his side. Hearing damaged. A deadening numbness filled his head with dull echoes. The rasping of a saw. Thudding detonations.

He didn’t need his visor display to know how badly he’d been hurt. His armour was battered, but unbreached, though his skin was burned to the bone, his scalp scorched bare. Temperature warnings, oxygen deficiencies, organ damage. He shut them out with a thought.

Clarity. He needed clarity.

Shadrak Meduson!

Autonomic reactions took over. Time and motion became gel-like as Horus pushed himself to his feet. He swayed, concussive shock waves making him dizzy. How bad did it have to get for a primarch to feel dizzy?

Flames surrounded him. The Dome of Revivification was gone, its structure torn away in scything arcs of explosive mass-reactive bolts. Cryo-cylinders lay in shattered ruin. Wet-leather bodies smoked like trail rations.

Horus saw Noctua and Aximand pinned beneath a fallen structural member. The plates of their armour were buckled and split, their helms splintered into pieces. No sign of the Widowmaker or Ezekyle.

‘Mortarion!’ he shouted ‘Fulgrim!’

His brothers? Where were his brothers?

A figure rose from the centre of the dome, painfully bright. Too bright, giving off a radiance that sent a twist of nausea through his gut. Sinuous, winged, many armed.

Beautiful, so very beautiful. Even bleeding sick light from fractures in his essence. He rose like a snow-maned phoenix, rising from the ashes of its immortal rebirth. Horus saw sinews like hawsers in Fulgrim’s neck, his black, murderer’s eyes now filled with light that was not light.

A howling Fire Raptor swung around, the gimbals of its waist cannons swivelling to track the Phoenician.

Before it could fire, the rear wings peeled back from its body, like the wings of a dragonfly plucked by a spiteful child. Its tail section crumpled, buckling inwards under invisible force.

Fulgrim roared and brought his hands together.

The gunship imploded, crushed to a mangled ball of twisted flesh and metal. Compressed ammunition detonated and the flaming wreckage dropped like a stone.

Despite the flames, Horus felt the icy wind of warp-craft fill the dome. He’d known his brother’s transformation had empowered him enormously, but this was staggering. He saw movement in the wreckage beneath the Phoenician.

Mortarion’s Barbaran plate was black as char, his pallid face seared the same colour. He leaked blood like a pierced bladder.

Ezekyle and Aximand appeared at their primarch’s side. The First Captain’s face was a mask of crimson, his topknot burned down to the skull. Strands of it hung over his face, making him look like the victim of a wasting disease. Aximand was shouting, dragging him, but all Horus heard were explosions.

The cloying torpor of near death fell from him.

Noise and fury returned as his senses caught up with the world. The two remaining Fire Raptors were circling, methodically and systematically destroying the dome. Horus saw interlocking trails of high-calibre shells streaking from the prows of the Legion’s Fire Raptors. Streams of fire raced downward as the gunships strafed in concert around the dome’s circumference.

Nothing could live through so thorough and savage an attack.

I should be dead.

He shook off Aximand’s grip and barged through the blazing wreckage of the dome towards Mortarion, immense in his custom Martian plate. Bodies of Dwell’s greatest minds snapped beneath his weight.

The Iron Tenth’s gunships filled the air with shells again.

He tried to shout, but his throat was a scorched ruin of smoke-damaged tissue. He coughed up ash and seared lung matter.

Explosions detonated prematurely, orange flame and black smoke. Shrapnel and casings fell like hot nails.

I should be dead.

And but for the craft of Malevolus and the Phoenician’s power, he would be.

Fulgrim’s arms were outstretched, and Horus guessed he had summoned a force barrier or kine-shield. Beads of phosphor-bright ichor ran like sweat down his body. Writhing smoke coated his serpent form as dark radiance spilled from his eyes and mouth.

Whatever he was doing, it was robbing the solid rounds of their potency. Not all of it, but most of it.

Six shells tore into Fulgrim’s body, exploding from his spine.

Horus cried aloud as if he had been struck himself. Blood like bright milk spattered Mortarion’s armour. It smoked like an acid burn. Fulgrim screamed and the roar of gunfire and explosions swelled in power. The platform of the dome sagged, solid metal warping in the heat of the fire.

‘Horus! Bring them down!’ gasped Fulgrim. ‘Quickly!’

Aximand and Abaddon fired their bolters at the gunships, hoping for a lucky hit. A cracked canopy, a buckled engine louvre. Impacts pummelled the gunships’ flanks, but Fire Raptors were built to withstand deadlier weapons than theirs.

Mortarion waded through the wreckage, as unbroken as ever, the black blade of Silence unlimbered and trailing a burning length of chain. He roared something in the heathen tongue of his home world as he ran towards the edge of the dome.

The Death Lord hurled Silence like an axeman.

The great reaper blade spun and hammered into the heraldic fist upon the nearest Fire Raptor’s glacis. Heels braced in the shattered dome, Mortarion hauled on the chain attached to Silence’s heel.

The gunship lurched in the air, but the Death Lord wasn’t done with it. Its Avenger cannon flensed Mortarion, driving him back. Plates sheared from him, blood arced in pressurised sprays. Flesh melted in the fury of high power mass-reactives.

And still Mortarion pulled on the chain, pulling the screaming gunship closer.

‘I’ve hooked him!’ yelled Mortarion. ‘Now finish it!’

The pilots fought to escape his grip. The Fire Raptor’s engines shrieked in power, but hand over hand, the downed primarch reeled the gunship in like a belligerent angler.

Horus appeared at Mortarion’s side, running.

Even in his towering armour he was running. Jumping.

He vaulted onto the shattered remains of a cryo-capsule and launched himself through the air. Hooked by the Death Lord, the gunship was powerless to evade. Horus landed on its prow and knelt to grip the haft of Silence as the gunship lurched with the impact of his landing.

He saw the pilots’ faces and drank in their terror. Horus never normally gave any thought to the men he killed. They were soldiers doing a job. Misguided and fighting for a lie, but simply soldiers doing what they were ordered to do.

But these men had hurt him. They’d tried to murder him and his brothers. They’d lain in wait for an opportunity to behead their enemy. That he’d been foolish enough to believe Shadrak Meduson would only have one plan in place inflamed Horus’s humours as much as the attempt itself.

He lifted his right arm, and Worldbreaker’s killing head caught the firelight.

The mace swung and demolished the pilot’s compartment.

The last Fire Raptor swung around the dome. Seeing him atop the second gunship and knowing it was doomed, the Fire Raptor’s cannons roared.

High explosive, armour penetrating shells ripped along the fuselage of the wallowing gunship, shearing it in two. It exploded in a geysering plume of fire, but Horus was already in the air.

Silence in one hand, Worldbreaker in the other, he landed on the back of the last gunship, slewing it around. The Fire Raptor gunned its engines as it tried to shake him from its back. Horus swung Silence in a wide arc and split the Fire Raptor’s spine.

Still roaring, the gunship’s engines wrenched free with a screech of tortured metal. Horus swept Worldbreaker around like a woodsman’s axe and its flanged head ploughed through the gunship’s fuselage, obliterating the pilots and turning the prow to scrap.

The shattered remains fell away as Horus dropped into the dome with both Silence and Worldbreaker held out at his sides.

An explosion mushroomed behind him.

Horus dropped both weapons and ran to Mortarion. He knelt and reached out to clasp his blood-soaked brother to his burned breast. Mortarion’s arms hung limp, tendons ripped from bones and muscles acid-burned raw.

Neither moved, a living tableau of the ashen sculptures of the dead left in an atomic detonation’s wake.

One touch and they would crumble to cinders.

‘My brother,’ wept Horus. ‘What have they done to you?’

THREE The Bringer of Rain / House Devine / First kill

At first, Loken thought he’d misheard. Surely Russ hadn’t said what he thought he’d just said. He searched the Wolf King’s eyes for any sign that this was another test, but saw nothing to convince him that Russ hadn’t just revealed his purpose.

‘Kill Horus?’ he said.

Russ nodded and began packing up the hnefatafl board, as though the matter were already concluded. Loken felt as though he had somehow missed the substance of a vital discussion.

‘You’re going to kill Horus?’

‘I am, but I need your help to do it.’

Loken laughed, now certain this was a joke.

‘You’re going to kill Horus?’ he repeated, carefully enunciating every word to avoid misunderstanding. ‘And you need my help?’

Russ looked over at Malcador with a frown. ‘Why does he keep asking me the same question? I know he’s not simple, so why is he being so dense?’

‘I think your directness after so oblique an approach has him confused.’

‘I was perfectly clear, but I will lay it out one last time.’

Loken forced himself to listen intently to the Wolf King’s every word, knowing there would be no hidden meanings, no subtext and no ulterior motives. What Russ required of him would be exactly as it was spoken.

‘I am going to lead the Rout in battle against Horus, and I am going to kill him.’

Loken sat back on the rock, still trying to process the idea of a combat between Leman Russ and Horus. Loken had seen both primarchs make war over the last century, but when it came down to blood and death he saw only one outcome.

‘Horus Lupercal will kill you,’ said Loken.

Had he named any other individual, Loken had no doubt the Wolf King would have torn his throat out before he’d even known what was happening. Instead, Russ nodded.

‘You’re right,’ he said, his eyes taking on a distant look as he relived old battles. ‘I’ve fought every one of my brothers over the centuries, either in training or with blooded blade. I know for a fact I can kill any one of them if had to… but Horus.’

Russ shook his head and his next words were spoken like a shameful confession, each one a bitter curse.

‘He’s the only one I don’t know if I can beat.’

Loken never thought to hear such a bald admission from any primarch, let alone the Wolf King. Its frank honesty lodged in his heart, and he would take Leman Russ’s words to the grave.

‘Then what can I do?’ he said. ‘Horus must be stopped, and if you’re going to be the one doing it, then I want to help.’

Russ nodded and said, ‘You were part of my brother’s inner council, his… what did you call it? The Mournival. You were there the day he turned traitor, and you know the Sons of Horus in a way I cannot.’

Loken felt the import of the primarch’s next words before he said them, like the tension in the air before a storm.

‘You will go back to your Legion like the aptrgangr that walks unseen in the wilds of Fenris,’ said Russ. ‘Lay a hunter’s trail within the rogue wolf’s lair. Reveal the flaw to which he is blind, and I can slay him.’

‘Go back to the Sons of Horus?’ said Loken.

‘Aye,’ said Russ. ‘My brothers all have a weakness, but I believe that only one of his own can see that of Horus. I know Horus as a brother, you know him as a father, and there are none who can bring down fathers like their sons.’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Loken, shaking his head. ‘I barely knew him at all. I thought I did, but everything he told me was a lie.’

‘Not everything,’ said Russ. ‘Before this madness, Horus was the best of us, but even the best are not perfect.’

‘Horus can be beaten,’ added Malcador. ‘He is a fanatic, and that’s how I know he can be beaten. Because beneath whatever horrors drive them, fanatics always hide a secret doubt.’

‘And you think I know what that is?’

‘Not yet,’ said Russ. ‘But I’m confident you will.’

Loken stood as the Wolf King’s certainty filled him. He sensed the breath of someone standing near him, the nearness of the ghost that finally convinced him to accept Malcador’s summons to Terra.

‘Very well, Lord Russ, I will be your pathfinder,’ said Loken, extending his hand. ‘You may have your sights set on the Warmaster, but there are those within the ranks of the Sons of Horus to whom I owe death.’

Russ shook his hand and said, ‘Have a care, Garviel Loken. This isn’t a path of vengeance I’m setting you on, nor is it one of execution. Leave such things to the Rout. It’s what we do best.’

‘I can’t do this alone,’ said Loken, turning to Malcador.

‘No, you cannot,’ agreed Malcador, reaching to take Loken’s hand. ‘The Knights Errant are yours to command in this. Choose who you will, with my blessing.’

The Sigillite glanced down at Loken’s palm, seeing the fading echo of a bruise in the shape of a gibbous moon.

‘A wound?’ asked Malcador.

‘A reminder.’

‘A reminder of what?’

‘Something I still have to do,’ said Loken, looking up to the ruined citadel high on the cliff side as the hooded figure of a man he knew to be dead withdrew into its shadow.

Loken turned from Russ and Malcador, following the snaking path that led back down the valley. As he left, the clouds gathered beneath the dome split apart.

And a warm rain began to fall in the Hegemon.

The blood-red Knight climbed through the rocky canyons and evergreen highlands of the Untar Mesas with long, loping strides. At nearly nine metres tall, its mechanised bulk simply splintered the lower branches of the towering bitterleaf trees it didn’t bother to avoid. Some broke apart on impact, some were sheared cleanly by the hard edges of the Knight’s ion shield. A wonder of ancient technology, the Knight was lighter kin to the Titan Legions, a lithe predator to their lumbering war engines.

Its name was Banelash, and a crackling whip writhed at one shoulder mount. Upon the other, banked racks of heavy stubber barrels whined with the energy stored in their propellant stacks.

The Knight’s hull plates were vermillion and ebony, segmented and overlapping like burnished naga scales. It had reaved the borders between warring states of Molech a thousand years before the coming of the Imperium. The Knight was a predator stalking the mountain forests, seeking dangerous quarry to bring down.

Encased within the pilot’s compartment, Raeven Devine, second-born son of Molech’s Imperial commander, let the sensorium surround him with graded representations of the landscape. Plugged into Banelash via the invasive technology of the Throne Mechanicum, its every motion and stride was his to command.

His limbs were its limbs; what it felt, he felt.

Sometimes, when he rode into the secret canyons to join Lyx and her intoxicated followers, the Knight’s heart would surge with memories of its previous pilots; a ghostly parade of wars he’d never fought, foes he hadn’t killed and blood he’d never shed.

Its powered whip had belonged to Raeven’s great-great-grandfather, who was said to have slain the last of the great nagahydra of distant Ophir.

A golden eagle icon within the sensorium depicted his father’s Knight a thousand metres below him. Cyprian Devine, Lord Commander Imperial of Molech, was rapidly approaching his hundred and twenty-fifth year, but still piloted Hellblade like he thought he was the equal of Raeven’s juvenated sixty-four.

Hellblade was old, far older than Banelash, and was said to be one of the original vajras that rode the Fulgurine Path with the Stormlord, thousands of years ago. Raeven thought that unlikely. The Sacristans could barely maintain the war machines of Molech’s noble Houses without their dour Mechanicum overseers to hand.

What hope would they have had before then?

Darting icons representing House Devine’s retainers, beaters and huscarls on skimmer-bikes ranged around his father’s Knight, but Raeven had long since outrun them into the mountains’ misty peaks.

If anyone was going to slay the beasts, it would be him.

The tracks of the rogue mallahgra pair led into the highest regions of the Untar Mesas, a knifeback range of mountains that effectively divided the world in two. It was rare for the great beasts – once so plentiful on Molech, now hunted almost to extinction – to come within sight of human beings, but as their numbers dwindled, so too did the extent of their hunting grounds.

The last three winters had been harsh, and the springs scarcely less so, with snow blocking the paths through the mountains. Prey animals had been driven down to the warmer lowlands, so it was little wonder the mallahgra were forced to descend from their fissure-lairs upon waking from hibernation.

The settlements crouched in the foothills of the Untar Mesas, scattered strip-mining hives and refining conurbation-stacks mainly, were now within the hunting grounds of a ravenous mallahgra and its mate. Three hundred people were already dead, with perhaps another thirty missing.

Raeven doubted any of those taken were alive, and if they were they’d soon wish they’d died in the first attack. Raeven had heard stories of mallahgra that had devoured their victims over days, a limb at a time.

Bleating petitions sent to the city of Lupercalia – a name of exquisite poor taste in these days of rebellion – begged the Knight Seneschal to sally forth and slay the beasts. Despite the high level of alert imposed on Molech with the Warmaster’s treachery, Raeven’s father had chosen to lead a hunting party into the Untar Mesas. As much as he despised his father, Raeven couldn’t deny that the old man knew the value of his word.

Despite Lyx offering innumerable pledges to the Serpent Gods to end Cyprian’s life, they had so far not obliged. Raeven had never really shared his sister-wife’s faith in the old religion, only indulging her beliefs for the carnal and intoxicating diversions they provided from the daily tedium of existence.

The path he was following traced the edge of a plunging cliff. Through breaks in the fog and cloud, Raeven could see the plains thousands of metres below. The trees reached almost to the sheer drop, snapped off where the brutish mallahgra had passed.

Their trail was easy enough to follow. Blood stained the ground in slashing arcs and every now and then he saw splintered nubs of discarded bone jutting from the snow. He’d inloaded the bio-sign taken from the latest attack to Banelash’s auspex, and it was only a matter of time until he came upon the beasts.

‘Sooner than I thought,’ he said, emerging onto a widened area of clear ground, and halting his Knight’s advance as he saw a huge body lying butchered on the snow before him.

At full height, a mallahgra stood nearly seven metres tall, with bulky simian shoulders and long, muscular arms that could tear an unskilled Knight apart. Their heads were blunt, conical horrors of mandibles, tentacles and row upon row of serrated triangular teeth.

They had six eyes, two forward looking in the manner of predators, two sited for peripheral vision and two embedded in a ridged fold of flesh at the back of its neck. Evolutionary adaptations that made them devils to hunt, but Raeven had always enjoyed a challenge.

Not that this beast offered much in the way of threat.

An ivory-furred adolescent male around five metres tall, it lay on its side with its belly carved open. Thick red blood steamed in the cold, and glistening ropes of pinkish blue intestines pooled around its stomach like butcher’s offal. The corpses of a dozen miners lay scattered around the creature’s body.

Raeven walked his Knight around the dead beast, keeping one eye on the sensorium for any sign of the female. Bloodied tracks led into the forest farther back from the edge of the cliff.

Before he could resume the hunt, the ground shook as Hellblade finally caught up to him. A number of skimmer-bikes followed, as Banelash’s sensorium fizzed with static and Cyprian Devine’s lined, patrician face appeared on the pict-manifold.

Wanting to get the first word in, Raeven said, ‘Glad you could join me.’

‘Damn you, boy, I told you to wait for me!’ snapped his father. ‘You aren’t Knight Seneschal yet! First kill isn’t yours to make.’

The skimmer-bikes circled the two Knights, several retainers dismounting to check the miners for signs of life.

‘As always, your snap judgement of my actions is entirely misplaced,’ said Raeven, lowering his pilot’s canopy to the mallahgra’s body and studying the shredded mass of its flanks and chest. By themselves, none of these injuries were mortal, but each would have been excruciatingly painful. The wound in its belly had killed the beast, a disembowelling cut made by something viciously sharp and with the power to rip through tough hide to the organs beneath.

Raeven pulled the canopy back to its full height and said, ‘I didn’t kill it.’

‘Don’t lie to me, boy.’

‘You know me, father, I’m not shy of taking credit for things others have done, but this beast didn’t fall to me. Look at these wounds.’

Hellblade leaned over the corpse, and Raeven took a moment to study his father’s ravaged features in the manifold. Cyprian Devine had eschewed juvenat treatments that were purely cosmetic, only allowing those that actively prolonged his life. In Cyprian’s world, all else was vanity, a character flaw he saw most evidently in his second son.

Raeven’s older half-brother, Albard, had always been Cyprian’s favoured son, but a failed attempt to bond with his Knight forty-three years ago had broken his mind and left him a virtual catatonic. Kept locked away in one of the Devine Towers, his continued existence was a stain on the ancient name of the House.

‘These tears in the beast’s flesh are messy, like something your chain-sabre would do,’ said Raeven as the Devine retainers carried the bodies of the miners to the skimmer-bikes. From the attention one man was getting from a medicae, it appeared there was actually a survivor.

‘The female must have done this,’ declared his father. ‘They must have fought over the spoils and she gutted him.’

‘An unlikely explanation,’ said Raeven, circling the corpse.

‘You have a better one?’

‘If the female killed her mate, then why did she leave the bodies?’ said Raeven. ‘No, something drove her from here.’

‘What could possibly drive a female mallahgra from her mate?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Raeven, lifting one of his Knight’s clawed feet and tipping the hulking mallahgra onto its front. ‘Something that can do this.’

Bloodied craters punctured the creature’s back, each one unmistakably an exit wound of explosive ammunition.

‘It’s been shot?’ hissed Cyprian. ‘Damn it all. House Kaushik, it’s got to be. Those faithless scavengers must have picked up the distress petition and sent their own Knights into the mountains, hoping to steal glory from my table!’

‘Look at these wounds,’ pointed out Raeven. ‘House Kaushik are little better than Tazkhar savages. Their Sacristans can barely maintain the fusion-powered crankers they favour, let alone anything this powerful.’

His father ignored him and strode towards the tree line where the blood-smeared tracks of the second mallahgra disappeared.

‘Sort out the retainers then follow me,’ ordered Cyprian. ‘The female’s injured, so she can’t have gone far. I’ll have her bloody head above the Argent Gate before morning, boy. And if anyone gets in my way, mark my words, I’ll have their heads up beside it.’

Cyprian walked Hellblade into the darkness beneath the bitterleaf canopy, leaving Raeven to deal with mundane business beneath his notice. Raeven turned Banelash and declined the canopy towards the circle of skimmer-bikes where the dead miners were being strapped down.

He linked with the vox-servile and said, ‘Take the bodies back to whichever hell-hole they were abducted from. Issue standard renumeration for death in service to any dependants and send death notices to the aexactor adepts.’

‘My lord,’ said the senior retainer.

‘Out of curiosity, is the survivor saying anything interesting?’

‘Nothing we can understand, my lord,’ said the medicae, one hand pressed to the side of his helm. ‘It’s doubtful he’ll live much longer.’

‘So he’s saying something?’

‘Yes, my lord.’

‘Don’t be an idiot all your life, man,’ snapped Raeven. ‘Tell me what he’s saying.’

‘He’s saying “lingchi”, my lord,’ said the medicae. ‘Keeps repeating it over and over.’

Raeven didn’t know the word. Its sound was familiar, like it belonged to a language he couldn’t speak, but was vaguely aware existed. He put it from his mind and turned Banelash, knowing his father wouldn’t approve of his dawdling with the lower orders.

He walked his Knight into the shadow of the towering bitterleaf tree line. His mood was sour as he followed Hellblade’s tracks and the bio-sign of the wounded mallahgra.

One dead beast and another his father was sure to claim.

What a colossal waste of time this hunt had proven to be.

Hellblade was a bullish machine, without the agility of Raeven’s mount, and the trail of broken branches was easy to follow. In many ways, it was the perfect match for Cyprian Devine, a man who lived as though in the midst of a charge.

Cold beams of light shafted through the forest canopy, ivory columns glittering with motes of powdered snow. Raeven followed Hellblade’s tracks through the narrow canyons of the forest, emerging onto a windswept plateau. Patches of crushed rock and smeared blood led into a bone-strewn fissure in a cliff ahead.

‘Gone back to your lair,’ said Raeven. ‘That was stupid.’

His father’s eagle icon in the sensorium was just ahead, two hundred metres into the fissure, and Raeven remembered the last time Hellblade had fought a mallahgra.

It had been on the eve of Raeven’s Becoming, a day some forty-odd years ago, but forever etched in his mind. A rogue Sacristan had tried to kill his father by blowing out the cranial inhibitors of a docile mallahgra with an electromagnetic bomb. The pain-maddened beast almost killed Raeven and Albard, but their father had split it in two with a single strike of his Knight’s chainsabre, despite taking spars of iron through his chest and stomach in the battle.

But that wasn’t the story that caught the people’s imagination.

Raeven had stood before the rampaging monster with only his brother’s powerless energy sabre held before him, a tiny figure who faced down the beast with no hope of victory. Lyx’s carefully placed whispers lauded Raeven’s courage and diminished Cyprian’s.

Years passed, and Raeven expected to take up his hereditary position, but the old bastard just wouldn’t die. Even when Raeven fathered three boys to continue the House name, Cyprian showed no sign of letting the reins of power slip from his grasp.

Denied any power of real worth, Raeven spent the years indulging Lyx in her beliefs, even taking part in some of her cult’s rituals when the inevitable boredom took hold. Lyx was an epicurean of the sensual arts, and the nights they spent beneath the moons, naked and delirious from envenomed Caeban wine were certainly memorable, but ultimately hollow compared to ruling an entire world.

A wash of red light through the sensorium snapped him from his bitter reverie, and he immediately brought Banelash up to full stride. Threat filters filled the auspex, and Raeven heard the familiar snaps of massed stubber fire.

‘Father?’ he said into the vox.

‘The beast!’ returned a voice thick with strain. ‘It wasn’t the other’s mate!’

Raeven pushed Banelash deeper into the darkness. Dazzling arc lights unfolded from the upper surfaces of the Knight’s carapace, flooding the fissure with light. The sensorium could guide him, but Raeven preferred to trust his own eyes when death lay in wait.

Banelash strained at the edge of his control, a wild colt even after all this time. Raeven was tempted to let it take the lead, but kept his grip firm. The older pilots were replete with tales of men whose minds had been lost when they allowed a mount’s spirit to overwhelm them.

Raeven powered the whip and fed shells into the stubber cannon. He felt the heat of their readiness envelop his hands, letting the trip hammer of his heart mirror the thunder of Banelash’s reactor.

The fissure was a winding split in the mountains. Its course was thick with debris, rotted vegetation, frozen mounds of excrement and the half-digested remains of dismembered carcasses. Raeven crushed it all flat as he followed the sounds of las-fire and the shrieking roar of a heavy-gauge chainsabre.

He pulled Banelash into a widened portion of the fissure, a cavern where the walls almost met high above and all but obscured the sunlight.

The spotlight beams lit a nightmarish sight of the largest mallahgra he had ever seen; fully ten metres tall and broader than any of the largest Knights. Its fur was a piebald mixture of white and russet, and its long arms were absurd with musculature. Blood poured from a wound torn in its side, but this beast cared nothing for such hurts.

Hellblade was down on one knee at the edge of a sulphurous chasm that belched noxious yellow fog. Its right leg was buckled and his father was desperately fending off thunderous blows from the monster’s simian arms with the revving edge of his blade. Blood sprayed, but the mallahgra was too enraged to notice.

Raeven lowered his mount’s head and charged, uncoiling the whip and letting fly with a burst of stubber fire. High-calibre bolts burned a path across the mallahgra’s back and it reared at the suddenness of his attack.

Raeven blanched at the monster’s size and the grizzled, ancient texture of its hide. Now he understood his father’s last words.

This wasn’t the dead adolescent’s mate.

It was its mother.

The mallahgra leapt at him, bellowing in outrage. A clubbing arm smashed into Banelash’s canopy. Glass shattered and Raeven sucked in a breath of savage cold. The impact was monstrous, and the beast swung at him again. Raeven swayed aside, pulling the ion shield over his exposed canopy to deflect the blow. The mallahgra’s blackened claws swept past him, barely a handspan from tearing his face away.

Raeven shucked his gun arm forward and a hurricane of stubber fire strobed the canyon with muzzle flare. Tracer rounds stabbed into the mallaghra’s shoulder, setting light to its fur and driving it back. He followed up with a crack from the energy lash that ploughed a bloody trough in its chest.

The mallahgra roared in pain, and Raeven didn’t give it a chance to recover. He stepped in close and slammed the hard edge of his ion shield into its face. Fangs snapped and oily blood poured from its ruined maw. The lash cracked again and peeled the muscle from the monster’s thigh.

A clawed hand tore at his chest armour, but Raeven batted it away with the barrels of his stubber cannon. He brought the arm back and pumped half a dozen shots into its face, shattering the bone and exploding the eye sited in the side of its skull.

The mallahgra surged towards him, and not even Raeven’s genhanced reflexes could match its speed. Its corded arms encircled Banelash, and began crushing the life out of him.

Hot animal breath doused him in rank saliva and the reek of rotten meat. Raeven gagged at the stench and fought to escape the monster’s grip. They stamped back and forth through the cavern like drunken dancers at a Serpent Revel, slamming into walls and dislodging debris from high above. A chunk of rock smashed onto Raeven’s shoulder, buckling his pauldrons and shattering his carapace lights. Broken glass rained into the shattered canopy and Raeven flinched as razored fragments sliced his cheeks.

Warning lights flashed on the damaged sensorium. Armour squealed as it reached its maximum-rated tolerances. Raeven brought his knee up into the mallahgra’s side, where his whip had previously wounded it. The beast roared, almost deafening Raeven, and its pain gave him the opening he needed.

He slammed his ion shield against the bloodied, heat-fused side of the mallahgra’s skull. The monster’s grip loosened and Raeven pulled free of its crushing embrace, unleashing a blitzing stream of fire into its chest and head.

Repeated lashes from his energy whip followed each salvo and the mewling beast stumbled away, its lifeblood flashing to red mist in the cauterising heat of gunfire.

Raeven laughed as he drove it back.

He didn’t see Hellblade surge up on its one good leg behind the mallahgra. All he saw was the fountain of viscous blood as the revving blade of his father’s chainsabre exploded from the mallahgra’s ribcage.

The life fled from its eyes and Raeven felt something caged within his chest for four decades stir at the monster’s death, something barbed and hateful and full of spite. The juddering chainsabre caught on the mallahgra’s ribs. It spasmed with false life before Cyprian wrenched the blade out through its side in a flood of reeking viscera. The gutted beast toppled into the chasm, and anger filled Raeven as it fell.

He turned Banelash to face his father’s wounded Knight.

Hellblade crouched at the edge of the chasm, one leg buckled beyond its ability to bear any weight. The Knight had suffered a grievous hurt, but with the ministrations of the Mechanicum and the Sacristans, it would walk again.

‘It died a good death,’ said Cyprian, between heaving breaths and using the end of his stilled blade to remain upright. ‘Damn shame the head is gone though. No one’s going to believe the size of that thing.’

‘The kill was mine,’ said Raeven with cold fury.

‘Now you’re being ridiculous,’ returned Cyprian. ‘I’m the Knight Seneschal, the right of First Kill was always mine. Don’t piss your britches, boy, I’ll credit you with aiding me. You’ll win a share of the glory.’

‘Aiding? You’d be dead if it wasn’t for me.’

‘But who ended its life? Me or you?’

The cage in Raeven’s chest unlocked and the barbed thing of hate and ambition that imprinting with the Throne Mechanicum had sought to imprison was freed to stab his soul once more.

‘And who will they say ended yours?’ hissed Raeven. ‘Me or the mallahgra?’

Too late, Cyprian Devine saw the depthless well of venom in his son’s heart, but there was nothing he could do to stop what happened next.

Stepping back to plant Banelash’s clawed foot in the centre of Hellblade’s chest, Raeven kicked the Knight into the chasm. His father yelled in outrage, and Raeven watched the ancient machine fall end over end. It slammed into a sharp outcropping of rock and broke apart like a confiscated automaton from the Clockwork City beneath a Sacristan’s forge hammer.

The remains of Hellblade vanished into the sulphurous mist, and Raeven turned away. With every purposeful stride he took from the chasm, the poisonous ambition within him took an ever more defined shape.

Raeven was now Imperial commander of Molech. What would Lyx make of this new development?

Raeven grinned, knowing exactly what she would say.

‘The Serpent Gods provide,’ he said.

FOUR Reforged / Filum Secundo / The Seven Neverborn

When the Warmaster needed to dominate or awe petitioners he received them in Lupercal’s Court, with its towering, vaulted ceiling of muttering shadows, black battle standards, glimmering lancets and basalt throne. But when simply desiring company, the summons was to his private staterooms.

Aximand had come here many times over the years, but usually in the company of Mournival brothers. In his staterooms, the Warmaster could put aside that heavy title for a few precious moments and simply be Horus.

Like most places aboard the Vengeful Spirit, it had changed markedly over the last few years. Trinkets taken in the early years of the Great Crusade had vanished, and many of the paintings were now hidden by sackcloth. A vast star map with the Emperor at its heart, and which had covered one entire wall, was long gone. In its stead were innumerable pages of densely wound script, together with fanciful imagery depicting cosmological conjunctions, omega-point diagrams, alchemical symbols, trefoil knots and a central image of an armoured warrior bearing a golden sword and glittering silver chalice.

Those pages had presumably been ripped from the hundreds of astrological primers, Crusade logs, histories of Unity and mythological texts that lay scattered like autumn leaves.

Aximand tilted his head to catch a few of the titles, He who saw the Deep; The Nephite Triptych; Monarchia Alighieri; Libri Carolini. There were others, with titles both mundane and esoteric. Some, Aximand noticed, were lettered in gold-leaf Colchisian cuneiform. Before he could read any further, a booming voice called his name.

‘Aximand,’ called Horus. ‘You know better than to stand there like some poxy ambassador, get in here.’

Aximand obeyed, limping past haphazardly stacked piles of books and data-slates towards the primarch’s inner sanctum. As always, it gave him a thrill of pride to be here, to know that his gene-father esteemed him worthy of this honour. Of course, Horus always dismissed such lofty nonsense, but that only made these moments more precious.

Even seated and without the encasement of armour, Horus was enormous, a heroic Akillius or Hektor, a cursed Gylgamesh or Shalbatana the Scarlet Handed. His skin was pink and raw with grafts and regeneration, especially around his right eye where the charred ruin of his skull had been exposed. His hair was still bristly with regrowth, but the attack on the Dome of Revivification appeared to have left no permanent scars. At least none that Aximand could see.

In the immediate aftermath of the ambush, the three primarchs had withdrawn to their flagships to heal and recuperate. The Sons of Horus had levelled Tyjun in a spasm of retaliation, murdering its populace and leaving no stone upon another to root out any other attackers.

Five days later, the Warmaster’s assembled fleets set sail from Dwell, leaving the planet a smouldering wasteland.

Horus worked at a table encircled by a curtain-wall of books, folded charts, celestial hierarchies and tablets of carven formulae.

From the thickness of its spine and tabular aspect of its pages, the book that currently held the Warmaster’s attention was a Crusade log. Even upside down, Aximand recognised the violet campaign badge in the upper corner of the facing page.

‘Murder?’ said Aximand. ‘An old tally, that one.’

Horus closed the book and looked up, a strange irritation in his eyes, as though he had just read something in the log he hadn’t liked. Puckered scar tissue pulled at his mouth as he spoke.

‘An old one, but still relevant,’ said Horus. ‘Sometimes you can learn as much, if not more, from the battles you lose as the ones you win.’

‘We won that one,’ pointed out Aximand.

‘We shouldn’t have had to fight it at all,’ said Horus, and Aximand knew not to ask any more.

Instead he simply made his report. ‘You wanted to know when the fleets translated, sir.’

Horus nodded. ‘Any surprises I should know about?’

‘No, all Sons of Horus, Death Guard and Titanicus vessels are accounted for and have been duly entered in the mission registry,’ said Aximand.

‘What’s our journey time looking like?’

‘Master Comnenus estimates six weeks to reach Molech.’

Horus raised an eyebrow. ‘That’s quicker than he originally calculated. Why the revised journey time?’

‘With the Ruinstorm behind the fleets, our esteemed shipmaster tells me that, and I quote: “the path before us welcomes our fleets like a bordello welcomes bored soldiers with full pockets”.’

Horus’s earlier irritation vanished like a shadow on the sun. ‘That sounds like Boas. Perhaps Lorgar’s rampage across the Five Hundred Worlds has been more useful than I expected.’

‘Lorgar’s rampage?’

‘Yes, I suppose Angron is doing most of the rampaging,’ chuckled Horus. ‘And what of the Third Legion?’

Aximand was used to swift changes of tack in the Warmaster’s questioning, and had his answer at the ready. ‘Word comes that they set course for the Halikarnaxes Stars as ordered.’

‘I sense a “but” missing from that sentence,’ said Horus.

Aximand said, ‘But the word did not come from Primarch Fulgrim.’

‘No, it wouldn’t have,’ agreed Horus, waving to a couch set against one wall upon which hung a variety of punch daggers and quirinal cestus gauntlets. ‘Sit, take some wine, it’s Jovian.’

Aximand poured two goblets of wine from an amethyst bottle and handed one to Horus before sitting on the portion of the couch not obscured by the primarch’s reading material.

‘Tell me, little one, how are your Mournival brothers?’ asked Horus as he sipped some wine. ‘Fulgrim’s power shielded us from the worst of the gunships’ fire, but you…’

Aximand shrugged, also taking a drink and finding its flavour much to his liking. ‘Burns and bruises mainly. We’ll heal. Kibre acts like it never happened, and Grael is still trying to figure out how the Tenth Legion kept three Fire Raptors hidden for so long.’

‘Some dark age tech salvaged from Medusa, I expect,’ said Horus. ‘And Ezekyle?’

‘He’s about ready to fall on his sword,’ said Aximand. ‘You were almost killed, and he blames himself for that.’

‘I dismissed the Justaerin, if you remember,’ pointed out Horus. ‘Tell Ezekyle that if there’s blame to be apportioned, the bulk of it’s mine. He’s not at fault.’

‘It might help if that came from you.’

Horus waved away Aximand’s suggestion. ‘Ezekyle is a big boy, he’ll understand. And if he doesn’t, well, I know Falkus covets his rank.’

‘You’d make the Widowmaker First Captain?’

‘No, of course not,’ said Horus, lapsing into silence. Aximand knew better than to break it and took more wine.

‘I should have known Meduson would have a contingency in case the White Scars failed,’ said Horus at last.

‘Do you think Shadrak Meduson was on one of those gunships?’

‘Perhaps, but I doubt it,’ said Horus. He finished his wine and placed the cup to one side. ‘But what aggrieves me most is the destruction the Legion unleashed in retaliation. Especially the loss of the Mausolytic. Razing it and Tyjun was unnecessary. So much there still to be discovered.’

‘With respect, sir, it had to be done,’ replied Aximand. ‘What you learned, others could learn. And truthfully, I’m not sorry we burned it.’

‘No? Why?’

‘The dead should stay dead,’ said Aximand, trying not to look over the Warmaster’s shoulder at the ornately wrought box of lacquered wood and iron.

Horus grinned, and Aximand wondered if he knew of the dreams that had plagued him before the reattaching of his face. Those dreams were gone now, consigned to history in the wake of his invincible rebirth and rededication.

‘I never considered the Dwellers truly dead,’ said Horus turning to address the box. ‘But even so, a man ought not to be afraid of the dead, little one. They have no power to harm us.’

‘They don’t,’ agreed Aximand as Horus rose from his seat.

‘And they don’t answer back,’ said Horus, hiding a grimace of pain and beckoning Aximand to his feet. With a stiff gait, Horus made his way into an adjacent room. ‘Walk with me. I have something for you.’

Aximand followed Horus into a reverentially dim arming chamber, illumined only by a soft glow above the steel-limbed rack supporting the Warmaster’s battleplate. Spindle-limbed adepts in ragged chasubles worked to repair the damage done by the Fire Raptors’ cannons. Aximand smelled fixatives, molten ceramite and dark lacquer.

Worldbreaker hung on reinforced hooks next to the left gauntlet. The lion-flanked amber eye upon the plastron seemed to follow Aximand as they traversed the chamber. Horus might have died, it seemed to say, but Aximand shook off the sensation of judgement as they approached a high-vaulted forge of smelting and metalworking. The seething glow of a furnace hazed the air.

Only when Aximand followed Horus into the chamber did he see his error. No natural light of a furnace illuminated the forge, but something bright and dark at the same time, something that left a fleeting succession of negative impressions on his retina. Aximand felt corpse breath on the back of his neck and tasted human ash at the sight of a flame-wreathed abomination floating a metre above the deck.

It had once been a Blood Angel. Now it was… what? A daemon? A monster? Both. Its crimson armour was broken, cracked where the evil within it licked outwards in unnatural, eternal flames.

Whoever the legionary within that armour had once been was immaterial. All that remained of him was the scorched prime helix symbol of an Apothecary. It called itself the Cruor Angelus, but the Sons of Horus knew it as the Red Angel.

It had been bound and gagged by chains that were originally gleaming silver, but had since been scorched black. Its head went unhelmed, but its features were impossible to discern through the infernal flames, save for two white-hot eyes filled with the rage of a million damned souls.

‘Why is it here?’ said Aximand, unwilling to voice its name.

‘Hush,’ replied Horus, leading Aximand towards a timber workbench upon which rested implements that looked more akin to surgeon’s tools than those of the metalworker. ‘The Faceless One’s aborted angel has a part to play in our current endeavour.’

‘We shouldn’t trust anything that came from that scheming bastard,’ said Aximand. ‘Exile was too easy. You should have let me kill him.’

‘If he doesn’t take my lesson to heart I may let you,’ said Horus, lifting something from the workbench. ‘But that’s a murder for another day.’

Only reluctantly did Aximand let his gaze turn from the Red Angel, as any warrior was loath to let an enemy fall from sight.

‘Here,’ said the Warmaster, holding a long, cloth-wrapped bundle before him. ‘This is yours.’

Aximand took the bundle and felt the weight of strong metal. He unwrapped it with reverent care, guessing what lay within.

Mourn-it-all’s edge had been badly notched in the fight against Hibou Khan, the White Scar’s borrowed Medusan blade proving to be more than the equal of Cthonian bluesteel.

‘Hard as a rock and hot as hell in the heart,’ said Horus, tapping his chest. ‘A weapon that’s Cthonia to the core.’

Aximand gripped the leather-wound hilt of the double-edged sword, holding the blade out before him and feeling a last part of him he’d not even appreciated was missing now restored. The fuller was thick with fresh etchings that glittered in the daemon-thing’s firelight. Aximand felt lethal potency within the blade that had nothing to do with its powered edges.

‘I need you and your sword, Little Horus Aximand,’ said the Warmaster. ‘The war on Molech will test us all, and you’re not you without it.’

‘It shames me I was not the one to restore its edge.’

‘No,’ said Horus. ‘It honours me that I could do it for you, my son.’

Arcadon Kyro had learned a great many things during his time as a Techmarine of the Ultramarines, but the teaching he’d taken most to heart was that no two vehicles were ever wholly alike in temper or mien. Each was as individual as the warriors they carried into battle, and they too had legacies worthy of remembrance.

Sabaen Queen was as good an example of this as he could wish for. A Stormbird of Terran provenance, it had led the triumphal fly-by over Anatolia in the last days before the XIII Legion launched the campaign to reclaim the Lunar enclaves from the Selenar cults alongside the XVI and XVII Legions. Kyro was yet unborn, but felt Sabaen Queen’s pride to have been part of the Great Crusade’s first true battle.

It was a proud aircraft, haughty even, but Kyro would sooner pilot a prideful craft than a workhorse made resentful by poor treatment. He banked Sabaen Queen around the easternmost peaks of the Untar Mesas, dropping his altitude sharply and pushing out the engines as the landscape opened up. The flight from the defence readiness inspection along the Aenatep peninsula had been a long one, and the Stormbird had earned this chance to flex her wings.

With brown hills and golden fields stretching to Iron Fist Mountain on the horizon, Molech resembled a great many of the Five Hundred Worlds, and was dotted with efficient agri-collectives and crisscrossed by wide roads, maglevs and glittering irrigation canals. It had been brought to compliance without the need for war, yet – for reasons unknown to Kyro – still boasted a garrison force numbering in the millions.

Ultramarines boots were still fresh on the ground, newly deployed as part of a regular rotation of Legion forces between Ultramar and Molech. Vared of the 11th Chapter had returned to Macragge with full honours, passing the Aquila Ultima to Castor Alcade, Legate of Battle Group II within the 25th Chapter.

With the Warmaster’s host said to be somewhere in the northern marches there was likely little glory to be won on Molech, but few warriors were so in need of glory as Castor Alcade.

Thus far, Alcade’s career had been unremarkable. He had assumed the mantle of legate by dint of a service record that showed him to be a warrior of due diligence and requisite ability, but little flair.

Under Alcade’s command, Battle Group II had acquired a largely unearned reputation for ill-fortune. Two particular examples in the last thirty years had turned arming-chamber whispers into ‘fact’.

On Varn’s World, they had fought alongside the Ninth and 235th Companies to crush the greenskin host of the Ghennai Cluster. Alcade coordinated a gruelling flanking campaign, routing the feral greenskin in the highland latitudes before arriving an hour after Klord Empion had broken the enemy host comprehensively at the battle of Sumaae Delta.

During the final storming of the cavern cities of Ghorstel, a series of malfunctioning auspex markers saw Alcade’s assault through the ventral manufactories misdirected into dead end arcologies. Hopelessly lost in the maze of tunnels, the absence of Battle Group II’s companies left Eikos Lamiad and his warriors to fight the bio-mechanical host of the Cybar-Mekattan unsupported.

Lamiad’s heroically-earned victory cemented an already formidable stature and led to his appointment as Tetrarch of Konor, while consigning Alcade’s reputation – through no fault of his own – to self-evident mediocrity.

It was said that the Avenging Son himself had remarked on the matter, saying, ‘Not every commander can be the proudest eagle, some must circle the aerie and allow others to fly farther.’

Kyro had his doubts as to the remark’s authenticity, but that didn’t seem to matter. Those who knew of Alcade’s reputation named him ‘Second String’– Filum Secundo – forgetting that, by its original meaning, the archer’s second string had to be just as strong and reliable as the first.

A threat auspex chirruped in Kyro’s ear as a mountaintop battery of Hydra anti-aircraft guns unmasked and locked onto the Sabaen Queen. He sent a communion pulse, telling the gunners that he was a friendly, and the threat disappeared from the slate.

‘The Untar Mesas guns?’ inquired Legate Alcade, appearing in the hatchway linking the troop compartment with the cockpit.

‘Yes, sir,’ replied Kyro. ‘A little slow in acquiring us, but I was making them sweat for it.’

‘A little sweat now will save a lot of blood when Horus’s dogs reach Molech,’ said Alcade, strapping himself into the co-pilot’s seat across from Kyro.

‘You really think the traitors will come here, sir?’

‘Given Molech’s location, eventually they must,’ said Alcade, and Kyro heard the hope that such an event might come sooner rather than later. Alcade wanted war to reach Molech. He had the scent of glory in his nostrils.

Kyro understood glory. He’d earned his share of it. Such an allure was more potent than any Apothecary’s opiates. The power of its need was something to be feared, even by transhuman warriors who claimed to be above such mortal weakness.

Alcade scanned the avionics display. His battleplate’s onboard systems would already have given him the Stormbird’s approximate location, but Ultramarines didn’t work with approximates.

‘So what’s your verdict on the Aenatep peninsula?’

Kyro nodded slowly. ‘Fair.’

‘That’s it?’

‘It’ll do if all they have to fight are mortals and xenos, but it’s not Legion strong.’

‘How would you strengthen it?’ asked Alcade. ‘Give me a theoretical.’

Kyro shook his head. ‘In the forge we prefer speculative and empirical – all the potentials and all working actuals. Even the best practical doesn’t become empirical until it’s been proven combat-effective a significant number of times.’

‘A subtle difference,’ said Alcade. ‘Too subtle for most when the bolts are in the air.’

‘That’s why Techmarines are so valuable,’ said Kyro, bringing them down towards the valley of Lupercalia, a name that must surely be changed in light of the Warmaster’s treachery. ‘We calculate how things need to be so the commanders in the field don’t have to.’

More range-markers and Hydras fixed on them, and Kyro let Sabaen Queen dismiss their interrogations with lofty disdain.

‘What would we do without our brave brothers in the forge to keep us mere commanders in line?’ said Alcade.

Kyro said, ‘Good to know you appreciate us, sir.’

‘Did you ever doubt it?’ grinned Alcade. ‘But you didn’t answer the question.’

Kyro spared his legate a sidelong glance. As heroic a warrior of the XIII Legion as any, not even transhuman genhancments could smooth out his patrician features or the finely sculpted planes of his cheekbones. His eyes were pale aquamarine, set in skin like weathered birch upon which he wore a waxed beard forked in the manner of the Khan’s sons. Perhaps he thought it gave him a rakish, dangerous appearance, but together with his tonsured silver hair, it made him look more monk than warrior.

‘I’d bring in another Chapter of the Thirteenth Legion to stiffen its soldiers’ backs,’ said Kyro. ‘Then more artillery. At least three brigades. Maybe some cohorts of Modwen’s Thallax cyborgs. And Titans, can’t go wrong with Titans.’

‘Always so precise,’ laughed Alcade. ‘I’d ask you the time and you’d tell me how to build a watch.’

‘It’s why I was chosen to go to Mars,’ said Kyro.

Ahead of the Stormbird, Lupercalia gouged into the mountains along a stepped valley of ochre stone. Six kilometres wide at its opening, the valley gradually narrowed as it ascended towards Mount Torger and the Citadel of Dawn, where Cyprian Devine ruled Molech with an admirably stern hand. The city’s walled defences were impressive to look at, but archaic and largely valueless against a foe with any real military ability.

Previous Ultramarines commanders had done their best to alter them, employing the primarch’s Notes towards Martial Codification, but they faced resistance from an intransigent population.

‘I sense there’s more you want to say,’ said Alcade.

‘Can I speak freely, sir?’

‘Of course.’

‘The problem with Molech isn’t the emplaced defences or its armed might, the problem is the embedded culture.’

‘Give me your theoretical, sorry, speculative.’

‘Very well. The way I see it, the people of Molech have been raised on tales of heroic Knights riding out to do battle in honourable contests of arms,’ said Kyro. ‘Their world hasn’t seen real fighting in centuries. They don’t know that massed armies of ordinary men with guns is the new reality. Numbers, logistics and planning are the determining factors in who wins and who dies.’

‘A grim view,’ said Alcade. ‘Especially for the Legions.’

‘An empirical view,’ said Kyro, tapping two fingers to the skull-stamped Ultima on his breastplate. ‘Ah, don’t mind me, sir, I was always best at envisaging worst-case scenarios. But if you’re right and the traitors do come to Molech, it’s not the Army regiments they’ll look to kill first.’

‘True, it will be us and Salicar’s Bloodsworn.’

‘We have three companies, and Emperor alone knows how many Blood Angels are on Molech.’

‘I’d say less than half our strength,’ said Alcade. ‘Vared spoke of Vitus Salicar being a warrior not overly given to the spirit of cooperation.’

‘So five hundred legionaries,’ said Kyro. ‘And hyperbole aside, that’s not enough to defend a planet. Therefore the primary burden of defending Molech has to fall on the Army regiments.’

‘They might be mortals, but there’s nearly fifty million fighting men and women on this planet. When war comes to Molech, it’ll be bloody beyond imagining, and it won’t be ended quickly.’

‘But in the final practical, mortals simply can’t resist massed Legion war, sir,’ said Kyro.

‘You don’t think nearly a hundred regiments can hold one of the Emperor’s worlds?’

‘What practical would you give any mortal army resisting Legion forces? Honestly? You know what they call it when baseline humans find themselves fighting warriors like us?’

‘Transhuman dread,’ said Alcade.

‘Transhuman dread, yes,’ agreed Kyro. ‘We’ve both seen it. Remember the breach at Parsabad? It was like the blood had frozen their veins. I almost felt sorry for the poor bastards we had to kill that day.’

Alcade nodded. ‘It was like threshing wheat.’

‘Since when have the noble families of Macragge ever threshed their own wheat?’ said Kyro.

‘Never,’ agreed Alcade, ‘but I have seen picts of it.’

Approach vectors appeared on the display slates in front of Kyro. Alcade fell silent as Sabaen Queen began its descent to the cavern hangar just below the great citadel at the valley’s heart.

The chiming of threat warnings was constant, but Kyro shut them off as he brought the aircraft level with a booming flare of deceleration, followed by the jolt of landing claws meeting the ground.

Alcade unsnapped his restraints and returned to the troop compartment, where fifty Ultramarines sat in banked rows along the aircraft’s centreline and fuselage. Kyro powered down the engines, letting the Stormbird reach its own equilibrium before releasing the locking mechanisms on the assault doors.

As the ground crew rushed to tend the aircraft, Kyro unsnapped his own restraints and finished the last of his post-flight checks. He placed a fist over the aquila on the flight console then made the Icon Mechanicum to honour both Terra and Mars.

‘My thanks,’ he said before ducking into the troop compartment. Armoured in cobalt-blue and ivory, the five squads of Ultramarines were a fine sight indeed, mustered and ready to debark.

The scents of scorched iron, hot engines and venting propellant blew in through lowered assault ramp, a heady mix that took Kyro back to the forge and the simple pleasure of shaping metal.

Gathering the equipment cases containing his servo-harness, Kyro followed the line warriors down the ramp as landing menials and deck crew readied the Stormbird for her next flight.

Didacus Theron was already waiting for them on the landing strip, and from the look on the centurion’s face the news he bore was of a dark hue. A low-born scrambler from Calth, he’d achieved high office within the Legion by virtue of saving the life of Tauro Nicodemus at Terioth Ridge nearly sixty years ago.

‘Grim tidings,’ said Theron, as the legate approached.

‘Speak,’ commanded Alcade.

‘Cyprian Devine is dead,’ said Theron, ‘but that’s not the worst of it.’

‘The Imperial commander is dead and that’s not the worst of it?’ said Kyro.

‘Not even close,’ said Theron. ‘The Five Hundred Worlds are under attack and the whoreson Warmaster is en route to Molech.’

Icy winds howled over the steeldust hull of the Valkyrie, spiralling in ghostly vortices around its cooling engines. Vapour streamed from the leading edges of its wings and linked tailfin, making it look as though it was still in flight. Loken had instructed Rassuah to keep the engines’ fires banked to prevent them icing up completely. Though his armour kept the cold at bay, Loken shivered at the frozen desolation of the mountaintop.

The Urals ran for nearly two and a half thousand kilometres, from the frozen reaches of Kara Oceanica to the ancient realm of the Kievan Rus Khaganate. Ahead, the towering forge spire of Mount Narodnaya was a hazed blur, wreathed in the smoke and lightning of mighty subterranean endeavours.

The riches of these mountains had been plundered by a succession of peoples, but none to match the monumental scale of the Terrawatt Clan. Said to spring from the same root as the Mechanicum, its theologiteks had carved temples into the bones of the Urals during a technological dark age, where they weathered the fury of Old Night in splendid isolation until their very existence became a whispered legend.

When the Terrawatt Clan finally emerged from their lair beneath the Kholat Syakhl, it was to find a planet ravaged by wars fought between monstrous ethnarchs and tyrants. As word of the Clan’s rebirth spread, petitioners came from across the globe to beg for their ancient wonders, offering bargains, treaties and threats in equal measure.

But only one man came offering more than he sought to take.

He called Himself Emperor, a title the Clan Aghas mocked until His vast knowledge of long forgotten technologies became apparent. His willingness to share these lost arts allied the Clan to His banner, and from their archives came many of the weapons that brought Old Earth to Unity. The entombed memory-cores of its eldest Aghas claimed it was their technology, not that of Mars, that precipitated the creation of the first proto-Astartes, a claim utterly refuted by the Mechanicum.

Loken saw little evidence of technological wonder here, just a high ridge of black rock swathed in freezing mists and blustering ash clouds expelled from the buried Dyatlov forge complexes. The rocks were bare of vegetation, sharp-edged and utterly inimical to flora of any kind. Loken turned on the spot, seeing nothing but the solitary landing platform upon which sat the Valkyrie.

He checked the slate he carried, its edges already limned with a coating of pale, fibrous dust.

‘You’re sure this is the place?’ he asked.

‘I have a hunter’s eye, and I’ve flown from one side of Terra to the other on the Sigillite’s business,’ said Rassuah, her voice clipped and efficient. ‘And I’ve landed at the Seven Strong Men many times, Garviel Loken, so, yes, I’m sure this is the place.’

‘Then where is he?’

‘You are asking me?’ said Rassuah. ‘He’s one of yours. Shouldn’t you know?’

‘I never met him,’ said Loken.

‘Neither have I, so why do you think I’ll know?’

Loken didn’t bother to answer. Rassuah was a mortal, but even Loken could tell there was more to her than met the eye. Her augmetics were subtly woven into a physique clearly honed by genetic modification and a rigorous regime of training. Everything about her spoke of excellence. Rassuah claimed to be a simple naval pilot, but smiled as she said it, as if daring Loken to contradict her.

Her inscrutability, skin tone, eye shape and gloss-black hair suggested Panpacific genestock, but she’d never volunteered any information on her heritage, and Loken never asked.

Rassuah had flown him from Old Himalazia to the northern reaches of the Urals to find the first member of Loken’s pathfinders, but it seemed that was going to be more difficult than anticipated.

The man Loken had come to find was Sons of Horus and he…

No, he wasn’t. He was a Luna Wolf.

He hadn’t been part of the Legion when it took that first step on the road to treachery. Not a true son then, but he was a gene-brother, and Loken wasn’t sure how he felt about that.

Yes, Iacton Qruze was one of his fellow Knights Errant, but he’d served with the Half-heard aboard the Vengeful Spirit when things had gone to hell. They had a shared experience of what their lost brothers had done that this warrior could never know.

The wind dropped for a moment, and Loken peered through the stilled clouds of particulate matter, seeing dark outlines like towering giants frozen to the summit. Too tall to be anything living, they were like the heavy columns of some vast temple that had been eroded over centuries of exposure.

He set off towards them, trudging through the wind-blown ash with long strides. The shapes emerged from the clouds, revealing themselves to be far larger than he had suspected, great pillars of banded rock like the megaliths of some tribal fane.

Six of them clustered close together, none less than thirty metres tall, with a seventh set apart like an outcast. Some were narrow at the base, widening like spear blades before tapering towards their peaks. The wind howled through them in a keening banshee’s wail that set Loken’s teeth on edge.

Static buzzed in his helmet, a side effect of the charged air from the unceasing industry beneath the mountains. Loken heard whistles, clicks and burps of distortion, and what sounded very much like soft breath.

Garvi…

Loken knew that voice and spun around, as if expecting to see his fallen comrade, Tarik Torgaddon, standing behind him. But he was utterly alone; even the Valkyrie’s outline growing indistinct in the fog.

He was no longer sure if he’d heard the voice or imagined its existence. It had been an apparition of his murdered friend that had convinced Loken to leave the sanctuary of the lunar biodome, a memory that was growing ever fainter, like the fading echoes of a distant dream.

Had that even happened, or was it a reflection of guilt and shame caught in the splintered shards of his tortured psyche?

Loken had been dug from the ruins of Isstvan III a broken shell of a man, haunted by delusions and phantasmal nightmares. Garro had brought him back to Terra and given him fresh purpose, but could any man return from such an abyss without scars?

He took a moment to balance his humours as bleeding whispers of what might have been vox-traffic drifted on the edge of hearing. Loken’s breath caught in his throat at its familiarity.

He’d heard this kind of thing before.

On Sixty-Three Nineteen.

At the Whisperheads.

Jubal’s horrifying transformation flashed before Loken’s eyes like a stuttering pict-feed and his hand dropped to the holstered bolt pistol. He thumbed the catch from its cover. He didn’t expect to draw it, but just resting his hand on its textured grip gave him comfort.

Moving through the gargantuan rock formations, the squalling static whined and crackled to the rhythm of the ash storm. Did the pillars amplify the interference or was it a by-product of the hundreds of forge temples below him?

The static abruptly cut out.

‘Do you know where you are?’ said a low voice, its accent guttural and hard-boned with palatal edges and rough vowels.

‘Tarik?’ said Loken.

‘No. Answer the question.’

‘The Urals,’ said Loken.

‘This particular mountain.’

‘I didn’t know it had a name.’

‘It’s called Manpupuner,’ said the voice. ‘I’m told it means little mountain of the gods in some dead language. The clans say these are the petrified corpses of the Seven Neverborn.’

‘Are you trying to frighten me with old legends?’

‘No. We were born here, did you realise that?’ continued the voice. ‘Not literally, of course, but the first breed of transhumans were made beneath this mountain.’

‘I didn’t know that,’ said Loken. ‘Where are you?’

‘Closer than you think, but you’ll have to find me if you want to talk face to face,’ said the voice. ‘If you can’t manage that, then we’ll not speak at all.’

‘Malcador said you would help me,’ said Loken. ‘He didn’t say anything about having to prove myself.’

‘There’s a lot that crafty old man isn’t saying,’ said the voice. ‘Now let’s see if you’re as good as Qruze says you are.’

The voice faded into a rising hash of static, and Loken pressed himself against the nearest rock pillar. Smooth where exposed to the wind, pitted where centuries of atmospheric pollutants had eaten away at the rock, the mass of stone was immense and loomed like the leg of a titanic war engine.

He eased his head around its rounded corner, switching between variant perceptual modes. None of the spectra through which his helm cycled could penetrate the fog. Loken suspected deliberate artifice in its occluding properties.

Something moved ahead of him, a half-glimpsed shadow of a cowled warrior with the swagger of complete confidence. Loken stepped away from the rock and gave chase. The brittle shale of the ground made stealth impossible, but that handicap would work against his enemy too. He reached where he thought the shadow had gone, but there was no sign of his quarry.

The mists swelled and surged, and the cragged towers of the Seven Neverborn loomed in the fog as if advancing and retreating. Whispering voices sighed through the vox-static; names and long lists of numbers, tallies of things long dead. Echoes of a past swept away by a cataclysmic tide of war and unremembering.

None were discernible, but the sound struck a mournful chord in Loken. He kept still, filtering out the voices, and trying to hear the telltale scrape of armour on stone, a footstep on gravel. Anything that might reveal a hidden presence. Given the nature of the man he was here to find, he wasn’t holding out much hope.

‘You’ve forgotten what Cthonia taught you,’ said the voice.

It burbled up through the static in his helm; no use for pinpointing a location.

‘Maybe you remember a little too much,’ replied Loken.

‘I remember that it was kill or be killed.’

‘Is that what this is?’ said Loken, moving as slowly and quietly as he could.

‘I’m not going to kill you,’ said the voice. ‘But you’re here to try and get me killed. Aren’t you?’

A flicker of movement in the mist to his right. Loken didn’t react, but gently eased his course towards it.

‘I’m here because I need you,’ said Loken, finally understanding the nature of this place. ‘The Knights Errant? This is where you trained them to become the grey ghosts, isn’t it?’

‘I taught them all,’ said the voice. ‘But not you. Why is that?’

Loken shook his head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘Because you are the warrior who stands in the light,’ said the voice, and Loken couldn’t decide if the words were meant in admiration or derision. ‘There’s nothing I can teach you.’

The blurred outline of the cowled warrior stood in the lee of a gigantic stone pillar, confident he went unobserved. Loken held him loose in his peripheral vision, moving as though unaware of his presence. He closed to within five paces. He would never get a better chance.

Loken leapt towards the source of the taunting voice.

The hooded man’s outline came apart like ash in a storm.

Over there, Garvi…

Loken turned on the spot, in time to see an umbral after-image of a man moving between two of the Seven Neverborn across the summit. Loken caught a flash of skin, a tattoo. Not the cowled man.

Whose voice was he hearing? Was he chasing ghosts?

The legends of the Neverborn were garish scare stories of outrageous hyperbole like those recounted in The Chronicles of Ursh. They spoke about phantom armies of killing shadows, mist-born wraiths and nightmares that clawed their way from men’s skulls, but that wasn’t what Loken was up against.

Cracks in his memory and a silent hunter were his foes here.

‘You’re going back, aren’t you? To Lupercal’s lair.’

Loken didn’t waste breath wondering how the nature of his mission could already be known. Instead, he opted to prick his opponent’s vanity.

‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘And I need your help to get in.’

‘Getting in’s the easy part. It’s getting out that’s going to be a problem.’

‘Less of a problem if you join me.’

‘I don’t make a habit of going on suicide missions.’

‘Neither do I.’

No reply was forthcoming, and Loken considered his options.

As he saw it, he had two; continue blundering around the mist-shrouded mountaintop while being made to look a fool, or leave empty-handed.

He was being tested, but tests only worked if both participants worked towards a common goal. Loken had already played one game without knowing the rules. The Wolf King had beaten him to learn something of his character, but this felt like someone taking pleasure in belittling him.

If Loken couldn’t play by someone else’s rules, he’d play by his own. He turned towards the Valkyrie. The aircraft was invisible in the mists, but its transponder signal was a softly glowing sigil on his visor. Abandoning any pretence of searching the mountaintop, he marched brazenly back to the assault carrier.

‘Malcador and his agents were thorough in their recruitment of Knights Errant,’ said Loken. ‘There’s no shortage of warriors I can assemble in time to make our mission window.’

Loken heard stealthy footsteps in the shale, but resisted the obvious bait. The Valkyrie emerged from the fog and Loken switched the vox-link to Rassuah’s channel.

‘Spool up the engines,’ he said. ‘We’re leaving.’

‘You found him?’

‘No, but put that hunter’s eye upon me.’

‘Understood.’

The footsteps sounded again, right behind him.

Loken whipped around, drawing his weapon and aiming it in one fluidly economical motion.

‘Don’t move,’ he said, but there was no one there.

Before Loken could react, a pistol pressed against the back of his helmet. A hammer pulled back with a sharp snap of oiled metal.

‘I expected more from you,’ said the voice behind the gun.

‘No you didn’t,’ said Loken, lowering his own pistol.

‘I expected you to try a little longer before giving up.’

‘Would I ever have found you?’

‘No.’

‘So what would be the point?’ said Loken. ‘I don’t fight battles I can’t win.’

‘Sometimes you don’t get to choose the battles you fight.’

‘But you can choose how you fight them,’ said Loken. ‘How’s that hunter’s eye, Rassuah?’

‘I have him,’ said Rassuah. ‘Say the word and I can put a turbo-penetrator through his leg. Or his head. It’s your choice.’

Loken slowly turned to face the man he had come to find. Armoured in pitted and scarred gunmetal armour without insignia, he went without helm and his bearded face was matted with dust. A draconic glyph tattoo coiled around his right eye, the mark of the Blackbloods, one of Cthonia’s most vicious murder-gangs.

Loken saw rugged bone structure that mirrored his own.

‘Severian,’ said Loken, spreading his hands. ‘I found you.’

‘By giving up,’ said Severian. ‘By changing the rules of the hunt.’

‘You of all people ought to know that’s how a Luna Wolf fights,’ said Loken. ‘Understand your foe and do whatever is necessary to bring him down.’

The warrior grinned, exposing ash-stained teeth. ‘You think your assassin friend can hit me? She won’t.’

‘If not her, then me,’ said Loken, bringing his pistol up.

Severian shook his head and flipped something towards Loken, something that glittered silver and metallic.

‘Here,’ said Severian. ‘You’ll need these.’

Loken instinctively reached up as Severian stepped away from him. ‘And I had such high hopes for you, Garviel Loken.’

The mist closed around him like a cloak.

Loken didn’t pursue. What would be the point?

He opened his palm to see what Severian had thrown him.

Two gleaming silver discs. At first Loken thought they were lodge medals, but when he turned them over and saw they were blank and mirror-reflective, he understood what they were.

Cthonian mirror-coins.

Tokens to be left on the eyes of the dead.

FIVE The painted angel / Bloodsworn / Pathfinders

The handhold was a good one, the stone of the ruined citadel still ruggedly impermeable despite being built on a storm-lashed coastline. It reminded Vitus Salicar of the hard rock of the Qarda Massif on Baal Secundus, the hostile range of rad-peaks called home by the tribe that had birthed him.

Granite-hard and bleached of colour after thousands of years’ exposure, the stone of the shattered tower offered plentiful handholds, but few were wider than the breadth of a finger. Salicar had climbed the tower many times, but this was his first attempt at the western facade. Erosion had worn the ocean-facing rock smooth, and truculent winds sought to tear him from his perch.

Clad only in a pair of khaki trews, Salicar’s transhuman physique was sculpted and pale, like one of the Adoni of the Grekan temples given life and motion. His muscled back was tattooed with a winged blood drop that writhed with every motion of his ascent. Salicar’s arms were marked with similar devices at his deltoids and biceps, with his forearms inked with images of dripping chalices and weeping-blood skulls. His hair was blond, long and pulled in a tight scalp lock, his features artistically handsome in their symmetry.

The sea was six hundred metres below him, a surging cauldron of thundering waves breaking against the base of the cliff. The advance of the tide filled deep depressions with foaming white water before its withdrawal revealed blades of rock beneath the surface. To fall would be to die, even for a transhuman engineered to be the perfect warrior by the gene-smiths of the Blood Angels.

And would that not be justice?

Salicar pushed away the troublesome thought and craned his neck back to scan the onward route of his ascent. A lightning strike had split the tower four decades ago, shearing it almost exactly in two. That it still stood was testament to the craft of its ancient builders. The path directly above him was impossible, the stone loose and kept in place only by a miracle of confluent compressional forces. Any ascent by that route would dislodge the entire upper reaches.

His current position at the edge of an arched window opening was tenuous as it was, but Vitus Salicar was not a warrior who refused any challenge once offered. Drazen had risked censure by calling him mad to make an attempt on the western facade, and Vastern told him in no uncertain terms that the Sanguinary Priests would not be held responsible for the loss of his gene-legacy.

So, up wasn’t an option, but across…

The opening was perhaps six metres wide, too far to jump sideways, but at the apex of the window was an overhanging corbel that might once have supported a long-vanished idol of the Stormlord.

Two metres above, and three to the side.

Difficult, but not impossible.

Salicar braced his legs, bending them as much as he was able, and leapt upwards like an enraged fire scorpion. The stone at his feet cracked with the sudden pressure. It fell from the wall as he jumped, and for a heart-stopping moment, Salicar hung in the air as though weightless.

Images of the shattered bones and pulverised organs Vastern had been all too graphic in describing flashed before his eyes. His arms windmilled for the corbel. One outflung hand scraped the edge of the stone and his fingers clamped down hard. He swung like a pendulum, grunting as the tendons of his arm tore.

Pain was good. It told him he wasn’t falling.

He closed his eyes and directed the pain away from his arm, letting it disperse through his body by repeating the mantra of flesh to spirit.

‘Pain is an illusion of the senses,’ he said through gritted teeth. ‘Despair an illusion of the mind. I do not despair, so I shall feel no pain.’

Athekhan had taught him that on Fraxenhold. The Prosperine mental discipline was simple, but effective, and soon worked its magic. The pain faded and Salicar opened his eyes, reaching up with his other hand to curl his fingers around the slender lip of the corbel.

He pulled himself up smoothly, as though performing calisthenics in the gymnasia. He swung his legs onto the narrow corbel and stood upright at the centre of the window’s arch. A projecting lip of a pediment above him offered another way onwards, but that route presented no significant challenge. He dismissed it and turned his attention to a portion of stonework further over that had fallen from higher on the tower.

Balanced precariously in a wedge-shaped gap in the wall, it sat on a rocky fulcrum like perfectly balanced scales. Salicar adjudged it wedged tightly enough to support his weight. Without taking the time to second guess himself, he vaulted from his narrow perch and landed on the block.

Right away, he knew he had been mistaken to believe it would support his mass. Though weighing several tonnes, it immediately tipped from position and slid from the wall. Salicar sprang away from the block and rammed his hands into a thin split in the rock above him. Skin tore and blood welled from his hands as he clenched his fists to bear his weight.

The block fell from the wall in a cascade of debris, carrying a wealth of shattered stonework with it. It tumbled end over end before slamming down with a booming explosion of splintered stone and a fifty metre geyser of seawater.

On the black stone quayside at the foot of the tower, heads craned upwards, little more than tiny pink ovals. The colours of their plate allowed Salicar to pick out his sub-commanders; Drazen in vermillion and gold, Vastern in white, Agana in black. The rest of his warriors were plated in Legion crimson, their swords glittering silver in the dying sunlight.

He turned from them and searched for another way onwards, but there was only the lip of the pediment above him. And as much as he desired challenge from this climb, there was no other way that wasn’t simply suicide.

Salicar eased one bloodied hand from the rock and grabbed hold of the projecting lip. With his weight borne, he withdrew his other hand and pulled himself up.

From here, handholds were plentiful, and he reached the uppermost course of mighty blocks without undue effort. He stood atop the ruined tower and drew himself up to his full height, a beautiful, painted man of idealised form.

He lifted his hands above his head, looking down at the crashing waves, transient pools and lethal rocks. Death hung in the balance of a heartbeat’s miscalculation.

And I might welcome it.

Arms swung down to his side, Salicar leapt from the tower.

The Citadel of the Stormlord had been raised at the northernmost peninsula of the island of Damesek; a forsaken spit of lightning-struck peaks carved from volcanic black stone. The island was all but uninhabited and linked to the mainland only by a fulgurite causeway from the pilgrim city of Avadon.

The citadel and the quay at its base were the only man-made structures on Damesek. The quay remained mostly intact, but the citadel was a ruined holdfast constructed in an earlier epoch around a solitary basalt peak. The pale stone of its construction was not native to the region, and the monumental effort it must have taken the pre-technological inhabitants of Molech to bring it here was beyond belief.

One of the planet’s oldest legends told of a mythical figure known as the Stormlord. Where he walked, thunder followed, and his Fulgurine Path had once been a pilgrim route across the landscape. The last portion of that route led to this peak, where the Stormlord had ascended on a bolt of lightning to the celestial ark that brought him to Molech.

Before the dismantling of the Blood Angels Librarius, Drazen had studied a great many such legends in search of the truth behind them, and this was a myth dismissed as allegory by most of Molech’s people.

Most, but not all.

A determined cadre of mendicants whose number dwindled with every passing generation still dwelled in the lower portions of the citadel, subsisting on the alms and offerings left by curious folk who came to gawp at the ruins.

Drazen Acorah first laid eyes on the citadel almost two years ago, and had trained here many times with Captain Salicar and the Bloodsworn. He found much to admire in the malnourished men and women who subsisted in the ruins of this barren coastline.

Like the Bloodsworn, they cleaved to a duty that appeared to serve little purpose, but would never dream of abandoning. They no longer called themselves priests – such a term was dangerous in this age of reason – but the word was appropriate.

There was something tangible in the air here. Not so long ago, Acorah might have openly called it ethereal. But like the azure of the Librarius he had once proudly worn, words like that had been cast aside. The citadel’s stones whispered of something incredible, something he had never felt before, and only with difficulty did he resist stretching out his senses to listen to their secrets.

Eighty-three chosen warriors of the IX Legion fought sparring bouts under the uncompromising gaze of Agana Serkan, their black-armoured Warden. These warriors were among the Legion’s best, hand-picked by Sanguinius to stand as his proxies. Commanded by the Emperor Himself, the Blood Angels had sent a Bloodsworn warrior band to Molech for over a century. As great an honour as it was to serve a direct command of the Master of Mankind, its members were distraught at being denied the chance to fight alongside their primarch against the hated nephilim in the Signus Cluster.

Acorah shared their dismay, but no force in the universe would compel him to break his vow of duty. Salicar had accepted a crimson grail filled with the mingled vitae of the previous Bloodsworn band of Captain Akeldama. Salicar and each of his warriors had drunk from the grail, releasing their predecessors from their oath before refilling it with their own blood to swear another.

He put aside memories of his arrival on Molech and walked to the edge of the quayside. Ocean-going vessels had once braved treacherous seas to bring pilgrims to this place, but many centuries had passed since any vessel had taken moorings here.

The mendicant priests that constantly fussed around them parted to make way for him. Fully armoured in his blood-red battleplate, even the tallest of them barely reached to the base of Acorah’s shoulder guard. They were in awe of him, but their fear kept them distant and Acorah was glad.

Their fear left a bilious taste in his mouth.

They didn’t like that Salicar regularly climbed the tallest tower, but that didn’t stop the captain. They couldn’t voice their objections in terms of blasphemy or desecration and instead cited the instability of its remains.

Acorah heard one of the mendicants gasp in terror and shielded his eyes as he turned his gaze to the top of the tower.

He already knew what he would see.

Vitus Salicar arced outwards from the summit of the tower, his outstretched arms haloed by the sunset like the pinions of a reborn phoenix.

Acorah blinked as Salicar’s body was flickeringly overlaid with vivid imagery: a red gold angel plummeting in fire; a comely youth borne aloft on disintegrating wings; a reckless son careening across the sky on a sun-chariot.

He tasted ash and soured meat, and bit back the urge to let his psyker power move through him as it once had so freely. He spat bile as Salicar plunged into a rocky basin of deep water the surge tide had filled only a fraction of a second before.

The water swept back, revealing his captain kneeling on the black rock between a pair of spear-like stalagmites. Salicar’s head was down, and when he stood upright, Acorah saw the same fatalistic expression he had worn since their return from the Preceptory Line.

Before the waters could rush in and fill the pool again, Salicar jogged over to the quayside and sprang upwards. Acorah knelt and grabbed his captain’s hand, pulling him up. Denied its bounty, the water boomed angrily against the stonework, showering them both with cold spume.

‘Satisfied now?’ he asked, as Salicar spat a mouthful of seawater.

Salicar nodded. ‘Until the next time.’

‘A less understanding man might say you had a death wish.’

‘I do not wish death,’ said Salicar.

Acorah looked back up the length of the tower.

‘Then why do you insist on taking such needless risks?’

‘For the challenge, Drazen,’ said Salicar, moving off towards the fighting men of the Bloodsworn. ‘If I’m not challenged, I grow stale. We all do. That’s why I come here.’

‘And that’s the only reason?’

‘No,’ said Salicar, but did not elaborate.

Acorah felt the tips of his fingers tingle with the desire to wield powers now decreed unnatural. How easy it would be to divine the captain’s true motivations, but another oath bound him against such a course.

They came to where the Legion thralls had placed Salicar’s battle armour, a master-worked suit of crimson plate, golden wings and black trim. His swords hung from a belt of tan leather and his gold-chased pistol was mag-locked in a thigh holster. His helm was a jade funerary mask, as empty of expression as an automaton’s.

‘The mendicants would rather you didn’t climb the tower,’ he said, as Salicar picked up a towel and began to dry himself.

‘They’re afraid I’ll hurt myself?’

‘I think it’s more the tower they’re concerned with.’

Salicar shook his head. ‘It’ll outlast us all.’

‘Not if you keep knocking bits of it loose,’ pointed out Acorah.

‘You fuss around me like a fawning thrall,’ said Salicar.

‘Someone has to,’ said Acorah, as Salicar looped a pair of glittering ident-tags around his neck. Even without his transhuman senses, it was impossible to miss the blood flecks on them.

‘Is it wise to keep those?’ he asked.

Salicar was instantly hostile.

‘Not wise, but necessary. Their blood is on our hands.’

‘We don’t know what happened that day,’ said Acorah, pushing against the nightmarish memory of awakening from a fugue state to find himself surrounded by corpses. ‘None of us do, but if there is guilt, it is shared by us all equally.’

‘I am captain of the Bloodsworn,’ said Salicar. ‘If the burden of guilt is not mine to bear, then whose?’

Yasu Nagasena’s mountainside villa had been extended several times in the last year, with numerous annexes, subterranean chambers and technological additions. It had originally been designed as a place of retreat and reflection, but had become an unofficial base of operations for many of the Sigillite’s operatives.

Instead of a place of solace for those who came here, it was often the last place on Terra they ever saw. Nagasena himself was in absentia on yet another hunt, and Loken’s pathfinders had taken up residence.

The walls of the room at the heart of the villa were covered in wax paper schematics retrieved from the deepest and most secure vaults of the palace. Hundreds of plans, sections and isometrics depicted one of the mightiest vessels ever adapted to the Scylla-pattern construction schemata.

The Vengeful Spirit had formed the core of the Luna Wolves campaigns for two centuries, a Gloriana-class war vessel of such power that entire systems had been cowed by the scale of the devastation it alone could unleash. The precisely inked lines of the plans were covered in hasty scrawls and pinned script paper. Choke points within the superstructure were identified, potential boarding points circled and its regions of greatest vulnerability and strength highlighted with painted brushstrokes. The latter far outnumbered the former.

Shipwrights’ plotter tables formed a circle around two warriors of transhuman scale, both engaged in heated debate as to the nature of the vessel they were to infiltrate.

Loken tapped a stylus against the upper transit decks.

‘The Avenue of Glory and Lament,’ said Loken. ‘It’s the approach to the strategium. Plenty of companionways and gallery decks connect to it, and it’s a natural highway through the ship.’

Loken’s companion was clearly of a different mindset, and shook his cybernetic-threaded skull. His bulk was considerable; broader and taller than Loken, but with a noticeable stoop that brought his pallid features to the same level.

His name was Tubal Cayne and he had once been an Iron Warrior.

‘Shows how long it’s been since you stormed a war vessel,’ he said, jabbing a finger at the funnel points along the transverse transits. ‘A breach there will require a fight, something I was under the impression you wanted to avoid. Besides, any commander worth his salt will have rapid reaction forces stationed here, here and all along here. Or are you telling me the Warmaster’s gone soft in the head as well as mad?’

Despite his primarch’s treachery, Loken felt an absurd need to defend him against Cayne’s insult. The Iron Warrior had a knack for irritating people with his cold logic and utter lack of empathy. Loken had already stepped in to keep Ares Voitek from strangling Cayne with his servo-arm when he suggested that the death of Ferrus Manus might actually have a positive effect on the Iron Tenth.

He took a deep breath to quell his rising choler. ‘The Vengeful Spirit has never been boarded,’ said Loken. ‘It’s a battle scenario we never bothered to run. Who’d be insane enough to board the Warmaster’s flagship?’

‘There’s always someone mad enough to try the one thing you’ve never considered,’ said Cayne. ‘Just look around you.’

‘Then where would you suggest?’ snapped Loken, tiring of Cayne’s incessant naysaying. He knew his irritation was more directed at himself, for each of Cayne’s objections was founded in logic and proper diligence of thought.

Cayne bent to study the schemata again, his eyes darting back and forth and his fingers tracing arcane patterns across the hair-thin lines of the Scyllan architect’s quill. Eventually he tapped a portside embarkation bay of a munitions sub-deck on the Vengeful Spirit’s ventral aspect.

‘The lower deck was always the weakest point in other ships’ defences,’ said Cayne, sweeping his finger out to encompass the adjacent dormitory spaces and magazine chambers. ‘It’s not presented to the planet below, so there’s only going to be menials down there, gun-crews and whatever dregs have sunk below the waterline.’

‘Other ships?’

‘Ships other than the Fourth Legion,’ said Cayne, and Loken felt a tremor of unease at the pride Cayne took when speaking of his former brothers. ‘The Lord of Iron knew a warship without guns is a powderless culverin and took steps to protect them.’

Tubal Cayne had come to the Knights Errant from the gaol of Kangba Marwu, one of the Crusader Host who had been garrisoned on Terra as a potent reminder of the Legion hosts fighting in humanity’s name. Cayne’s evolution of breaching doctrines during the storming of the glacier fortresses of Saturn’s rings was still an exemplary model by which orbital strongpoints ought to be taken. His release from the Legio Custodes cells had been Malcador’s doing, but had only been approved by Constantin Valdor after rigorous psy-screens had revealed no trace of traitorous rancour.

Cayne was not the only parolee from Kangba Marwu set to join this pathfinding mission, but he was the only one Loken had met so far. The Iron Warrior had responded to the treachery of Horus with stoic practicality, lamenting his Legion’s choice of alignment, while understanding that his place was no longer in their ranks.

‘Yes,’ nodded Cayne. ‘That’s your way in.’

Loken traced the route a craft would need to follow to reach the ventral decks and said, ‘That means flying through the guns’ fire zones. Minefields, sentinel arrays.’

‘More than likely, but a small enough craft most likely won’t show up on the threat auspex of cannons that size. And if a shell hits us we’ll be dead before we even know it. So why worry?’

Loken let out a breath at the thought of flying through a gauntlet of ship-killing ordnance and detection arrays. As plans went, it was a risky one, but Cayne was right. This was the portion of the Vengeful Spirit that offered the best way in.

The sound of breath at the doorway forestalled any further discussion. A young girl in a simple cream shift, with gleaming black skin and hard eyes of pale ivory stood at the open door, her hands clasped demurely in front of her. Loken had assumed she was a servant of Yasu Nagasena, but she carried a holstered pistol at her side at all times. He didn’t know what position she occupied within the household, but that she was utterly devoted to the villa’s master was beyond question.

‘Mistress Amita sent me to tell you that Rassuah is on approach,’ she said.

Tubal Cayne looked up. ‘The last of us?’

Loken nodded. ‘Yes.’

‘Then let’s see who else is walking into hell,’ said Cayne.

Rubio and Varren came up from the sparring chambers carved into the rock beneath Nagasena’s villa, slathered in oily sweat and making imaginary sword cuts as they debated the merits of gladius over chainaxe. Though both warriors had left their Legion identity behind, their Legion expertise was still invaluable.

The interior courtyard of the villa was a place of peace and quiet reflection. A pool with a fountain in the shape of a coiled serpentine dragon burbled in the centre of gene-spliced plants and artificial blooms. Half a dozen robed servants tended the garden, and honeyed scents filled the air.

‘So they’re here,’ said Varren upon noticing Loken.

The former captain of the World Eaters was bare to the waist, his flesh a tapestry of knotted scar tissue, as if he had been stitched together as part of some hideous experiment in reanimation. Tattoos coiled around the scars and over his shoulders; each one a badge of honour and a memory of killing.

Macer Varren had come to the Sol system at the head of a patchwork fleet of refugees, together with detachments from the Emperor’s Children and White Scars. In the treachery that followed, Varren’s loyalty had been proven beyond question and Garro had offered him a place within Malcador’s Knights Errant.

His companion, Tylos Rubio, had been the first warrior that Garro had recruited, snatched from the war-torn surface of Calth in the moments after the XVII Legion doomed the Veridian star. A warrior of the Librarius whose powers had been shackled by the Decree of Nikaea, Rubio had once again taken up psychic arms against the Warmaster. The loss of the cobalt-blue still troubled him, and Loken knew exactly how he felt – though for very different reasons.

His features were the polar opposite of Varren’s; sculpted where the World Eater had been battered into shape, unblemished where Varren was forged by scars. His eyes were heavy with regret and loss, but the nascent brotherhood of the Knights Errant was awakening in him a sense of belonging that had hitherto been absent.

‘Where are the others?’ asked Rubio, raising a hand in greeting.

‘Don’t you know?’ asked Cayne. ‘Aren’t you supposed to be psychic?’

‘My powers are not parlour tricks, Tubal,’ said Rubio, as he and Varren fell into step with Loken and Cayne. ‘I do not lightly employ them.’

‘Voitek is already on the platform,’ said Loken. ‘He said the aegis-field needed calibrating.’

‘What about the Half-heard?’ asked Varren.

‘Iacton is–’

‘Not on Terra,’ finished Rubio.

Varren halted as they reached the fortified entrance of the tunnel cut through the mountain that led to the newly-built platforms at the rear of the villa.

‘You just said you didn’t use your powers unless you needed to,’ said Cayne, unlocking the armoured portal and allowing the heavy door to grind into its housing.

‘One does not need psychic powers to know when Iacton Qruze is near,’ said Rubio. ‘He has a presence that far outweighs his belittling epithet.’

With Qruze’s permission, Loken had reluctantly explained the old nickname of ‘Half-heard’ to his fellow Knights. A warrior whose words went unheeded by the vast majority of the Luna Wolves had turned out to have been one of the keepers of the Legion’s soul. Qruze’s days of being disregarded were over, but the name had stuck and always would.

‘So where is he then?’ pressed Varren.

‘He has a heavy burden elsewhere,’ said Rubio. ‘One that grieves and shames him, but one from which he will not turn.’

‘Just like the rest of us,’ grunted Varren.

No one said any more, and they entered the mountain, following a long and winding tunnel bored by industrial-scale meltas. Caged lumen globes were strung from the glass-smooth ceiling, swaying gently in sighs of ventilation.

After a journey of two kilometres, they emerged into a steep sided shaft cut into the haunches of the mountain – a hundred metres wide and three times that in height. In the centre of the cavernous space was a single landing platform, large enough to take a Stormbird, but not much else.

Kneeling beside an opened bank of machine racks at the foot of the platform was a warrior in identical burnished metal armour to the rest of them. Two articulated limbs at his side worked to sort tools and arrange couplings on a long length of oiled cloth. Another two mechanical arms curled over his shoulders arranging nests of cables and preparing connectors to be reattached.

‘Have you not finished yet?’ asked Cayne. ‘You have had ample time to make the necessary adjustments, and Mistress Rassuah is expected at any minute.’

Ares Voitek did not look up or deign to answer, having now learned to resist Cayne’s baiting. He continued working, with all four limbs now embroiled in the guts of the machine. The arms moved with whirring mechanical precision, each one guided by the mind impulse unit attached to the nape of Voitek’s neck.

‘There,’ said Voitek. ‘Not even Severian could find this place now.’

Loken looked up as the shimmering aegis-field rippled with energy across the wedge of light above them. He saw no difference in its appearance, but assumed the Iron Hand had improved its performance in ways he wasn’t equipped to register. The field’s mechanics concealed the platform’s location via a blend of refractive fields and geomagnetic scramblers. To all intents and purposes, the entrance of the landing field was invisible.

Voitek stood and the servo-arms arranged themselves across his back and midriff with a clatter of folding metal. Voitek’s left arm was a brutal augmetic from the elbow down, gleaming silver and kept lustrous by a regime of polishing that went beyond obsessive.

‘If it’s that good, will Rassuah be able to find it?’ asked Varren.

‘She already has,’ grumbled Voitek, his voice artificially rendered and grating through a constant burble of machine noise.

‘Then let’s be waiting for her,’ said Loken.

The five warriors climbed a switchback of iron stairs to the raised platform as the aegis-field rippled with the passage of an aircraft. A bare metal Valkyrie assault carrier descended on rippling cones of jetfire, deafening in the close confines of the shaft. The air became hot and metallic as it turned ninety degrees on its axis to land with its rear quarters aligned with the embarkation ramps.

‘You got them all?’ asked Varren.

‘All four,’ confirmed Loken.

‘Does word come of where we are bound?’ asked Rubio.

‘Saturn’s sixth moon,’ said Loken. ‘To pick up Iacton Qruze.’

‘And after Titan?’ said Ares Voitek. ‘The Warmaster?’

‘We’ll learn that when we are assembled,’ said Loken as the roar of the Valkyrie’s engines diminished and its assault ramp dropped.

Four figures marched from its troop compartment, all in the burnished silver of the Knights Errant and armed with a variety of weaponry. Loken knew them from their data files, but even without that information it would have been child’s play to identify the four warriors.

Bror Tyrfingr; tall, slender and hollow-cheeked, with a long mane of snow-white hair and a loping stride. A Space Wolf.

Rama Karayan; keeping to the shadows, shaven headed, sallow of complexion and dark eyed. Without doubt a son of Corax.

The shaven headed warrior with a forked beard waxed to points could only be Altan Nohai, an Apothecary of the White Scars.

And finally, Callion Zaven. Patrician and haughty, his bearing was a hair’s breadth from arrogant. Zaven’s gaze swept over the waiting warriors, as though judging their worth. A true warrior of the Emperor’s Children.

Loken heard Ares Voitek’s vox-grille blurt a hash of static, and didn’t need Mechanicum augmetics to translate his bone-deep anger at seeing a warrior from the Legion that had murdered his primarch.

The four new arrivals halted at the base of the ramp, and both groups took a moment to gauge the measure of the other. Loken took a step forward, but it was Tyrfingr who spoke first.

‘You’re Loken?’ he said.

‘I am.’

Tyrfingr extended his hand and Loken took it in the old way, palm to wrist. Tyrfingr’s other hand shot up and gripped the back of Loken’s neck, as if to tear out his throat with his teeth.

‘Bror Tyrfingr,’ he said. ‘You brought the silver wolf to bring down the rogue wolf. That’s the best decision you’ll ever make, but if I think your roots are weak, I’ll kill you myself.’

SIX Nine-tenths of the lore / Tarnhelm / Adoratrice

Though its original purpose had been subverted, the so-called ‘Quiet Order’ of the Sons of Horus still met in secret. The dormitory halls had once housed thousands of deckhands, but only echoes dwelled here in the normal run of things.

Before Isstvan, a time that no longer held meaning for the Legion, the lodge had met only as often as campaign necessity allowed. It had been an indulgence permitted by the primarch, encouraged even, but always subservient to the demands of war. Now it met regularly as the Sons of Horus learned more of the secret arts.

Close to a thousand warriors gathered in the long, vaulted chamber, an army of sea-green plate, transverse helm-crests and crimson mantles. War-blackened banners hung from the dormitory arches, and bloodied trophies were speared on long pike shafts along the chamber’s length. Wide bowls of promethium billowed chemical fumes and orange flame. A slow drum beat of fists on thighs echoed from the walls of stone and steel.

The sense of anticipation was palpable.

Serghar Targost felt it too, but he forced himself to keep his steps measured and his bearing regal. The captain of the Seventh Company was broad and powerful, as were all legionaries, but there was a density to him that gave sparring partners pause when they drew his name in the training cages. His blunt features were not those of a true son, and the old scar bisecting his forehead had been overwritten by a more heinous wound.

An Iron Hands Terminator had struck him in the dying moments of Isstvan V and the impact trauma had almost ended him there and then. The enclosing pressure of his helm had kept the broth of his brain from oozing through the pulverised ruin of his skull. The Apothecaries had sutured the bone fragments together beneath the skin, fixing the largest shards in place with dozens of tensile anchors on the surface of his face.

With Lev Goshen’s help, Targost had attached the ebon claws torn from the scaled pelt of a dead Salamander to the protruding ends of the anchors, giving him the spiked features of a madman. He could no longer wear a battle helm, but Targost considered it an acceptable trade off.

Targost moved through the Sons of Horus, pausing now and then to observe their labours. Sometimes he would offer instruction on the precise angle of a blade, the correct syntax of Colchisian grammar forms or the required pronunciation of a ritual mantra.

The air sang with potential, as though a secret symphony existed just beyond the threshold of perception and would soon burst through into life. Targost smiled. Only a few short years ago he would have mocked the absurd poetry of such a sentiment.

Yet there was truth to it.

Tonight would see the lodge change from a fraternity of dabblers into an order favoured by the touch of Primordial Truth.

Everyone here knew it, and none more so than Maloghurst.

The Warmaster’s equerry entered the chamber via one of the vertical transit spines, clad in a long chasuble of ermine over his battleplate. Maloghurst gave a respectful nod. No rank structure existed within the Quiet Order, save that of lodge master, and even the Warmaster’s equerry had to respect that office.

‘Equerry,’ said Targost as Maloghurst limped to accompany him.

‘Lodge master,’ replied Maloghurst, turning to match Targost’s pace despite the fused mass of bone and cartilage within his pelvis and lower spine that stubbornly refused to heal. He walked with the aid of an ebony cane topped with an amber pommel-stone, but Targost suspected the equerry’s wounding was no longer as debilitating as he made out.

‘I doubt there is a more abandoned space aboard the Vengeful Spirit,’ said Maloghurst with a grin. ‘You realise, of course, that the lodge has no more need to hide itself in shadows.’

Targost nodded. ‘I know, but old habits, you understand?’

‘Absolutely,’ agreed Maloghurst. ‘Traditions must be maintained. Even more so now.’

Maloghurst had earned the soubriquet, ‘the Twisted’, for having a mind that wove labyrinthine intrigues around the Warmaster, but the old nickname had assumed a more literal connotation in the opening shots of the war-making on Terra.

The other Terra, where the misguided fool who believed himself Emperor had stood against the Sons of Horus.

No, Targost reminded himself, back then the Legion had still been the Luna Wolves, their name not yet reflecting the honour of the warrior that led them. Maloghurst had healed, and despite the poor taste of the old nickname, he desired it kept.

They moved through the throng, and as news of Maloghurst’s arrival spread, the warriors parted before them to reveal their destination.

Atop a raised plinth marked with chalked geometric symbols stood two structural beams welded together to form an ‘X’. Chained to the cross was a legionary stripped of his armour with his head fixed in place by a heavy iron clamp across his brow.

Ger Gerradon, late of Tithonus Assault, he’d taken two Chogorian tulwars through the lungs on Dwell, and by the time the Apothecaries got to him his oxygen-starved brain was irrevocably damaged. Nothing remained of the man he had once been, just a drooling meat-form who could serve no useful purpose within the Legion.

Until now.

Sixteen hooded lodge members arranged in a circle around Gerradon held weeping captives taken in the assault on Tyjun. Highborns for the most part, some native to Dwell, some Imperial imports; men and women who’d thrown themselves on the mercy of the Sons of Horus only to find they had none to give. In any conventional war they would be bargaining chips, tools of negotiation, but here they were something altogether more valuable. They sobbed and debased themselves with begging or attempts at bargaining, while others offered their loyalty or things far more precious.

A reverent hush descended on the chamber as Maloghurst and Targost stepped onto the plinth. Maloghurst made a meal out of his step, and Targost shook his head at the equerry’s theatrics.

‘Let’s get this done,’ said Targost, holding out his hand.

Maloghurst shook his head. ‘You can’t simply rush this, lodge master,’ he said. ‘I know you are all about the fundamentals, but this is not a breach to be stormed. Ritual is everything here, Serghar, the proper order of things must be observed, the right words spoken and the offerings made at precisely the right time.’

‘Just give me the knife,’ said Targhost. ‘You speak the words and tell me when to open their throats.’

The captives wailed and their captors tightened their grips.

Maloghurst produced a long dagger from within his robes, its blade curved and worked from dark stone. Its surface was chipped and crude, like something hacked from the ground by savages, but Targost knew its edge to be sharper than any arming chamber tech could match.

‘Is that…’ he began.

‘One of the blades Erebus crafted?’ said Maloghurst. ‘No, not that one of course, but one like it.’

Targost nodded and took the blade, testing its heft and flexing his fingers on the leather-wrapped handle. It felt good in his grip, natural. Made for him.

‘I like it,’ he said and turned to Ger Gerradon.

Like him, Gerradon wasn’t a true son, his features bearing a malnourished sharpness from a Cthonian childhood that no amount of genhancing could ever restore.

‘A loyal member of the lodge and a ferocious killer,’ said Targost. ‘A man born for assault duties. It’s a blow to the Legion to have lost his sword arm.’

‘If I have the truth of it, then Ger will fight alongside his brothers with a new soul within him.’

‘What the Seventeenth Legion call a daemon?’

‘An old term, but as good a word as any,’ agreed Maloghurst. ‘Lorgar’s sons call their twin-flames the Gal Vorbak. Ours will be the Luperci, the Brothers of the Wolf.’

Gerradon’s eyes were open, but unseeing. His lips parted, as though he was trying to speak, and drool spilled onto his chest.

‘Nothing of the man we knew remains,’ said Maloghurst. ‘This will restore him.’

‘Then let’s get it done,’ snapped Targost.

Maloghurst stood before Gerradon, placing a tattooed hand on his scarred chest. Targost didn’t remember the Twisted having tattoos, but recognised their provenance. The books Erebus had shown him, the ancient texts said to have been borne to Colchis from Old Earth, had been filled with stanzas of artes rendered in the same runic script.

‘Be ready with that knife, Serghar,’ said Maloghurst.

‘Have no fear on that score,’ Targost assured him.

Maloghurst nodded and began to speak, but in no language Targost had ever heard. The more the equerry spoke, the less Targost believed it was a language in any sense that he could comprehend.

He saw Maloghurst’s mouth moving, but the motion of his lips wasn’t matching the noise in Targost’s ears; like rusted metal grating on stone, a death rattle and a tuneless singer combined.

Targost coughed a wad of mucus. He tasted blood and spat onto the deck. He blinked away a momentary dizziness and tightened his grip on the stone dagger as the bile in his stomach climbed his gullet. Targost’s eyes widened as noxious black smoke streamed from the blade. The miasma clung to its edges and Targost felt the weight of murder in the dagger’s long existence. The temperature plummeted, his every exhalation visible as a long plume of breath.

‘Now,’ said Maloghurst and the sixteen hooded warriors pulled the captives’ heads back to expose their necks.

Targost stepped towards the nearest, a young man with handsome features and wide, terrified eyes.

‘Please, I just–’

Targost didn’t let him finish and plunged the smoke-edged dagger deep into his throat. Blood fountained from the grotesque wound. The hooded warrior pushed the dying man forward, and Targost moved on, opening one throat after another with no heed of his victims’ horror or last words.

As the last one died, their blood lapped around Targost’s boots and spilled over the edge of the plinth. The chalked symbols drank deeply, and Targost felt a tremor in his hand.

‘Mal…’ he said as his arm lifted the blade to his own throat.

Maloghurst didn’t respond, his lips still twisting in opposition to the unsounds he was making. Targost twisted his head, but the world around him was a frozen tableau.

‘Maloghurst!’ repeated Targost.

‘He can’t help you,’ said Ger Gerradon.

Targost looked into a face alight with malice and perverse enjoyment of suffering. No longer slack with brain death, Gerradon’s features were pulled in a rictus grin. His eyes were milky white and empty, like the unpainted eyes of a doll. Whatever their ritual had drawn from the warp was not Ger Gerradon, but something incalculably old, raw-birthed and bloody.

‘Sixteen? That’s the best you could do?’ it said. ‘Sixteen measly souls?’

‘It’s a sacred number,’ hissed Targost, fighting to keep the blade from reaching his neck. Despite the freezing temperatures, sweat ran in runnels down his face.

‘To who?’

‘To us, the Legion…’ grunted Targost. ‘We’re the Sixteenth Legion, the twin Octed.’

‘Ah, I see,’ said the warp-thing. ‘Sacred to you, but meaningless to the neverborn. After everything Erebus taught you people, you still manage to get it wrong.’

Anger touched Targost, and the blade’s inexorable path to the pulsing artery in his neck slowed.

‘Wrong? We summoned you, didn’t we?’

The thing wearing Gerradon’s flesh laughed. ‘You didn’t summon me, I came back of my own accord. I have so much to teach you.’

‘Came back?’ said Targost. ‘Who are you?’

‘I’m hurt you don’t recognise me, Serghar.’

The smoking edges of the gore-encrusted blade touched Targost’s neck. Skin parted before its razor tip. Blood pumped as he pushed it deeper into his neck.

‘Who am I?’ rasped the daemon. ‘I’m Tormaggedon.’

Rassuah flew the pathfinders from Old Himalazia to Ultima Thule, the outermost structure still considered to be in Terran orbit. Discounting the as yet unfinished Ardent Reef, Ultima Thule was the most recent addition to the inhabited plates that made stately circuits around humanity’s birth rock; smaller than the supercontinent of Lemurya, less productive than the industrial powerhouse of Rodinia and without the grandiose architecture of Antillia, Vaalbara or Kanyakumari.

It had been constructed sixty-two years previously, by workers since assigned to distant sectors of the Imperium. Eclipsed in scale and power by its grander brethren, its entry in the Terran orbital registry was little more than a footnote.

Over the course of its life, Ultima Thule had been quietly forgotten by the vast majority of Terra’s inhabitants. And where most orbital architects would lament such a fate for their creation, anonymity had always been the goal of Ultima Thule.

Its structure comprised of a pair of matte-black cylinders, five hundred metres in length and two hundred wide, connected by a central orb-hub. No armoured windows pierced its structure and no collision avoidance lights strobed to warn of its presence. Any space-farer lucky enough to catch a glimpse of Ultima Thule, could be forgiven for mistaking it for dead orbital junk.

That appearance was deliberately misleading, for Ultima Thule was one of the most sophisticated structures orbiting Terra, its endless suites of auspex quietly monitoring spatial traffic throughout the system.

A docking bay opened on its dark side, remaining visible only as long as it took to retrieve the void-capable Valkyrie. Auspex-hardened blast doors shut behind the assault carrier, and Ultima Thule continued its procession around the planet below as though it had never existed.

Anonymous and forgotten.

Silent and invisible.

Just as Malcador had decreed when he ordered it built.

The Repository was cool, the air kept at a constant relative humidity and temperature. The more fragile artefacts stored here were hermetically sealed in stasis fields, and Malcador tasted the tang of the recessed power generators.

Crystal-fronted cabinets lit up at his passing, but he spared their contents little notice. A book that had once plunged the world into war, sketches by the Polymath of Firenza the Emperor had – wisely, it turned out – deemed too dangerous for Perturabo to see, the half-formed sculpture of beauty incarnate.

Malcador had lied when he told young Khalid Hassan that these rough formed walls were all that remained of the Sigillite Fortress, but some truths were uncomfortable enough without burdening others with them.

The chamber was smaller than those that surrounded it, and it took Malcador a moment only to reach the stele of Gyptia. It sat on a reinforced timber cradle, the black gloss of its original construction undimmed by the passage of millennia. Lives had been lost to retrieve this fragment of humanity’s soul, as was the case with many of the objects stored here.

Malcador closed his eyes and placed his fingertips upon the cold surface of the stone. Granodiorite, an igneous rock similar to granite. Hard wearing, but not indestructible.

Given what it had unlocked in ages past, there was a pleasing symmetry to what it now allowed him to do. Malcador’s breathing slowed and the already cooled air chilled yet further.

‘My lord,’ he said.

Silence was Malcador’s only answer, and he feared the holocaust raging beneath the palace was too fierce, too all-consuming for a reply. Beneath wasn’t strictly speaking correct, but it was the only preposition that seemed to fit.

Malcador.

The Emperor’s voice echoed within his mind, stentorian and dominant, yet familiar and fraternal. Malcador felt its power, even over so immeasurable a distance, but also the effort it was taking to forge the link.

‘How goes the fight?’

We bleed out every day, while the daemons grow ever stronger. I do not have much time, my friend. War calls.

‘Leman Russ is on Terra,’ said Malcador.

I know. Even here, I can feel the Wolf King’s presence.

‘He brings word of the Lion. Twenty thousand Dark Angels are reportedly bound for Ultramar.’

Why does he not make haste for Terra?

Sweat ran down Malcador’s back at the strain of maintaining this connection. ‘There are… unsettling rumours of what is happening in Guilliman’s domain.’

I cannot see the Five Hundred Worlds. Why is that?

‘We call it the Ruinstorm. Nemo and I believe the slaughter on Calth to have been part of an orchestrated chain of events that precipitated the birth of a catastrophic and impenetrable warp storm.’

And what do you believe Roboute is doing?

‘It’s Guilliman, what do think he’s doing? He’s building an empire.’

And the Lion goes to stop him?

‘So the Wolf King says, my lord. It seems the warriors of the Lion stand with us after all.’

You doubted them? The First? Even after all they accomplished in the time before the others took up their swords?

‘I did,’ admitted Malcador. ‘After Rogal’s secret emissaries to their home world returned empty-handed, we feared the worst. But Caliban’s angels came to the Wolves’ aid when Alpharius threatened to destroy them.’

Alpharius… my son, what chance did you give my dream? Ah, even when war presses in from all sides, my sons still seek to press their advantage. They are like the feudal lords of old, scenting opportunity for their own advancement in the fires of adversity.

The regret pained Malcador’s thoughts.

‘Russ still plans to fight Horus eye to eye,’ said Malcador. ‘He sends my Knights to guide his blade and no words of mine can sway him from his course.’

You think he should not fight Horus?

‘Russ is your executioner,’ said Malcador tactfully. ‘But his axe falls a little too readily these days. Magnus felt it, now Horus will feel it.’

Two rebel angels. His axe falls on those deserving its smile.

‘And what happens when Russ takes it upon himself to decide who is loyal and who deserves execution?’

Russ is true-hearted, one of the few I know will never fall.

‘You suspect others may prove false?’

To my eternal regret, I do.

‘Who?’

Another long pause made Malcador fear his question would remain unanswered, but at last the Emperor replied.

The Khan makes a virtue of being unknowable, of being the mystery that none can answer. Some among his Legion have already embraced treachery, and others may yet.

‘What would you have me do, my lord?’

Keep watching him, Malcador. Watch the Khan more closely than any other.

‘I have never wanted to fly anything so much in all my life,’ said Rassuah.

Looking at the sleek, wedge-shaped craft with its jutting, aerodyne prow, Loken couldn’t help but agree with her.

‘I’m told it’s called Tarnhelm,’ he said.

‘Call it what you want, but if I’m not flying it within the hour, there’s going to be blood spilled,’ said Rassuah.

Loken grinned at her eagerness. He disliked aircraft on principle, but even he recognised something beautiful in the Tarnhelm.

Perhaps because it looked so utterly unlike any other aircraft in the Legiones Astartes inventory. The warcraft of the Legions were designed to be brutal, in appearance as well as effect. Their form followed function, which was to kill as quickly and efficiently as possible. Tarnhelm’s sleek lines spoke of an altogether different purpose.

Its basic structure was constructed around a central crew section with bulbous drive pods at the rear that tapered towards the prow and formed the ship’s delta-winged shape. Without any pennants or beacons, there was nothing to give any clue to its identity or affiliation.

‘What is it?’ asked Varren. ‘It’s not an attack ship or a guncutter; too few armaments. And there’s not enough armour for it to be a troop transport. One good hit is going to gut it. I don’t understand what it is.’

‘This is a craft designed to pass through the stars unseen,’ said Rama Karayan, and all eyes turned to look at him, as it was the most any of them had heard him say.

‘Why in the world would you want to do that?’ asked Callion Zaven, his expression as confused as Varren’s. ‘The point of the Legions is to be seen.’

‘Not always,’ said Altan Nohai. ‘What the Khan called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease before the enemy even knows he is there.’

Zaven looked unconvinced. ‘Shock and awe becomes a lot harder when no one sees it coming.’

‘It’s got teeth, mind,’ said Ares Voitek, his servo-arms unlimbering to point out the barely visible seams of recessed weapon nacelles and missile pods. ‘But as Macer says, it’s not an attack ship.’

‘It’s a draugrjúka,’ said Bror Tyrfingr.

Seeing the looks of confusion among his fellow pathfinders, Bror shook his head and said, ‘Don’t you people understand Juvik?’

‘Juvik?’ asked Rubio.

‘Fenrisian hearth-cant,’ said Tubal Cayne. ‘It’s a stripped-down, simplified language. No subtlety to it – punchy and declarative, just like the warriors that speak it.’

‘Have a care, Tubal,’ warned Bror, squaring his shoulders. ‘A man could take offence at that.’

That seemed to confuse Cayne. ‘I don’t see how. Nothing I said was untrue. I’ve met enough Space Wolves to know that.’

Loken expected anger, but Bror laughed. ‘Space Wolves? Ha, I forgot that was your idiot name for the Rout. If I didn’t think you were being completely serious I’d rip your arms off. Stay by my side and I’ll show you just how subtle a Space Wolf can be.’

‘So what’s a draugrjúka?’ asked Loken.

‘A ghost ship,’ said Bror.

A grey-robed servile with augmetic implants worn around her skull like a tonsure had met the pathfinders in the docking bay, and she now led them aboard the Tarnhelm. The vessel’s interior was stripped back, with only the barest minimum of fitments that would allow it to carry crew.

Its astropath was kept in sealed cryo-stasis, and its Navigator had yet to be implanted in the tapered cupola on the dorsal section. The long-axis of the ship was a cramped dormitory, with alcoves serving as medicae bays, equipment stowage and sleeping areas. Individual crew compartments were set towards the rear of the craft, with a slender nave reaching from the communal areas of the ship to its tapered prow.

Rassuah made her way towards the bridge, while the rest of the pathfinders stowed their equipment in cunningly arranged lockers and weapon racks.

The Knights Errant had been extant only a short while, too short for any real traditions to bed in, but a custom that had been readily adopted was for each warrior to retain a single artefact from his former Legion.

Loken thought back to the battered metal crate in which he had kept his meagre belongings; the garrotting wire, the feathers and the broken combat blade. Junk to any other eyes than his, but there had been one item whose loss had grieved him.

The data-slate Ignace Karkasy had given him, the one from Euphrati Keeler. That had been a treasure beyond value, a record of the time when the universe made sense, when the Luna Wolves had been a byword for honour, nobility and brotherhood. Like everything else he had once owned, it was gone.

He snapped his chainsword into the locker’s blade rack, careful to fix it in place. Its blade was fresh from a manufactory city in Albyon and inscribed with a boast that it was warranted never to fail.

Just like the thousands of others forged there.

His bolter was no different, the product of manufactories geared for war on a galactic scale, where the ability to mass-produce reliable weaponry was of far greater importance that any considerations of individuality. Lastly, he placed the mirror tokens Severian had given him into the locker. Loken had thought about throwing them away, but some fatalistic instinct told him that he might yet have need of them.

He closed the locker, watching as the rest of his pathfinders stowed their gear. Tubal Cayne unpacked a piece of surveying gear, a modified theodolite with multiple auspex capabilities, Rama Karayan a rifle with an elongated barrel and oversized sight. Ares Voitek had his servo-harness with its burnished gauntlet icon, and Bror Tyrfingr stowed what appeared to be a leather cestus gauntlet of entwined knotwork with ebon claws like knife blades.

Callion Zaven appeared at Loken’s side, opening the locker next to him and slotting home a custom-worked boltgun with a clawed wing motif acid-etched onto its platework. Within the Luna Wolves, such weapons had been for officers, but the killing fields of Murder had shown Loken that many of the warriors in the III Legion wielded heavily embellished armaments.

Zaven saw Loken’s attention and said, ‘A poor effort, I know. Not a patch on my original bolter.’

‘That’s not your touchstone?’

‘Throne, no!’ said Zaven, unbuckling his hand-tooled leather sword belt and holding it between them ‘This is my touchstone.’

The sword’s handle was tightly wound golden wire, its pommel an ebony talon. The quillons were swept eagle wings with a glittering amethyst mounted at the centre of both sides.

‘Draw it,’ said Zaven.

Loken did so, and his admiration for the weapon increased tenfold. The weapon had heft, but was incredibly light. The handle and setting had been wrought by human hand, but the blade had never known a smith’s hammer. Curved like a Chogorian sweep-sword and milky white, dappling to a jaundiced yellow at its edge, the blade was clearly organic.

‘It’s a vapour-wraith hewclaw,’ said Zaven. ‘Cut it from one of their warrior caste on Jupiter after he’d stuck it through my heart. By the time I got out of the apothecarion my Legion had already moved on and I found myself part of the Crusader Host for a time. Disappointing, but it gave me the time to work the hewclaw into a duelling blade. Try it out.’

‘Perhaps another time,’ said Loken.

‘Indeed so,’ replied Zaven, taking no offence as he took the sword back from Loken. He grinned. ‘I heard how you put down that odious little bastard, Lucius. I wish I’d seen that.’

‘It was over quickly,’ said Loken. ‘There wasn’t much to see.’

Zaven laughed, and Loken saw a glint in his eye that might have been admiration or could have been appraisal. ‘I don’t doubt it. You’ll have to tell me about it someday. Or perhaps we might match blades on the journey.’

Loken shook his head. ‘Don’t you think we have enough enemies before us without looking for them in our own ranks?’

Zaven put his hands up, and Loken was instantly contrite.

‘As you wish,’ said Zaven, his eyes darting to Loken’s equipment case. ‘So what did you keep?’

‘Nothing,’ said Loken, blinking away the after-image of a hooded shadow towards the rear of the compartment. His heartbeat spiked and droplets of sweat beaded on his forehead.

‘Come on, everyone keeps something,’ grinned Zaven, oblivious to Loken’s discomfort. ‘Rubio has his little gladius, Varren that woodsman’s axe, and Qruze keeps that battered old boltgun. And Cayne has… whatever grubby engineer’s tool that is. Tell me, what did you keep?’

Loken slammed his locker shut.

‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘I lost everything on Isstvan Three.’

Aside from the times he’d been deflowering his half-brother’s wife, Raeven had always hated Albard’s tower. Situated in the very heart of Lupercalia, it was a grim edifice of black stone and copper sheeting. The city was in a state of mourning, black flags and the entwined eagle and naga banners hanging from every window. Raeven’s late father might have been a bastard, but he was at least a bastard who’d earned his people’s respect.

Raeven climbed the stairs slowly, taking his time and savouring this culmination of his desires. Lyx and his mother followed behind, as eager as him to consummate this sublime moment.

The tower was kept dark. The Sacristans assigned to Albard’s care claimed his eyes could not tolerate light beyond the dimmest lumen. Raeven’s spies told him Albard never ventured beyond the tower’s top chambers, confined by lunacy and infrequent brushes with moribund lucidity.

‘I hope he’s rational,’ said Lyx, his sister-wife’s words seeming to take their cue from Raeven’s thoughts as they so often did. ‘It won’t be any fun if he’s lost in madness.’

‘Then you should prepare yourself for disappointment,’ said Raeven. ‘It’s a rare day our brother even knows his own name.’

‘He will be rational,’ said his mother, climbing the steps with wheezing mechanical awkwardness.

‘How can you be so sure?’ asked Raeven.

‘Because I have seen it,’ replied his mother, and Raeven knew not to doubt her. That Adoratrice consorts were privy to many secrets was well known all across Molech, but that those of House Devine could witness things not yet come to pass was known only to Lupercalia’s Knights.

The Devine Adoratrices had preserved that ability for thousands of years by keeping the genestock of their House from being diluted by inferior bloodlines. It surprised Raeven that Lyx had not seen what his mother had, but the ways of the Adoratrice were not his to know.

Cebella Devine, his mother and Adoratrice Drakaina to his father, was now at least a hundred years of age. Her husband had rejected cosmetic juvenat treatments for vanity’s sake, but Cebella embraced them with gusto. Her skin was lifted back over her skull like tightened plastic, fixed in place with surgical sutures to a grotesque headpiece that resembled a device of skull-violating horror.

A hunched pair of biologis servitors followed in Cebella’s wake, tethered to her via a series of hissing pipes and feeder tubes. Both were venom-blinded and implanted with numerous monitoring devices and gurgling, hissing cylinders containing gel-nutrients, anti-senescence compounds and restorative cell cultures harvested from vat-grown newborns.

To keep Cebella’s brittle bones from undue stresses, an ingenious scaffold of suspensor fields, exo-lattices and fibre-bundle muscles had been surgically bonded with her skeletal structure.

‘You’d better be right,’ snapped Lyx, straightening her bronze-panelled dress and arranging her hair. ‘It’ll be pointless if he’s no better than a beast or a vegetable.’

Lyx had once been wed to Albard, but her vows had been broken even before he’d put his betrothal ring on her. Though it had been their mother that engineered Raeven and Lyx’s relationship, Cebella held a depthless contempt for her daughter that Raeven could only attribute to jealousy of her apparent youth.

‘It won’t be pointless,’ he said, shutting them both up before they could get into one of their all-too-frequent arguments. His mother’s sickly flesh contorted with what he presumed was a smile, though it was hard to tell. ‘After all this time, I want to see the look in his eyes when I tell him I killed his father.’

‘Your father too, and mine,’ pointed out Lyx.

Their mother’s womb had ejected Raeven mere minutes before Lyx, but sometimes it felt like decades. Today was such a day.

‘I’m aware of that,’ he said, pausing just before he reached the upper landing of the tower. ‘I want him to see the woman who replaced his own mother on one side, his former wife on the other. I want him to know that everything that was and should have been his is now mine.’

Lyx slipped her arm through his, and his mood lightened. As she had done since they were suckled babes, she knew his moods and needs better than he. To her loving populace, her beauty and body were sustained by calisthenics and subtle juvenat treatments.

Raeven knew better.

Many of his wife’s long absences into Lupercalia’s hidden valleys were spent undergoing nightmarish chirurgical procedures administered by Shargali-Shi and his coven of androgyne Serpent Cultists. Raeven had witnessed one such operation, a dreadful blend of surgery, alchemy and carnal ritual, and vowed never to do so again. The Ophiolater claimed to channel the Vril-ya, the power of the Serpent Gods once worshipped all across Molech in an earlier age. Raeven didn’t know if that was true or not, but the results spoke for themselves. Though nearly sixty-five, Lyx could easily pass for less than half that.

‘The serpent moons grow ever fuller,’ said Lyx. ‘Shargali-Shi will call the Vril-yaal to gather soon.’

He smiled. A six day bacchanalia of intoxicating venoms and writhing hedonism within the hidden temple caverns was just what he needed to lighten the coming burden of planetary command.

‘Yes,’ he said with a grin of anticipation, and all but bounded up the last few steps.

The entrance vestibule of the topmost chambers was dark, the two Dawn Guard standing sentinel at the onward doorway little more than dark silhouettes. Despite the poor light, Raeven knew both of them; soldiers from his mother’s personal detail. He wondered if they’d shared her bed, and judged it more than likely from the conspicuous aversion of their gaze.

They stepped aside as Raeven approached, one opening the door for him as the other bowed deeply. Raeven swept past them and moved through richly appointed antechambers, medicae bays and chambers of observation.

A trio of nervous Sacristans awaited them at the entrance to Albard’s private rooms. Each was red-robed, in imitation of their Mechanicum masters, plugged with bionics and rank with sweat and grease. Not quite Cult Mechanicum, but too altered to be thought of as human either. If not for their rote maintenance of the Knights, Raeven would have advocated their elimination years ago.

‘My lord,’ said a Sacristan Raeven thought was called Onak.

‘Does he know?’ said Raeven.

‘No, my lord,’ said Onak. ‘Your instructions were most precise.’

‘Good, you’re a competent Sacristan and it would have irked me to flay you alive.’

All three Sacristans moved aside with alacrity as Raeven pushed open the door. The air that gusted from within was musty and stifling, a fetor of urine, flatus and insanity.

A deep couch with a sagging footstool was set on the edge of a dimmed fireplace that was entirely holographic. Upon the couch sat a man who looked old enough to be Raeven’s grandfather. Denied sunlight and the rejuvenating surgeries of his half-brother, Albard Devine was a wretch of a human being, his skull hairless and pale as newly-hatched maggots.

Before his mind had snapped, Albard’s physique had been robust and stocky, but now he was little more than a drained revenant of parchment-dry flesh sunken over a rack of misaligned bones.

Albard had been cruelly handsome, bluntly so, with the stony harshness people expected of a warrior king. That man was long gone. A gelatinous lesion emerging from the burn scars he’d received upon his maturity leaked yellow pus into his long beard. Clotted with mucus and spilled food the beard reached almost to Albard’s waist, and the one eye that stared at the fire was jaundiced and milky with cataracts.

‘Is that you, Onak?’ said Albard, his voice a tremulous husk of a thing. ‘The fire must be dying. I’m cold.’

He doesn’t even realise it’s a hologram, thought Raeven, and his mother’s assurance that his half-brother would be in a state of relative lucidity seemed dashed.

‘It’s me, brother,’ said Raeven, moving to stand beside the couch. The stench of corruption grew stronger, and he wished he’d brought a vial of Caeban root to waft under his nose.

‘Father?’

‘No, you idiot,’ he said. ‘Listen closely. It’s me, Raeven.’

‘Raeven?’ said Albard, shifting uneasily on the couch. Something rustled beneath the couch in response to Albard’s movement, and Raeven saw the thick, serpentine body of Shesha. His father’s last surviving naga shifted position with creaking leathery motion, a forked tongue flicking from her fanged mouth. Well over two centuries old, Shesha was in the last years of life, near blind and her long, scaled body already beginning to ossify.

‘Yes, brother,’ said Raeven, kneeling beside Albard and reluctantly placing a hand on his knee. The fabric of his coverlet was stiff and encrusted, but Raeven felt the brittle, bird-like bones beneath. A haze of filth billowed from the coverlet, and Raeven felt his gorge rise.

‘I don’t want you here,’ said Albard and Raeven felt a flutter of hope that his half-brother was at least in touching distance of sanity. ‘I told them not to let you in.’

‘I know, but I have something to tell you.’

‘I don’t want to hear it.’

‘You will.’

‘No.’

‘Father is dead.’

Albard finally deigned to look at him, and Raeven saw himself reflected in that glossy white, hopeless eye. The augmetic had long since ceased to function.

‘Dead?’

‘Yes, dead,’ said Raeven, leaning in despite the rancid miasma surrounding Albard. His half-brother blinked his one eye and looked past his shoulder, now aware of the presence of others in the room.

‘Who else is here?’ he said, sounding suddenly afraid.

‘Mother, my mother,’ said Raeven. ‘And Lyx. You remember her?’

Albard’s head sank back to his chest, and Raeven wondered if he’d drifted off into some chem-induced slumber. The Sacristans kept Albard moderately sedated at all times to keep the ravaged synapses of his brain from causing an explosive aneurysm within his skull.

‘I remember a whore by that name,’ said Albard as a rivulet of yellowed saliva leaked from the dry gash of his mouth.

Raeven grinned as he felt Lyx’s rising fury. Men had endured days of unimaginable agony for far less.

‘Yes, that’s her,’ said Raeven. He’d pay for that later, but more and more he relished the punishment more than the pleasure.

‘Did you kill him?’ said Albard, fixing Raeven with his rheumy gaze. ‘Did you kill my father?’

Raeven looked back over his shoulder as Cebella and Lyx drew closer to better savour Albard’s humiliation. His mother’s features were unmoving, but Lyx’s cheeks were flushed in the light of the holographic fire.

‘I did, yes, and the memory of it still makes me smile,’ said Raeven. ‘I should have done it a long time ago. The old bastard just wouldn’t let go, wouldn’t hand me what was rightfully mine.’

Albard let out a wheezing exhalation of breath as dry as winds over the Tazkhar steppe. It took a second for Raeven to recognise the sound as bitter laughter.

‘Rightfully yours? You remember who you’re talking to? I’m the firstborn of House Devine.’

‘Ah, of course,’ said Raeven, standing and wiping his hands on a silk handkerchief he withdrew from his brocaded coat. ‘Yes, well, it’s not like our House can be led by a cripple who can’t even bond with his Knight, now is it?’

Albard coughed into his beard, a dry, hacking retch that brought up yet more phlegmy matter. When he looked up, his eye was clearer than it had been in decades.

‘I’ve had a lot of time to think, over these long years, brother,’ said Albard, when the coughing fit subsided. ‘I know I could have recovered enough to leave this tower, but you and Lyx made sure that never happened, didn’t you?’

‘Mother helped,’ said Raeven. ‘So how does it feel, brother? To see everything that should have been yours is now mine?’

‘Honestly? I couldn’t care less,’ said Albard. ‘You think after all this time I care what happens to me? Mother’s pet Sacristans keep me barely alive, and I know I’ll never leave this tower. Tell me, brother, why in the world would I care what you do anymore?’

‘Then we’re done here,’ said Raeven, fighting to keep his anger from showing. He’d come here to humiliate Albard, but the wretched bastard had been hollowed out too much to appreciate the pain.

He turned to face Cebella and Lyx. ‘Take the blood you need, but make it quick.’

‘Quick?’ pouted Lyx.

‘Quick,’ repeated Raeven. ‘The Lord Generals and the Legions have called for a council of war and I’ll not start my governorship by having anyone doubting my competency.’

Lyx shrugged and pulled a naga-fang filleting knife from the many concealed folds of her dress as she stood above the shrivelled wraith of her former husband and half-brother.

‘Shargali-Shi needs the blood of the firstborn,’ said Lyx, dropping to one knee and resting the blade against the side of Albard’s neck. ‘Not all of it, but a lot.’

Albard spat in her face.

‘This may be quick,’ she said, wiping her face, ‘but I promise it will be agonising.’

SEVEN The Nameless Fortress / War council / The gift

Loken stepped onto the cold embarkation deck of the orbital fortress. Fixed a hundred kilometres above Titan’s surface and swathed in the darkness of its night-side, the bleak station spun gently above an active cryovolcano. Rassuah had flown the Tarnhelm onto its embarkation deck with a light hand at the controls, her every auspex warning that she was bracketed by lethal ordnance.

Vapour rose from the void-cold flanks of the Tarnhelm, and Loken sweated in his armour. The deck was enormous, with space enough for great prison-barques to disgorge their human cargo and the custodians of the fortress to render them.

A squad of mortal warriors in gloss-red armour and silver-visored helms awaited him at the base of the ramp, but Loken ignored them in favour of the broadly built veteran standing before them.

Armoured identically to Loken, the warrior’s deeply tanned and deeper lined face were well known to him. White hair, kept close-cropped, and a neat beard of the same hue made him look old. Pale eyes that had seen too much were even older.

‘Loken,’ said Iacton Qruze, his voice little more than a whisper. ‘It’s good to see you, lad.’

‘Qruze,’ replied Loken, coming forward to take the old warrior’s hand. The grip was firm, unyielding, as if Qruze were afraid to let go. ‘What is this place?’

‘A place of forgetting,’ said Qruze.

‘A prison?’

Qruze nodded, as though reluctant to expound on the grim purpose behind the nameless fortress.

‘An unkind place,’ said Loken, taking in the featureless walls and bleak, institutional grimness. ‘Not a place to which the ideals of the Imperium easily cling.’

‘Perhaps not,’ agreed Qruze, ‘but only the young and naïve believe wars can be won without such places. And to my lasting regret, I am neither.’

‘None of us are, Iacton,’ said Loken. ‘But why do we find you here?’

Qruze hesitated, and Loken saw his eyes dart in the direction of Tisiphone, the great double-edged sword harnessed across his back.

‘Did you bring them?’ asked Qruze.

‘All but one,’ answered Loken, curious as to why Qruze had ignored his question.

‘Who didn’t you get?’

‘Severian.’

Qruze nodded. ‘He was always going to be the hardest to convince. Well, our mission just went from almost impossible to nigh suicidal.’

‘I think that’s the part he objected to.’

‘He always was a clever man,’ said Qruze.

‘You knew him?’ asked Loken, and instantly regretted it when he saw a distant look enter Qruze’s eyes.

‘I fought alongside the Twenty-Fifth Company on Dahinta,’ said Qruze.

‘The overseers,’ said Loken, remembering the hard fought campaigns to cleanse the derelict cities of scavenger machines.

‘Aye, it was Severian that got us past the circuit defences of the Silicate Palace to the inner precincts of the Archdroid,’ said Qruze. ‘He saved us months of grinding attrition. I remember when he first brought word of the–’

Loken was well used to Iacton Qruze’s wandering reminiscences, but this was not the time to indulge his fondness for old Legion history.

‘We should be going,’ he said before Qruze could go any further.

‘Aye, you’re right, lad,’ agreed Qruze with a sigh. ‘The sooner I’m away from this damn place the better. Necessity is all well and good, but that doesn’t make what we do in its name any easier.’

Loken turned to board the Tarnhelm, but Qruze made no move to follow him.

‘Iacton?’

‘This won’t be easy for you, Garviel,’ said Qruze.

Instantly alert, Loken said, ‘What won’t?’

‘There’s someone here who needs to speak to you.’

‘To me? Who?’

Qruze inclined his head towards the red-armoured gaolers, who snapped to attention in escort formation.

‘She asked for you by name, lad,’ said Qruze.

‘Who did?’ repeated Loken.

‘Best you see for yourself.’

Of all the hells Loken had seen and imagined, few compared to the bleak desolation and hopelessness of this orbital prison. Every aspect of its design appeared calculated to crush the human spirit, from the grim institutional mundanity of its appearance to the oppressive gloom that offered no respite or any hope that its occupants would ever see open skies again.

Qruze had boarded the Tarnhelm, leaving him in the custody of the fortress’s gaolers. They moved with precision and appeared to care little for the fact that he was a warrior of the Legions. To them, he was just another detail to be factored into their security protocols.

They marched him through vaulted corridors of dark iron and echoing chambers that still bore faint traces of blood and faeces no amount of cleaning fluid could ever scrub away. The route was not direct, and several times Loken was sure they had doubled back over their course, following a twisting path deeper into the heart of the fortress.

His escorting gaolers were trying to disorient him, make him lose any sense of which way they might have come or in which direction lay the exit. A tactic that might work on ordinary prisoners, already half-broken and desperate, but one that was wasted on a legionary with an eidetic sense of direction.

As they marched down a winding screw-stair, Loken tried to imagine who could be incarcerated here that might have asked for him by name.

It should have been easy; Qruze had said ‘she’, and he knew few females.

Legion life was an overtly masculine environment, though the Imperium cared little for the sex of the soldiers that made up its armies, flew its starships and facilitated its operation. Most of the women he’d met were dead, so maybe this was someone who’d since learned of his existence. A sister or mother, or perhaps even the daughter of someone he’d once known.

He heard distant screams and the soft echo of weeping. The sounds had no obvious source and Loken had the unsettling impression of years of misery so intense they had imprinted on the walls themselves.

His guardians eventually led him to a barred chamber suspended over a vault of complete darkness. A number of passageways led from the chamber, each narrow enough for a mortal, but almost claustrophobic for a warrior of his stature. They moved along the rightmost corridor, and Loken detected the unmistakable stench of human flesh and ingrained filth and sweat. But most of all he smelled despair.

His escort stopped at a cell secured by a heavy iron door marked with alphanumerics and what looked like some kind of lingua-technis. It meant nothing to him, as he suspected was the point. Everything about this place was designed to be unfamiliar and unwelcoming.

A lock disengaged and the door rose into the frame with a clockwork ratcheting sound, though none of the guards had touched it. Remote contact with a centralised control room most likely. The guards stood aside and Loken didn’t waste any words on them, ducking beneath the lintel and stepping within.

Almost no light penetrated the cell, only diffuse reflections from the corridor outside, but that was more than enough for Loken to make out the outline of a kneeling figure.

Loken was no expert on the female form, but the figure’s loose robes gave little in its shape to distinguish it. A head turned towards him at the sound of the door opening, and Loken saw something familiar in its faintly elongated occipital structure.

A faint buzzing sound came from the high ceiling, and a humming florescent lumen disc sparked to life. It flickered for a few seconds before the freshly routed power stabilised.

At first Loken thought this was a hallucination or another vision of someone long dead, but when she spoke, it was the voice he knew from the many hours they had spent in remembrance.

He remembered her as being small, even though most mortals were small to him. Her skin had been so black he’d wondered if it had been dyed, but the sickly light of the lumen disk made it seem somehow grey.

Her skull was hairless, made ovoid by cranial implants.

She smiled, the expression faltering and unfamiliar. Loken guessed it had been a long time since she had need of those particular muscles.

‘Hello, Captain Loken,’ said Mersadie Oliton.

Hacked from the rock of the mountains long before the I Legion built the Citadel of Dawn, the Hall of Flames was a raked amphitheatre of rulership. In the long centuries since then, a vault had had been built around the amphitheatre, a fortress around the vault and a city around the fortress.

Much had changed on Molech since then, but the Hall retained much of its original purpose. The firstborn scions of House Devine were still ritually burned here and the planet’s rulers still made decisions affecting the lives of millions here. It was, however, no longer a place where mechanised warriors settled their honour duels with fights to the death.

Right now, Raeven almost wished it was.

A hail of stubber fire from Banelash would make short work of the squabbling representatives and silence their strident voices.

As pleasant a fantasy as that was, Raeven took a deep breath and tried to pay attention to what was going on around him. Enthroned at the centre of the amphitheatre, Raeven held the bull-headed sceptre said to have been borne by the Stormlord himself. The artefact was certainly ancient, but that anything could have survived thousands of years without blemish seemed unlikely.

He dragged his focus back to the five hundred men and women filling the tiered chamber; the senior military officers of Molech. Aides, scriveners, calculus logi, savants and ensigns surrounded them like acolytes, and Raeven was reminded of Shargali-Shi and his Serpent Cult devotees.

Castor Alcade and three grim-faced Ultramarines sat on the stone benches at floor-level across from Vitus Salicar. He too was not alone, with a Blood Angel in red gold to his left, another in black to his right.

Tyana Kourion, Lord General of the Grand Army of Molech, sat motionless in the centre of the next tier in her dress greens, stoic and grim. Colonels from a dozen regiments gathered around her like moths drawn to a beneficent flame. Raeven didn’t know them, but recognised Kourion’s immediate subordinates.

The heads of the four operational theatres were each seated beneath the sigil denoting one of the cardinal compass points.

Clad in her signature drakescale burnoose and golden eye-mask was Marshal Edoraki Hakon of the Northern Oceanic, and sat along from her was Colonel Oskur von Valkenberg of the Western Marches, whose uniform looked as though he’d slept in it for a month. Commander Abdi Kheda of the Kushite Eastings wore full body armour as though she expected to fight her way back through the jungles to her posting, and finally the Khan of the Southern Steppe, Corwen Malbek, sat cross-legged with a longsword and rifle balanced across his knees.

Behind the four commanders sat hundreds of colonels, majors and captains of the various regiments of the Imperial Army, each clad in their battledress armour. The sheer variety of uniforms had the effect of making the gathered soldiery look like revellers in a gaudy carnival. Until now, Raeven hadn’t quite grasped just how many regiments were garrisoned on Molech.

His mother and Lyx were in the great gallery above, already in bitter disagreement over the course he should take.

Lyx spoke of the vision she’d had the night of Raeven’s Becoming, of how his actions would decide the course of a great war fought on Molech.

Both claimed the power of foresight, but neither could say with any certainty what those actions would be or in whose favour he would turn the war. Was he to align with Horus, and in so doing be granted dominion of the systems around Molech? Or was it his destiny to fight the Warmaster and win glory and repute in his defeat? Both roads offered hope of fulfilling his sister’s prophetic vision, but which to choose?

In addition to the ground forces, Molech boasted a sizeable naval presence, with a fleet of over sixty vessels, including eight capital ships and numerous frigates less than a hundred years old. Lord Admiral Brython Semper appeared to be asleep, though such a feat was surely impossible in so noisy an environment. Uniformed ratings took notes for him, but Raeven suspected Semper would never read them. He had no interest in ground-pounding warfare. If the Warmaster’s forces reached Molech’s surface, he would already be lost to the void.

Seated apart from the branches of conventional warriors were the Mechanicum contingents, brooding figures swathed in a mix of reds and blacks who each kept to their own little enclaves. Raeven knew more than most of the Mechanicum, but even that was rumour and second-hand gossip culled from his spies among the Sacristans.

In the position of prime importance stood the Mechanicum being designated Bellona Modwen of the Ordo Reductor. The senior Martian Adept was fully encased in gloss-green cybernetic body armour that made her look like a seated sarcophagus. The sinister mech-warrior cohorts of Thallax were hers to command, as was a fearsome array of war machines, tanks and unknowable technologies locked in the catacombs of Mount Torger.

Her magi trained the Sacristans and kept the Knights functional. As such, the Martian Priesthood was a substantial power bloc on Molech and had the right to attend every military conclave, though they seldom exercised that right.

The Mechanicum and the fleet might be keeping their own counsel, but the junior officers of the Army were making up for their absent voices. They loudly hectored the speakers below them, either in complete agreement or to drown out what they saw as rank stupidity.

Raeven couldn’t decide which.

Current Right of Voice belonged to the Warmonger of Legio Fortidus; an amazonian looking woman in an oil-stained khaki bodyglove named Ur-Nammu. In heavily accented Gothic, she set out the position of her Legio, which, to Raeven’s ears ran thusly.

Princeps Uta-Dagon and Utu-Lerna would not endorse any plan that didn’t involve charging the Titans of Legio Fortidus straight at the enemy the instant they landed.

Opinicus, the Invocatio of Legio Gryphonicus, held the view that just because the rest of Legio Fortidus had been wiped out on Mars was no reason for the rest of them to throw themselves on the swords of self-sacrifice.

As Raeven understood it, both Ur-Nammu and Opinicus undertook roughly the same role within their Legios, a form of ambassador between the inhuman Titan princeps and those they must perforce fight alongside.

Their bickering was pointless, for Carthal Ashur, the cruelly handsome Calator Martialis of Legio Crucius had yet to speak. The lesser ambassadors would eventually defer to him, for the largest Titan on Molech was a Crucius engine, the ancient colossus known as Paragon of Terra. Ashur carried the authority of the Princeps Magnus, Etana Kalonice, and if she had been roused from her war-dreams beneath Iron Fist Mountain, then the smaller Legios would undoubtedly fall into line behind her.

The ambassadors of the Legios eventually finished speaking and deliberations moved onto logistical matters: the establishment of supply lines, ordnance depots and stockpiling. Raeven’s threshold for boredom – already stretched thin by the hours of debate – was pushed to breaking point by long recitations of supply levels. A dozen aexactor clerks had already spoken, and dozens more stood in line to be heard.

Raeven rose from his throne and hammered the sceptre on the stone floor of the hall, eliciting fearful gasps from the reliquary keepers. He drew his pistol and aimed it at the nearest scrivener and his parchment-spewing data-slate.

‘You. Shut up. Right now,’ he said, his drawing of the weapon cutting through the droning account of lasrifle power-cell shortages at the Kushite Preceptory Line. ‘All of you listen very carefully to what I’m about to say. I will shoot the next scribe who dares to read an inventory list or stock level. Right through the head.’

The clerks lowered their data-slates and shuffled uncomfortably in place.

‘That’s what I thought,’ said Raeven. ‘Right, will someone tell me something of actual bloody importance. Please.’

Castor Alcade of the Ultramarines stood and said, ‘What sort of thing are you looking to hear, Lord Devine? This is how wars are fought, with properly emplaced lines of supply and a fully functioning infrastructure in place to support the front-line forces. If you want to hold this world against the Warmaster, then these are the things you need to know.’

‘No,’ said Raeven. ‘They’re the things you need to know. All I need to know is where I will ride into battle. I have an army of scriveners, quartermasters and savants to deal with numbers and lists.’

‘The Five Hundred Worlds are burning,’ snapped Alcade, ‘yet my Ultramarines stand ready to fight and die for a world not their own. Speak like that again, and I’ll take every warrior back to Ultramar.’

‘The Emperor Himself tasked your Legion and the Blood Angels with the defence of Molech,’ said Raeven with a mocking smile. ‘You would forsake that duty? I don’t think so.’

‘You would be wise not to test that theory,’ warned Alcade.

‘I am the rightful ruler of Molech,’ snapped Raeven. ‘Military command of this world falls to me, and if I learned anything from my father, may he rest in peace, it’s that a ruler needs to surround himself with the best people he can, delegate authority and then not interfere.’

‘An Imperial commander can delegate authority,’ said Alcade, ‘but never responsibility.’

Raeven struggled to control his anger, feeling it twist in his chest like a poisoned blade.

‘My House has ruled Molech for generations,’ he said with cold hostility. ‘I know the meaning of responsibility.’

Alcade shook his head. ‘I’m not sure you do, Lord Devine. Responsibility is a unique concept. You can share it with others, but your portion is not diminished. You may delegate it, but it is still with you. Blood has given you command of Molech, and its security is your responsibility. No evasion, or wilful avoidance of that fact can shift it to others.’

Raeven forced a mask of composure to settle upon his features and nodded as though accepting the legate’s patronising words as wisdom.

‘Your words carry the acumen of your primarch,’ he said, each word filling his belly with cankerous venom. ‘I will, of course, review the recommendations of the tithe-takers in due course, but perhaps this is a time for war stratagems rather than dry lists of numbers and dispute between allies?’

Alcade nodded and bowed in wary agreement.

‘Indeed so, Lord Devine,’ said Alcade, sitting back down.

Raeven let out a poisoned breath that felt like it was scorching his throat. He fixed his gaze on Brython Semper, taking a moment to compose himself and giving the Lord Admiral’s aide time to elbow him in the ribs.

‘Admiral Semper, can you tell us how long we have before the War-master’s forces reach Molech?’

Dressed in a regal purple frock coat of baroque ornamentation, Brython Semper stood and fastened his top button. The Lord Admiral’s hair was silver white and pulled into a long scalp lock, his face a scarred, partially augmetic mask.

‘Of course, my lord,’ he said, inloading the contents of his aide’s data-slate to his ocular implant. ‘The astropathic choirs send word of impending arrivals of scores of vessels, perhaps as many as forty or fifty in total. Nor are the approaching craft making any secret of their arrival. I’m getting all sorts of nonsense about astropaths hearing wolves howling in the warp and ships screaming their designations. More than likely it’s some form of empyreal distortion or simply reflected vox-transmissions, but it’s clear the Warmaster wants us to know he’s coming. Though if he thinks we’re a bunch of cowards who’ll run screaming at the first sign of the enemy, he’s in for a rude awakening.’

Vitus Salicar interrupted the Lord Admiral before he could continue. ‘It would be a mistake to think that just because you outnumber the Warmaster’s fleet, you hold the upper hand. Legion void-war is a savage, merciless thing.’

Semper bowed to the Blood Angel and said, ‘I know full well how dangerous the Space Marines are, captain.’

‘You don’t,’ said Salicar sadly. ‘We are killers, reapers of flesh. You must never forget that.’

Before the Lord Admiral could respond to the Blood Angel’s melancholic tone, Raeven said, ‘How soon will the enemy be here?’

Visibly struggling to contain his temper in the face of Salicar’s dismissal of his fleet’s capabilities, Semper spoke slowly and carefully.

‘The Master of Astropaths’ best estimate is a real space breach any day now, putting them within reach of Molech in around two weeks. I’ve already issued a muster order to pull our picket ships back from the system’s edge.’

‘You won’t engage the traitors in open space?’

‘Since I am not in the habit of throwing away the lives of my crews, no, I will not,’ said Semper. ‘As Captain Salicar helpfully pointed out, the warships of the Space Marines are not to be underestimated, so our best course of action is to dispatch a provocateur force to goad the traitors onto the horns of our orbital guns. Our main fleet will remain within the umbra of the orbital batteries on the Karman line. Between the hammer and anvil of our static guns and the warfleet, we can gut the traitor ships before they can land so much as a single warrior.’

Despite his bombastic tone, Raeven liked the cut of Semper’s jib and nodded.

‘Do it, Lord Admiral,’ he said. ‘Dispatch the provocateur force and wish them good hunting.’

The cell had no furniture, not even a bed. A thin mattress lay folded in one corner, together with a chipped night-soil pot and a small box, like a presentation case for a medal.

‘You look like you’ve seen a ghost,’ said Mersadie, rising from her kneeling position.

Loken’s mouth opened, but no sounds came out.

This was the second dead person he’d seen, but this one was flesh and blood. She was here. Mersadie Oliton, his personal remembrancer.

She was alive. Here. Now.

She wasn’t the same though. The harsh light revealed faded scars tracing looping arcs over the sides and upper surfaces of her diminished skull. Surgical scars. Excisions.

She saw him looking and said, ‘They took out my embedded memory coils. All the images and all the remembrances I’d stored. All gone. All I have left of them are my organic memories and even they’re beginning to fade.’

‘I left you on the Vengeful Spirit,’ said Loken. ‘I thought you must be dead.’

‘I would be if it wasn’t for Iacton,’ replied Mersadie.

‘Iacton? Iacton Qruze?’

‘Yes. He saved us from the murder of the remembrancers and got us off the ship,’ said Mersadie. ‘He didn’t tell you?’

‘No,’ said Loken. ‘He didn’t.’

‘We escaped with Iacton and Captain Garro.’

‘You were on the Eisenstein?’ said Loken, disbelief and wonder competing for his full attention. Qruze had said little of the perilous journey from Isstvan, but neglecting to mention Mersadie’s survival beggared belief.

‘And I wasn’t the only one Iacton saved.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Euphrati got off the Vengeful Spirit, Kyril too.’

‘Sindermann and Keeler are alive?’

Mersadie nodded. ‘As far as I know, but before you ask, I don’t know where they are. I haven’t seen either of them in years.’

Loken paced the interior of the cell, raw emotions surging like a chaotic tide within him. Sindermann had been a dear friend to him. A mentor of superlative intellect and a confidante of sorts, a bridge between trans-human sensibilities and mortal concerns. That Keeler had also survived was a miracle, for the imagist had a real knack for getting herself into trouble.

‘You didn’t know she was alive?’ asked Mersadie.

‘No,’ said Loken.

‘You’ve heard of the Saint?’

Loken shook his head. ‘No. What saint?’

‘You have been out of the loop, haven’t you?’

Loken paused, angry and confused. She was not to blame, but she was here. He wanted to lash out, but released a shuddering breath that seemed to expel a heavy weight of bilious humours.

‘I was dead, I think,’ he said at last. ‘For a while. Or as good as dead. Maybe I was just lost, so very lost.’

‘But you came back,’ said Mersadie, reaching out to take his hand. ‘They brought you back because you’re needed.’

‘So I’m told,’ said Loken wearily, curling his fingers around hers, careful not to squeeze too hard.

They stood unmoving, neither willing to break the silence or the shared intimacy. Her skin was soft, reminding Loken of a fleeting moment in his life. When he had been young and innocent, when he had loved and been loved in return. When he had been human.

Loken sighed and released Mersadie’s hand.

‘I have to get you out of here,’ he said.

‘You can’t,’ she said, withdrawing her hand.

‘I’m one of Malcador’s chosen,’ said Loken. ‘I’ll send word to the Sigillite and have you taken back to Terra. I’m not letting you rot away in here another minute.’

‘Garviel,’ said Mersadie, and her use of his given name stopped him in his tracks. ‘They’re not going to let me out of here. Not for now, at least. I spent a long time in the heart of the Warmaster’s flagship. People have been executed for a lot less.’

‘I’ll vouch for you,’ said Loken. ‘I’ll guarantee your loyalty.’

Mersadie shook her head and folded her arms.

‘If you didn’t know who I was, if you hadn’t shared your life with me, would you want someone like me released? If I was a stranger, what would you do? Turn me loose or keep me imprisoned?’

Loken took a step forward. ‘I can’t just leave you here. You don’t deserve this.’

‘You’re right, I don’t deserve this, but you don’t have a choice,’ said Mersadie. ‘You have to leave me.’

Her hand reached up to brush the bare metal of his unmarked plate. Thin fingers traced the line of his pauldron and swept across the curve of the shoulder guard.

‘It’s strange to see you in this armour.’

‘I no longer have a Legion,’ he said simply, angry at her wilful desire to languish in this prison.

She nodded. ‘They told me you died on Isstvan, but I didn’t believe them. I knew you were alive.’

‘You knew I’d survived?’

‘I did.’

‘How?’

‘Euphrati told me.’

‘You said you didn’t know where she was.’

‘I don’t.’

‘Then how–’

Mersadie turned away, as though reluctant to give voice to her thoughts for fear of his ridicule. She bent to retrieve the presentation case from the ground next to the mattress. When she turned back to him, he saw her eyes were wet with tears.

‘I dreamed of Euphrati,’ she said. ‘She told me you’d come here. I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous, but after all I’ve seen and been through, it’s almost normal.’

The anger drained from Loken, replaced by an echoing sense of helplessness. Mersadie’s words touched something deep within him, and he could hear the soft breath of a third person, the ghost of a shadow in a room where none existed.

‘It isn’t ridiculous,’ said Loken. ‘What did she say?’

‘She told me to give you this,’ said Mersadie, holding out the case. ‘To pass on.’

‘What is it?’

‘Something that once belonged to Iacton Qruze,’ she said. ‘Something she said he needs to have again.’

Loken took the box, but didn’t open it.

‘She said to remind Iacton that he is the Half-heard no longer, that his voice will be heard louder than any other in his Legion.’

‘What does that mean?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Mersadie. ‘It was a dream, it’s not like it’s an exact science.’

Loken nodded, though what he was hearing made little sense. At least as little sense as answering a summons to war on the word of a dead man.

‘Did Euphrati say anything else?’ he asked.

Mersadie nodded and the tears brimming on the edge of her eyes like a river about to break its banks spilled down her cheeks.

‘Yes,’ sobbed Mersadie. ‘She said to say goodbye.’

EIGHT The Eater of Lives / Confrontation / Hope in lies

The apothecarion decks of the Endurance were cold, bare metal and reeked of the embalmers art. Acrid chemicals fogged the air and hissing vats of noxious fluids bubbled on retorts between dull iron slabs, suspended cryo-tubes and racks of surgical equipment.

Mortarion had spent altogether too much time here already in the pain-filled days following the attack of Meduson’s sleeper assassins. Swathed in counterseptic wraps and bathed in regenerative poultices like an embalmed king of the Gyptia, his superhuman metabolism had taken only seven hours to undo the worst of the damage.

A squad of Deathshroud Terminators escorted him through the artificially cold space with their manreapers gripped loosely. The primarch’s honour guard lightly rocked their outsized scythes from shoulder to shoulder to keep them in motion. Even on the flagship, they were taking no chances.

Frost webbed the canted hafts and the light of organ-harvesters glittered from the ice forming on the blades. Armoured in dusky white armour edged in a mixture of crimson and olive drab, they spread out in a pyramid formation, threat auspex alert for the intruder they knew was somewhere on this deck.

Mortarion went bareheaded, fresh skin grafts flushed with highly-oxygenated blood that made him look healthier than he had in centuries. A rebreather gorget still covered the lower half of his face, and gusts of earthy breath sighed from its portcullis-like grille. His sockets were craters cut in a lunar landscape, his eyes nuggets of amberglass.

Silence was clamped to his armour’s backplate. He had no need of its edge, the Deathshroud had more than enough to go round. Instead, he carried the Lantern, a colossal Shenlongi pistol, drum-fed and possessed of an energy matrix few beam weapons of comparable size could match.

The Deathshroud spread out as their sweep of the chamber reached the impregnable vault at its end. Sealed with locks of magnificent complexity, the gene-vault was a place of mystery and a repository of the Death Guard’s future.

Caipha Morarg, late of 24th Breacher Squad, now serving as Mortarion’s equerry, shook his head and put up his bolter as he followed his master into the apothecarion.

‘My lord, there’s no one here,’ he said.

‘There is, Caipha,’ said Mortarion, his voice the breath of a parched desert wind. ‘I can feel it.’

‘We’ve swept the deck from end to end and side to side,’ reaffirmed Morarg. ‘If there was something here, we’d already have found it.’

‘There’s still one place to look,’ said Mortarion.

Morarg followed the primarch’s gaze.

‘The gene-vault?’ he said. ‘It’s void-hardened and energy shielded. It’s a wonder the damn Apothecaries can get in.’

‘Do you doubt me, Caipha?’ whispered Mortarion.

‘Never, my lord.’

‘And have you ever known me to be wrong in such matters?’

‘No, my lord.’

‘Then trust me when I say there’s something in there.’

‘Something?’

Mortarion nodded, and he canted his head to one side, as though listening to sounds only he could hear. The muscles in his face twitched, but with the gorget obscuring his jaw, it was impossible to be certain what expression he made.

‘Open the door,’ he ordered, and a gaggle of hazard-suited Legions serfs ran to it with pneumatic key-drivers and one-time cipher code wands. They inserted the power-keys, but before any were engaged, a green-cloaked Apothecary approached Mortarion under the watchful gaze of the Deathshroud.

‘My lord,’ said the Apothecary. ‘I beg you to reconsider.’

‘What is your name?’ asked Mortarion.

‘Koray Burcu, my lord.’

‘We have just breached Molech’s system edge, Apothecary Burcu, and there is an intruder aboard the Endurance,’ said Mortarion. ‘It is behind that door. I require you to open it. Now.’

Koray Burcu wilted under Mortarion’s gaze, but to his credit, the Apothecary stood his ground.

‘My lord, please,’ said Burcu. ‘I implore you to withdraw from the apothecarion. The gene-vault must be kept sterile and at positive pressure. This entire stock of gene-seed is at risk of contamination if the door is opened even a fraction.’

‘Nevertheless, you will do as I order,’ said Mortarion. ‘I can do it without you, Apothecary, but it will take time. And in that time, what do you think an intruder might be doing in there?’

Burcu considered the primarch’s words and made his way to the gleaming vault door. Numerous key-drivers turned simultaneously under Burcu’s direction as he wanded a helix-code unique to this moment and which would change immediately upon the door’s opening.

The door split at its junction with the wall and a blast of frozen, sharp-edged air escaped from within. Mortarion felt it cut the skin of his face, relishing the needle-like jab of cold. The door swung wider and the hazard-suited thralls withdrew as the reek of preserving chemicals and frost-resistant power cells tainted the air with bio-mechanical flavours. Mortarion tasted something else on the air, a fetor of something so lethal that only one such as he could authorise its release.

But such things were stored in the deepest magazines, locked away in vaults even more secure than this.

‘Touch nothing,’ warned Burcu, moving ahead of the Deathshroud as they stepped over the high threshold of the gene-vault.

Mortarion turned to Morarg and said, ‘Seal the door behind me, and only open it again on my express order.’

‘My lord?’ said Morarg. ‘After Dwell, my place is at your side!’

‘Not this time,’ said Mortarion and his meaning was ironclad.

Devotion to duty clamped down on Morarg’s next words and he nodded stiffly as Mortarion turned and followed Koray Burcu into the vault. No sooner was Mortarion inside than the heavy adamantium door swung closed.

The space within was a hundred metre square vault of frost-white and gleaming silver. Shielded banks of gurgling cryo-tubes lined the walls, and rows of centrifuge drums formed a central aisle.

Illuminated sigils and runic inscriptions of genetic purity flickered on brass-rimmed data-slates, and Mortarion extrapolated mental maps of the gene-code fragments. Here was a collection of mucranoids, there a chemical bath of zygotes that would one day be a Betcher’s Gland. Behind them, bubbling cylinders of eyeballs.

Half-formed organs floated in gestation tanks and puffs of vapour from humming condensers filled the air with chill moisture that crunched underfoot in microscopic ice crystals. Koray Burcu claimed the atmosphere within the vault was sterile, but such was not the case. The air vibrated with potential, a thing pressing itself upon the fabric of reality like a newborn in a rupturing birth sac.

Only he could feel it. Only he knew what it was.

The Deathshroud advanced cautiously, and Mortarion sensed their confusion. To them, the vault was empty, no sign of the intruder their primarch said they would find. That they believed their gene-father might be mistaken amused him. What must it be like for a warrior of the Legions to think such a thing?

Much as it was for a primarch, he supposed.

But they could not sense what he could sense.

Mortarion had spent a lifetime on a world where the monstrous creations of rogue geneticists and spirit channelling corpse-whisperers had haunted the fogbound crags of Barbarus. Where monsters truly worthy of the name were wrought into being every day. Had even fashioned a few of his own.

Mortarion knew the spoor of such beasts, but more than that, he recognised the scent of one of his own.

‘You see, my lord,’ said Apothecary Burcu. ‘It’s plain to see there’s nothing here, so can we all please vacate the gene-labs?’

‘You’re wrong,’ said Mortarion.

‘My lord?’ said Burcu, consulting a grainy holo floating above his narthecium gauntlet. ‘I don’t understand.’

‘He’s here, he just can’t show himself yet, can you?’

The primarch’s words were addressed to the air, but the voice that answered sounded like rocks grinding against one another in a mudslide and seemed to echo from all around them.

Meat. Need meat.

Mortarion nodded, already suspecting that was why he had chosen this place. The Deathshroud formed a circle around Mortarion, warscythes at the ready, sensorium desperately searching for the source of the voice.

‘My lord, what is that?’ asked Burcu.

‘An old friend,’ said Mortarion. ‘One I thought lost.’

No one ever thought of the Death Lord as being quick. Relentless, yes. Implacable and dogged, absolutely. But quick? No, never that.

Silence was a hard iron blur, and by the time its blade completed its circuit, all seven of the Deathshroud lay slain, simply bisected at their midriffs. An apocalyptic quantity of gore erupted within the vault, a glut of shimmering, impossibly bright blood. It sprayed the walls and flooded the polished steel deck plates in a red tide. Mortarion tasted its bitter tang.

Apothecary Burcu backed away from him, his eyes wide and disbelieving behind the visor of his helm. Mortarion didn’t stop him.

‘My lord?’ begged the Apothecary. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Something grim, Koray,’ said Mortarion. ‘Something necessary.’

The air in front of Mortarion looked scratched, a phantom image of a humanoid form etched on an incredibly fine pane of glass. Or a pict-feed with the half-formed impression of a body on it, an outline of something that existed only as potential.

The scratched, hurried impression of form stepped into the lake of blood and gradually, impossibly, the liquid’s outward spread began to reverse. Slowly, but with greater speed as the rich fluid of all life was drawn into its ethereal form, a figure began to take shape.

First a pair of feet, then ankles, calves, knees and muscular thighs. Then pelvic bones, a spine, organs and whipping, cording, glistening musculature wrapping itself around a wet red skeleton. As though an invisible mould were being filled with the blood of the Deathshroud, the powerful form of a towering, transhuman warrior took shape.

Fed and fashioned from the blood of the dead, it was form without the casing of skin. A fleshless revenant with butcher’s hocks of meat laced around ossified ribs, hardened femurs and a skull like a rock. Red-rimmed eyes of madness stared out from lidless sockets and though the body was yet freshly made, it reeked of putrefaction. The thing’s mouth worked jerkily, rubbery tendons pulling taut as the exposed jawline flexed in its housing of bone.

A tongue, raw and purple, ran along fresh-grown nubs of teeth.

For the briefest instant, the illusion of rebirth was complete, but it didn’t last. Flaccid white runnels of decomposition streaked the red meat like fatty tissue, and curls of corpse gas lifted from flesh that wriggled as though infested with feasting maggots. Weeping sores opened across the musculature and purulent blisters popped like soap bubbles to leak viscous mucus.

Glass cracked and warning bells began chiming.

Mortarion looked to his left as, one by one, the bell jars of developing zygotes exploded with uncontrolled growth. Rampant necrosis swelled from algal fronds of stem cells and nascent buds of organs. Veined with black, they grew and grew until the bloated mass ruptured with flatulent brays of stinking fumes.

Chemical baths curdled in an instant, their surfaces frothing with scum and overflowing in glutinous ropes. The centrifuges vibrated as the specimens within expanded and mutated with ultra-rapid growth before dying just as quickly.

Behind the primarch, Apothecary Burcu was desperately trying to manipulate one of the key-drivers while punching in a code that had already been rendered obsolete.

‘Please, my lord!’ he shouted. ‘It’s contamination. We have to get out of here right now! Hurry, before it’s too late!’

‘It’s already too late,’ said the wet, fleshless thing of glistening organs. Burcu turned and his eyes widened in horror at the sight of an oozing weave of translucent skin coating the monster’s body. It grew and thickened over the naked organs, unevenly and in patches, but expanding all the time. Decay claimed the skin almost as soon as it grew, flaking from the body in blood-blackened scabs.

The monster’s hand punched out. Its fingers stabbed through Burcu’s eye lenses. The Apothecary wailed and dropped to his knees as the monster tore the helmet from his head. Burcu’s sockets were ruined craters, gaping wounds in his skull that wept bloody tears down ashen cheeks.

But losing his eyes was the least of Koray Burcu’s pain.

His cries turned to gurgling retching. The Apothecary’s chest spasmed as lungs genhanced to survive in the most hostile environments were assaulted from within by a pathogen so deadly it had no equal.

The Apothecary vomited a flood of rancid matter, falling onto all fours as he was devoured by his hyper-accelerated immune system. Death fluids leaked from every orifice, and Mortarion watched dispassionately as the flesh all but melted from his bones, like the humans of Barbarus who climbed too high into the poison fogs and paid the ultimate price.

His brothers would be horrified by Burcu’s death and his abhorrent murderer, but Mortarion had seen far worse in his youth; the monstrous kings of the dark mountains were endlessly inventive in their anatomical abominations.

Koray Burcu slumped forward and a slurry of stinking black and vermillion spilled onto the deck. The Apothecary’s body was no more, a broth of decaying meat and spoiled fluids.

Mortarion knelt beside the remains and ran a finger through the mess. He brought the sludge to his face and sniffed. The biological poison was a planetary exterminator, but to one raised in the toxic hell of Barbarus, it was little more than an irritant. Both his fathers had worked to render his physiology proof against any infection, no matter its power.

‘The Life-Eater virus,’ said Mortarion.

‘That’s what killed me,’ said the monster, as the regenerating and decaying cloak of skin slithered over its body. ‘So that’s what the warp used to remake me.’

Mortarion watched as waxen skin inched over the skull to reveal a face he’d last seen en route to the Eisenstein. No sooner was it revealed than it rotted away again, an unending cycle of rebirth and death.

Even bereft of skin, Mortarion knew the face of one of his sons.

‘Commander,’ said Mortarion. ‘Welcome back to the Legion.’

‘We go to the killing fields, my lord?’

‘The Warmaster calls us to Molech,’ said Mortarion.

‘My lord,’ said Ignatius Grulgor, turning his limbs over to better examine the reeking, living death of his diseased body and finding it much to his liking. ‘I am yours to command. Unleash me. I am the Eater of Lives.’

‘All in good time, my son,’ said Mortarion. ‘First you’re going to need some decent armour or you’ll kill everyone on my ship.’

It was bad enough when the occupants of the nameless fortress prison had been unknown to Loken, but knowing he had no choice except to leave Mersadie incarcerated cut him to the bone. The cell door closing was a knife in the belly, but she was right. With agents of the Warmaster likely abroad in the solar system, perhaps even on Terra itself, there existed no prospect of her release.

Perhaps his escort sensed the build up of anger in him, for they led him back to the embarkation deck without the needless obfuscation of the route. As Loken had suspected, his final destination had been close to where the Tarnhelm had set down.

The sleek ship sat in a launch cradle, already prepped and ready to depart. Bror Tyrfingr had called it a draugrjúka, a ghost ship, and he was right to do so, but not for its stealthy properties.

It carried people who might as well be ghosts, presences that went unnoticed by all, and – more importantly – whose existence would never be acknowledged.

Loken saw Banu Rassuah in the pilot’s blister on the arrowhead frontal section, and Ares Voitek circled the craft with Tyrfingr, using his servo-arms to point out especially noteworthy elements of the ship’s construction.

Tyrfingr looked up at Loken’s approach. His brow furrowed as though detecting a noisome stench or the approach of an enemy.

His eyes roamed Loken’s face and his hand slipped to his holster.

‘Ho,’ said Tyrfingr. ‘There’s a man whose icerunner’s slipped a sheet. You found trouble?’

Loken ignored him and climbed the rear ramp to the fuselage. The central dormitory section was only half full. Callion Zaven sat at the central table with Tubal Cayne, extolling the virtues of personal combat over massed escalades. At the far end, Varren and Nohai compared scars on their bulging forearms, while Rama Karayan cleaned the disassembled skeleton of his rifle.

Tylos Rubio was nowhere to be seen, and Qruze emerged from the low-ceilinged passageway leading to the pilot’s compartment.

‘Good, you’re back,’ said Zaven, managing to completely misread Loken’s humours. ‘Perhaps we can actually get out of the system.’

‘Qruze,’ snapped Loken, reaching to his belt. ‘This is for you.’

Loken’s wrist snapped out, and the lacquered wooden box flew from his hand like a throwing blade. It flashed towards Qruze, and though the Half-heard was no longer as quick as he once was, he caught the box a finger’s breadth from his chest.

‘What’s–’ he said, but Loken didn’t let him finish.

Loken’s fist slammed into Qruze’s face like a pile-driver. The venerable warrior staggered, but didn’t fall, his heartwood too seasoned to be felled by one blow. Loken gave him three more, one after the other with bone-crunching force.

Qruze bent double, instinctively driving forward into the fists of his attacker. Loken slammed a knee into Qruze’s gut, then spun low to drive an elbow to the side of his head. Skin split and Qruze dropped to his knees. Loken kicked him in the chest. The Half-heard flew back into the lockers, crumpling steel with the impact. Buckled doors flew open and the stowed gear tumbled to the deck: a combat blade, leather strops, two pistols, whetstones and numerous ammunition clips.

The Knights Errant scattered at the sudden violence in their midst, but none moved to intervene. Loken was on Qruze in a heartbeat, his fists like wrecking balls as they slammed into the Half-heard.

Qruze wasn’t fighting back.

Teeth snapped under Loken’s assault.

Blood sprayed the bare metal of his armour.

Loken’s fury at Mersadie’s imprisonment cast a red shadow over everything. He wanted to kill Qruze like he’d never wanted to kill anyone before. With every ringing hammer blow he unleashed, he heard his name being called.

He was back in the ruins, surrounded by death and creatures more corpse than living thing. He felt their claws upon his armour, pulling him upright. He threw them off, tasting the planet-wide reek of decaying meat and the hot iron of expended munitions. He was Cerberus again, right in the heart of it.

Lost to madness on the killing fields of Isstvan.

Spitting breath, Loken swept up the combat blade. The edge glittered in the subdued lighting, hanging in the air like an executioner awaiting his master’s sign.

And for an instant Loken wasn’t looking at Qruze, but Little Horus Aximand, the melancholic killer of Tarik Torgaddon.

The blade plunged down, aimed for Qruze’s exposed throat.

It stopped a centimetre from flesh, as though striking an unseen barrier. Loken screamed and pushed with every scrap of strength, but the blade refused to budge. The handle froze in his grip, blistering the skin with arctic ferocity before turning it black with frostbite.

The pain brought clarity, and Loken looked up to see Tylos Rubio with his hand extended and wreathed in a haze of corposant.

‘Drop it, Garvi,’ said a voice, though he could not say for certain to whom it belonged. Loken couldn’t feel his hand, the icy touch of Rubio’s psykery numbing it completely. He surged to his feet and hurled the blade away. It shattered into icy fragments on the curved fuselage.

‘Throne, Loken, what was that about?’ demanded Nohai, pushing past him to kneel by Qruze’s slumped form. ‘You’ve damn near killed him.’

Qruze demurred, but his words were too mangled by swollen lips and broken teeth to make out. The faces of the warriors around him were pictures in shock. They looked at Loken as they would a lunatic berserker.

Loken went to go to Qruze, but Varren stepped in front of him. Bror Tyrfingr stood next to him.

‘The old man is down,’ said Tyrfingr. ‘Leash your wolf. Now.’

Loken ignored him, but Varren put a hand on his chest, a solid, immovable brace. If he wanted past, he’d have to fight the former World Eater too.

‘Whatever this is,’ said Varren. ‘This isn’t the time.’

Varren’s words were calmly said, and Loken’s anger diminished with every heartbeat. He nodded and stepped back with his fists uncurling. The sight of his brother legionary’s blood dripping from his cracked knuckles was the final parting of the curtain, and reason resumed its position at the seat of his consciousness.

‘I’m done,’ he said, backing away until he reached a wall and slumped down to his haunches. His assault had not exerted him overmuch, but his chest heaved with effort.

‘Good. I’d hate to have to kill you,’ said Tyrfingr, taking a seat at the table. ‘And by the way, you owe me a knife. I spent weeks getting that one balanced properly.’

‘Sorry,’ said Loken, watching Nohai work on Qruze’s ruined face.

‘Ach, it’s only a blade,’ said Tyrfingr. ‘And it was Tylos here that broke it with that witchery of his.’

‘Me?’ said Rubio. ‘I stopped Loken from murder.’

‘Couldn’t you have plucked the blade from his hand?’ asked Tubal Cayne, examining the broken fragments of the blade. ‘I once saw a psyker of the Fifteenth Legion pluck the blades from an eldar swordsman’s hands, so I know it can be done. Or was the Librarius of Ultramar less skilled than that of Prospero?’

Rubio ignored Cayne’s jibe and made his way back to his private compartment bunk. Loken pushed himself to his feet and crossed the deck towards Qruze. Varren and Tyrfingr moved to intercept him, but he shook his head.

‘I only want to talk,’ he said.

Varren nodded and stepped aside, but kept his posture taut.

Loken looked down at Qruze, whose eyes were all but obscured by swollen flesh. Clotted blood matted his beard and purple bruising flowered all across the Half-heard’s face. Impressions of Loken’s gauntlets were battered into his skin. Nohai was clearing the blood away, but that wasn’t making the damage Loken had inflicted look any less severe. Qruze lifted his head at the sound of his approach, seemingly unafraid of further violence.

‘How long did you know she was here?’ said Loken, the calmness of his voice in stark contrast to the fading colour of his skin.

Qruze mopped his cheek where the skin had split and spat a wad of bloody phlegm. At first, Loken thought he wasn’t going to answer, but when the words came, they came without rancour.

‘Almost two years.’

‘Two years,’ said Loken, and his fingers curled back into fists.

‘Go on,’ said Qruze softly. ‘Get it out of your system, lad. Beat me some more if it helps.’

‘Shut up, Iacton,’ said Nohai. ‘And, Loken, step back or I’ll seriously reconsider my Apothecary’s Oath.’

‘You left her to rot in there for two years, Iacton,’ said Loken. ‘After you’d risked everything to save her and the others. Euphrati and Kyril? Where are they? Are they here too?’

‘I don’t know where they are,’ said Qruze.

‘Why should I believe you?’

‘Because it’s the truth, I swear,’ said Qruze, grimacing as Nohai inserted another needle into his skull. ‘Nathaniel might have an idea where they are, but I don’t.’

Loken paced the deck, angry and confused and hurt.

‘Why didn’t you tell me?’ he asked, as the hulking shape of a gold-armoured warrior appeared silhouetted at the boarding ramp.

‘Because I ordered him not to,’ said Rogal Dorn.

A space was cleared for the primarch of the Imperial Fists, though he declined to sit. Chairs were righted and the debris of the recently unleashed violence cleared away. Loken sat the farthest distance he could manage from Iacton Qruze, a terrible weight of shame hanging around his neck. The fury that had driven him to assault the Half-heard had dissipated utterly, though the lie between them still soured his belly.

Rogal Dorn paced the length of the table, his arms folded across his chest. His granite-hard face was stern, and heavy with duty, as though ill-news still swathed him. His armour’s golden lustre was faded, but here on this hidden fortress, nothing of beauty could shine.

‘You were hard on Iacton,’ said Dorn, and the square tones of his voice reminded Loken of how astonishingly soft it had once been. Soft, yet with steel in its bones. That steel was still there, but all softness had been stripped away.

‘No more than he deserved,’ replied Loken. He was being churlish, but even genhanced livers took time to purge black bile.

‘You know that’s not true,’ said Dorn, as Ares Voitek set a cut-down fuel canister in the centre of the table. ‘Iacton was obeying an order from the Lord Protector of Terra. You would do the same.’

The last sentence was as much challenge as it was statement of fact, and Loken nodded slowly.

The months following Loken’s return from Isstvan had shown him the depths of Rogal Dorn’s displeasure as he was pared down to the bone for signs of treachery. That Malcador and Garro had vouchsafed him loyal was perhaps all that had saved him from an executioner’s blade.

‘I recall when I first met you aboard the Vengeful Spirit, Garviel Loken,’ said Dorn. ‘You and Tarik almost came to blows with Efried and… my First Captain.’

Loken nodded, reluctant to be drawn into reminiscence, even with a being as godly as a primarch. He heard the pause where he expected to hear Sigismund’s name, and wondered what, if anything, it meant.

Ares Voitek filled the silence by distributing tin cups around the table via his servo-arms and pouring a measure of clear liquid into each one.

‘What’s this you’re giving me, Ares?’ said Dorn, as Voitek handed him the first filled cup.

‘It’s called dzira, my lord,’ explained Voitek. ‘It’s what the clans of Medusa drink when there’s bridges to be mended between brothers.’

‘And you just happened to have some aboard?’

Loken looked at the clear liquid in the cup, smelling all manner of strange mixtures in its chemical structure.

‘Not exactly,’ said Voitek. ‘But there’s enough alcohol-based fluids aboard the Tarnhelm for someone with a working knowledge of alchymical processes to knock up a viable substitute. Normally a Clan Chief would pass a piyala bowl around his warring sons, but I think we can break protocol on that just this once.’

‘Just this once,’ agreed Dorn and took a drink.

The primarch’s eyebrow raised a fraction, which should have told Loken what to expect. He followed Lord Dorn’s example and swallowed a mouthful of Voitek’s spirit. Its heat was chemical and raw, like coolant drained from the core of a plasma reactor. Loken’s body could process almost any toxin and expel it as harmless waste product, but he doubted the Emperor had dzira in mind when conceiving the Legiones Astartes physiology.

The others around the table, Qruze included, drank from their cups. All apart from Bror Tyrfingr and Altan Nohai reacted as though Voitek had tried to poison them, but kept their reactions to coughs and splutters.

Dorn’s gaze swept the warriors at the table, and said, ‘I know little of Medusan customs, but if the drinking of this dzira has served its clans well, then let its purpose be echoed here.’

Dorn leaned over the table, pressing both palms to its surface.

‘Your mission is too important to fail through internal division. Every one of you is here because you have strengths and virtues that have cleft you from your parent Legions. Malcador trusts you, though some of you have yet to earn such from me. I hold deeds, not faith, gut-feelings or the whispers of prognosticators as the sum of a warrior’s character. Let this mission be what earns you the boon of my trust. Find what the Wolf King needs, and you will have earned the Sigillite a measure of that trust too.’

‘Why were you and Qruze here, my lord?’ asked Macer Varren without embarrassment.

Loken saw a conspiratorial glance pass between Rogal Dorn and Iacton Qruze. The Half-heard dropped his gaze, and Rogal Dorn let out a heavy sigh that made Varren wish he’d never asked.

‘To kill a man I once held in high esteem,’ said Dorn, ever unwilling to shirk from the truth. ‘A good man sent to his death by Horus to sap our resolve and unbind the mortar that holds the Imperium together.’

Loken swallowed another mouthful of dzira, and the shame keeping him pinned to his seat receded enough for him to ask, ‘My lord, do you know where Euphrati Keeler and Kyril Sindermann are?’

Dorn shook his head. ‘No, Loken, I do not, save that they are not on Terra. I am as ignorant of their whereabouts as Iacton, but if I had to guess, and I’m loath to guess, I’d say they were somewhere on Rodinia right now. They move from plate to plate, hidden by their followers and aided by deluded fools. There were reports she had been seen on Antillia, then Vaalbara and even around the globe on Lemurya. I hear reports of her sermonising all across the orbital ring, but I suspect a great deal of those are false dissemination to throw the hunters off the scent.’

‘Surely one woman isn’t worth that effort,’ said Cayne.

‘Mistress Keeler is more than just one woman,’ said Dorn. ‘This saint nonsense that’s sprung up around her is more dangerous than you know. Her words fill malleable hearts with false faith and the expectation of miraculous intervention. She imbues the Emperor with divine powers. And if He is a god, what need has He of His people to defend Him? No, the Lectio Divinitatus is just the sort of invented lunacy the Emperor sought to see ended with Unity.’

‘Perhaps her words give people hope,’ said Loken.

‘Hope in lies,’ replied Dorn, folding his arms and stepping away from the table. His brief time with them was over. The primarch made his way to the boarding ramp, but turned and said one last thing before departing for Terra.

‘I own only the empirical clarity of Imperial Truth.’

Loken knew those words well.

He’d said them once in the water garden on Sixty-Three Nineteen and many times since in the dungeons of Terra. It could be no coincidence that Rogal Dorn repeated them here. The memory of them was a reminder of sundered confraternity, oaths broken and brothers murdered in cold blood.

‘As do I,’ said Loken, but Rogal Dorn was already gone.

NINE Remember the moon / Good hunting / Provocateur

A vast dome of coffered glass filled the frontal arc of the Vengeful Spirit’s high-vaulted strategium, through which could be seen the inky blackness of Molech’s inner planetary sphere. The few visible points of light were fragile reflections on the armoured hulls of starships of all description and displacement. An armada of conquest attended upon the Vengeful Spirit, surrounding Lupercal’s flagship like prowling pack hunters as they drew the noose on Molech.

Recessed lumen globes bathed the domed chamber in light it had not known since before the war against the Auretian Technocracy. A grand ouslite dais was set at the heart of the strategium, a metre in height, ten in diameter. It had once been part of Lupercal’s Court, a meeting table, podium of address and, in times not so long ago, an altar of sacrifice.

To Aximand, it felt like that phase of the Legion’s past was simply the first stage of its ongoing transformation; another change he had embraced as surely as he embraced his own autumnal aspect. The last blood spilled on its surface had been that of a supposed ally, an arch schemer and manipulator whose ambitions had finally overstepped his reach.

Erebus the snake, the self-aggrandising, self-appointed prophet of rebellion. Mewling and stripped of flesh and power, the base plotter had fled the Vengeful Spirit for destinations unknown.

Aximand was not sorry to see him go.

The bloodied trophies and gory window-dressing that had attended his teachings were also gone, ripped into the void by the impact of a clade killer’s burning attack ship. Dark robed Mechanicum adepts and muttering, shadow-draped Thallaxii had restored the strategium to its former glory. Where Imperial eagles once glared down at the assembled warriors, now the Eye of Horus observed proceedings.

The message was clear.

The Vengeful Spirit was the Warmaster’s ship again, and he its commander. This was a new beginning, a fresh crusade to match the one that had taken them to the very edge of space on a bloodied road of compliant worlds. Lupercal had conquered those worlds once, and he would conquer them again as he forged an Imperium Novus from the ashes of the old.

The Mournival stood with their master at the ouslite dais, lenses cunningly wrought into its upper surfaces projecting three-dimensional topography of Molech’s close-system space. Maloghurst tapped the surface of a data-slate and updated icons winked to life. More ships, more defence monitors, more minefields, more void-traps, more neutron snares, more orbital defence platforms.

‘It’s a mess,’ said Aximand.

‘Lots of ships,’ agreed Abaddon with relish.

‘You’re already thinking of how to get close enough to storm them, aren’t you?’ said Aximand.

‘I already know how,’ said the First Captain. ‘First we–’

Horus held up a gauntleted hand to forestall the First Captain’s stratagem.

‘Take pause, Ezekyle,’ said Horus. ‘You and Aximand are old hands at this, and breacher work barely tests your sword arms. Let’s assay the temper of the new blood you’ve added to the mix.’

Noctua and Kibre straightened as Horus gestured towards the garlanded orb of Molech at the centre of the illumined display.

‘You’re no strangers to a broil of swords and bolters, but show me how you’d crack Molech’s girdle.’

As Aximand expected, it was Kibre who spoke first.

He leaned into the projection and swept a hand out to encompass the orbital weapon platforms with their racks of torpedoes and macro-cannons.

‘A speartip right through their fleet to the heart of the guns,’ said Kibre. ‘An overwhelming assault into the centre, hard and fast, with flanking waves to push their ships into the blade of our spear.’

Aximand was pleased to see Grael Noctua shake his head.

‘You disagree?’ asked Maloghurst, also catching the gesture.

‘In principle, no,’ said Noctua.

Horus laughed. ‘A politician’s way of saying yes. No wonder you like him so much, Mal.’

‘The plan is sound,’ said Abaddon. ‘It’s what I would do.’

‘Why doesn’t that surprise me?’ grinned Aximand.

‘Then let your little sergeant tell us what he would do,’ grunted Abaddon, his veneer of civility worn thin.

Noctua’s face was a cold mask. ‘Ezekyle, I know I’m new in the Mournival, but call me that again and we’re going to have a problem.’

Abaddon’s eyes bored into Noctua, but the First Captain was aware enough to know he’d crossed a line. With the Warmaster at his side, Abaddon could afford to be gracious without loss of face.

‘Apologies, brother,’ he said. ‘I’m too long in the company of the Justaerin to remember my manners. Go on, how would you improve the Widowmaker’s gambit?’

Noctua inclined his head, satisfied his point had been made, but savvy enough to understand that he had strained the bounds of his new position. Aximand wondered when the Mournival had become so fraught that a warrior needed to watch words to his brothers.

The answer readily presented itself.

Since the two whose names could never be voiced had upset a balance so natural none of them even understood it existed.

Noctua took the data-slate from Maloghurst and scanned its display. His eyes darted between its contents and the holographics. Aximand liked his thoroughness. It matched his own.

‘Well?’ said Horus. ‘Lev Goshen tells me you have a bold voice, Grael. Use it. Illuminate us.’

‘The moon,’ said Noctua with a feral wolf’s grin. ‘I’d remember the moon.’

Molech’s Enlightenment was a fast ship, the fastest in the fleet, its captain liked to boast. Given the slightest encouragement, Captain Argaun would extol the virtues of his vessel; a Cobra-class destroyer with engines barely thirty years out of an overhaul and a highly trained and motivated crew.

More importantly, the Enlightenment had tasted blood, which was more than could be said for most of Battlefleet Molech’s warships.

Captain Argaun had fought xenos reavers and opportunistic pirate cutters operating out of the mid-system asteroid belt for years. He was the right blend of aggression and competence.

And best of all, he was lucky.

‘How are they looking, Mister Cairu?’ said Argaun, reclining on his captain’s throne and tapping out updated command notes on an inset data-slate. Behind him, junior ratings tore off order-scrolls from chattering auto-writers and hurried to carry them out.

‘No change in bearing, speed or formation, captain,’ replied Lieutenant Cairu from his position overseeing the combat auspex teams. ‘Vanguard in force, seven vessels at least. The rest of the fleet is following in a gradually widening gun line with its bulk carriers and Titan landers tucked in behind. Looks like a rolling planetary englobement.’

Argaun grunted and looked up at the viewing bay, a flattened, steel-rimmed ellipse fed positional data by banked rows of implanted servitors.

‘Standard Legion tactics then,’ he said, almost disappointed. ‘I expected more of the Warmaster.’

The rotating sphere of the engagement volume filled the viewing bay, lit with identifier icons and scrolling data-streams. Some captains liked to see open space, but to Argaun’s way of thinking, that had always seemed utterly pointless. Given the distances involved in void war, the most a captain might see – if he was lucky – were flickering points of light that vanished almost as soon as they became visible.

He magnified the representation of the battlescape. Signifier-runes had identified most of the vessels in the oncoming fleet.

Death Guard and Sons of Horus.

Neither Legion was noted for subtlety. Both were renowned for ferocity. It was upon this latter characteristic that Admiral Brython’s provocateur strategy hinged.

The Enlightenment led a racing fleet of six fast-attack vessels, and it was their task to seduce the traitors into the teeth of the orbital platforms.

‘There you are,’ said Argaun, picking out the crimson sigil representing the Vengeful Spirit and feeling a thrill of anticipation travel the length of his augmetic spine. The Enlightenment and its accompanying ships were far beyond the reach of the orbital guns. They were exposed, but Argaun wasn’t worried. He’d heard Tyana Kourion say that to see the Legions at war was to witness gods of battle, but that was typical Army nonsense.

In the void, a warrior’s prowess counted for nothing.

A lance strike or a torpedo detonation would kill a legionary just as easily as a deck menial, and any captain careless enough to let a Space Marine ship get close enough to launch a boarding action deserved everything they got.

‘Time to firing range?’

‘Eight minutes.’

‘Eight minutes, aye,’ said Argaun, opening a vox-link to the rest of the provocateur force.

‘All captains, my compliments,’ said Argaun. ‘Begin your launch sequences for prow torpedoes. Full spread, and good hunting.’

‘Torpedoes in the void,’ said Maloghurst, watching as holographic salvoes crawled across the plinth’s display.

‘Time to impact?’ asked Horus.

‘Do you really need me to tell you, sir?’

‘No, but do it anyway,’ said Horus. ‘They’re playing their role, so let’s allow them to think we’re playing ours.’

Maloghurst nodded and estimated the travel time of the enemy torpedoes. ‘I make it ninety-seven minutes.’

‘Actually it’s ninety-five,’ said Horus, steepling his fingers and watching the inexorable unfolding of the battle before him.

‘Ninety-five, aye,’ said Maloghurst as the battle cogitators confirmed the Warmaster’s calculation. ‘Forgive me, sir, it’s been a while since I’ve needed to work deck duty. It’s not a task for which I have any enthusiasm.’

Horus waved away Maloghurst’s apology and nodded in agreement.

‘Yes, I’ve always hated void war over other forms of battle.’

‘And yet, as in all forms of war, you excel at it.’

‘A commander shouldn’t be so far removed from the surging ebb and flow of combat,’ said Horus, as if Maloghurst hadn’t spoken. ‘I am a being wrought for war on a visceral scale, where force and mass and courage are death’s currency.’

‘I almost miss it sometimes,’ replied Maloghurst. ‘The simplicity of an open battlefield, a loaded boltgun in my hand and an enemy in front of me to kill.’

‘It’s been a long time since anything was that simple, Mal.’

‘If it ever was.’

‘There’s truth in that,’ agreed Horus. ‘There’s truth in that indeed.’

Another truth of void war was that until warships came together in murderous congress, there was very little to do but wait. The closure speeds of the opposing vanguards were enormous, but so too were the distances between them.

But when the dying began, it began quickly.

Multiple salvoes of ordnance erupted from both vanguard fleets, each torpedo fifty metres in length and little more than a huge rocket booster capped with an extraordinarily lethal warhead. As scores of torpedoes surged from their launch tubes, barrages of armour penetrating shells blasted from prow batteries.

Each volley was silent in the void, but brutalising echoes reverberated through every gun deck like the pounding drumbeats of titanic slave overseers, deafening those not already insensate to the unending clamour.

Glimmering plasma trails intersected between the fleets, then split apart as they hunted for targets.

First blood went to the Enlightenment. A spiralling torpedo, launched from its starboard launch tubes by Master Gunner Vordheen and his seventy-strong munition crew, smashed through the armour plating of the Sons of Horus frigate, Raksha.

The impact triggered a secondary engine within the torpedo that hurled the main payload deeper into the guts of its target. Like an arena killer whose blade finds a crack in his opponent’s armour, the torpedo ripped through dozens of bulkheads before its primary warhead exploded in the heart of the starship.

Raksha’s keel snapped in two and over a quarter of its seven hundred crew members were immolated in a storm of atomic fire. Sheets of armour plating blew out like billowing sailcloth in a storm. Pressurised oxygen burned with brief intensity as compartment after compartment was vented to the void. The debris of the frigate’s demise continued moving forward in an expanding cone of tumbling iron, like buckshot from an armsman’s shotcannon.

The Imperial destroyer, Implacable Resolve, took the next hits, a torpedo to its rear quarter and a lance strike that sheared off its command tower. The vessel broke formation in a veering yaw, spewing a comet’s tail of debris and vented plasmic fumes. Without captain or command deck to correct her course, the ship fell from the vanguard until the raging hull fires finally reached the ventral magazines and blew it apart in a seething fireball.

Three more vessels were crippled in quick succession; Devine Right, Cthonia Rising, and Reaper of Barbarus. A pair of ‘fist-to-finger’ impacts penetrated the Imperial vessel’s prow armour and a superhot plasma jet roared the length of its long axis. Gutted by searing fires, Devine Right exploded moments later as its weapon stores cooked off. The Death Guard destroyer was reduced to a radioactive hulk and critical reactor emissions that lit up the Imperial threat auspex like a beacon fire. The Sons of Horus frigate simply vanished, dead in the water as its power and life supporting mechanisms failed in the first instant of impact.

Both vanguards had been savaged, but the traitor ships had taken the worst of the engagement. Four vessels remained battle worthy in the Warmaster’s vanguard, though all had taken hits in the opening shots of the engagement.

Their captains were hungry for blood, and they fired their ship’s engines, eager to tear into the enemy at close range. Behind them, the fleets of the Death Guard and Sons of Horus followed suit.

Battle would be joined and the dead avenged.

The Imperial ships would learn what it meant to face the Warmaster.

But Battlefleet Molech had no intention of going head to head with a vastly superior fleet. No sooner had the ordnance struck the traitor vanguard than Captain Argaun issued orders to turn the provocateur fleet around. His remaining ships raced back to Molech and the cover of its orbital weapon platforms.

And, just as Lord Admiral Semper had planned, the blooded fleet of the Warmaster gave chase.

‘Remember the moon, he says,’ grunted Abaddon. ‘As if any Cthonian even took part in that fight.’

Unable to make any sound within the frozen vacuum of the tomb ship, the First Captain’s voice sounded in Kalus Ekaddon’s helmet over the vox.

He didn’t answer. Strict vox-silence protocols were in force, but when had something as trivial as a direct order from the Warmaster troubled Ezekyle Abaddon?

‘Remember the moon,’ repeated Abaddon. ‘For two hundred years, we’ve tried to forget the moon.’

On the flag bridge of the Guardian of Aquinas, Lord Admiral Brython Semper watched the unfolding engagement in the central hololith with a measured sense of satisfaction. He paced with his hands laced behind his back. A cohort of nine Thallax followed him on hissing, piston-driven legs, the low hum of their lightning guns ruffling hairs on the back of his neck.

At least, he told himself it was their strange weaponry.

Semper didn’t like the blank-faced cybernetics, as it always unnerved him to know there was some scrap of a living being within that sarcophagus armour.

Still, at least they didn’t speak unless you spoke to them, unlike Proximo Tarchon of the vessel’s assigned complement of Ultramarines, who proffered unasked-for tactical advice like he were the one who’d spent most of his life aboard a warship.

Tarchon was only a centurion, for Throne’s sake, but still he acted as though the Guardian of Aquinas was his own Legion warship.

To the Mechanicum and the fleet, Semper’s flagship was an Avenger-class grand cruiser, which captured something of the vessel’s majesty, but nothing of its savagery. A part of the Guardian’s crew since his recruitment on Cypra Mundi, Brython Semper knew just how ferocious a machine of war it was.

Its mode of attack was not subtle. It owed nothing to finesse and was bloody in the way two starving rats locked in a box was bloody. Guardian of Aquinas was a gunboat, a sledgehammer vessel that waited for the enemy line to widen before surging into the gap and unleashing hellish broadsides from multiple gun decks.

‘Good hunting indeed, Argaun,’ hissed Semper, as the wounded vessels of the provocateur fleet limped back into range of the orbital weapons platforms. ‘Gave those traitor bastards a bloody nose and then some. By Mars and all his red blades, you did!’

That was overstating the damage caused by the provocateur fleet, but his lavish estimation of it would fire the blood of his crew. The Thallax straightened at the mention of the Red Planet. In pride or some conditioned reflex, he couldn’t tell.

As impressive as Argaun’s attack had been, it was just the prelude to the real fight. Semper cast his critical gaze over the disposition of his fleet, and was content.

Forty-two Imperial vessels were spread between three attack formations; a strong centre of frigates and destroyers, with fast-attack cruisers on the flanks. Two Gothics sailed abeam of the flagship, the Admonishment in Fire and the Solar’s Glory. Both had fought in the reclamation of the birth system and, like the Guardian of Aquinas, they were linebreakers, armed with broadside lances that were sure to wreak fearful havoc among the traitor ships.

Sailing in the leftmost battlegroup was Semper’s mailed fist.

Adranus was a Dominator, and its nova cannon was going to create the gap Semper and the Gothics would rip wide open.

The combined Sons of Horus and Death Guard fleets were in wrathful pursuit of the vessels that had hurt them. As Argaun had communicated, the enemy fleets were moving to englobe Molech, but retained a centre mass to engage the orbital defences and Battlefleet Molech.

Semper saw a textbook planetary assault formation, one any first-year cadet would recognise from the works of de Ruyter, Duilius or Yi Sun Shin.

‘They must not think very highly of us to come at us with so basic an attack,’ said Semper, loud enough for the deck crews to hear. ‘So much for Captain Salicar’s fears of us being outfought.’

Yet for all his outward bluster, Semper was under no illusions that the enemy approaching Molech was supremely dangerous. He’d studied the Warmaster’s tactics during the Great Crusade. His assaults were brutal, without mercy and the enemy almost never saw their doom coming.

This assault felt almost comically simple and direct.

What was he not seeing?

The Warmaster’s fleets would be in range of the orbitals at his back in less than three minutes. The hololith flickered with confirmed firing solutions received from their master gunners.

He’d already authorised captain’s discretion for each of the platform’s commanders. They knew their trade, and needed no direction from him to punish the traitors.

Yet the nagging doubt that wormed its way into his thoughts at the sight of so basic an assault formation wouldn’t go away.

What am I missing?

Platform Master Panrik had a surfeit of weapons aboard the Var Sohn orbital station; torpedo racks, missile tubes, close-range defence cannon, ion shields, mass drivers and battery after battery of macro-cannons.

All were eager to be unleashed.

‘Weapon systems at full readiness,’ reported the deck officer. ‘Command authority transfer on your mark.’

Panrik nodded. They’d achieved full readiness a little slower than he’d have liked. Still within acceptable tolerances, so no sense in making a scene just now.

‘Mark,’ said Panrik, inserting the silver command ring on his right index finger into the slot on his throne. He turned and sub-vocally recited his authority signifiers.

Clamps locked his neck in place, and a whirring, rotating connector plug slotted into the mind impulse unit socket drilled through into his spine.

Information flooded him.

Every surveyor and auspex on the great, crescent shaped platform was now his to access. His organic vision faded, replaced with a sensorium suite of approach vectors, closure speeds, deflection angles and targeting solutions.

In a very real sense, Panrik became Orbital Platform Var Sohn.

A potent sense of might surged through him. Connection burn and inload surge made him wince, but it faded as cognition-enhancing stims flooded his thalamus and occipital lobe.

Implanted vents at the back of Panrik’s skull opened, allowing the heat generated by his over-clocked brain to dissipate.

‘I have command authority, aye,’ replied Panrik, alternating between the local auspex and the feed coming in from the attack logisters of the Guardian of Aquinas. The enemy fleet was coming in hard and fast, looking to roll straight over the orbital defences and break through before suffering too much damage.

A bold strategy, but a risky one.

Too risky, thought Panrik, glancing down at the staggered line of orbitals and the haze of minefields strung between them like glittering jewels.

Panrik cricked his neck and flexed his fingers.

Weapon systems armed in response.

‘Come ahead then,’ he said to the advancing fleets. ‘Give it your best shot.’

00:12

Aximand watched the mottled grey and green marble of Molech rotate below him. Close, so very close. Ice limned the kinetic bracing and frost webbed the plate of his fellow warriors. For the last sixteen hours, he’d been watching the timer in the corner of his visor count down to zero.

00:09

Inaction didn’t suit him. It didn’t suit any of them, but he at least had learned to deal with it. Ezekyle and Falkus were prowling hounds who savoured the swift kill. Not for them the patient hunt. In contrast, Aximand was a bowstring that lost nothing of its power by being kept taut. Yet even he’d found this long, frozen vigil testing.

00:05

Noctua, he suspected, could outlast them all.

Aximand almost smiled as he wondered how long it had taken before Ezekyle broke the vox-silence protocol. Not long. He’d be too full of hubris to resist letting his mouth run away from him.

Aximand remembered the tales of the moon’s fall.

00:02

He remembered chimeric monsters of the Selenar cults; gene-spliced bioweapons, killing machines of flesh and acid and gibbering insanity. He remembered tales of slaughter. Unrestrained, wild, savage and yet to be tempered by Lupercal’s discipline.

But most famous of all was the cry of surrender.

Call off your wolves!

00:00

‘Speartip,’ said Aximand. ‘Light them up.’

‘Contacts!’ shouted the deck officer.

Panrik had seen them no more than a fraction of a second before, but had disregarded them due to their position behind and below Var Sohn. They were faint, no more than flickers.

They couldn’t possibly be hostile.

But they were growing stronger with every passing moment.

‘Malfunctioning mines?’ suggested the auspex master. ‘Or hyper-accelerated debris caught in the flare of a surveyor sweep.’

Panrik didn’t need cognition-enhancing drugs to hear the desperate hope in the man’s voice. He knew fine well what these returns were. He just didn’t know how the hell they’d gotten there.

‘Tomb ships! Throne, they’re tomb ships!’ said the auspex master. ‘I’ve heard of the tactic, but thought it was just a myth.’

‘What in the name of Hellblade’s balls are tomb ships?’

‘Tomb ships,’ repeated the auspex master. ‘Vessels shot into the void and then completely shut down, emptied of atmosphere and left to fly towards their target. There’s no power emissions, so they’re virtually impossible to detect until they fire up their reactors. It’s also next to impossible to pull off.’

‘Clearly not impossible enough,’ said Panrik, each dart of his ocular implant shifting fire-priorities. ‘Retask batteries Theta through Lambda to low orbit echelon fire. Atmospheric bursts only, I don’t want any of our munitions hitting the surface. Ventral torpedo bays recalculate firing solutions and someone get me the Lord Admiral.’

Two ships were right on top of him, a dozen more spread behind the network of orbital platforms. They’d appeared from nowhere, the surveyor returns from their hulls growing stronger as dormant reactors were quick-cycled to readiness and targeting auspex trawled his platform for weak points.

He felt the shudder of point-blank torpedo impacts on the hull through the mind impulse unit link with Var Sohn’s surface systems. He grimaced in sympathetic pain. Armour penetrators, not explosive warheads.

The sensorium came alive with hull-breach warnings and system failures as the newly-revealed ships lashed them with terrifyingly accurate gunfire.

Var Sohn’s defence systems blew apart, one by one.

‘They mean to board us,’ he said with a sick jolt of horror.

This was just the fight he was bred for.

Head hunched low behind a breacher’s shield, moving forward, Mourn-it-all’s enhanced edge cutting through meat and bone and armour with ease. The boarding torpedo smoked and howled in the splintered underside of the orbital plate. Melting ice streamed from its superheated hull, and Sons of Horus breachers poured from its interior.

The rapid reaction force sent to intercept them were dead. Exo-armoured mortals. Highly trained and well armoured. Now nothing more than offal and butcher meat scattered like abattoir refuse.

Yade Durso, second Captain of the Fifth Company, together with five warriors in heavily reinforced battleplate and shields formed a wedge with him at its point. Tactical overlays appeared on his visor; schematics, objectives, kill boxes. Another timer. This one even more crucial than the last.

Remember the moon, Grael Noctua had said.

Aximand threw back his head and howled.

And let raw savagery take him.

A flicker of ignis fatuus was the first warning. Crackling blue teleport flare arced between the primary stanchions of the Var Zerba orbital plate’s command centre. Ear canals crackled in the seconds before a hard bang of displaced air shattered every data-slate within twenty metres of the transloc point.

Ezekyle Abaddon, Kalus Ekaddon and six Justaerin stood in an outward facing ring, their armour glossy and black, trailing vapour ghosts of teleporter flare. A hooded priest of the Mechanicum stood in the centre of the ring of Terminators, a hunched thing of multiple limbs, glowing eye lenses and hissing pneumatics.

The junior officers barely had time to register the presence of the hulking killers before a blitzing storm of combi-bolter fire mowed them down.

‘Kill them all,’ said Abaddon.

The Justaerin spread out, spewing shots that looked indiscriminate, but were in fact, preternaturally exact. The Warmaster’s orders had been unambiguous. The defence platforms were to be captured intact.

Within moments, it was done.

Abaddon marched to the throne at the heart of the control centre. A mewling wretch sat there, soiled and weeping. His eyes were screwed shut. As if that would save him. Abaddon broke his neck and wrenched the limp sack of bones from the throne without bothering to undo the neck clamp. The Platform Master’s head tore off and bounced over the deck before coming to rest by an armaments panel.

‘You,’ barked Abaddon, waving the Mechanicum priest forward. ‘Sit your arse down and get this thing shooting.’

The fight through the Mausolytica had been bloody, but its outcome had, knew Grael Noctua, been a foregone conclusion. The fight through the heart of Var Crixia was just the same. Its defenders were well trained, well armed and disciplined.

But they had never fought transhumans before.

The Warlocked were eternal, a squad never omitted from the 25th Company’s order of battle. Death occasionally altered its composition, but a line of continuity could be traced from its current makeup all the way back to its inception.

Noctua fought along the starboard axial, a gently curved transit way that ran from one tip of the crescent shaped station to the other. Herringbone passageways branched from the main axial like ribs, and it was from these raked corridors that the exo-armoured mortals were attempting to hold them off.

It wasn’t working.

Breachers went in hard and fast, running at the low-crouch. Shields up, heads down, bolters locked into the slotted upper edge. Braying streaks of miniature rockets rammed down the main axial, killing anything that dared to show itself. Automated gun carriages pummelled the advancing legionaries, but were quickly bracketed and shredded by bolter fire.

Static emplacements unmasked from ceiling mounts and hidden wall caskets. Grenade dispensers dumped frags and krak bombs. Battleplate withstood the bulk of it. Legion warriors stomped on through the acrid broil of aerosolised blood and yellow smoke.

Noctua advanced behind the wall of shields, bolter pulled in tight to his shoulder. Ahead, a barricade of hard plasteel and light-distorting refractors extruded from a choke point in the corridor. Bulky shapes moved through the haze.

Sawing blasts of autocannon fire punched into shields. Ceramite and steel splintered. Other weapons fired. Louder, harder and with a bigger, more lethal muzzle sound. A legionary grunted in pain as a shot found a gap in the shields and blew out his kneecap.

Mass-reactives.

The shell ricocheted from hardened bone and travelled down the length of the warrior’s shin. It detonated at his ankle and obliterated his foot. Trailing the shredded remains on a rope of mangled tendons like a grotesque form of penitentiary ball and chain, the warrior kept up with his fellow shieldbearers.

Over the upper edges of the shields, Noctua saw hints of the defenders. It was like looking through a pane of fat-smeared glass. They were big, bigger than even the largest mortal exo-suit, and Noctua was confused until chance light through the refractors granted him a fleeting impression of cobalt-blue and gold plate. An Ultima rendered in mother-of-pearl.

‘Legion foe!’ he shouted. ‘Ultramarines.’

Another volley of hard, echoing shots. Two of the breachers went down. One with the back of his helm a smoking, ruined crater. The other with his head lolling over his back and his throat blown out to the spine.

The advance faltered, but didn’t stop. Legionaries following behind swept up the fallen shields and dressed ranks. One died before he could bring the shield up completely, his shoulders and ribs separated by a pair of bolter shells. Another pitched over without a head as a round slotted neatly through the bolter notch.

Noctua took his turn, bending to grab the shield before it hit the ground. A shot punched the lip of the shield and he felt the blazing edge of the shell score a line across his brow where his Mournival mark was graven.

He slid home his bolter.

‘Onwards,’ he said. ‘We stop, we die.’

Gunshots sounded from one of the herringbone corridors. Stubber fire, cannon blasts and whickering volleys of flechettes.

Pin us in place with Legion forces then overwhelm us with mortal units shooting from the flanks and rear. Clever. Practical.

They could fight their way clear. Retreat, regroup. Find a workaround. But that would take time. Time the fleet didn’t have if it wasn’t going to be savaged by Var Crixia’s guns.

No, retreat wasn’t an option.

Suddenly it didn’t need to be.

An ululating howl came from one of the herringbone corridors, and a pack of dark-armoured warriors charged into the fray. They moved like sprinting acrobats, using the walls as well as the deck to propel themselves forward.

They hit the barricade like a shell from a demolisher cannon, smashing it to splinters with the ferocity of impact. Some fired bolters and wielded blades, others simply tore into their foes with what looked like implanted claws. Blood arced up in cataclysmic geysers and the savagery was beyond anything Noctua had ever seen. Refractors blew out with squalling shrieks and what had previously been hidden was now revealed.

Noctua had thought his reinforcements to be another squad of the 25th Company, but such was not the case. They were still Sons of Horus, or had been once – their armour was a mix of swamp green, soot black and flaked blood. Some went without helms, their faces protean and scabbed with wounds cut into their faces.

The stench of burned meat attended them, and though the refractors were no more, Noctua still felt as though the air between them was somehow polluted. Inhuman strength, beyond even that of a trans-human tore the Ultramarines apart. Limbs were rent from shoulder guards, clawed fists punched through plastrons and thickly-muscled hearts ripped from splintered rib sheaths.

Noctua watched as one of the smoking warriors twisted a helm from a gorget with the head and spinal column still attached. He swung this like a spike-headed flail, battering another of the XIII Legion to death with it.

The warrior spread his arms wide and roared, his maw a red furnace into hell. Scars covered his neck and cheeks, and he bled toxic smoke from two old wounds in his chest.

Shock pinned Noctua in place.

Ger Gerradon, whose fighting days ended on Dwell.

Noctua’s eyes met those of Gerradon, and he saw madness behind that gaze – malignant fire and a soul that burned in its chains. The moment lasted an instant only, and Noctua threw off his horror at what Gerradon had become.

The Ultramarines were dead, no longer a threat.

Time to deal with the enemies that were.

‘Come about,’ ordered Noctua, and the shields lifted high, their bearers turning on the spot as the warriors behind them pushed past. In one fluid manoeuvre, the entire formation of the Warlocked was reversed.

Bolter fire flayed the mortal soldiers, and they balked in the face of sudden reversal. With their Legion allies dead, the mortals knew that the fight was over, and fled.

It went against the grain to let them go, but this plan was of his devising, and he was already behind. Var Crixia’s guns needed to be firing at the right targets.

Noctua turned to see what Ger Gerradon and his warriors were doing, reluctant to let them out of his sight, even for a second.

They were on their knees.

Feasting on the Ultramarines they had killed.

TEN I want that ship / Warmaster / Stowaway

Horus returned to the bridge. As the tomb ships closed on the orbitals, he’d retired to his personal chambers and left the observation of the coming attack to Maloghurst.

The strategium was a large space, airy and vaulted, but with the return of the Warmaster arrayed in the full panoply of battle, it seemed cramped. Nor had he returned alone, Falkus Kibre and twenty of the Justaerin carrying breacher shields came with him.

Kibre’s helmet hung at his belt. His face was a picture in rapture. Such a change from the bitter resentment he’d worn when the Warmaster removed him from the assault elements. Now he was going into battle at the Warmaster’s side, and no greater honour existed within the Sons of Horus.

‘You’re still set on doing this then?’ asked Maloghurst.

‘I want that ship, Mal,’ replied Horus, rolling his shoulders in a clatter of plate to loosen the muscles beneath. ‘And I’m out of practice.’

‘I counsel you again, sir, you should not do this.’

‘Worried I’ll get hurt, Mal?’ asked Horus, lifting Worldbreaker from his belt. The haft of the mace was the length of a mortal man. Lethal against a Legion foe, absurd overkill against baseline humans.

‘It’s an unnecessary risk.’

Horus slapped a mailed fist on the Widowmaker’s shoulder, a booming clang of metal that echoed through the strategium like rolling thunder.

‘I have Falkus here to protect me,’ said Horus, unhooking his battle helm and hauling it down onto his gorget. The lenses flared red as its auto-senses were activated.

Maloghurst felt a tremor of awe travel the length of his twisted spine. Horus was an avenging angel, an avatar of battle incarnate and the master of war. So terrible and powerful. Maloghurst was horrified his quotidian dealings with the primarch had rendered the miraculous almost banal.

‘I’ve sat on the sidelines for too long, Mal. It’s time everyone remembered that this fight is my fight. It will be my deeds that ensure it’s my name that echoes down through the ages. I won’t have my warriors win my war without me.’

Maloghurst nodded, convinced the moment Horus had secured his helm. He dropped to his knees, though the movement sent a jolt of searing pain through his fused hips.

‘My lord,’ said Maloghurst.

‘No kneeling, not from you,’ said Horus, hauling his equerry to his feet.

‘Sorry,’ said Maloghurst. ‘Old habits.’

Horus nodded, as though people kneeling to him were an everyday occurrence. Which, of course, it was.

‘Bloody the Spirit for me, Mal,’ said Horus, turning and leading the Justaerin to the embarkation deck where his Stormbird awaited. ‘I don’t expect I’ll be gone long.’

This is it. This is what I missed.

‘Tomb ships,’ hissed Admiral Semper, seeing notations on an instructional primer from his cadet days writ large in reality on the hololith. ‘Throne, bloody almighty, tomb ships. They’re fighting the subjugation of the moon all over again. The thrice damned bloody moon.’

The hololith told a tale of horror. Of a plan in tatters, of arrogance and, ultimately, death.

‘If it had been anyone else but the Sons of Horus, I wouldn’t have believed it,’ whispered Semper. ‘Who but the Warmaster would have the audacity to launch a full quarter of his fleet into the void and hope they arrived in time and at the right location?’

Except, of course, the Warmaster hadn’t hoped the tomb ships would arrive where he needed them. He’d known. Known with a certainty that chilled Semper to the bone.

‘The orbital platforms are gone,’ said his Master of Surveyors, hardly daring to believe the evidence of the hololith. Semper shared the man’s disbelief.

‘They’re worse than gone, the enemy has them,’ he replied, watching as the most powerful platforms, Var Crixia and Var Zerba, cracked open the orbitals that the enemy assault forces hadn’t seized. Var Sohn had launched – and was still launching – spreads of torpedoes into his hopelessly scattered fleet.

‘Is the day lost, Lord Admiral?’

The answer was surely obvious, but the man deserved a considered answer. The Lord Admiral swept his gaze over the catastrophic ruin of what had begun as an ironclad stratagem.

He laughed and the nearby Thallax rotated their torsos at the unfamiliar sound. Semper shook his head. He’d forgotten the first rule of war regarding contact with the enemy.

Semper’s rightmost battlegroup was no more. Every vessel gutted by treacherous fire from the captured orbitals. As the warships foundered in the wake of the shocking reversal, the Death Guard surged into them like ambush predators picking off herd stragglers. Alone and overwhelmed, each Imperial ship was brutalised until it was no more than a smouldering ruin.

The crippled hulks were then driven into the gravitational clutches of Molech by snub-nosed ram-ships. Wrecks plunged through the atmosphere. Blazing re-entry plumes followed them down.

Semper had traced the trajectories, hoping against hope that the wrecks would hit the atmosphere too sharply and burn to ash before reaching the surface. Or be too shallow and bounce off, careening into deep space.

But whoever had calculated the angle of re-entry had been precise, and every missile of wreckage was going to strike Molech with the kinetic force of heavy battlefield atomics.

The Sons of Horus swarmed the Adranus, its nova cannon useless at close quarters and its broadsides unable to hold off the raptor packs of Thunderhawks, Stormbirds and Dreadclaw assault pods slamming into its flanks.

With its escorts crippled by the orbitals, the Dominator was easy prey and was being gutted by vultures. An ignoble death, a bloody death. The Dominator was going down hard.

Screaming vox blurts told of thousands of Legion warriors and things of howling darkness ripping it apart from within. He’d ordered the vox shut off, the screams of the Adranus’s crew too terrible to be borne.

Only the centre yet endured.

Admonishment in Fire had been manoeuvring when the first assault teams hit the orbitals. Its captain ordered an emergency burst of the engines which undoubtedly saved her ship. For now. Its lance broadsides had demolished Var Uncad and reduced it to a smouldering ruin.

Solar’s Glory was ablaze, but still in the fight. With the destruction of Var Uncad, it had been spared the full force of the fire intended to cripple it. A handful of light cruisers had weathered the swarms of torpedoes, but none were in any condition to take the fight to the traitors. At least six would be dead in the void within minutes, and the remaining four could barely manoeuvre or muster a firing line.

There would be no crossing-the-T this day.

‘Yes, the day is lost,’ said Lord Admiral Semper. ‘The rest is silence.’

Five Stormbirds flew the flaming gauntlet from the Vengeful Spirit on an assault run. Four streaked forward to take up position alongside the fifth. They peeled away from the Warmaster’s flagship as its vast engines fired, manoeuvring it towards the mighty form of Guardian of Aquinas as it swung in.

The two flag vessels were closing like champions in the crucible of combat, seeking one another out in the midst of slaughter.

It would be an unequal fight. The Vengeful Spirit was old and tough, its marrow seasoned and its blackened soul ready to taste blood. Collimated blinks of light streamed between the two ships, high-energy pulse lasers intended to strip shields and ablative coatings of ice.

Deck after deck of guns boomed silently in the void, hurling monstrous projectiles through the space between them. In void terms, the two warships were at point-blank range. Two swordsmen too close to use their main blades and reduced to stabbing at one another with punch daggers.

They moved in opposition like stately galleons, sliding through clouds of molten debris and listing wrecks with impunity. Bright hurricanes of light streamed back and forth, explosions, premature detonations of intercepted munitions, crackling arcs of squalling, scraping void shields. Hull plates buckled and blew out as both ships traded blows like punch-drunk pugilists.

In their wake, streams of molten debris and shimmer-trails of frozen oxygen glittered in the star’s light. The escorting Gothics attending Guardian of Aquinas came in hard beside her, the Admonishment in Fire and the Solar’s Glory hurling thousands of tonnes of explosive ordnance at the Vengeful Spirit.

The Warmaster’s ship shuddered under the impacts, but it was built to take punishment, built to bully its way through harsher storms than this.

The Endurance came in low, oblique. Shadowed by burning orbitals and pulsing reactor detonations. Its prow weapons savaged the Admonishment in Fire and crumpled its hull as if with a fiery sledgehammer. The stricken ship’s gun decks burned and its weapons stuttered in the face of the Endurance’s assault.

It kept shooting even as the Death Guard vessel rammed it amidships. Millions of tonnes of iron and adamantium moving at speed had unstoppable momentum. The Endurance’s reinforced frontal ram ripped through the weakened armour of its target and drove its grey bulk through the very heart of the Admonishment in Fire.

The Gothic simply ceased to exist, its keel shattered and its exposed interior compartments raked by unending broadsides. The wreckage spun away, spiralling clouds of flash-freezing atmosphere blooming from its shorn halves.

The Solar’s Glory, already ablaze and choking on its own blood had already stopped shooting and its rear quarters vanished in the light of a newborn star. A reactor breach or deliberate overload, it didn’t matter. A white-hot sphere of plasma bloomed from the vessel and engulfed the flanks of the Endurance.

Almost as soon as the fiery explosion flared to life it began to diminish. An inverted hemisphere was gouged in the Endurance’s hull and intense oxygen fires burned with raging intensity before the void snuffed them out.

Any other vessel would have been hopelessly crippled, left wheezing and dying by so grievous a wound. But even more than the Vengeful Spirit, the Endurance was built to take pain. Damage control mechanisms had already sealed off the ruptured decks and it heeled around to rake the engine decks of the Guardian of Aquinas.

Lord Admiral Brython Semper’s flagship was a gutsy fighter, and though it was ablaze from prow to stern, it kept hurting its attackers with murderous broadsides. Through burning fire decks, its master gunners whipped their choking crews to load one last salvo, one final shell, one parting broadside.

Guardian of Aquinas was doomed, but the killing blow would not come from without, it would come from within.

Two of the gauntlet-running Stormbirds were obliterated before they began their attack run. Simply swatted out of existence by the blitzing storm of detonations filling the space between the grappling warships. Another had its trajectory fatally altered by the close passage of a torpedo, sending it into the hot zone of laser bursts where it immediately exploded.

The final pair swooped low over the topside superstructure of the Guardian of Aquinas. They weaved evasion patterns between close-in defence turrets and barrage lines. Raptors on the hunt, they flew almost suicidally close to the gnarled structure of Semper’s flagship.

The hull breach behind the bridge was exactly where it was expected, and both Stormbirds flared their wings as vectored thrust suddenly reversed to match their forward velocity with that of the Guardian of Aquinas. Assault ramps opened and streams of heavily armed warriors dropped from their troop compartments.

Terminators, breachers and assaulters. Hard fighters all and equipped to fight in the kind of war Space Marines were bred to win. Brutal, close-quarter, barging, blade work. Blazing scrum-fights of bolters, stabbing blades and full-contact bloodwork.

First into the Guardian of Aquinas was the Warmaster.

Bolter shells hosed the ten metre transit in horizontal spears of fire. The shooting was disciplined. He’d expect no less from warriors of the XIII Legion. Horus felt the hot breath of near-misses, and the kinetic force of their passage battered the plates of his armour.

Shields hunched before them, scraping the deck, Sons of Horus breachers advanced through the banging fury of the defence. Explosions and gunfire rang from the walls. Metallic coughs of grenade detonations filled its volume with scything shrapnel.

To Horus’s left, Falkus Kibre fired his combi-bolter over the edge of his shield. A Terminator hardly needed a shield, but Falkus hadn’t brought it for his own protection.

‘Maloghurst does love to nanny me,’ Horus had advised the Widowmaker in the instant before launching the assault. ‘Keep it for yourself.’

Never one to gainsay an order if it stood to keep him alive and safe, Falkus had done just that.

The defenders were coming at them from all sides; Ultramarines to the front, a mix of carapace-armoured storm troopers, Army and skitarii to the flanks. The Justaerin advanced in a salient wedge, pushed out in a segmented formation of bolters, blades and shields.

Chaingun fire pummelled the shields and beam cutters sliced through them in white-edged lines. Even Terminator armour was vulnerable. A powerhouse of armoured might, the only thing that could resist a warrior encased in Tactical Dreadnought armour was an identically equipped warrior.

Or so Horus had thought.

Argonaddu went down, the Hero of Ullanor bisected through the chest by a sizzling beam cutter that left a nasty stink of cauterised meat. His killers struggled to reset their weapon, ratcheting cranks and pumping charge-bellows. Horus raised his gauntlet-mounted bolters, their proportions outlandish to any other, but perfectly suited to his primarch’s scale.

A continuous stream of shells briefly linked muzzle flare and target. The beam gunners exploded in a confetti of shredded, scorched meat tissue and volcanic blood.

The skitarii launched an assault into the flanks of their advance. The heavies came first. Combat-augs with grossly swollen musculature who wielded motorised saw blades and polearms with photonic edges.

‘Ware left!’ shouted Kibre, and the Justaerin on the edge of the formation halted and braced for impact. Skitarii were hellish fighters, chosen for aggressive, almost psychopathic tendencies that could be yoked by cybernetics. These were, if anything, more feral than any Horus had seen.

Warriors of the wasteland, post-apocalyptic killers. Reminiscent of the barbarian tribes Horus had last seen as stasis-preserved specimens of pre-Unity. Bedecked in fanged amulets, furred cloaks and scaled breastplates, they charged like men possessed.

A Terminator was a tank in humanoid form, more a war machine than a suit of armour. Only the very best could adapt to its use and only the best of the best fought alongside the Warmaster. A volley of combi-bolters sawed into the skitarii. A dozen fell, two dozen more came on.

They slammed into the Terminators in a flurry of roaring blades and unsubtle firearms. High-load shells exploded against bonded ceramite and plasteel, caroming from deflective angles and ricocheting wildly.

Kibre waded in among them, shooting the head from the nearest skitarii killer. His shield bludgeoned the next, caving his face to a fragmented pulp of liquid flesh and bone. This was the work Kibre loved best. Batter kills, armour blows. Feeling the blood spray your visor, feeling the bones break beneath your fists.

Horus left him to it and jabbed his clawed fist at Hargun, Ultar and Parthaan.

‘Keep the right clear,’ he said. ‘They’ll come from that side next.’

His words were prophetic.

Cloaked in power-fields, ion-bucklers and photon-disruptors, blue cloaked warriors of the Forlorn Spartaks threw themselves at the Sons of Horus. Despite himself, Horus was struck by admiration for the Spartaks’ courage. Transhuman dread could freeze even the bravest warrior in place, but they came anyway.

Ultar swung his rotor cannon to bear and the deafening bray of its spinning barrels filled the transit. Hargun chugged shells from his combi-bolter. Power-fields shrieked under the hammer blow impacts and photon-disruptors were no protection against the detonation of the fat shells.

Parthaan broke formation and closed the distance far faster than anything his size ought to be able to move. A shieldwall could only hold for as long as it remained solid, but rotor cannon and combi-bolter had broken this one open. Parthaan went in head down, like a battering ram, striking left and right with his oversized fist. Crumpled forms were hurled about like refuse, bent in ways no body was meant to bend. They shattered on impact, leaving bright red spray patterns on the wall.

The Spartaks fought a thing that could not be fought, tried to kill he who could not be killed. A dozen fell to Parthaan’s fist, then a dozen more. They threw themselves at him as though eager to join their comrades in death. The warrior of the Justaerin waded through blood and bodies, trampling them to gory mud beneath his armoured boots. Gunfire and blades tore at his armour, tearing the ocean green paint from its surfaces, but doing no harm.

On the opposite flank, Kibre’s warriors were having a harder time against the skitarii. Cauterised fear centres blunted them to the terror of Terminators. Implanted aggression boosters made them wild. Horus was mildly surprised to see two Justaerin on their knees, armour carved open and wet organs flopping out onto the deck.

He hadn’t seen that, hadn’t incorporated it into his plans.

After Ullanor, many claimed the title of Warmaster was simply a recognition of Horus’s rank within the Great Crusade. A bellicose thing, fit only for the purposes of conquest. Something to be set aside when the fighting was done.

To his lasting regret, Horus knew better.

Warmaster was not a title, it was what he was.

The flow of battle was music to him, a virtuoso performance that could be read and anticipated like the perfect arrangement of notes. Battle was a chaotic, unpredictable maelstrom of chance, a random imbroglio where death played no favours. Horus knew war, knew battle as intimately as a lover. Horus knew what would come next as clearly as if he had lived it before.

Now.

Parthaan’s rampage was ended as a coruscating beam of hyper-dense light struck the back of his armour. For an instant it played harmlessly over the blood-matted plate. Then the Justaerin’s armour buckled as though an invisible giant was crushing him in its fist. Plates ruptured as a rising whine of building power split the air over Parthaan’s screams of agony.

A thunderclap of discharge and Parthaan died as he imploded at the subatomic level, and every particle of his being turned inwards and crushed by its own mass. Shattered plates collapsed as though the man within them had simply vaporised and Horus smelled a stink-wind of misted blood and bone.

A beat as the Justaerin struggled to comprehend what had just happened.

‘Ultar!’ shouted Horus. ‘Rapier platform. Conversion beamer.’

The rotor cannon turned on the gun carriage. Ultar walked his shells into it and reduced it to scrap metal.

‘Now they’ll come,’ whispered Horus and swung Worldbreaker from his shoulder. He kept the weapon moving. Even for a being of his stature, it took time to build speed and power with so heavy a weapon.

A warrior with a transverse crest of ivory led the Ultramarines.

A centurion. Visor tags identified him as Proximo Tarchon and Horus assimilated his available service record instantaneously.

Ambitious, honourable, practical.

Gladius, of course. Energised combat-buckler on the opposite arm. Bolt pistol, expected.

Tarchon fired as he ran. The thirty Ultramarines at his back did likewise, maintaining their rate of fire even as they charged.

‘Impressive,’ said Horus. ‘You do my brother much honour.’

Two Justaerin nearest the charging Ultramarines went down, carefully bracketed by the warriors in cobalt-blue. With enough mass-reactives brought to bear, even Tactical Dreadnought armour could be penetrated. Return fire punched half a dozen Ultramarines from their feet. Armour cracked open, flesh detonated.

Horus didn’t give the XIII Legion a chance to fire again.

Without seeming to move, he was suddenly among them. Worldbreaker swung and three Ultramarines exploded as though siege mines had detonated within their chest cavities. A copious volume of blood wetted the air. The flanged mace swung back again, one-handed. Low on an upward arc. Another four warriors died. Their bodies slammed against the walls with bone shattering force, their outlines punched into the steelwork.

Tarchon came at him, gladius arcing towards his throat.

The haft of Worldbreaker deflected the blade. Tarchon kicked him in the midriff, firing his bolter one-handed into his chest. Explosions ripped across the Warmaster’s breastplate and the amber eye at its centre split down the middle.

Horus caught the bolter between the talons of his gauntlet. A twist of the wrist and the weapon snapped just behind the magazine. Horus stepped inside Tarchon’s guard and took hold of his gorget.

Tarchon stabbed with his gladius. Horus felt blood well from the cut. He lifted Tarchon from the deck as though he was a child and clubbed his fist into the centurion’s chest.

The impact drove him back through his men, felling them like corn before the scythe. Horus kept going, sometimes bludgeoning, sometimes disembowelling. Gore boiled on his talons, clotted on Worldbreaker. Dripped from the cracked amber eye upon his breast.

He pushed into the Ultramarines. Surrounded on all sides by transhuman warriors. Honourable men who, only a short few years ago, would have called him lord. They might have balked at his naked ambition, resented his appointment to Warmaster over their own primarch, but still they loved and respected him. And now he had to kill them. They stabbed and shot, undaunted in the face of the might of the demigod in their midst. Blades scored furrows in his armour, bolt shells exploded. Fire and fury surrounded the Warmaster.

Against so many sublime warriors, even a primarch could be brought down. Primarchs were functionally immortal, but they weren’t invulnerable. People often forgot the difference.

In a fight like this, the skill was to find the moments of stillness, the places between the blades and bullets. A chainblade sailed past his head. Horus removed its owner’s. Bolter shells ricocheted from his thigh plate. Horus punched his taloned fist through a warrior’s hearts and lungs.

Always in motion, talons and mace killing with every stroke.

Twenty-three seconds later, the transit was a charnel house. Hundreds dead and every drop of blood wrung to paint the walls.

Horus let out a cathartic breath.

He felt someone approach and reined in a violent reaction.

‘Falkus,’ said Horus. ‘Get me the centurion’s gladius.’

The blast door to the command bridge was bulging inwards. The first blow had hit it like a Titan’s fist. The second buckled the metal and tore its upper corners from the frame. Lord Admiral Brython Semper stood with his duelling sabre unsheathed and the captain’s twin-barrelled Boyer held loosely at his thigh.

The upper barrel was an ancient beam weapon – a volkite, some called it – the underslung portion a one-shot plasma jet. It was a Space Marine killer, but could it kill a primarch?

Would he get the chance to find out?

He’d be lucky to get even a single shot off with the Boyer.

Perhaps a hundred people stood with him; surveyor readers, aides, juniors, scriveners and battle-techs, deckhands. None were combat-trained worth a damn. Only a single squad of armsmen with shotcannons and the nine Thallaxii Ferrox had any hope of inflicting real damage.

Banks of acrid smoke filled the bridge, and the only light was from a few stuttering lumens. The hololith had failed, and hydraulic fluids drizzled from ruptured pipework. Nothing remained of the command network. The vox crackled with screams.

‘We’ll make them pay for this, admiral,’ said a crewman, Semper couldn’t see who.

He wanted to say something suitably heroic. A valedictory speech to inspire his crew and earn them an ending worthy of the Guardian of Aquinas. All that filled his thoughts were the last words Vitus Salicar had said to him.

We are killers, reapers of flesh. You must never forget that.

The blast door finally tore free of its mounting and fell into the bridge like a profane monolith toppled by iconoclasts. A towering figure was revealed, a giant of legend.

Haloed by flames of murder and dripping with blood.

A mantle of stiffened fur wreathed the war god’s shoulders. His armour was the colour of night and gleamed with the fire of dying empires.

Semper had expected a charge, bursts of gunfire.

The god threw something at his feet. Semper looked down.

An Ultramarines gladius, the blade coated in vivid crimson. Its handle was wrapped in red leather. The hemispherical pommel was ivory, inlaid with the wreath-enclosed company number.

‘That belonged to Proximo Tarchon,’ said the god. ‘Centurion of the Ninth Division, Battle Group Two, Legiones Astartes Ultramarines.’

Semper knew he should spit in the traitor’s face or at least raise his weapon. His crew deserved to be led into their last battle by their captain. Yet the idea of raising a weapon against a being so perfectly formed, so sublime, seemed abhorrent.

He knew he faced a betrayer – an enemy, the enemy – yet Semper felt enraptured by his sheer magnificence.

The Warmaster took a step onto the bridge, and it took every ounce of Semper’s willpower not to kneel. ‘Proximo Tarchon and his warriors faced me without fear, for they were trained by my brother on Macragge, and such men are uniquely skilled at death dealing. But Proximo Tarchon and his warriors could not stop me.’

Semper tried to answer the Warmaster, but he couldn’t long hold his gaze and his tongue felt leaden.

‘Why are you telling me this?’ he managed at last.

‘Because you fought honourably,’ said the Warmaster. ‘And you deserve to know how futile it would be to waste your lives in pointless defiance at this point.’

Semper felt the paralysing awe he’d felt of the Warmaster diminish in the face of so arrogant a statement. He wished he’d had the chance to return to Cypra Mundi and watch his son grow to manhood. He wished the blast shutters weren’t down over the viewing bay so he might see the stars one last time.

He wished he could be the one to kill this god.

Semper lifted his duelling sabre to his lips and kissed its blade. He thumbed the activation clasp on the Boyer gun.

‘For the Imperium!’ shouted Semper as he charged the Warmaster.

Horus stood in the midst of carnage. One hundred and eleven people dead in less than a minute. A corpse lay at the Warmaster’s feet, divided into long sections by a diagonal stroke of energised talons.

‘Who was he?’ asked Mortarion, his holographic form wavering on the temporary floating disc projector the Mechanicum had rigged. Beyond the Death Lord’s image, faint impressions of Deathshroud could be seen, trailing their master like ghosts. The disc maintained a constant distance of three metres from Horus, closer than Falkus Kibre would have liked – even for a hologram – but exceptions had to be made for the primarch’s brothers.

‘Lord Admiral Brython Semper,’ said Horus.

‘A Lord Admiral,’ said the Death Lord. ‘Looks like you were right. Our father really does value this world.’

Horus nodded absently and knelt by Brython’s corpse. ‘A pointless death,’ said Horus.

‘He tried to kill you,’ pointed out Falkus Kibre, taking position at the Warmaster’s right hand.

‘He didn’t have to.’

‘Of course he did,’ said Kibre. ‘You know he had to. He might actually have surrendered until you said what you did at the end.’

Horus rose to his full, towering height. ‘You think I wanted him to attack me?’

‘Of course,’ said Kibre, puzzled the Warmaster would even ask.

‘Tell me, then – why did I provoke the Lord Admiral?’

Kibre looked up at Lupercal, and saw a fractional tilt to the corner of his mouth. A test, then. Aximand had warned him that the Warmaster liked to play these little games. Kibre took a moment to marshal his response. Quick answers were for Aximand or Noctua.

‘Because the Lord Admiral’s name would have been reviled forever if he’d surrendered his vessel,’ offered Kibre. ‘He’d fought hard and done all that honour demanded, but to surrender would have cursed his line from here till the end of time.’

Mortarion grinned. ‘What’s this? Insight from the Widowmaker?’

Kibre shrugged, hearing derision.

‘I’m a simple warrior, my lord,’ he said. ‘Not a stupid one.’

‘Which is why I was pleased when Ezekyle put your name forward for the Mournival,’ said Horus. ‘Things have become complex, Falkus, far more so than I thought. And far quicker. It’s good to have a simple man at your side in such times, don’t you agree, brother?’

‘If you say so,’ grunted Mortarion, and Kibre smiled. The gesture was so unfamiliar to him he didn’t at first know what his facial muscles were doing.

The Warmaster placed a hand on his shoulder and walked him to the command throne of Guardian of Aquinas. The hololith had been returned to life, painting a grim portrait of Molech’s future.

‘Tell me what my simple warrior sees, Falkus,’ said Horus. ‘You’re Mournival now, so you need to be more than just a shock trooper. Simple or otherwise.’

Kibre studied the shimmering globe of Molech. He took his time, and it was an effort not to advocate a full drop pod assault immediately. How long was it since he’d had to employ anything other than the directness of breacher tactics?

‘The battle for space is won,’ said Kibre. ‘The weapon platforms are ours, and the enemy ships are crippled or captured.’

‘Tell me about the orbitals,’ asked Horus.

‘They’re manoeuvring to new positions, but we can’t rely on them.’

‘Why not?’

‘Molech’s adepts will be re-tasking the surface missile batteries to destroy the platforms. We’ll take out some before they fire, but they were never intended to resist fire from the ground. At best, we’ll get a few salvoes away before the platforms are inoperable.’

‘Hardly worth the effort to capture them,’ said Mortarion.

‘A few salvoes from orbit is worth a whole battalion of legionaries,’ said Kibre. ‘Calth taught the Seventeenth Legion that much.’

‘He’s right, brother,’ said Horus, zooming in from the view of Molech’s orbital volume to its planetary zones. Four continental masses, only two of which were inhabited or defended to any degree. One heavily industrialised, the other pastoral.

The Sons of Horus and the Death Guard forces would direct the main thrust of their attack upon the latter continent. Molech’s primary seat of command lay within a mountain valley, at a city named for Horus himself, Lupercalia.

The Warmaster jabbed a talon at Lupercalia and traced a route across the continent, over verdant plains, past cities, through mountain valleys, before ending up at a ruined citadel on a storm-lashed island virtually clinging to the coastline.

‘The Fulgurine Path,’ said Horus. ‘That’s the road I need to walk, and this citadel is where we’ll begin.’

‘And the rest of Molech?’ said Mortarion.

‘Unleash your Eater of Lives,’ ordered Horus. ‘Lay waste.’

Loken moved down the corridor with Bror Tyrfingr to his left, Ares Voitek to his right. He kept the shotcannon pulled in tight, looking down the unfamiliar iron sight as he moved smoothly into the drive chamber. He hadn’t used a weapon like this since his time in the Scout Auxilia, but firing bolt weapons aboard a thin-skinned starship was generally frowned upon.

Tarnhelm wasn’t a large ship, so when Banu Rassuah informed Loken she’d detected an unauthorised bio-sign during her final calculations for Mandeville translation, it didn’t take long to narrow down the potential hiding places in which a stowaway could be hiding.

While the rest of the pathfinders secured the frontal areas of the ship, Loken, Tyrfingr and Voitek swept back to the drives.

‘Someone from that grim fortress orbiting Titan?’ asked Voitek, his upper servo-arms clicking with restraint cuffs. ‘That Oliton girl you saw?’

Loken shook his head. ‘No. It’s not her.’

‘Then a warp-thing?’ offered Tyrfingr. ‘Something shat out by the Warmaster’s maleficarum?’

The former Space Wolf had eschewed a shotcannon in favour of his combat blade and knotted leather cestus gauntlet. Its night-bladed claws tapped on his thigh plate in a rhythmic tattoo.

None of them answered Tyrfingr’s question. Each of them knew too much to lightly dismiss such speculation. The drive chamber was the only place left on the ship where anyone could realistically conceal themselves, but so far they had found nothing.

The engine spaces were elliptical in section, with a raised floor and suspended ceiling, flanked on both sides by two enormous cylinders that thrummed with barely contained power. Looped cables encircled narrowed portions of the main drives, and hardwired calculus-servitors with shimmering eyes mumbled binaric plainsong.

A central nave ended at a communion altar, at which stood the unmoving figure of the nameless Mechanicum adept mono-tasked with overseeing the engine functions.

Sitting cross-legged before the altar was a bearded, tattooed warrior in the unadorned plate of the Knights Errant. He was assembling the components of a bolter he’d spread out on the deck.

Loken lowered his shotcannon as the warrior looked up with a disappointed shake of his head.

‘What,’ said Loken, ‘are you doing?’

‘I got bored of waiting for you to find me,’ replied Severian.